《Edge Cases》
Chapter 1: Setting Off
Chapter 1: Setting Off
"Come on, we''re celebrating!" Misa grinned at Derivan. The half-orc''s hand held a full tankard of beer that threatened to slosh out of the sides as she gestured at his helmet; it was only the weak enchantment on the mug that prevented it. "Take off the damn helmet already. I''ve never seen you once without that thing."
"I cannot," Derivan said. He sat at his corner of the table, back leaning against the tavern wall. A faint light flickered within his helmet, the only indication of his amusement. "You know this."
"Bah," Misa scoffed. "You should''ve met me earlier! I''d have told you that your armor was cursed. What kind of armor is ck and spiky and not cursed?"
"An [Armor of Melee Reflection]!" Vex piped up. Their resident lizardkin wizard seemed a little bit dazed, waving his mug of beer around before mming it onto the table. The liquid sshed over his hands, and he looked at it, blinking a few times. "Whoops. Good... good thing I''m not wearing robes. Bah! Wizards. Make it too obvious that they''re... that they''re wizards."
Indeed, Vex was dressed in protective leathers and had a dagger for a focus. Most people would have assumed he was a rogue; it was a trick he''d used more than once to keep bandits on the alert for a close-range surprise attack that never came. "Aaalso! [ck Thorn Armor]. And [Evolving Armor]. Aaand it''s a verymon deeck... decorative element in Ely"
"Vex," Sev interrupted, looking exasperated, though there was a hint ofughter in his eyes. "You''ve had this entire conversation with Misa before. She''s just drunk. And so are you. I am not healing her from a hangover again, and since when did you drink?"
Misa stared their human cleric in the eye, scowling, and gulped down her entire tankard of beer.
"I dont need you to heal my hangovers!" she dered once she was done, wiping some beer off of her lip and pointing at Derivan. "Aaand another thing! What kind of stupid curse is that? Curses are supposed to be evil and shit! Yours lets you not eat and you just can''t take it off? And what about bathing? How are you supposed to bathe?"
Misa narrowed her eyes, leaning in to Derivan who leaned back, both amused and faintly concerned and took a big sniff. "You don''t even smell.Cheater. Your armor cheats."
"I''d take that trade... trader? Trade... off. Tradeoff," Vex agreed, looking probably far too proud of himself for remembering the word. He grasped a little uselessly at his mug, still staring off in Derivan''s general direction.
Sev squinted at him and stole the mug away before he could grab it, slipping a ss of water into the lizardkin''s hands instead.
Vex barely seemed to notice, gulping it down with exactly the same amount of enthusiasm without breaking eye contact with their armored teammate. "I''d be able to study so many more things! Like magic. And armor. And magic armor."
Evidently, the lizardkin had motivations. But Sev had other concerns.
"Veeeex?" Sev stared at his friend, a suspicion forming in his mind. Vex had always been quite vocal about his dislike for alcohol. And he hadnt reacted to the change in his drink...
"Yeees?"
"Did you"
"I cast a spell to numb my taste buds!" Vex interrupted gleefully, looking all too excited to share the details of his magic. "Yesss. Can''t win against Misa without it! Alcohol tastes weeeeird. Also I wanna sleep." Vex nted his face on the table, his snout thunking against the wood, though his fingers continued reaching for the ss of water near him. "I''m good at spells!"
Sev sighed.
Derivan chuckled softly. "I think perhaps we should retire for the night," he said, reaching for the lolling lizardkin and easily lifting him into his arms. "I will get Vex to bed. Can you look after Misa?"
Sev, having only just sighed, pointedly took a deep breath so he could let out a louder, long-suffering sigh. He nced at Misa. She appeared to be engaged in a staring match with the air above his head, waving down extra mugs of beer and gulping them down without breaking eye contact.
"Yeah, fine," Sev grumbled.
"Youuuu." Vex poked at his armor a few times, and Derivan looked down at his friend, suppressing an amused chuckle. "You know Misa isn''t really pressuring you to take off your armor, right?"
"I know, Vex," Derivan said. It wasn''t the first time he wished he could smile the light in his helmet glowed faintly in his closest approximation of one, though. "She is teasing me about it, yes? It is fine."
"Good!" Vex dered. "Cause I''ve told her not to pressure you."
Derivan chuckled. "I do not mind it, Vex. But I appreciate your support."
"Also your armor isn''t cursed," Vex said, poking him again; Derivan froze, barely controlling the flinch that threatened to drop his friend. "Can''t taste any curse magicing from it. So... not cursed."
He knows Wait. Did he say taste?
"Did you say taste?" Derivan repeated out loud, staring at the drunken form of his friend. "Did you... lick my armor?"
"Noooooo," Vex said, in a way that Derivan decided sounded suspiciously like a yes. "But you picked me up and my tongue wasn''t in my mouth. So, technically, your armor licked me."
"I do not believe that is how that works," Derivan said, but heughed, shaking his head in fond amusement. He nudged the door to Vex''s room open with a hand, walking backwards into the room and surveying it briefly. The whole ce was a mess, typical of their wizardly friend scattered scrolls and dispersed drawings, rubbings from runes arranged haphazardly on his desk.
No doubt half of them were trapped, too. He''d made the mistake of trying to touch some of Vex''s belongings without permission once.
Never again.
Instead, Derivan carefully made his way to the bed and knelt to roll the lizard onto his bed. "You must sleep, my friend."
"Nooo," Vex protested. "I don''t wanna... sleep. Sleep is a stupid spell anyway. It only works as a sleeping aid! I wanna make a spell that reces sleep... that''d be neat. A sleep spell, but it just gives you all the rest that sleep gives you... how would it go? Maybe if I [Sleep]"
Credit where credit was due Derivan had never seen a spellcaster identally cast a spell on themselves.
It was quite genuinely impressive. Spellcasting usually required some level of concentration, and Vexs ability to do this mid-ramble was a testament to the fact that he was, in fact, good at spells.
He let an amused smirk touch his eyes, ncing around to find the lizardkins enchanted pitcher of water. Hed let it run out of mana again. Derivan let some of his mana flow into it so that Vex would have some water for when he woke up, then slipped out of the room and back into his own, just across the hall.
There, in the privacy of his room, Derivan paused. He stared at the bed sitting just beneath the window, at the barely-disturbed covers thatid across it.
With his back to the door, he slid to the ground with a sigh.
For all that he tried... rting to organic beings was difficult.
He understood the purpose of beds. The others had certainlyined about not having them often enough. But the idea offort was... foreign to him.
He stared at the bed in the corner of the room. It did nothing for him, because he couldn''t feel anything except when his armor was damaged. Even the weight of anything he carried was only a faint ghost of a sensation. The idea of getting drunk, or needing water, or getting embroiled in apetition to drink more of a substance that only seemed to make people feel worse when they woke up it was all incredibly foreign to him.
Still, when he watched his teammates do those things, it was with a sense of inexplicable fondness.
With a thought, he pulled up his status, and stared at it.
Derivan, Level 26
Health: 520/520
Mana: 260/260
Stats:
Strength: 30 (84)
Intelligence: 26 (62)
Wisdom: 17 (72)
Agility: 17 (90)
[Disguise Status Level 26] [Buff]
Applied by the [Disguise Status] skill. Appear for all intents and purposes like an adventurer of any level.
: Restricts your stats and skills to the chosen level.
Skill List:
[Consume], [Disguise Status], [Combat Proficiency], [Guard Stance], [Meditation], [Paralyzing sh], [Oneshot Protection]
Infiltrating Armor.
It disgusted him to see that title and the fact that his name was nothing more than a falsebel stered onto his status was somehow even worse. It was a reminder of what he was. It was a reminder that he would never truly be a part of the society he had joined; that he was only pretending at it.
If any one of the others figured out what he really was... he didn''t know what they''d do. He wasn''t sure he wanted to know.
They''d been adventuring together for months, though Vex had joined them more recently. Derivan had grown attached to all of them to Sev''s protectiveness, Misa''s boisterous nature, Vex''s inexplicable knowledge of obscure trivia. He couldn''t imagine parting with any of them, and yet...
He was helping them get stronger. It was necessary, in a world of dungeons and monster attacks; if he didn''t, they could die.
...Admittedly, he was sure they''d argue the point, if he could bring it up. They were, after all, very powerful for their ranks and levels. Sev and Misa both had rare sses. Vex hadn''t talked about his, but he suspected the wizard did too. All of them were clever in their own ways, and had nopunctions about exploiting all the intricacies of the skills their sses offered them.
He remembered Sev''s boast about [Divine Communion] with a wry sort of amusement. The way the cleric spoke of it, it was a skill that would allow him a moment to speak with his god and request help; it would work once, and then the skill would wither and die.
So they had that to keep them safe, even if Derivan didn''t help them. Even if he left.
But... he wanted to stay.
There was no real way for him to win. The truest victory would be one where they lived on without him, with the strength he''d helped them gain.
Derivan told himself that the thought was afort butfort was still a foreign concept to him, and he wasn''t sure if he could make himself believe it.
The armor sighed. Still leaning against the door, he allowed himself to slip into sleep although for him, it wasn''t a true rest. It was [Meditation].
But for a short while, it helped him feel like he wasn''t a monster, and that was enough.
"Alright," Sev announced. "I got us our next quest."
"Why do you always get to pick?" Vex grumbled. The lizard was nursing his head, and Derivan patted his back gently in sympathy. It seemed to help.
"Because if you pick, we''ll just end up studying some ruins for a week," Sev said drily. "And if Misa picks, we''re going to fight another horde. Or an Elite."
Vex paled a little at the thought of fighting an Elite.
"And if I pick?" Derivan asked.
"...Do you want to pick?" Sev looked at him curiously.
"Not as such." Derivan admitted, shrugging. In truth, he couldn''t he didn''t know enough about the quest system, or the dangers they might encounter. His knowledge of the world atrge was limited to the eight or so months of wandering he''d done with this very team once he left his dungeon. "But I was curious."
"I have no idea what you''d pick," Sev told him. "But I don''t have any objections if you want to pick next time, but for now..."
The cleric spread a map out onto the table, then jabbed a spot with his finger. "We''re collecting some mana crystals from the local Nucleus. It''s a rtively low-level job, but this particr Nucleus has seen a lot of monster activitytely, so we need to be on alert."
Misa frowned for a moment. She looked like she was about to protest, but something passed through her eyes, and she sighed instead. "Mana crystals, huh?" she finally said. "Are they having trouble getting adventurers to collect them again?"
Sev nodded, offering the half-orc a slight, apologetic grimace. "Yeah. It''s low-hanging fruit, but someone needs to do it."
Misa grumbled. "Too many adventurers think they''re too good for ''the baby shit'' once they get past level 10."
There was a brief silence unspokenmiseration from the table. Even Derivan understood the problem; he''d seen enough of it, even in the few short months of his travel.
Mana crystals were in short supply. It was too dangerous for nonbat sses to collect them, but the job of collecting them was ordinarily slow and boring. Tobat this, the Adventurer''s Guild had made it so that it was the only quest avable to those between levels 5 and 10, where 5 was the minimum level needed to join the Guild.
The problem was that adventurers themselves rarely stayed below level 10 for long.
Larger cities often had their own harvesting teams rather than relying on adventurers, with bigger ones and the Prime Kingdoms built directly on top of a Nucleus or a dungeon. Smaller viges, though, had precious little to survive. Their own harvesting teams were often small, consisting of only a precious few that hadbat sses, and if those teams were ever unable to harvest...
Well. Mana crystals were important. They were used in everything health potions,mps, stoves. [Disease Purification] often required at least a grade three mana crystal. That was three days'' worth of farming for a standard adventuring team, and a small vige usually only had one of those.
Worse, usage of a small grade one crystal every week was required to maintain an individual''s link to the system, and allowing the link to degrade was catastrophic.
"Alright," Misa said, throwing on her pack. "Let''s go." Vex blinked blearily twice, watching the way she moved with ease.
"...didn''t you say you weren''t going to cure her hangover?" Vex said, staring suspiciously at Sev.
The cleric shrugged. "I didn''t. She''s just... fine, apparently?"
"I can hear you," Misa said, half-amused, half-annoyed. "First of all, you drank like half a mug of beer. I have no idea how you have a hangover. Second, I kept drinking after you left, and I do have a hangover. It hurts like shit. I wanna punch something."
She paused, then sighed. "But... shit, guys, this mana crystal stuff? Yeah, normally I''din we''re not pushing ourselves or whatever, but we''ve seen what not having mana crystals does to a vige. So let''s... go get some crystals."
Sev was silent for a moment, then let out an explosive sigh, tapping both Vex and Misa on the shoulder. A small, glowing light left his fingers as he did so.
"This is a one time thing," he huffed. Youre supposed to learn your lesson.
Derivan, perhaps wisely, didn''t mention that he did this nearly every time Misa got a hangover. Misa and Vex both, on the other hand, visibly sagged in relief.
"Thanks," they chorused, and Sev nodded.
"Never doing that again," Vex added, muttering to himself.
Derivan was the only one that noticed the way Sev''s hands shook briefly after he cast his spell.
Chapter 2: Tower Defense, Kind Of
Chapter 2: Tower Defense, Kind Of
The trek to the Mana Nucleus was one that would take a few hours of walking not that they had much of a choice, given there were no caravans avable for hire that were headed in that direction. They walked in the standard formation they''d adopted after being ambushed one too many times. Derivan and Vex were side by side at the back, behind Sev; Misa led the way in front, setting a steady pace for their travels.
As was standard practice for them, they were each training their skills, trying to better understand the abilities the system had afforded them. Misa swung her mace in front of her, the dull-ck glow of [Guard Stance] surrounding her body. Sev was lit up with the light-blue magic of [Channel Divinity], muttering quietly to himself as he examined his status window.
Derivan was mostly just talking to Vex.
"We don''t exactly know how a Nucleus is formed," Vex exined to Derivan. A small me lit Vex''s hand as he spoke, looking for all intents and purposes like a channeled [Fireball], for all that that should have been impossible. "There are a lot of theories about the fluctuation of mana beneath the earth, but since no one can dig that far down, no one''s been able to verify it. All we know is that a Nucleus will asionally erupt into ce, and if we cultivate it properly, a dungeon will form from it."
"But we do not know the true nature of a dungeon," Derivan noted. It was phrased as a statement, but he was curious. How much did people know of dungeons? Perhaps they would be able to exin the anomaly of his existence; why he... was.
"Basically," Vex agreed, shrugging. "It seems pretty random what kind of dungeon forms from any given Nucleus. It''s got something to do with mana, but the prevailing type of ambient mana doesn''t seem to matter. Mana type variation seems to affect how random a dungeon''s effects are, and high mana concentrations seem to be good for dungeon quality."
He hesitated. "They do also seem to base themselves at least partially off the Nucleus'' local environment and the people present at the time they form... The big cities and the capitals of the Prime Kingdoms all have really weird dungeons. But they can harvest all the mana crystals they need from them, so they don''t really care."
"This I have noticed," Derivan said a little drily, though internally he frowned. He''d never been to arger city too many high-level adventurers meant it was more likely for him to be noticed.
But in their time as adventurers they''d all been to many of the smaller viges that were starving for crystals.
None of them were particrly pretty sights. One in particr came to mind they''d used all their crystals to cure a disease raging through their vige, and it had cost them; thebat-harvesters that would normally mine crystals for them were still recovering, and they were left without a way to get new crystals for weeks. Half the vigers had veins glowing the bitter blue of system-sickness.
"...Yeah," Vex said after a moment, his voice softer; he seemed to be remembering something too, though he offered Derivan a small smile when the armor looked at him. "Dungeons can form naturally without being cultivated, too, but the result tends to be a lot more chaotic. They''re much safer when we guide the mana flows manually, and stack the environment in our favor. These days it usually involves a lot of safety signs."
Derivan couldn''t help but smirk slightly at the thought of a dungeon that had to base part of its existence on safety signs.
"...Thank you for the exnation," Derivan opted to say after a moment, and Vex gave him a bright grin.
"Anytime."
"We''re almost there! Stay sharp!" Misa called out only momentster, and both Derivan and Vex immediately fell into focus.
The Nucleus wasing into sight. It took the form of a massive crater in the ground, with the walls ridged to look almost like the seats of a coliseum; there were mana crystals poking out of the dirt in odd, disorienting arrays. The air shimmered with ambient power, threads of aspected mana tearing strange ripples in the air as they moved. It was a strange sight they''d been to Nuclei before, and none of them had looked so... charged, forck of a better term.
"It looks almost like it''s about to form a dungeon," Vex murmured to himself, his eyes flicking across the patterns quickly. Derivan nced curiously at his friend.
"This is what dungeon formation looks like?" he asked.
"In theory," Vex said with a nod. "I''ve never seen it myself, so I''m only guessing."
"I have," Sev called back from his position in front of them his tone was strangely grim, his grip on his staff a little tighter than before. The glow of his [Channel Divinity] faded as he allowed his mana to regenerate. "You''re right. This ce is about to form a dungeon. It''s about... two, three days away?"
Vex gave Sev a strange, ''how the hell are you calcting that from the concentration of wiggles in the air'' sort of look, which Derivan felt was quite fair. Or perhaps he was projecting.
"And the Guild didn''t tell us?" Misa''s tone was a mixture of worry and anger. Lack of information was dangerous.
Sev shook his head. "Dungeon formations can be pretty spontaneous. It''s possible the scout didn''t know. At this early stage, it should still be rtively safe..."
"But the mana concentration will attract more monsters," Derivan said, speaking with more calmness than he felt. He could feel the way the mana was pulling at him, a faint tug in his soul, drawing him towards the crater.
He''d been feeling it for a while, now that he paid attention to the sensation.
But he didn''t have a way of exining to anyone what he knew and how he knew it, so it was a fact that he tucked away into the back of his mind. If nothing else, thepulsion was easy for him to resist, "We must stay on guard, even still."
Vex nodded seriously, though there was a flicker of a sort of nervousness in his eyes. He was a practiced adventurer in that he didn''t let that affect him, though; he grabbed his dagger, holding it at the ready. [Dagger Proficiency] kept his grip steady and his stance strong. The runes that focused his magic were engraved into the hilt in a design that he''d painstakingly built and carved himself, but they were well-hidden, barely visible except to the trained eye.
Misa gripped her mace firmly, and Derivan drew his sword. Both of them radiated with the magic of [Guard Stance].
It was more precaution than anything the Nucleus seemed empty of the monsters that would usually be milling about. The knowledge of the uing dungeon formation had them all on edge, though, and they descended into the crater practicing as much caution as they could.
Mana Crystal Collection Processing...
Ambient mana concentration detected at 79%.
Ambient mana deviation within 1.4 standard deviations.
Crystal purification proceeding... Estimated time: 17 hours, 15 minutes to Grade 2 crystal.
And there was the other reason adventurers avoided mana crystal duty.
It was boring.
Mana crystals littered the ground but the ones in the ground were raw and unprocessed, and the uses for them were limited. Instead, adventurers had to stand guard in the Nucleus while the system worked to process and bank the mana crystals.
All while the Nucleus kept calling more monsters in to defend it, obviously. Because sitting in a ce for days wasn''t enough.
"Can we not collect the crystals ourselves and process them outside of the Nucleus?" Derivan asked, his voice low. He''d always wondered, but this was the first time he felt a pressing desire to leave.
"It''s been tried. No one''s been able to get it to work well so far," Sev answered, shaking his head. "We can process raw mana crystals, but it takes a lot of effort and high-level skills, and it takes much longer than just letting the system do it. So... here we are."
"Here we are," Derivan echoed. The pull he felt was getting stronger. Nothing he couldn''t resist, but he was reasonably sure they would be attacked soon; his eyes scanned the edges of the crater, watching for any movement.
What he didn''t expect was for a monster to burrow up from beneath.
Thankfully, that was the benefit of [Guard Stance]. A flicker, and Derivan was watching the ground instead of the edges of the crater, his body already poised to react; the monster erupted from the ground with ws poised to strike at Vex, and the metal of Derivan''s de turned away the strike with ease.
A level 20 [Crystal Mimic]. A spidery little thing that looked like it was made of the very same raw mana crystals that littered the ground, except strung together in a way that made it look like a lopsided monster. But the level... It was stronger than any monster had a right to be in a wild Nucleus.
An effect of the uing dungeon formation, then? That meant this would be dangerous. If nothing else, hordes at this level were still manageable, although he''d have to be especially careful to protect Vex. "Level 20 here!"
"I''ve got a level 15!" Misa called back, easily beating off the mimic hounding her; a smash of her mace sent it flying ten feet back, crystalline legs fracturing as they scrambled for purchase in the dirt. "Good level range for us!"
"As long as an Elite doesn''t show up," Sev muttered, ncing around with no small amount of trepidation. Small bolts of light sted out of his staff, pelting into the ''eyes'' of both mimics with remarkable uracy. Beady little things, barely visible in the refractory shine of their bodies; it was a wonder that Sev could spot them at all. The cleric wore an expression of focused concentration as his eyes darted between his two targets, and the mimics whined as they flinched away from the light.
"Don''t jinx us," Vex hissed. The wizard spun his dagger in his hands, runes glinting into existence around his dagger as he did so. A [Fireball] sprang into the air in front of him, and Derivan leapt out of the way just in time for it to crash into the mimic he was fighting and send it sprawling back. Derivan wasted no time in chasing after it, a ck crackle of electricity racing along the length of his de to discharge into the twitching mimic.
At almost the same time, Misa roared, her mace crashing with frightening force into her opponent. That mimic shattered into fragments.
Your party has killed a Level 20 Crystal Mimic!
Your party has killed a Level 15 Crystal Mimic!
Calcting XP rewards...
XP rewards distributed.
Mana concentration increased.
Ambient mana deviation decreased.
Mana Crystal Collection progress boosted.
Almost as soon as the battle began, it was over. A level 20 and level 15 mimic wasn''t a true threat to their party, but it paid to stay cautious. A critical strike would still rip through health like paper without any proper defensive skills, and only Derivan and Misa had those.
"Is it... normal to get boosts for mana crystal collection like this?" Derivan asked, ncing at the text. He didn''t remember that showing up for any of their previous collection quests.
Vex shook his head. "It only happens when a dungeon is forming. It''s technically much more lucrative to get mana crystals from a forming dungeon, but it''s pretty unpredictable, so the Guild isn''t usually prepared for it. They send out calls with better rewards and a much higher priority when they are, though."
"I sent them a message about the dungeon as soon as we saw it forming," Sev added. "But it''ll take them time to actually mobilize their scouts and get rewards ready, so we can''t expect any help for... probably at least the next day."
"I see," Derivan said with a short nod. The pull he felt on his soul had faded down to almost nothing a brief reprieve of some sort. He thought about it briefly, then added, "[Monster Sense] is telling me we have some time before the monsters begin to appear again. Should we attempt to set up some defenses?"
Vex perked up at this. "Did you get a new skill?"
"...Sort of," Derivan answered, a little bit defensively, and he saw Vex sagging slightly in disappointment. He coughed once, then used another small lie he''d concocted. "I am... still having some trouble with my interface. But if I am able to retrieve the skill description, I will share it with you."
"Okay!" Just like that, Vex brightened again the lizardkin was interested in anything and everything rted to magic and the system. ording to him, all skills were magic, obviously. Just because some of them didn''t take mana didn''t mean that they weren''t magic.
That it was usually considered impolite to share specific skills and status screens proved to be no boundary for the lizard, though he typically took rejection with grace. "If your skill is telling us we have some time, then I''ll ritual cast [Earth Ward]. It''ll prevent monsters from digging underneath us again and we can set up a proper defensive perimeter."
Vex didn''t actually take that long to cast his spell all he needed to do was to carve out the runes into the air with his dagger, and he was skilled enough that each rune only took him about a minute. The wizard drew his wardrge enough to give them all enough room to fight. Then, after a brief discussion, he used another skill to build up dark walls of force, giving them a sort of corridor in which they could fight.
With more uses of the skill, he created a tform for himself, bncing it on the edges of the other force walls to give himself a ce to cast from. Sev would stay in the middle, able to direct healing towards any of them and mostly protected from the fight.
"Are we still good?" he called down.
"[Monster Sense]is getting stronger, but I do not believe we are at risk of attack yet," Derivan reported.
"Make sure you''re protected up there!" Misa said. "It''ll be hard to block any projectiles headed towards you from here."
"Got it," Vex answered, his eyes focused.
"Man," Sev grumbled. "I wish I had a wizard on my team when I was lower-leveled and doing these quests. I didn''t know you guys could just instantly build fortifications."
Vex smiled a bit at that. He couldn''t deny that part of him was a little scared he was the lowest-leveled of the group, and a critical strike by monsters at this level might be enough to take him out in one shot. But he''d always known adventuring would be a risk; that was the point. Danger, after all, meant better sses. He''d even built himself with that in mind, spending little to no stat points on health and defense.
If he''d told anyone in his home that thought process, they would likely have called him stupid and dragged him to a Fountain but his choices (and, admittedly, the absurd size of his mana pool, although Vex didn''t like to think of that) were part of what allowed him to hit above his level and had resulted in his eptance into his current party.
And his current party was really cool. He wouldn''t trade them for anything. A few months of facing mortal danger had a way of forging strong bonds, sure, but it was more than that
"Monsters iing!" Derivan reported, and Vex brought his dagger to hand. No time to ruminate now.
Everyone else saw him cast [Fireball]. It was, certainly, a ball of fire but no level 19''s [Fireball] would annihte monsters quite like his did.
The others knew by now that he was likely more than just a wizard, but he''d never told them what his actual ss was. At first, he''d simply been too anxious; it was dangerous to talk about having a rare ss, since they were coveted by the Prime Kingdoms and there was a bounty on low-leveled rare ssers.
But Misa hadn''t hesitated to tell him about her rare ss, and while Sev and Derivan hadn''t told him their exact sses, they''d both told him they were rare. He''d wanted to return the favor then and there, but the words stuck in his throat; he didn''t know them well enough, then. He couldn''t. So he''d swallowed, and nodded, and thanked them for sharing.
And then time passed, and he grew to know them, and... truth be told, he''d made the decision to tell them weeks ago, on a night when Derivan had brought him some soup while he sketched away at his notes. He''d nced back to see Sev and Misa waving at him, and Derivan smiling at him in his own odd way, the eye-lights in his helmet curving upwards. They didn''t want to disturb him while he worked, but made sure he was fed anyway.
Vex smiled a bit to himself. He couldn''t have found a better team, or a better group of friends. And a team of rare ssers? Practically unheard of! Even in the Prime Kingdoms it almost seemed like the system itself manipted circumstances to make rare ssers operate independently rather than together on a single team.
Which was maybe a bit concerning, actually. But he couldn''t imagine that to be true; it didn''t fit with anything the system did.
Nah. It was fine. He was pretty sure nothing could go wrong.
Chapter 3: Skills
Chapter 3: Skills
Derivan struck down thest of the Crystal Mimics, his sword slowing as it shattered. He didn''t have the muscles to feel the ache of acid or the soreness of prolonged battle, but his movements were beginning to feel sluggish. It took more effort for him to move and react, even to speak.
Conveniently enough, that meant that he sounded out of breath when he spoke, just like a human would. "That is... thest of them. [Monster Sense]has faded again. I believe we are due for a break."
"No fuckin'' kidding," Misa groaned, flopping down onto the ground with a thump. "How long have we been at this?"
"Five hours," Vex said. He leapt nimbly down from the tform he''d been standing on, but stumbled slightly as he straightened; Sev quickly grabbed him and steadied him, and he flushed slightly as he nodded at the cleric. "Thanks. We''re lucky, I think; the countdown''s down to about twenty minutes. I knew crystal processing would be faster, but I didn''t realize it would be this much faster."
Vex called up the window again to confirm, ncing quickly through the disyed information.
Mana Crystal Collection Processing...
Ambient mana concentration detected at 95%.
Ambient mana deviation measured within 1.3 standard deviations.
Crystal purification proceeding... Estimated time: 18 minutes, 20 seconds to Grade 2 crystal.
"We''ve shaved about twelve hours off the initial reported time," Vex said. "A grade 2 can sustain a vige for a week. Should we stay for a grade 3?"
"If it keeps speeding up, we should," Sev said, but he bit his lip. "I hope the Guild hurries up. It''d be better if multiple parties could take advantage of this, and that mana concentration is going up way faster than is normal."
"There''s no guarantee that any adventurers will be close enough, anyway," Misa grunted. "Though at least with a job like this they''d actually pick up the quest."
"The mana concentration is significant?" Derivan asked curiously. "Vex mentioned earlier that the quality of the resulting dungeon depended on mana concentration, but I was unaware that it had an effect on the time taken for a dungeon to form."
"Dungeons always form a certain amount of time after the process begins, but reaching a hundred percent usually triggers the process immediately." Vex looked at the status. "Sev, you said it was two or three days away?"
"It was," Sev confirmed, flicking a finger through his own status with a worried scowl on his face. "I should''ve noticed it before, but it''s elerating. And not just because of the monsters we fought off that contributed only about three percent of the mana concentration. We''ve gone up the other sixteen percent in five hours."
"Worrying," Vex said, his brows furrowing; he wondered if it had something to do with the amount of mana he was throwing around. "Then I think we should definitely stay. There''s no guarantee anyone else would be able to get here in time to take advantage of the bonus."
"I agree," Misa said, and Derivan nodded as well.
"We''re staying, then," Sev decided. "Anyone need healing? I''m about topped up on mana." Sev nced around, checking the party for injuries. No one was significantly hurt... a low-cost [Area Heal], then.
The glow of his heal rippled through the party, reflecting briefly off the walls of force that made up the small defensive structure Vex had built. Everyone let out a small sigh of relief, and the party settled in to wait.
Surprisingly, the wait was uneventful.
Mana Crystal Collection Processed.
Ambient mana concentration detected at 96%.
Ambient mana deviation measured within 1.3 standard deviations.
Crystal purificationplete! A Grade 2 Mana Crystal has been deposited with your party leader.
Please remain within the Nucleus to upgrade your crystal further.
A pause, and then the screen updated, reflecting a new upgrade time for the next grade of crystal.
Grade 2 Mana Crystal detected!
Grade 2 Mana Crystal will be upgraded to Grade 3 in: 10 minutes, 40 seconds.
"...Ten minutes?" Vex said, staring nkly. "That... can''t be right."
"It''s not." Sev gripped at his staff, his face suddenly pale. He nced at a screen no one else could see. "I changed my mind. We should leave. Now."
"But... ten minutes. A Grade 3 crystal will keep a vige topped off for at least a month, if they don''t need to cure any diseases." Misa breathed, staring at the disy and half reaching out towards it. Then she shook her head fiercely. "I no, you''re right. [Danger Sense] is telling me we should leave, too. Let''s go."
"We cannot," Derivan said softly, and the other three all nced at him. He gestured to the the edge of the crater that made up the Nucleus.
Past the force walls Vex had conjured, mana was swirling, the concentration so thick it was visible as streams of glittering light. It would have been beautiful if not for the fact that it was beginning to form into solid, physical structures. It began from the outer edges of the crater, where towering walls of light were beginning to solidify.
"We are best protected here," Derivan said. "If we leave now"
"We''ll get stuck out in the open with no defenses," Sev breathed. He shook his head. "Okay. Shit. Ten minutes. We can do this. Once the dungeon finishes forming, we can leave. I have [Divine Communion] if things go too far to shit. We''ll be fine."
Warning!
Ambient mana concentration has reached 100%!
Dungeon formation imminent!
Grade 2 Mana Crystal will be upgraded to Grade 3 upon dungeon formation. Further upgrades will be provided based on remaining ambient mana andbat performance.
Estimated time left: 10 minutes.
"Iing!" Derivan shouted, and everyone scrambled into position. The first monster burst into view, burrowing up from just outside the [Earth Ward], andunched itself towards Derivan in a blur of motion; the armor barely managed to bring his sword up in time to block the scything des of its legs. "Level 37 Burrowing Spider!" he called back.
"I''ve got a level 32 Earthwyrm!" Misa shouted; her voice was pained, the wyrm having managed to squirm past her guard for a moment to dig a deep gash into the flesh of her arm. She saw her health ticking rapidly down in the corner of her vision shit, it''s got poison, she thought briefly before the familiarfort of a heal trickled through her arm, and she gripped her mace in a [Paralyzing Bash] to give herself a moment to breathe.
There were more monsters. So many more monsters, this time. It was sheer luck that they weren''t intelligent enough to register the walls that Vex had built as anything more than an obstacle. As long as there was an opening, they flooded towards that, instead of trying to break down the spell.
The corridor of force itself was narrow enough that neither Misa nor Derivan needed to fight off too many of them at the same time. But the monsters were hard to kill, and they were slowly getting pushed inward, closer towards the center of the corridor where Sev stood. Even with Vex desperately casting spells, even with Sev''s support magic flooding through them and gifting them with divine strength... It felt like they wouldn''tst three minutes, let alone the ten they needed tost for the dungeon to finish forming.
It was going to be a long fight.
Misa grit her teeth. The wyrm she was fighting was ten levels above her. If it was the only enemy she had to fight, she could handle it; level differences didn''t matter as much as Skills did, and monsters in particr didn''t usually have the intelligence to take advantage of stat differences. But she had to do more than fend off the wyrm: she had to fend off every enemy in front of her, and make sure none of them could get past her.
There were too many for that.
But that was fine. She could handle this. There was a reason she was their tank, over even Derivan and the ridiculous durability of his armor.
On the best of days, Misa disliked her ss. It was rare, sure, and she had no doubt that others would kill to get it but it was a reminder, too. A reminder that she''d failed, once upon a time; a reminder that she''d once stood before a horde of monsters just like this one, her fellows dead and beaten.
A reminder that for all that she''d fought, she was only one person, and she could do nothing against a horde. She fought until she was inside her vige, engaging as many as she could, but even then the monsters kept flooding past her. She could still remember the chitteringughter.
She''d tried. It wasn''t that she hadn''t tried. She fought until she could barely stand, until her limbs were broken and bleeding. She still didn''t know how she''d managed to survive, how she''d managed to keep fighting; the memory was a blur for her.
But when she''de to, she''d seen how her status had changed. She''d been given a ss. [Fallen Guardian].
The name was a reminder of her failure, and it never stopped hurting but at the same time, a part of her was grateful. She''d be able to prevent that from ever happening again.
[To Fall Yet Hold the Line] [Active Skill] [Maxed]
Cost: 10% Max Health per Attack Blocked
You guard the gate, and none shall pass while your blood still flows.
If you would fail to block an enemy, you do not.
It was a powerful skill vaguely worded skills like that always were. It had its weaknesses, of course, and anyone that knew precisely how her skill worked would be able to subdue her all too quickly. But against monsters, with a healer at her back?
As long as ten of them weren''t attacking her at once, she would be fine. She trusted Sev.
With that in mind, Misa moved.
Skills provided by the system were some mixture of natural prowess, knowledge, and physical or magical capability. Rarer skills allowed the users to break past their limits, either granting them with greater knowledge or particrly in the case of skills that were not explicitly magical allowing them to perform impossible physical feats.
This was one of thetter types of skill. Misa had neither the stats nor the reaction time to block three wyrms that were over level 30 all at once, but she somehow still did, flowing from one form to the other and striking them each hard enough to knock them back. The skill drew on her knowledge, predicting what she would do if she had the speed and power, and moved her body for her.
The cost, of course, was that her body could not truly handle those speeds or feats of strength; her muscles and ligaments tore with every movement.
It was a small price to pay. This was still on the lower end of what the skill could do, in any case.
Misa twisted. A wyrm wasunching itself towards her, teeth gnashing in the air; she leapt to meet it, sword impaling it through the mouth and into dark, bitter flesh. In the next instant a wyrm threatened to cross the line she held, and Misa found herself there; her de flicked through the flesh of the first wyrm like it was nothing, and she impaled the second one through the head into Vex''s [Earth Ward].
Without pausing, she spun and punched, trusting the skill guiding her movements. She left her de and the squirming wyrm in the ground. Though she had no idea what she was aiming at, there was a satisfying smack as the force of her fist sent thest wyrm crashing into the edge of the corridor of force.
Misa breathed. She felt healing trickle in. Part of her was worried that they wouldn''t be able to keep this up; ten minutes suddenly felt like a long, long time.
Another part of her was falling back into an old state of mind, letting all her worries and fears fade away. There was no space in battle to think about any of that.
All she had to do was hold the line.
Derivan was worried. He was stronger than any of hispanions thought, certainly, but there was only so much he could do to hide the true extent of his skills; he would not allow them to die simply to preserve his secret. No. If this fight revealed him, and this was where his journey ended...
...It was easier not to think about.
Despite the warning on [Hide Status], the skill couldn''tpletely force him to fight as a level 26. The problem was twofold; one, no skill would remove knowledge that you already possessed. [Combat Proficiency] was a skill that was currently being restricted down to a grade 1 skill but he still possessed all his memories of fighting at maxed [Combat Proficiency].
The second problem was that skills themselves were neverpletely disabled; the most they would do was be restricted to grade one. But some of his skills were exceptionally effective even at a grade of one; it was one of the perks of being an elite monster, as much as he hated the thought.
[Consume] [Active Skill] [Maxed ]
Cost: 250 MP
Grapple a target. If the target does not break out of your grapple in seconds, absorb the target, refilling your HP and MP by of their remaining HP and MP, and gain the [Satiated] buff.
[Satiated] grants of all stats and skills possessed by the target, andsts for 10 seconds per 10% of the target''s remaining HP.Note: Until [Satiated] expires, target has a chance of escaping every 5 seconds.
[Consume] may not be used while [Satiated] is active.
It wasn''t a skill he enjoyed using. But for this battle, while he was still restricted to level 26...
The average Burrowing Spider or Earthwyrm, at level 35, took him 30 seconds to kill without assistance from Vex. Grappling would restrict his movements slightly, but not he had the benefit of beingrge enough to grapple the smaller enemies with a single hand.
Derivan had three enemies headed for him; one level 32, one level 40, and one level 37. This was a small enough crowd that he could handle them, even with his current stats.
The level 37 Burrowing Spider reached him first, and he ducked underneath its leap, catching its exoskeleton on the wicked hook at the end of his sword; he spun his de forward, smashing it into the ground and stunning it.
Before it could recover, he ran forward. He grabbed the level 40 wyrm in the middle of its body, ignoring the razor-sharp teeth and making sure it didn''t have the leverage to twist around and bite him. He activated [Consume], then scrambled back into position, using the force of his de hitting the ground tounch himself back.
It was a trick Misa had taught him. If the skill or weapon was stronger than his stats, it could give him more power and speed to leverage than his stats would.
The level 32 Burrowing Spider was scrambling over the still-struggling body of the first; they were getting tangled with one another in their desperation to get to Sev. Derivan didn''t give them the chance his sword mmed into the two wriggling spiders, cracking carapace and sttering insectoid goop.
Not enough to kill them. But enough to wound them badly; they retreated briefly, hissing at him.
Four more seconds.
He opted to wait. The spiders were circling his position, wary of him; the other monsters were looking for an opportunity to attack. The timer continued to tick down.
One. Zero
There was a sh of darkness, and the wyrm he was holding on to abruptly vanished.
Buff [Satiated]applied!
7.5% of the stats of a level 40 monster was not an incredible boost, though it also wasn''t insignificant. More important, however, were the skills.
Or, more urately, the skill. There was only one skill that he cared about receiving. The [Earth Ward] Vex had applied to the ground did, after all, only prevent enemies from moving; it would do nothing to stop him from wreaking whatever havoc he wanted.
[Burrow] [Active] [Grade: 1] [Temporary]
Cost: 15 MP/s
Move underground at normal movement speed.
The other ridiculous thing about [Consume], of course, was that skills were often designed for the particr species they belonged to. Earthwyrms did not move particrly well onnd, but dug through the dirt like they were swimming through water. Tranted to Derivan, who could already move at high speeds for his level?
The armor dove into the dirt, feeling it part easily for him; his feetnded on tforms that didn''t exist, and he felt the earth almost pushing him forward as he aimed towards one of the two Burrowing Spiders. He swung hard as he exited the dirt, still moving at twice his normal velocity
Carapace shattered.
Your party has killed a Level 37 Burrowing Spider!
Derivan would have smiled grimly, if he could. That spider still had more than half of its health. This was good. And he still had 97 seconds left on the buff.
It wasn''t quite enough yet. But he could make this work.
Chapter 4: A Lack of Oversight
Chapter 4: A Lack of Oversight
"Has he... always been able to swim through the ground like that?" Vex asked, ncing at Sev with only the faintest hint of awkward incredulity. He was pretty proud of himself for that, actually.
"No," Sev said. To his relief, the cleric sounded about as confused as he did. "...Doesn''t matter right now, though. Stay focused."
Right. They were still in a fight for their lives; a horde of upper Bronze-ranked monsters were beyond the scope of something their party was built to deal with. They were managing surprisingly well so far, but Misa in particr was falling behind; her Skill could only help her hold back the enemy, not kill them.
Most of the time, anyway. The practice she''d put into using it paid off; sometimes, in the process of the Skill forcing her to move in physically impossible ways, it would incidentally allow her to shear her weapon through an enemy with absurd physical force. In those instances, it definitely helped her kill monsters. But that was easier said than done.
Derivan, on the other hand, seemed to be managing well enough by himself. Vex opted to focus his efforts on helping Misa. He wasn''t worried about hiding his ss anymore he''d already decided to tell them, after all.
He spun his dagger, feeling the runes call out to him as he did so.
Magic was more than just a set of skills offered by the system more than runes that programmed reality.
Magic was alive. It was a living art that wanted to be used.
He would not be locked down by a system that drew boundaries and imposed artificial structures on a force that desired nothing more than freedom.
He was a [Chromaturgist].
Vex didn''t know what it was about his ss that allowed him to work against the system. He would have assumed it was a fundamental conceit of using a system-offered ss that he would be limited to its capabilities.
He certainly wasn''t , though.
This spell was one he''d figured out a while ago, while trying to understand the structure of a basic [Fireball]. His ss gave him the ability to read and examine Skills on a deeperyer than most people had ess to; he could see not only the way the mana flowed into the spell, but the runes that the system created to assist its formation.
One to gather the mana into a ball. Another to keep it tightly contained. A third to convert the mana as it spread outward, twisting the neutral mana into the aspect of Fire; that part of the spell would only trigger on impact as the containmentyer shattered.
It was all so... tightly structured. There was a certain simple elegance to it, certainly, but he couldn''t help but feel like he could do better.
So he did.
The gathering rune was fine, but he improved on it, having the spell draw from both his personal mana stores and the ambient mana in the air. With the mana concentration of the Nucleus being what it was, it meant the spell was more powerful than ever. That was as simple as copying the runic node that drew from his mana stores and tweaking it slightly,yering it strategically over the spell..
The containment rune existed only to ensure that the spell exploded at the point of contact. Pumping enough mana into the spell forced that mana to expand once theyer broke. This had been harder for him to modify he''d had to study other spells that elerated the spread of mana. Area-of-effect spells, mostly, that affected arger area than the mana input would suggest. The result was a rune that created ayer that, rather than shattering on impact, would crack at specified points and start shrinking, ejecting mana with force.
Thest rune... it was hard to exin what he''d done with it. His modifications to any rune that changed the aspect of mana relied on his understanding of the concept it epassed. This, more than anything, was the part that was more art than science. The runes sang to him, and acted in concert with him, and they worked together to bring his understanding into reality.
Fortunately, fire and mana were two concepts he understood very, very well.
His dagger finished moving through the air. He cast.
Unknown skill attempted!
Parsing...
Disying best approximation.
[Aspect of the gue ### Manaburn ###Fireball]
It was always interesting to see how the system decided tobel his spells. He''d think about thatter. For now, he watched with [Advanced Mana Sight], making sure his spell was working as he''d intended.
The spell was brighter than any [Fireball]. It sailed through the air in an arc, crashing into the middle of the monsters that spread out in front of Misa; when itnded, it bounced. Fire sputtered out of the spell like a liquid rather than sma,sting longer and spreading further than any spell he''d attempted back when he was still trying to hide his ss.
Where any amount of the liquid fire touched a monster, it sank into its skin and began to burn. Not at nerves and flesh and tissue; the thought of a spell like that made him flinch. But it burned at the mana they could ess, eating away the very resource they needed for most of their skills.
Wyrms could no longer [Burrow]. They crawled on the ground instead, wiggling ineffectually forward. Burrowing Spiders attacked without mana, their normally deadly, delike legs reduced to the rough equivalent of a stick.
And it was spreading. Clouds of mana, invisible to the naked eye, seemed to spread through the air every time an infected monster moved; it would sink into other, uninfected monsters, slowly burning through their mana too.
This spreading aspect beled ''gue'' by the system was new to him. Vex was suddenly very d that his party members were excluded from the effects of his magic, and decided that he''d reexamine the runes that went into this spellter.
If there was ater.
"Vex, what the fuck was that?!" Misa called up to him, and the lizard nearly jumped. "That was amazing!"
"Um... new spell! I''ll exinter!" Vex shouted back. He nced at his mana, tail swishing around nervously; the spell had taken nearly all of his rather impressive mana pool. 1,400 MP... it would be a while before he could cast it again. But the effects wouldst for five minutes, and there were smaller spells he could cast in the meantime to keep the party ahead.
He breathed. He was still nervous. They needed to survive for ten minutes; with a spell he couldn''t cast again, that left them with still half of the full time they needed. But Misa was fighting a little more steadily now, beating back the enemies and killing them, albeit slowly; even Derivan was fighting with a little less tension
Knowing that Derivan was leaping in and out of the ground didn''t make the sight any less ridiculous the second time. The situation still felt a little unreal to him.
Okay. Derivan would be fine.
Vex had to admit, the sight was amusing, and made him feel a little bit better about their impossible odds.
It proved to be a grueling fight but they managed. It took everyst scrap of the resources they had avable. Sev was throwing out healing every time he could spare the mana, looking more and more haggard every time he did so. In an attempt to save on mana, Vex leapt down from his tform and joined Misa at her side, relying on [Dagger Proficiency] to fight instead of spells.
(Misa protested this rather vocally, but didn''t have the time to physically stop Vex, with all her efforts focused on making sure he didn''t get hit.)
Misa kept her skill up, paying in blood for every enemy that she would have failed to stop without the skill but as the skill kept going, she got better, anticipating each enemy''s movements and relying on her skill less and less. It was one of the benefits of fighting a fixed set of monsters.
Their patterns became recognizable. Easier.
A memory teased at her, and she forcefully shut it down. Now wasn''t the time.
Derivan''s [Satiated]buff wore off, and he didn''t have the mana to keep using it but his initial use had given him enough of a head start that he could handle the enemiesing in from his side.
The spell Vex used helped both of them, of course, until it wore off; once it did, Vex leapt back onto his tform, supporting them both with basic [Fireball]s and [Conjure Dagger]s. It was a fight they were slowly losing a fight they would lose, if it kept going with the same intensity. But already there were fewer enemies, the monsters tapering down to a saner number.
[Grade 2 Mana Crystal will be upgraded to Grade 3 upon dungeon formation. Estimated time left: 10 seconds.]
10 seconds left. The monsters were almost entirely gone, with a few stragglers being quickly cut down by Derivan or Misa. Vex and Sev were both meditating, recovering their mana. They were all alive. Derivan and Misa were injured, with a few close calls nearly taking Misa out.
But their injuries were nothing that wouldn''t heal.
The clock ran down.
3.
2.
1.
Grade 2 Mana Crystal has been upgraded to Grade 3!
Dungeon formation in progress.
Logging Mana Nucleus state...
Ambient mana concentration detected at %!
Ambient mana deviation measured outside 3 standard deviations!
Recovering...
Excess mana will be routed to bonus dungeon rooms. Excess deviation will have unpredictable effects on dungeon formation.
What?
On the one hand, this should have been over, and it didn''t matter what the system said as long as they didn''t have to keep fighting. But the mana concentration was strange should have been impossible, even. The mana deviation had gone up, even though it usually stabilized as a dungeon progressed towards forming.
Something felt wrong. To all of them, even the ones that didn''t know the specifics of dungeon formation; there was a foreboding there.
Calcting parameters for bonus rooms from local seeds...
Seed 1:
[Fallen Guardian]>
Bonus room created:
The Vige''s Last Defense>
Misa swallowed, staring at the name; an old, old pain welled up inside her. She didn''t know what she was supposed to feel, only that something about this felt terribly invasive.
Seed 2:
[Chromaturgist]>
Bonus room created:
Seed parameters exceed allowable local parameters. Seeking administrator approval...
Recovering...
Bonus room created:
A World Without the System>
Vex stared. Well, that was that, he supposed; he''d been nning on revealing his ss anyway, although he hadn''t expected it to happen quite like this. There was still a speck of nervousness in him it was hard topletely be rid of the fear he''d held ever since the notification first appeared.
But no one said anything. He nced around, and Misa offered him a small, supportive smile, like she knew what he was feeling and wanted him to know it was fine. Derivan simply looked curious.
Sev seemed... kind of surprised, but not about the ss.
Feeling heartened by hisrades, he nced back to the message but his heart dropped slightly when he saw thest part.
What the fuck was red? He''d never seen that color in the system, and the error preceding it worried him.
Seed 3:
Unexpected seed! Compensating...
Bonus room created:
The Bridge Between>
Derivan froze. He wanted to speak, but the words felt thick in his throat; he stared at the screen in front of him, willing it to change. He could feel the sharp gazes of his friends, drilling into him.
The system hadn''t even afforded him a name. It
"It''s fine," Sev spoke softly before his thoughts could spiral further. The armor looked up, then, only to see that the others were offering him tired smiles.
...They''d known.
"...Thank you, then," Derivan said with a bow of his head. "And I am sorry for keeping up the ruse as long as I did."
"You had to," Misa said shortly, ncing at Sev. The cleric nodded, and his words dipped into a careful warning.
"Right now, the system''s on pause, because it''s calcting. I don''t know what will happen once it''s finished, but I don''t think it''ll like that you''re ying outside the role it gave you. Derivan... be careful."
Derivan didn''t know what to say. He nodded once, feeling trepidation rise up within him; Vex nced at him nervously, then walked over to sit next to him.
It was a small gesture of support, but it was one he appreciated.
Seed 4:
Compounding errors detected. Local fractures detected. Compensation nodes saturated. Unable to furtherpensate.
WARNING: Local boundaries may fail catastrophically without administrator override!
WARNING: Local boundaries may-
Overridemand epted. Bonus room offered:
Come and find me.>
"...Okay," Sev breathed. "I... wasn''t expecting that."
"What the fuck secrets have you been keeping?!" Misa burst out, though she seemed more startled than angry.
"It''splicated," Sev muttered.
"It might not be all him," Vex offered, though he looked worried. "It mentionedpounding errors, right? Almost all of us had some kind of error. Yours might just be the"
Another box interrupted them.
WARNING: Mana concentration and amount of deviation still in excess. Routing excess mana...
Grade 3 Crystal upgraded to Grade 4!
Grade 4 Crystal upgraded to Grade 5!
Grade 5 Crystal upgraded to Grade 6!
Grade 6
Overridemand epted. Remaining excess mana routed to Overseer summoning.
Repent, sinner, for ye are but amb before the ughter.
"I don''t think this is finished yet," Sev said, a littlemely.
The four of them stared at the notification. The notifications. The second box hovered ominously,rger and and with a greater presence than all the previous ones.
"I never thought I''d see a box this threatening," Vexmented, his tail twitch betraying his nervousness. Misa snorted anyway, needing that small bit of humor.
But that was all the time they had.
The force walls that Vex had built shattered like so much broken ss, and the [Earth Ward] dissipated.
Above them, mana was boiling, twisting and turning into currents, gathering into a single form.
Barely visible above, the ovey of the system glowed. For all that it was nearly impossible to see in the chaos, itmanded all their attention.
Chapter 5: Skill Abuse
Chapter 5: Skill Abuse
Derivan knew what he needed to do.
The rest of the party had already expended everything they had. Sev had exhausted most of his mana trying to keep them all alive. Vex had simrly spent most of his mana on spells, and Misa was already barely keeping it together. She had 30% of her health left, and a direct hit from a three-digit leveled creature something he had, until now, been certain was impossible would kill her instantly even if she were still at full health.
Derivan had a protective buffer she didn''t, and much more health besides.
He took a breath. He didn''t need to, but he did it anyway; it was one of the many small things that made him feel a little more like what he yearned to be. Someone the system didn''t see as a monster. Someone with a name, and a ss that reflected who he was as a person.
Not what he had now; not thebel the system had burned into him.
Level 86 Infiltrating Armor.
He''d given himself a name, but if the system that the entire world ran on didn''t acknowledge it then who was he, really?
Derivan had never really allowed himself to consider his wish of being more, before. It seemed like too much to hope for. Then he''d been revealed, only to find out that his party members already knew, and didn''t care... he felt that spark of hope.
Now, again, that spark died; he wasn''t foolish enough to think that he could survive against anything this powerful.
But he could buy them time.
The system did not see him as a person. Misa, Sev, Vex they did. That was enough to be worth sacrificing himself for.
He would''ve done it for less.
Besides, he could already feel what Sev meant his link to the system creeping in once again, shrouding his soul. It was so insidious a force that he''d never felt it before, had assumed it to be just a part of his being; only when it was gone and then returned did he understand it for what it was.
And along with the link came a feeling of foreboding. He didn''t know what it meant, but he had a suspicion, and it was a suspicion that both terrified him and filled him with resolve.
"Run," Derivan said quietly. "Please."
He didn''t hear what they said in response. He understood, intellectually, that they protested immediately; he saw in the corner of his eyes that Misa was struggling to get up, that Vex was staring like he wanted to run after him. Sev held them both back with a gentle barrier of light, though he himself looked torn, and Derivan allowed himself a small, hidden smile at the sight.
They were true friends, all of them.
Disguise Status deactivated.
Level 26 > Level 86
All [Disguise Status]-rted restrictions removed.
Maximum health increased.
Maximum MP increased.
Derivan leapt into the air. It''d been a long, long time since he''d moved like this,pletely free from the restrictions imposed on him by [Disguise Status]. He shot through the air faster than he anticipated, his de whistling through the wind in front of him. Wisps of ck lightning congealed along his sword as he activated another skill.
[Paralyzing sh].
It was a basic Skill afforded to many meleebatants. He didn''t need to defeat the Overseer, whatever an Overseer was. He needed to grapple it for the one second he would need to activate [Consume] at its maximum level. It could break out afterwards, but that happened at set intervals. It would give his friends time. It hadn''t even finished forming yet; he was willing to bet it couldn''t use skills
The Overseer reached for his de and caught it. Lightning dissipated like so much useless mana.
Worse, that same ck lightning began to course through its body.
Derivan stared.
Far, far away, he thought he heard Sev yell in panic and felt the familiar charge of a heal rush through his body. It was a powerful heal that brought him back up to full health in a fraction of a second, and even then it barely hit him in time.
Flick.
Derivan''s armor sounded like a gong as a manapressed finger mmed into his body, visibly denting the metal and sending him flying back towards the ground. He couldn''t try to rotate or minimize the impact of his fall; his own [Paralyzing sh] worked against him, ck lightning flickering across his body and freezing up his joints when he tried to move.
He heard his friends shouting again and heard the worry in their voices. He felt light barriers break beneath him as Sev tried to cushion his fall, and then a gust of wind as Vex tried to counteract the force of it.
He still mmed into the ground, almost right next to where Sev had set up the barrier for Misa and Vex.
Half his health in one blow, and he suspected that Sev''s heal and [Oneshot Protection] were the only things that had stopped him from being instantly killed.
[Oneshot Protection] [Passive] [No Grade]
Enemies cannot deal more than 50% of your maximum health in damage in one attack.
If Sev hadn''t healed him in time... How had he known? How had he managed to heal him enough to max out his health? The cleric was the second strongest in their team, but he shouldn''t have been able to heal half the health of a level 86 monster.
He looked over at Sev, sitting only a few feet away from him; the human looked pale, pained. There wasn''t time for questions.
"We have a n," Sev told him. "Twoyers. Vex has a spell that can directly attack mana but he needs time to regenerate mana and it might not be strong enough. If it doesn''t work, we''ll fall back to my cast of [Divine Communion]. I''ll start it now, but it''s a ritual cast and will take longer than Vex''s spell. Misa will be the second line of defense, but she can''t hold it off for long, especially if it realizes it just needs to attack quickly. You''re the only one that might be able to stall it for long."
Derivan wanted to tell them to run. A n was forming in his head; he could survive, at least for a while. But he saw the determination in their eyes, and he wasn''t sure he could hold it off for long enough that it would matter if they did run.
The Overseer could move faster than any of them could. Even him. He''d thought his level and his stats could at least be more of a barrier
"I will," he told Sev, putting his doubts to the side. Misa nodded at him seriously, getting into position. Vex sat down to meditate. Sev began casting, lights slowly gimmering into existence around him. Motes of silvery brilliance drew into the focus he held in his fist.
The Overseer descended.
The mana, previously churning in visible waves of tattered light, had settled down into barely-visible distortions in the air and behind them, the Overseer was finally fully visible.
It was a mockery of something humanoid and bipedal,pressed energy making the barest attempt at a body. Twisted light strung together into limbs that were just a little too long and a little too thick; its fists were malformed things, fingers glued back into its own construct like it didn''t quite understand what they were for.
And then, of course, there were the eyes. Far too many eyes, the sizes different and wrong, with no pupils or irises to speak of. If not for the shape, they would barely seem like eyes at all, and yet looking at them gave Derivan the distinct feeling of being watched
A smile cracked open in the mana that made up the Overseer''s body. Cracked. The energy seemed to ripple and twist, and it seemed almost like the mana itself had been permanently rent. There was an echo of pain from something that wasn''t the Overseer.
Derivan charged again.
He was more careful, this time. [Paralyzing sh] hadn''t worked, but a grapple for [Consume] was still his best bet for time; all he had to do was get somewhere the Overseer wouldn''t reach. A grapple counted as long as he was holding on to the target. He didn''t need to actually pin the Overseer down.
Still wearing the same jagged, almost pained-looking smile, the Overseer reached down to swat him away. It was a strike that would kill him, and it moved too fast for him to dodge.
No.
Disguise Status activated.
Level 86 > Level 43
Stat and skill suppression activated.
Maximum health reduced.
Maximum MP reduced.
The hit struck him, sending him flying, but it didn''t kill him, [Oneshot Protection] activating again. [Disguise Status] only reduced his maximum health; it didn''t adjust his health percentage as a whole.
Which, well, was stupid. It was an obvious oversight. But it worked.
He hadn''t been sure it would. Derivan took a breath he didn''t need to take, then mmed his sword into the ground to kill his momentum. A split secondter, he''d deactivated [Disguise Status] to charge forward again.
The Overseer was underestimating him; he''d paid attention to exactly what it had done. It attacked him as soon as he was within reach. It wasn''t guaranteed that it would do the same thing twice, but that was often the pattern that other monsters followed, for reasons he didn''t yet understand.
He didn''t wait for the Overseer to attack he didn''t have the speed to dodge out of the way. Derivan jumped as soon as he was within reach, anticipating the attack.
It came.
The blow was powerful enough that the drag force pulled him along with it; Derivan went along with the flow, knowing he had only a split second of confusion in which he could act. He needed to get behind the Overseer. The change in his momentum helped. He darted to the side, leapt
And clung to the Overseer''s back.
It helped a lot that the Overseer''s chosen body n was, frankly, terrible. Long arms gave it better reach, but it couldn''t maneuver them into position to hit him, and it didn''t have the joints. He didn''t know what skills the Overseer had, either, but as long as he could hold on for a second
[Buff [Satiated]applied!]
The Overseer vanished in a re of ck light. Derivan fell to the ground, almost stunned that it had worked.
It was only enough to guarantee them five seconds, but five seconds was a lot inbat.
"...What happened?" Misa asked. She didn''t ask if he''d won; she knew from the tension in his posture that he had not. But Derivan didn''t have time to answer.
He''d gained skills, and they needed information. He nced through what he''d gained as quickly as he could, flicking copies off to Vex and Misa at the same time; Sev couldn''t receive system boxes while preparing [Divine Communion].
[Creature of Mana] [Passive] [No Grade] [Temporary]
You are born of mana and made of mana. Any mana-based spell effect that would be turned against you is altered to your benefit, whether to strike down your foes or to reinforce your form.
As an additional benefit, your physical form holds no true shape. You may, through an act of concentration, change the appearance of your form.
[Overseer] [Passive] [No Grade] [Temporary]
Skill description and functionality not avable. Locked to administrator ess.
[Creature of Chaos] [Active] [No Grade] [Temporary]
Shape mana to your will, imbuing it with the very essence of Chaos. Mana manipted by you will be unstable in form and aspect, shifting rapidly until all possibilities are exhausted.
As an additional benefit, slow down or speed up the entropic progression of any object or creature with an act of concentration.
Derivan didn''t know how [Creature of Mana] would affect Vex''s spell; he trusted the mage to figure it out. If it was too risky to cast, he wouldn''t cast it, and they would hope that Sev''s spell would give them a way out of this situation. He knew very little about [Divine Communion], for Sev had never truly exined what it was, only that it could save them if they were caught in an impossible situation. It seemed powerful, but the fact that it could only be used once and had a cast time that made it nearly useless inbat made it... difficult to work with.
[Overseer] was... interesting. But there was nothing he could do with it.
[Creature of Chaos] was concerning. Clearly, whatever the Overseer was, it hadn''t seen him as enough of a threat to use that ability. Derivan didn''t know what entropic progression was, but it didn''t sound good. He would have to make sure that the Overseer didn''t get the opportunity to concentrate.
There wasn''t much he could do about the first part of the skill. He''d just have to deal with it.
Two seconds had passed. Derivan felt something in his soul seem to shiver.
Three.
Something inside his soul seemed to snap. Derivan felt a strange sense of impossible vertigo for a moment, as something upied the same space as him; he''d never experienced his [Satiated] buff failing early before. He was thrown back violently, and he only barely managed to catch himself and prevent damage.
But five seconds hadn''t yet passed.
Chapter 6: Chains
Chapter 6: Chains
Derivan caught and strangled the re of panic as his Skill failed. What did that tell him?
There were only a few possibilities. One, somehow, the Overseer still had ess to its skills, and one of them allowed it to mess with [Consume]. Two, it was at such a high level that it could simply ignore the Skill. But... no. That didn''t make sense. Skills were generally fairly absolute, the rules of the system invible. Sheer levels were rarely enough to allow their effects to be broken.
No; it had to be the first possibility. Whatever principle escaping from [Consume] operated on, the Overseer had done something to it. It couldn''t have been [Creature of Mana]; [Consume] cost mana, but it wasn''t a spell effect. And besides, the Skill had seeded.
That left [Overseer] and [Creature of Chaos]. [Overseer] was a dead end for spection
"It''s [Creature of Chaos]," Vex sent him over the system. Derivan risked a quick nce at the wizard, who still seemed deep in [Meditation], but seemed perfectly capable of typing on the system interface while doing so. "Entropic progression is how the system talks about skill cooldowns."
Ah. That exined things.
"Misa," Derivan said. "I will need your help for this. I cannot take it alone. I am sorry."
The half-orc nodded. "You have a n?"
"I need you to taunt it," Derivan said. "I will do the rest."
The Overseer had taken a moment to recover from stumbling back into realspace, but now it roared, charging towards them. Clearly, it hadn''t liked being trapped. Derivan readied himself he could minimize the harm that Misa would be exposed to if he was quick.
The spot he''d clung to on the Overseer''s back was still a weak point; it hadn''t changed shape, and couldn''t reach its own back. The problem was that it knew what he could do, now, and wouldn''t risk that happening again.
Sure enough, even as he tried to run around it, the Overseer rotated, keeping one of its many eyes on him.
But that was where Misa came in.
The trick with [To Fall Yet Hold the Line]was one that they had taken a while to figure out that was the problem with Skills that were vaguely worded. They had specific mechanics that needed to be tested to be really understood. Misa could block any attack at a t cost of only ten percent of her health, but only if she would otherwise fail to block it. A partial block didn''t count as a failure, which, oddly enough, made it less effective against monsters of her own level.
But it was good at holding the line against a limited number of enemies. It was even better at defending one ally, because as they had discovered she could keep adjusting the metaphorical ''line'' for her Skill.
Derivan dashed forward. An attack came, this time not a physical blow he could dodge; he felt it before he saw it, the way the mana around the Overseer twisted in an ugly, impossible way. He felt something in his soul begin to twist in response
but then Misa was there. Her focus glowed.
If you would fail to block an attack, you do not.
It was an attack she would have failed to block. She did not.
Derivan leapt past her.
The Overseer reacted, surprised but not wanting to be caught off guard again. This time it reached for him, hand reaching forward in an impossibly fast grab and once more Misa was there to block it.
If Derivan had been hit, he would have been sent flying. With Misa, a steady reverberation rolled through the air instead, her body staying perfectly in ce what she needed to do to fully block the attack. Derivan took the opportunity totch himself on to the Overseer, even as instinct forced the mana abomination to try to ovee the sudden barrier set before him.
He just needed one second. But the Overseer seemed prepared and spun just before the timer ticked down, fast enough that sheer inertia threw him off.
Then Misa did something he hadn''t expected or known that she could do she blocked him, appearing just behind him with her shoulder to his back to steady him, leaving him just within range tond on the Overseer again.
This time, Derivan grabbed the Overseer''s head. It had the reach to attack him, but Misa blocked both attacks at once, somehow, her body twisting in an impossible blur even as a roar of pain bellowed out from her lungs. While she was distracted, mana pulsed around it, charging with lightning and mming into his body, and he watched his health drain rapidly.
But not fast enough.
[Buff [Satiated] applied!]
The Overseer vanished for the second time in a blip of dark light; Derivan reacted instantly, reaching for the new skill hovering in the back of his mind. [Creature of Chaos]. The entropic progression portion of the skill required concentration, so he concentrated on slowing down the escape interval for [Consuming], and
Maybe using [Creature of Chaos] counted as an attack?
"Misa," Derivan said. "Please try to block him. If you have enough health."
He didn''t see what she did, or listen to what she said in response. He dove deeper into his soul, concentrating; he felt the skills ticking inside him. One temporary, one permanent. One holding back another, but slipping.
He held.
Five seconds passed.
Six. Seven.
Derivan didn''t let the tion distract him. He kept his focus on the skill, feeling it tremble in his grasp. He felt almost like he was in a trance, bnced on a razor''s edge; it was on the verge of copsing, and he knew he would only be able to hold on to it for the barest second longer
"Derivan!" Vex called out to him, and his eyes red to life in his helmet.
That was a signal, if he''d ever heard one. He let go of the skill.
The Overseer burst into existence again, this time with a roar of fury that turned into a solid wave of sound; he saw barriers that Vex had ced shatter even as his body was physically rebuffed by apressed wave of air. Too many eyes on the mana abomination''s body fixated on him, narrowing with anger.
The air trembled with chaotic mana. Derivan saw Misa lying next to Vex; unconscious or dead, he couldn''t tell. He saw Sev with his eyes screwed shut, still chanting. He saw Vex shouting something, determined
He saw an iprehensiblence shoot forward. The mana abomination staggered backwards with a cry of something that sounded like shock, though the sound was alien to him. An impossible fire burned into a being that was equally impossible, ripping ephemeral holes in an ephemeral body.
For a long, eternal moment, everything seemed still and frozen.
Then he saw Vex copse. The Overseer crashed into a wall of the crater, but that was a distant thing; his senses went numb as he began to run for his friends. Sev was the only one left standing, still speaking a silent prayer. That, more than anything else, told him this wasn''t over.
Derivan ran forward as fast as he could. The Overseer burst from the dirt, angrier than ever, wounded but not dead. Vex had done more damage than should have been possible with mana, and yet...
A massive spike of chaotic mana formed in front of the creature not aimed at him, but aimed at his friends. He ran harder, almost praying.
But he already knew he couldn''t get there in time. He didn''t know what he would do if he could.
The mana moved faster than he could, ance almost the same as Vex''s sting back towards them.
Sev opened his eyes. They shone with a brilliant blue.
"[Divine Communion]," he spoke.
A rift opened.
It was somewhere, nowhere, and everywhere, all at once. In its wake, reality seemed to bend, and then fracture.
The Overseer, the crater, and the mana crystals vanished. The system interface cracked. The rift grew.
And then they were in a void.
But that void was not empty.
Chains stretched into the sky; rusting, burning chains, with fire king off the dense, dusty metal. Chains were scattered around on the floor, too, all of them burning with the same strange, impossible me. They cast an eerie glow onto the nothingness that was the ground Derivan stood on.
They led to an odd, dark speck floating in the air, too far away to properly see.
Derivan stared. None of this made any sense to him.
"...What is this ce? Onyx?" Sev''s voice echoed in the emptiness. It was the first time Derivan had ever heard their cleric sound so hesitant. It was enough to snap Derivan''s attention back in the direction of his friends, and he breathed a small sigh of relief to see that everyone was fine. Vex and Misa were both slowly getting to their feet, looking around in no small amount of confusion.
None of them had the chance to say a word before Sev began to walk then run towards the figure in the distance.
"H-hey!" Misa called out, but Sev seemed to ignore her; she cursed under her breath, reaching out to steady Vex as Derivan slowly approached them.
"You are both okay?" he asked, a little uncertain. "I was... I am worried. I did not see what happened."
"Honestly I have no idea what the fuck happened either," Misa answered, grimacing a bit as she looked at her status. "My health is still shot. I''m not dead, but I''m also not regenerating. Sev never mentioned[Divine Communion] pping us all in a big fuckoff void, did he?"
"I believe I would have remembered it if he had," Derivan said drily, but the humor helped. Misa was... not okay, perhaps, but she was feeling well enough to make jokes, and that told him enough.
Vex, on the other hand, wasn''t paying attention to either of them. He was kneeling down next to the chains, staring at the fire that was slowly eating away at the false metal. It took him a moment to realize that both Misa and Derivan were looking at him questioningly, and he shook his head helplessly in response. "This fire is weird. I think it''s... I think it''s my magic?"
"...Your magic?" Misa asked, raising an eyebrow but she looked up as she spoke, and her eyes sharpened. She let out a sharp curse. "Shit. Okay, questionster. We gotta go after Sev."
Derivan nced in the cleric''s direction. He was still running full-tilt towards the speck in the distance, heedless of any potential danger. With a curse and a quick apology, he grabbed Misa and Vex, the former grumbling and thetter letting out a high-pitched yelp.
It was the only way they''d catch up with Sev, though.
Even then, by the time they caught up with the cleric, he was already there, standing just in front of the figure they''d seen in the distance. Sev was apparently capable of running very quickly when he wanted to.
Now that they were closer, they could see what Sev had apparently realized long before them. The chains led to a person, a figure cut out of pitch-ck stone whose arms and feet were bound inyered, twisting chains. The chains here didn''t burn; the fire was still moving slowly, inching up the chains from what might have been miles away.
The slow rise and fall of the figure''s chest and the blood dripping from him, a thick, viscous fluid were the only indications that he was anything more than a chiseled sculpture.
"I don''t understand," Sev said softly. He reached out, but whoever this was hung too far up for Sev to reach. His fingers grazed the chains leading up to his feet, instead. The cleric seemed deeply shaken. "I thought..."
"Who is Onyx?" It was Misa that spoke, but her voice was surprisingly gentle. She ced a hand on Sev''s shoulder, and it seemed to startle him enough to nudge him back to reality.
"He is... the god I work with," Sev answered, looking helplessly at Misa, then at the rest of the party. "I mean. I don''t know if that''s the right way to put it. But I don''t that''s not the point. This is him, I think. But I don''t..."
I don''t know what happened. The words were left unspoken, the cleric staring up at the figure of his god mutely. All of them were briefly silent, taking in the sight.
This was supposed to be a god?
Derivan didn''t know much about the gods, but the idea of anyone or anything doing this to a god chilled him.
Vex was the first one among them to speak.
"The notification. When the Overseer was called. The second one, that was red remember what it said?"
"''Repent, sinner, for ye are but amb before the ughter''," Sev answered almost automatically. His face was ashen. Vex nodded.
"I... I thought the singr use of sinner was a mistake, or a reference to just one of us. But... maybe it wasn''t talking about us." The lizard knelt, a finger brushing along the chains. "That fire was my magic," he said quietly. "It shouldn''t be here, wherever this is. I cast it on the Overseer. The only way my magic could be here is if these chains are somehow... linked."
None of them knew how to react. They shared concerned gazes, with Sev''s expression looking a little more distraught and distressed as they stood beneath the unconscious god. Derivan ced a hand on the cleric''s shoulder.
"Perhaps you could heal him?" Derivan suggested softly. Sev looked like he was aching to do something. Even now, a dark fluid dripped down onto the ground from Onyx''s body, slowly evaporating into nothingness. Sev grimaced a bit, looking up at the figure hanging in the air. "Or we could try to break the chains."
"I... maybe. I don''t know what would happen if I tried." Sev bit his lip, looking conflicted. "Skills don''t work properly here. They''re stronger sometimes, weaker other times. Sometimes the effect of the Skill ispletely twisted. I''ll try to heal him, and then hopefully he''ll have some answers for us, and can help us break the chains."
Sev seemed to feel a little better as he spoke, at least. He was the kind of person that worked better when he had a n to follow. He took a steadying breath and focused, reaching for a ce within him that Derivan couldn''t see.
Derivan could feel the power gathering, though. Sev spoke, his voice reverberating: "[Divine Inhtion]."
It was a strange name for a healing spell, Derivan thought, but he hardly had time to focus on it. There was a sharp re of light, almost ring in its intensity.
And yet for all the power the spell seemed to have, and for all that it sent Sev staggering backwards, panting like it had torn out some vital piece of him nothing seemed to change.
The god continued to bleed. The chains continued to burn, the fire slowly inching closer.
Sev seemed to sag, something inside him folding in on itself. Derivan was about to suggest trying to break the chains anyway, but before he could, Onyx spoke.
His voice was quiet and weak, far from what Derivan imagined the voice of a god would be and yet beneath that weakness was a quiet fortitude and a well of preserved strength.
"Your friend has weakened my chains," he said. Sev startled, almost reaching out but he couldn''t reach Onyx any more than he could before. "And you have restored some small part of me. I can... pull this form away. Back into the upper nes. You must... leave. The dungeon will form. It will have answers."
"We are here now," Derivan said. "Can we not help you?"
"We could smash up the chains," Misa said, eyeing them critically. "They don''t look that strong."
"I can burn them again," Vex offered.
Onyx offered them all a small, pained smile. "You cannot break them now. Not... as you are."
"I thought I saved you," Sev said, his voice small.
Onyx paused, and spoke gently. "You did."
There was a sense of finality to those words; a sense of an ending. A goodbye, perhaps. But there was no time to make sense of it, for there was also the sense of a Skill petering out; of a god leveraging what limited strength he retained to drag a metaphysical body through an impossible distance.
And then they were back, just outside the crater that had once been the Mana Nucleus. It was home to a freshly-formed dungeon made of towering blue stone. None of them spared it a second nce; it was all too... normal. Pristine. Shining there like nothing had happened.
They''d won an impossible battle.
But somehow, it didn''t feel like a victory.
Chapter 7: A Complete Disregard for Fate
Chapter 7: A Complete Disregard for Fate
The party was quiet and downtrodden, even as they began their journey back towards the Guild. They had reported the formation of the dungeon, of course. That was a necessary procedure, and it helped them, too, to engage with something approaching normal. The dungeon meant better resources for everyone in the region, possibly better gear. It was entirely possible that the mana crystal shortage for all the nearby viges could be solved with this, depending on how the politics of dungeon ownership shook out.
They were not going into the dungeon immediately. That was a surefire way to die: there were sses specifically oriented towards scouting out dungeons, understanding their traps and their dangers. The Adventurer''s Guild would rank the dungeon, and then they would delve it. It was procedure.
But Onyx had said they would find answers in the dungeon. Why? Something was clearly wrong. Between the danger in the Mana Nucleus, the abnormal formation of the dungeon, the strange messages from the system...
The imprisonment of a god.
There was a lot on their minds, simply put. Sev seemed worried and withdrawn, his mind no doubt on his own god''s imprisonment and state of being.
Derivan was the first one to speak. He stopped abruptly in his tracks, and the rest of the party stopped as well, turning to look at him; the armor looked... disturbed.
"You know what I am," Derivan said softly. "You knew, even before it was revealed back there. It did not bother you?"
There was a brief silence. Misa and Sev nced at each other; Vex held back a little more, looking nervous.
Sev was the one that answered, seeming to put aside his worry for now. "Kind of. I had a pretty strong suspicion, and Misa felt the same way when she joined. We talked about it, and we decided it didn''t really matter."
Derivan nced at Misa, who shrugged. "Look, you saved me, I saved you, that''s enough reason for me to trust anyone."
"We were just waiting for you to befortable with telling us," Sev continued. He gave Vex an apologetic look. "It was one of the things we were going to tell you."
"I sort of guessed anyway," Vex admitted. He took a breath, and seemed to let his nervousness flow out of him. Derivan couldn''t help a small smile. The lizard had been incredibly nervous when he''d first joined them, terrified of letting even the smallest detail slip about his ss.
He was still shy, but he''d gained a lot of confidence, at least around his team. Vex continued, looking earnestly at Derivan. "Your armor''s magic isn''t right for a curse. I mean, I didn''t know exactly what was going on, but I figured you had some kind of secret. I just didn''t really care, and I trusted you would tell me tell us eventually."
Vex looked down, now a little bit nervous again. Open secret or not, it felt strange to be talking about his ss. "...Besides, it''s not like I wasn''t hiding my own secret."
"Right!" Misa burst out, looking excited or perhaps simply relieved to have something totch on to that wasn''t so heavy. "What the heck is a [Chromaturgist]? How the fuck is it so powerful?"
Vex chuckled a bit, though he avoided looking directly at Misa, casting his gaze off into the distance instead. He was proud of his aplishments; it just wasn''t something he''d ever really had the opportunity to boast about. "It''s... hard to exin. It''s a ss that lets me analyze, deconstruct, and reconstruct magic. The spells were powerful because I figured out how to use ambient mana in my spells, and the ambient mana in the Nucleus was really concentrated."
Misa let out a whistle. "Sounds strong. Especially once the ss grows."
"Says the woman that can block anything," Vex chuckled. "I''ve never seen anyone fight like you do."
"That skill is limited," Misa said with a scowl. There was a small beat, and then she smiled. "...but I guess it is pretty cool."
Derivan smiled a bit, listening to his friends banter. The faint glow in his eyes strengthened briefly, then dimmed again. Something had felt strange the moment they left the Nucleus, and that feeling of wrongness was only growing. It was the reason he''d stopped.
He''d thought at first that he simply needed to ask about how they knew, partially to break the silence, and partially to assure himself that hispanions truly didn''t care that he was what the system deemed a monster. But now, everything seemed fine, and yet...
Derivan remembered Sev''s words. I don''t think it''ll like that you''re ying outside the role it gave you. Implying that the system was... alive? That it didn''t like his presence, his ability to have his own will?
He felt a noxious seed coil around his heart, the tendrils of a system he didn''t understand.
You are an infiltrator, it told him. Not in so many words, but in a distinct set of impulses and instincts he now recognized as foreign. You are discovered. You must eliminate those who know.
I will do no such thing, Derivan thought in return, and he forced his will against those alien instincts; they fought and wed against him, but they were impulses that he could ignore.
For now.
"I cannot stay," the armor said quietly. Misa and Vex both startled, looking up at him; their protests ovepped one another, loud and indignant.
"What?! You can''t just"
"You don''t have to"
Sev, on the other hand... He didn''t seem to react nearly as strongly. He watched Derivan carefully, instead, a mild furrow in his brows and a sadness in his eyes; Derivan looked at the cleric, bowing his head slightly.
"You know why I must leave," he said.
Sev took in the words and then slowly nodded. "I can guess," the cleric answered.
"Don''t give me this cryptic bullshit!" Misa half exploded, suddenly genuinely angry. "Sev, you''ve told me you need to keep secrets, and I trust you. But you need to exin what we just saw, because I''m not just going to ept at face value that Derivan needs to leave. He just risked his life to help us survive whatever the fuck that was."
She looked willing to fight him on it, too. Even Vex''s fists were balled up, though it seemed subconscious on his part.
"I-I would understand if you wanted to leave," the lizardkin said, looking up at his friend. It seemed like even saying those words were a struggle for him. "But you don''t seem like you want to."
Ah.
That hurt. It was a painful truth.
Derivan looked around. He saw Misa''s eyes ze with a righteous anger, undirected though it was. He saw Vex stand surprisingly tall, meeting his gaze with a firmness he wouldn''t have managed a month ago. He saw Sev look at him and give him a slight, small nod, and he took it as a cue to exin.
"You''re right that I do not want to leave," he admitted. "But what Sev said before, that I had to keep my secret... I think I would have told you sooner, if it had been only my choice. But it was not. I did not realize it until now."
He hesitated, searching for the words. "This system is...plicated. I do not know how it operates, or why it exists. But at least for monsters" Here he winced at the word, hating thebel. "it appears toe with... instincts? Instructions. It was subtle enough for me to miss it before, and I was unhindered when you did not know what I was, for infiltrators must blend in as much as possible. But now that you do..."
"The system is trying to force him to attack," Sev said. He watched Derivan carefully, but he didn''t seem afraid. The armor wondered if he was being wise or foolish, heartened as he was by the cleric''s trust. "But it cannot. Because you are not what the system believes you are."
"And yet, I am." Derivan said, though he spoke with no small amount of sorrow. "I understand and appreciate your faith in me, but it seems unavoidable that I will be a risk. Even now, I feel the system pushing my role upon me."
To their credit, both Misa and Vex took a moment to absorb this information. Neither immediately rejected Derivan, nor insisted that he stay; when they finally spoke, it was with the firmness of a friend that had given the situation its due consideration.
Which, admittedly, meant that it was a long, painful silence before either of them spoke. But he was all the more certain that they spoke with sincerity.
"I''m okay with that risk," Misa said. She folded her arms, brow furrowing slightly, but with a steadily growing confidence. "I don''t think it''s right that you''d have to leave us because of something out of your control. Besides, with us, we can at least keep an eye on you. If you don''t have support to keep you anchored, and your instincts are forced on you as you say..."
She hesitated, then shook her head. "It''s easier to fight your darkest thoughts when you have friends, Derivan. If you push those around you away, you leave yourself with nothing to hold on to. Trust me. I''ve been there."
"You''re a friend. I might be being selfish, but I just don''t want you to leave," Vex said simply. Derivan blinked in surprise, but the lizardkin stared back at him with a certitude in his eyes that he''d never seen before. He''de up and discarded a hundred different rationalizations, and ended on simple honesty. He smiled a small smile. "I''d say I''m sorry, but I''m really not."
Sev smiled a small smile. "How about it, Derivan? I believe you''re better off with us than out there by yourself, too. I understand why you think you have to leave, but let''s be honest."
"No one in this group gives a damn what the system thinks. Every single one of us breaks the system in some stupid way, and frankly, if we need to break it again to keep you with us? Do you think we''d even hesitate?"
Derivan paused. "I am a risk," he said again, uncertain.
"Yeah, no," Misa said. "I''m with Sev on this. Let''s smash the system."
"At least a little bit," Vex said, and then when Misa looked at him, he threw his arms up. "Or a lot! A lot, if Derivan needs it."
"If you''re a risk, I think we get the right to choose whether we take that risk or not," Sev said. "And honestly, I think we''ve all chosen. You earned your ce with us long ago, Derivan."
"Saved our asses one time too many, too," Misa added.
"And mine!" Vex piped up. To be included? Derivan couldn''t help chuckling, regardless, feeling a warmth blossom inside of him as he looked at hispanions his friends. He shouldn''t have doubted them for a second. Tell them the system was restraining him, and of course they''d leap to the conclusion of breaking the system.
Again.
The other two nodded, firmly; Derivan didn''t know what to say. Slowly, he stepped forward only now realizing that the other three stood in a circle with a space they''d left open just for him.
"Now!" Sev pped his hands together; the smile he smiled was a genuine one, with a hint of the mischievous spark he sometimes had. "I have a really stupid n. Hey, Misa. Don''t you think this kind of intrusiveness miiight count as... say, an attack?"
There was a pause.
"Oh by the fucking gods you cannot be serious." Misa stared, seeming delighted. "Wait, are you serious? Can I oh, that would be stupid. Is this continuous attack, though? That might drain my health almost instantly. The skill''s weird with continuous attacks."
"It might. But you''ve got a really good cleric." Sev smirked with just a bit of smugness, then lost it as he added. "But uh, we can try a different n if you feel like that''s too risky"
"Are you kidding me? I''m in," Misa said with barely a second''s thought. She had one stupid bullshit skill that she could use frequently, and she would use it every time she could.
"Would just blocking it be enough?" Vex asked, worried. "I mean, if she stops blocking it..."
"Probably not," Sev said, shaking his head. "But that''s where youe in, ''cause I''ve got it on good authority that the system isn''t just changing him; it''s using magic. It''s just using really subtle magic. You won''t be able to see it directly, but you''ll be able to see how Misa blocks him, and... well, I mean, I hope that''s enough. That''s where my n ends. But we can always find other methods if this doesn''t work."
"Okay." Vex nodded. He felt he normally would have protested, or asked questions about what kind of magic this was, but he was caught up in the current; they were going to fix a problem! "Let''s do it."
Derivan felt rather bemused as the whole party set themselves up around him. Misa stood in front of him, feeling a bit silly as she held out her mace, while Vex stood just beside them both, watching intently. Sev was a little farther back, carefully keeping his healing magic focused on Misa.
"Ready?" Misa asked him. He nodded.
Misa activated [To Fall Yet Hold the Line].
Truth be told, everything after that happened too quickly for Derivan to keep track of, with half his focus split on whatever the system was doing to him.
Misa held up a sword mace focus wand, and there was a re of light and magic. Vex shouted something, his voice full of hope. Sev''s magic twisted through the air, touching on Misa, keeping her healed so that she could maintain the block even as the oppressing sensation of thoughts not his own left him, however temporarily.
Vex did something, reaching out and forward, and the air in front of him immediately shimmered with notifications.
WARNING: ###### aspect magic is not allowed
WARNING: Users are rmended to immediately cease
"Oh fuck you!" Misa shouted distantly. Vex made a noise that was a distinct sound of agreement.
Local ##### boundary in flux. System state unable to match local state. Resetting...
Reset partially sessful. No fallback state found. Data corrupted.
Adjusting...
Level 86 Infiltrating Armor > Derivan, Level
Derivan blinked, the glow of his eyes flickering in his helmet as he stared at the box. "Oh."
He had a name.
"Did it work?" Misa grinned at him, panting. Vex was too out of breath to even speak. Even Sev was trembling slightly, in the same way his magic always seemed to take an odd, physical toll on him.
Derivan checked his status, putting aside the feelings that were threatening to overwhelm him for the moment. The sight of the screen was both a relief and concerning, all at once.
Derivan, Level
Health:
Mana:
Stats:
Skill List:
"The system does seem to have updated," Derivan said, though he said it a little doubtfully. He felt in his soul again for the grip of the system, and it seemed duller; not missing, but lesser.
Different, perhaps.
"I am no longer an Infiltrating Armor. Not ording to my status. I... have a name, now, the one I chose for myself. But I also have no ss, and my level, skills, and stats all report only errors."
"Huh," Sev said. "But... the problem is fixed, right?"
"There are no foreign impulses pressing down on me," Derivan said quietly. He looked at his friends, feeling a weight lift from a heart he didn''t technically have. "I... it is different. Peaceful. I do not have words, except to thank you."
They all smiled at him. Vex outright gave him a hug, and though it was a little awkward, Derivan tried to hug him back. He''d learn how to do that without stabbing someone with one of his spikes, one of these days, though Vex didn''t particrly seem to mind.
"We should probably keep heading back," Sev said, gesturing to the road ahead. "It''s gettingte."
So they did. They had a lot more to talk about, and a lot they needed to try and understand but for now, at least, there was an unspoken agreement that they would do it .
They needed normalcy, and time to collect their thoughts.
And then... well, it would be time for a long talk, and to figure out how they would get their answers.
Chapter 8: Answers. Also, More Questions.
Chapter 8: Answers. Also, More Questions.
"A dungeon formed?" the clerk asked incredulously. "Dungeons don''t just form without warning. Our scouts would''ve noticed!"
"Max," Sev said, rubbing his temples tiredly. "You''re my favorite clerk but now isn''t the time for this. That was exhausting. We need our pay, and like, five consecutive days of sleep."
"Maybe more," Misa chipped in. Vex nodded as seriously as he could, from his position half-hidden behind Derivan.
"Sorry," Max said, though she sounded only halfway apologetic. She gave them a genuine smile, all traces of disbelief and incredulity vanishing as she nced at Misa and the others. "It''s a bit of an inside joke. I can''t believe you guys managed to get a grade six, though. That dungeon''s going to be terrifying."
"d I''m not the one that''ll have to do the paperwork," Sev joked, and Max stuck her tongue out at him. She was rapidly counting out their pay even while she spoke, packing coins into a pouch that seemed too small to fit them all. It wasn''t even a magical pouch; just the effect of some sort of skill, it seemed.
"Just wait," she threatened. "You''re going to move up in this guild and then you''re going to have to do all the paperwork. You''re only a Bronze-ranked team and you survived a solo formation event! I guarantee the Guildmaster is going to be interested."
"If people moved up based on power alone I''d be a bit worried about the future of the Guild," Sev said drily.
"Good thing they don''t," Max said cheerfully, grinning as she handed him the pouch. "But you can''t count on that. Your team passes all the other requirements, too."
"There are other requirements?" Derivan asked curiously.
"Of course!" Max grinned at him, then lowered her voice to speak in a conspiratorial whisper. "Just don''t tell the other teams. It''s a secret."
"Doesn''t seem like much of a secret if we can talk about it here," Misamented.
"I mean, it''s a little bit of an open secret," Max admitted. "So it''s not the end of the world if you tell someone. But character tests are more honest when people don''t know that it''s a test."
"You''re doing character tests?" Vex asked, peeking out at Max. The clerk shrugged and nodded.
"Well, yeah. Think about what the Adventuring Guild does."
"...Adventure?" Vex said, perplexed.
"We help people," Maxughed. "I mean, yes, we ''adventure'', but what does that even mean, really? ''Adventuring Guild'' isn''t really a name we came up with; we just picked it up from the neshifted folk that ended up here. Most of the time, the quests we have up on the board are meant to help out the viges that aren''t being directly supported by any of the Prime Kingdoms."
"Huh," Misa said. "I mean, the kill quests and collection quests are obviously those. But the exploration ones?"
"Even the ones about exploring ruins are, technically, almost always ruins that happen to have monster infestations that are troubling the small towns nearby," Max said. "Don''t get me wrong. We''re interested in learning more about the history of the world, too. There''s too much missing from our history. We do encourage ''adventuring'', insofar as adventuring involves digging out the mysteries packed beneath the earth, or figuring out the intricacies of a dungeon."
"That''s why you need character tests," Vex said. Max nodded.
"Can''t just have powerful assholes running around doing whatever they want on rank," Max said drily. "Mind you, our system isn''t perfect. The Guild is involved in a lot of regional politics and that means we have to make exceptions sometimes, and sometimes those exceptions are really stupid. But uh... it''s not my ce to talk about those. And there are peopleing." She gave them a bright smile. "You should probably leave. These ones haven''t adapted to the culture here yet."
"Oh god," Sev groaned. "Good luck."
"You know I can handle ''em," Max winked, shooing them up the stairs. Then, rather abruptly, she settled back into the perfect image of a bored clerk. The party gathered their belongings and began to traipse up the stairs even as the door mmed open.
Derivan,st up the stairs, just barely caught Max gasping in what he recognized now as exaggerated surprise.
"A wyrm? Wyrms don''t just appear without warning. Our scouts would have noticed!"
"She did what?" Misaughed, grinning wide, as Derivan exined what he''d heard while they were leaving. "There''s no way that keeps working."
The four of them were gathered briefly in Sev''s room to talk before they retired for the night Vex, in particr, looked almost like he was about to fall asleep on his feet. Derivan stood next to him, giving the poor lizard something to lean on as he tried not to pass out entirely.
"It does, and you would''ve seen it yourself if you didn''t keep dragging everyone else off to the bar every time wee back to the Guild," Sev said drily, though a smirk twitched at the edge of his mouth. "This is the first time you haven''t wanted to drink."
"This is the first time I''ve been too tired to drink!" Misa said, as if that exined everything; Sev just rolled his eyes and chuckled.
There was a momentary, peaceable sort of silence.
Then Misa shook her head, seeming to gather herself, and let out a breath.
"Okay," she said. Vex perked up a bit, hearing the seriousness in her tone, the lizardkin trying to banish the sleepiness from his frame. "Sev, listen. I trust you. I don''t believe you''d keep a secret from us without a very good reason. But it''s... secrets can get teams like us killed, you know? We don''t know your ss, we don''t know your skills, and you seem to know things you shouldn''t. What can you tell us?"
Sev blinked twice, then seemed to sag slightly. He nced at Vex and Derivan both, who stared at him not with suspicion, but withpassion; they seemed worried about him. So there was that. Even Misa was more speaking out of concern for the party than any anger towards him.
He sighed.
"I think I can tell you more than before," the cleric said quietly. "And we need to talk about what happened with Onyx at the end there, anyway. It''s relevant. I''m just not sure that you''ll like it. But... well, here."
"My ss is [Traces of the Lost]. It''s a Unique ss that evolved out of my old Cleric ss, and its primary feature is that it allows... allowed me to sacrifice aspects of my person to achieve an effect. It still kinda does, I guess. But nothing big anymore."
"...Sacrifice?" Vex looked up at Sev, worried. Misa just stared sharply at him, and Derivan frowned.
"Yeah. Sacrifice." Sev smiled humorlessly, then shook his head and leaned back against the wall. "It sucked, let me tell you. It was a powerful ss, don''t get me wrong, but... there I was, with a ss that let me achieve almost anything. And I couldn''t do anything big with it. It was too dangerous to do anything big with it, because it was a powerful ss, and if I lost too much of who I was then there''d be a monster with that ss, and it''d be a monster wearing my skin."
He nced at Derivan. "...Maybe I shouldn''t use the word monster. Sorry."
"That is hardly the problem," Derivan said, continuing to frown severely at their cleric.
"Yeah, what the fuck?" Misa said. "Don''t tell me you''ve had to do that every time you heal us."
"No, I have normal healing spells from my old Cleric ss that don''t rely on that mechanic," Sev said with a small chuckle. Then he paused, and amended the statement slightly. "Okay, sometimes. It depends on what I''m healing. But like I said, I can''t make big sacrifices anymore. I don''t really have a spell that cures hangovers, for example, but I can sacrifice a little bit of my wellbeing to heal it, and it just gives me a minor headache in return."
"That''s not okay. You can''t just do that to yourself without telling us about it," Misa protested. "It was just a stupid hangover! I would''ve gotten over it!"
"That is why your hands were shaking after healing them," Derivan surmised. "Sev. Such sacrifices, even if they are small... We are your friends. We deserve to know what you are doing for us."
"And to choose if you get to do it," Vex added, huffing slightly. "I mean... don''t get me wrong. Thank you. But that''s..."
"There is a bigger question, I think," Derivan said. "What happened? What did you sacrifice?"
Sev sighed. "Yeah. I''m... Okay, so you guys know that I''m one of the neshifted, from a ce called Earth. But you know I don''t remember much about it."
"You fed us some story about having amnesia, then heavily implied you were lying about it, because you suck at lying," Misa said drily. Sev chuckled slightly at that, allowing himself a small smile.
"Well, yeah. The truth is... well. You remember how Onyx said I saved him?"
"Yeah," Misa said, her brow furrowing.
"The system tried to erase him," Sev said bluntly.
"What?" Misa and Vex both asked at the same time. Derivan''s eyes merely narrowed slightly, a mixture of curiosity and worry within them.
"I though the gods made the system," Vex said, almost flustered. "If they didn''t, then"
"Let us allow Sev to exin, Vex," Derivan said gently, touching the lizardkin on the arm; Vex fell silent at that, nodding, but looking a little bit shaken.
"When the system tries to erase a god, all the followers of that god have to pick a new one," Sev said. "And if you refuse, the system starts to erase you. Pieces of you. Bit by bit. Guess how I got my ss." He smiled a wry, somewhat pained smile.
"You refused? I mean, no offense, but you''re not exactly... very devout." Misa frowned.
"Do I need to be?" Sev asked.
He sighed. "Onyx was is, I hope my friend. I wanted to be a cleric to heal, and I just picked one of the lesser-known gods thinking at most I''d have to pretend to worship someone for a bit. But he never once asked me to worship him; we just talked, and it turned out he was a pretty cool guy."
"You just... hung out with a god?" Vex asked nkly.
"I hung out with a person," Sev corrected. "He just happened to be a powerful one."
"You''re very strange," Misa muttered. Vex made a noise of agreement, looking like his world had been rocked for the second time. Derivan, on the other hand, wasn''t particrly surprised. The human had also referred to him as ''a pretty cool guy'' once, so it was nothing new for him.
"But yeah. The system wanted to erase Onyx, but I refused to choose a new god. I just kept trying to heal him while the system was doing its thing, and one of the heals caught on something, and... I''m not sure what happened. It''s kind of a blur. It interacted with my ss in some way and tore a huge chunk out of my memories. Tore a huge chunk out of my freedom, too, present and future. It''s why I couldn''t talk about this before I literally couldn''t. And then..."
Here, Sev frowned. "I can''t talk about the rest of it," he admitted. "I think part of it is still going. The effect hasn''t finished resolving yet. But everything I know, I know because of that incident. It nted some pieces of knowledge that I guess it decided I needed."
There was a small silence.
"Sorry," Sev said. "I know it''s a lot. I was hoping we could all rest before I talked about it."
"I''m the one that asked," Misa said, shaking her head. "Look, I... thank you for telling us. This is what you meant when you said you thought you saved him?"
"Yeah," Sev said. "He''s... been quiet after that. I just thought he needed time to recover. I didn''t think... I don''t know what all that was. I want to help him. But I don''t know what to do." He clenched his fists briefly.
Vex, Misa, and Derivan all nced at each other. "There is only one ce to start," Derivan said. "We were told we would find answers in the dungeon. So we will delve it, when we are able."
"You guys don''t have to do this, you know," Sev said.
"Bullshit," Misa said, Vex nodding in agreement. "We''re a team. Your problems are ours. But we''re still going to have to wait for the scouts to get back; it''s too dangerous to just rush into a dungeon with no information."
"Of course," Sev nodded, sighing tiredly. This time the silence that followed was one of shared camaraderie, a moment of focus they all gave towards a goal they decided to share. Derivan was the first one to break that silence, as Vex began to droop.
"Let us get some rest, for now," Derivan said. "I believe we are all due a rest. It has been a long day, and while Vex is trying his best, I believe he is seconds away from falling asleep."
"''M fine," Vex protested but he staggered a bit as he tried to straighten himself. Derivan caught him before he could fall, shaking his head.
"You are not. We need rest." Derivan picked up the entire wizard, despite his protests. "I will take you to your room. Again."
After depositing Vex inside his room carefully avoiding the many traps stillid all across the floor Derivan returned to his own, and contemted the bed. Derivan had previously never exactly slept. It was an organic need that he''d never really understood.
Now, though, he found that his consciousness seemed to be unmoored and drifting. It was different than anything he''d ever felt before. Perhaps this was what sleep was like? Now that his status had changed, and the system viewed him as something different, could he experience what other beings experienced?
Something told him it didn''t work like that. He climbed into the bed anyway, wincing slightly as some of his armor-spikes punctured the fabric.
If nothing else, these were questions that he could ask, now, without worrying that his identity would be discovered. It was a surprisingly freeing realization.
His mind wandered, and kept wandering, until he no longer saw the ceiling above him, but an impossible, empty void. In that void, he saw shapes that twisted and spun into more impossibilities, swimming through the air like they were fish. He heard what seemed like voices, though they echoed directly into his mind.
He had no idea what any of this was or what was happening. Voices came and went, asking questions and eventually losing interest; he would have asked questions of his own, but unmoored as his thoughts were, he didn''t think to question them; he simply answered the questions as they came.
The first was a bright, almost manic voice, apanied by a shape that twisted in on itself with fractal brilliance.
How are the Bright-Lights, the Not-Dark! The stars, you call them! Do they still spin and turn? Do they speak to the people, bring them joy and terror?
The stars? They do not speak. They have always been silent.
Bah! What of the Great Kingdom? Does it still thrive?
There are three Prime Kingdoms. I do not know which of them you speak of.
A different voice came, then, softer and almost seductive. It seemed to caress his mind when it spoke, and he found it deeply ufortable.
Tell me of my children. The thought-forms, the hidden-shadows. Do they fill the skies and forests?
I have not heard of them. I do not know what they are.
Perhaps they yet hide...
The second voice drifted away, and Derivan found he was d of it. The third one was boisterous, loud.
Tell me of the conquest of Redle! It must have been a glorious battle.
I am afraid I cannot answer. I have heard of no such ce.
Impossible! Redle was on the verge of conquering the continent! Has their name faded so thoroughly?
That voice faded, seeming to mutter to itself.
The final voice was one of simple curiosity.
What are you?
Derivan''s answer was honest.
I cannot say. I do not know.
You will. You must.
Derivan woke up. He was disoriented, at first, from what might have been dreams and yet the more he tried to think on them, the more they slipped from his mind. He''d heard Vex discussing the experience of dreaming before. Perhaps this was what it was? It seemed... strange. Ufortable.
Even that feeling of difort passed quickly, though, leaving only a lingering doubt.
Shaking his head, Derivan left the bed wincing as his spikes tore yet another hole in the fabric.
Time to find the others.
"You want me to fight... a slime?" Derivan asked curiously. He stared at the slime he was being presented with it was a white, wobbly thing that sat at level 1. It might as well have been a pet. "Why?"
"We don''t really have anything else to do until we resupply and the scouts report back about the dungeon. And right now, we don''t know how much health you have or if I can even heal you," Sev pointed out. "It''s better that we start small, figure out what you can and can''t do before we head into the potentially deadly dungeon. Slimes are the perfect first target."
Vex nodded; he''d clearly discussed this with Sev while Derivan was still... asleep, if that was what that was. Misa was just standing nearby, watching.
Derivan stared at the slime. It stared back, wobbling. Slowly, he raised his sword; but the whole situation felt just a little bit ridiculous. He understood the logic, but surely his test could be a little more... dignified.
The slime wobbled, this time a little more aggressively. Or perhaps he was imagining it?
"Perhaps we can find some wolves?" Derivan offered. The slime was so non-threatening he couldn''t quite bring himself to stab it. "I am sure the danger would be minimal with your assistance."
"This is the safest option we''ve got," Misa answered seriously. But she was fighting a bit of a smirk.
"...alright," Derivan replied with a small sigh. He readied his sword, staring down the slime as it began to wobble even more aggressively.
Then, before he could bring himself to attack, itunched itself at him.
Derivan tried to react, but missed. It was an abrupt and disconcerting realization that he was nowhere near as fast as he was used to being. The slime slipped past his de, rocketing towards him...
...and promptly sttered itself on his helmet.
Your party has killed a Level 1 Regenerating Slime!
"Oh," Derivan said.
"Wait, what? What happened?" Sev asked, blinking a bit. "Is that possible?"
"Does your armor reflect damage?" Vex asked, peering at him. "Or, uh... you? I don''t actually know how to talk about your... you."
"Armor is fine," Derivan said, even as Vex walked off and promptly buried his face into Misa''s stomach. She gave their wizard a consoling pat. "And I don''t reflect damage."
"Then that shouldn''t happen," Sev said, frowning slightly. "System health is a damage buffer. The system tries to follow physics as realistically as possible, but generally, you don''t take damage from attacking something. Otherwise half of the people with strength Skills would just... stter on contact with anything more durable than them."
"Perhaps it was simply too weak, and we should try something stronger?" Derivan said, trying and failing to wipe some of the slime off of his armor. Vex coughed lightly, got over his embarrassment, and walked over to cast a quick spell that cleansed the slime off his armor. The residue seemed to be slowly pulling itself back together, a fact that Derivan felt strangely relieved by.
"I don''t think that''s what happened," Vex offered. He bent down to examine the slime, watching its remnants slowly crawl together. "Sev''s right. This shouldn''t have been possible."
"Check your status," Misa suggested. "Maybe something changed. Or you got a new buff?"
Frowning a little doubtfully, Derivan opened his status, and paused in surprise.
Something had changed.
Derivan, Level
Health:
Mana:
Stats:
Slime: 1
Skill List:
"Well," Derivan said. "Something did change. But I am unsure if it is what caused... that."
Chapter 9: Who Even Invented These Stats?
Chapter 9: Who Even Invented These Stats?
"A slime stat doesn''t make any fucking sense!" Misa groaned, throwing up her hands with exasperation. It was, if Derivan was counting correctly, about the fourth time she had made the deration. She was pacing about the training field, wearing grooves into the dirt with her boots. "What''s it even supposed to do? A slime is a type of creature, not a stat!"
"You seem particrly distressed by this," Derivan noted, watching Misa with mild amusement. He supposed he should feel more concerned but he couldn''t quite bring himself to.
"The system''s stupid," Misa grumbled, folding her arms.
"I mean, yeah. Have you looked at your Skill?" Sev raised an eyebrow at her.
"It''s fine when it''s stupid in my favour, obviously," Misa said, finally smirking slightly. "Okay. Fine. We''ve got a new stat to figure out. This might be cool. What does it do?"
"Maybe it''s got something to do with malleability and flexibility?" Vex suggested, his brows furrowing slightly. He poked at Derivan''s outstretched arm. "You don''t feel any softer. Or any more wet." Misa snickered a bit, and Vex pointedly ignored her. "Do you feel any different? Any changes in your status besides the new stat?"
"No," Derivan said, shaking his head even as he checked it over one more time. He couldn''t say if his body felt any different, either. "I suspect that even if it changed my physical body, it would be difficult to notice with only one point in the stat."
"So you have to train the stat?" Misa frowned. "You don''t have any points, and your level seems to be broken, so you''d have to if you want to get it up."
"I am unsure how I would train ''slime''." Derivan poked at his arm, frowning slightly. Vex was right; his armor didn''t feel any different.
"Well, what is a slime? Vex?" Sev asked, ncing at their wizard.
Vex huffed a bit. "I don''t know everything, you know," he said.
There was a pause.
Vex sighed. "A base slime is just liquid imbued with enough magic to make it semi-solid. Once a certain critical concentration of mana is achieved, it keeps attracting more ambient mana to it, causing the slime to grow in size and power. The type of mana, as well as the liquid medium, influences the type of slime it is."
"Thanks, Vex," Sev said with a grin, and their resident lizardkin just muttered something under his breath, his scales tinted just faintly red.
"So... does that mean we try to imbue Derivan with more magic?" Misa asked, raising an eyebrow.
"We could try that," Sev said. "Or get more slimes to fight him, since that''s what triggered it the first time. Or just wait, and see if it actually does umte over time from the ambient mana."
"I would prefer not to wait," Derivanmented. He nced at Sev for all that the cleric was pretending at normalcy, there was a definite edge to him that wasn''t there before. He was nervous. "I would like to be of assistance in the dungeon."
"Other people can explore that dungeon too, you know," Misa said, letting out a tired sigh. "It doesn''t actually have to be us."
"Are you... actually suggesting giving up a fight?" Vex blinked up at her.
"No!" Misa shot back. "But... I had time to sleep on it, right? Holy fuck, we were in over our heads yesterday. We don''t even know what level that dungeon is going to be. We might not be ready for it now, or anytime soon. I''m just saying we shouldn''t put it all on ourselves."
"You''re not wrong, but it might not matter," Sev said with a sigh. "Those bonus rooms were created using us as seeds, the system prompt said? We were the temtes. You''re right in that we''re probably not the only ones that can beat them, but we might still have insight that others don''t."
"Don''t tell me that we''re ''chosen ones''," Misa said, scowling. "Absolutely not. I call bullshit."
"We''re not. But we might figure out whatever''s hidden in the dungeon faster," Sev pointed out. "It doesn''t really matter until the scouts get back and we hear what they have to say, anyway."
Misa sighed, looking away. "Yeah. You''re right, I guess," she said.
It wasn''t like Misa to turn down a fight of any kind, no matter how ridiculous the odds were. Derivan wondered what had changed she seemed worried. For herself? That wasn''t particrly like her. Then... for them?
"Perhaps you should explore the dungeon without me?" he offered. Seeing both Misa and Vex immediately open their mouths to protest, he hurried to rify. "I am not leaving. I will remain here, if you will have me when you return. But... I am not ready for a dungeon, and I do not know how long it will take for me to be ready."
"We''ll... have to see how dangerous the dungeon is," Sev said, hesitating. He was worried about Onyx; Derivan saw that fact in a dozen small details, from the way the cleric''s robes were creased near his hands to the small waver in his voice. He wanted to act. "We shouldn''t rush in without you if it''s dangerous. We''re used to fighting together, and a potentially deadly dungeon is not the ce to try to change things up."
"Let''s start with what we can do," Vex offered. He looked a little nervous it was rare for the wizard to try to take the lead in anything. "I''ll try to imbue Derivan with some of my magic, and we''ll see if that does anything. If it doesn''t, we''ll try to find some slimes and other, weaker monsters for Derivan to fight. By that time the Guild''s scouts will probably be back from grading the dungeon, and we can figure out what to do from there."
Everyone nodded. That seemed like a good enough n for now. Vex moved to stand in front of Derivan, looking a little nervous as he ced a hand on the armored chestte. "Can you open your stat screen?" he said. "Keep an eye on it. See what changes, if anything."
Derivan nodded, pulling up his stat screen. He paused. "Have you started imbuing yet?" he asked.
"No," Vex frowned. "Why? Did something change?"
"Yes," Derivan answered, with a slightly puzzled tilt to his head. There was. "But the change is not with the slime stat. There is a new one. Physical Empathy, with 14 points."
There was a long pause.
"You just... got another new stat? Just like that? There has to be some rules to this." Sev ran a hand through his hair. "Were you trying to read our bodynguage or something?"
"As I always do," Derivan said. "Was I not meant to?"
"No, I mean... I don''t know. It just doesn''t make sense that these are stats. It should be a Skill, right? [Body Language], or something." Sev sighed. "The system isn''t usually this hard to figure out."
"Perhaps we should move on with the testing, for now?" Derivan suggested. "We were about to attempt to imbue my armor with Vex''s magic."
"I guess we need to keep testing," Sev agreed, though he continued to wear a small frown. Misa was just watching, her brows slightly furrowed as she thought.
Vex nodded, and took a deep breath.
An odd warmth blossomed on Derivan''s armor a strange sensation for the animated armor, who wasn''t particrly used to feeling temperature in any significant way. It grew slowly as that energy slowly filtered through his armor and into his core, and it took an effort of will not to hiss or step back. It was ufortable.
That difort only grew, though Derivan did his best to withstand it and then something abruptly changed, like an enchantment had been shut off. The pressure eased, though notpletely.
His nced at his status.
Derivan, Level
Health:
Mana: 127/100
Stats:
Slime: 1
Physical Empathy: 14
Magic: 5
Skill List:
"My mana stat has returned, though with a cap of 100 mana," Derivan reported, shifting a little ufortably. Even as he spoke, the amount of mana he had continued to tick upwards over his supposed cap; presumably an effect of the magic Vex was pouring into him. There was that sensation of building difort again. "Another stat has appeared as well; magic, at a level of five."
"Magic?" Vex asked. The trickle of his magic slowed, but didn''t stop he seemed excited, at least, bouncing up on his heels and peering closely at Derivan like that would let him see past the armor and into his stats. "We''ll have to do some tests on that one. Maybe try some spellcasting?"
"We''re going to need to figure out what all of these new stats do," Sev muttered, his brows furrowed. "Okay. I think we haven''t been taking this seriously enough. We''re operating with a dearth of information; we don''t even know if there''s a limit to the number of stats Derivan can have. If he caps out at four stats we know nothing about, and those stats have no synergy, he might be fucked." He nced at Derivan. "No offense."
"None taken," Derivan said. "I do not think that is possible."
Sev snorted, Misaughed, and Vex turned bright red; Derivan didn''t get it. He''d simply meant that he would learn to fight regardless of what stats he obtained. He''d been creative with his abilities before. This would just be a different application of them.
"But what I''m saying is that we need to be careful, and maybe stop picking up new stats for now," Sev said. "I mean. It seems kind of random so far, so maybe it can''t be helped. But we''ll try not to do anything more than we''re already doing until we know a little more about what''s going on? Maybe there''ll be answers in the dungeon."
"I do not believe it will have answers about this," Derivan said a little doubtfully. But it was a fair point. He nced at his status as something inside him felt like it ticked over, and blinked, eye-lights flickering.
"My maximum mana has increased as well," Derivan said. Indeed, there was considerably less pressure inside his soul; something in it feltrger, though the pressure was slowly increasing again. He watched the count tick up to 203/200. "And so did the slime stat. It is at two points, now."
Vex paused, surprised. "Slime is your mana capacity?" he asked, then shook his head. "No. That can''t be it. But slimes are rted to mana capacity..."
Vex fell silent, a strange flicker of emotion passing over him. Derivan watched him, concerned Physical Empathy didn''t seem to help him pinpoint what it was, and it vanished as quickly as it appeared. The lizardkin looked up at him, noticing his worry, and smiled a weak smile. "Oh, uh, sorry. I think it''s probably just rted to mana capacity? I''m guessing it has more effects, but mana is how you train the stat. But honestly, we''re in uncharted territory as far as the system goes, so I don''t actually know. I don''t think it''d be called slime if it was just mana capacity, though.."
"I suppose we will find out, once it is trained enough," Derivan said. He was tempted to ask what that was but Vex didn''t seem inclined to talk about it, and the armor didn''t want to push. It was the first time he''d felt conflicted about such a thing, and in the end, he stayed silent; Vex would surely talk about it when he was ready.
In the meantime, the lizardkin continued to push mana into him, a gentle flow of warmth that he found surprisinglyforting. The odd pressure had a bit more, and Derivan found that even when he was ''full'' on mana, he could focus on the warmth as a pleasant distraction.
His mana stopped at 299, refusing to tick over into 300. At the same time, Vex frowned a bit, seeming bewildered.
"I can sense the mana inside you," he said. "But the new mana is... dissipating? No. It''s going somewhere else."
Derivan frowned and closed his eyes, trying to feel for what Vex was talking about. If the warmth he felt was mana, then it was a new sense for him. When he''d used skills before, his mana just vanished, and the skill activated.
Now, though, he tried to follow the feeling of warmth in his chest. Part of it trickled into him, coalescing into a node of warmth he identified as or suspected to be his mana pool. The rest... It wasn''t disappearing. What was happening to it? It was hard to follow
No, there it was. It was turning into threads, the warmth he felt so thin he almost didn''t notice them at all. Now that he was actively concentrating, he could almost feel how those thin threads of warmth seemed to be touching on the very edges of his soul, doing something to it. Reinforcing it, perhaps? Strengthening it?
The changes didn''t seem bad, at least.
There was a sudden pulse. It was subtle, but he saw the way something inside him felt like it solidified; the armor opened his eyes, ncing at his status.
Slime had gone up to 3. His maximum mana was 300.
"A hundred to my mana pool per point of slime, I think," Derivan said. He saw Vex''s eyes widen, though the lizard didn''t say anything. "For now, it appears that going over my mana limit increases that stat."
"The multipliers on that are way better than the ones on Intelligence," Vex said.
"Well, we''ve established something, at least," Sev said with a sigh. "Vex, could you help Derivan train up that stat? We need to figure out what it does, preferably sooner rather thanter."
"Of course," Vex said. He seemed surprised, but willing. "I''ve got lots of mana to spare."
"I''m also thinking you''ll get your health back if I try to heal you." Sev frowned a little bit, considering the idea. "I don''t think we should do that yet, though."
"Why not?" Misa asked. She''d moved to lean against a wall as she watched, but now she frowned. "More health means safety. For him and us."
"I mean, does it?" Sev asked. "I''m not so sure. If we''re fighting something that can take us out in one hit, health isn''t all that relevant."
"We''re not going to be fighting something that absurd every day. That thing didn''t even follow the level rules."
"All I''m saying is, we know what happens when someone has health and takes a hit. Do we know what happens if they don''t have health?"
There was a long silence.
"System sickness," Vex suddenly said. "There''s not a lot of literature on it, but people in the early stages of system sickness have been known to fight weaker monsters without taking any apparent damage. Slimes, usually."
"If that''s the case..." Sev muttered, thinking out loud. "Okay. I was talking about this earlier. Health is part of the systemyer. It enforces health-damage interactions, right?"
"The system''syer of health means you can damage powerful monsters, as long as they don''t have defensive skills. Damage is damage, no matter the source. But it works the other way around, too." Vex''s brows furrowed as he followed the train of thought. "Weak, low-level monsters can damage you, even if they''re just slimes sshing against you. But if either participantcks health, there''s no enforced interaction, which means"
"It means the slime attacked you and did what slime is supposed to do when hitting something solid," Misa said drily, having caught on. "It didn''t have the protection of its health, even though it was at full health, because it was attacking you."
"Oh," Derivan said.
It was a double-edged sword. He would be able to defeat others based entirely on their physical or magical natures, rather than going through the system of health and damage. But he, too, was uniquely vulnerable.
Sort of.
Most individuals would be uniquely vulnerable. Derivan was a magically animated suit of armor that had been created in what was functionally a tinum ranked dungeon.
"This is kind of broken," Misa said, sounding delighted.
"We need to confirm this," Vex said. "This is all just theory, and we shouldn''t risk so much on theory. But it makes sense."
"At some point you might end up needing the buffer of health," Sev added. "This is a unique advantage, so we should try to keep it. But if we''re fighting something that can just disenchant your armor or something, you''re going to need health to protect you. And if you get banged up and need healing... You might get damaged over time, you know?"
Derivan thought carefully. He could prolong the necessity of restoring his health if he was careful he could use skills that provided damage buffers, like force fields. Or he could use evasive skills.
Assuming he could acquire skills at all. Sev was right, though this was a unique advantage. It came with some costs, but nothing that couldn''t be worked around, and it was a way for him to be immediately useful regardless of his level and stats. If the enemies were physically weak enough, then his armor could handle the damage.
"We still have some time before the scouts return with their evaluation of the dungeon," Derivan said. "I will use that time to train what I have ess to, and hope both that I can assist with the dungeon and that the answers for my status lie within the dungeon. But my hopes are not high; this happened after the dungeon formed, not before. We may have to experiment, and work with whatever bes of my status. Vex, you are willing to keep assisting me, yes?"
"Of course," Vex said brightly. "We can do some magic!"
"I need to get my gear repaired," Misa said. "And we need to stock up on supplies before we head out again. Maybe grab some potions this time."
"I''ll grab the potions," Sev said. "I need to head to the temple and see if I can find out anything about the gods. I''ll stock up while I''m there. The scouts should be back by the end of the day, so we''ll meet in the Guild lobby around that time?"
"Yes," Derivan agreed.
"Okay," Vex said, pping his hands together. "Let''s get to work!"
Everyone stared at him. He blinked.
"What? I wanted to try doing the thing Sev does."
Misa smirked, even as Sev tried and failed to stop himself from grinning. "I''m really d we have you on board, you know," she said.
"...Derivan, let''s go before Misa makes fun of me."
Derivan nodded seriously.
"You''re adorable!" Misa called after him, even as Derivan and Vex fled. "You can''t escape the truth!"
Chapter 10: Magic and Understanding
Chapter 10: Magic and Understanding
Derivan and Vex had both retreated to Vex''s room. It was a mess, still, but the lizard cleared out a space on the floor for the armor to sit. Comfort wasn''t a strict necessity for him, Derivan assured his friend though that didn''t stop Vex from fretting about it.
"You''re sure you don''t need a chair?" Vex asked again.
Derivan, equal parts amused and exasperated, chuckled. "Comfort does nothing for me, Vex," he said. "It is the same reason I do not need my own tent and bedroll when we make camp."
"Right," Vex said, then paused, looking down. "Sorry. I mean, I knew you were different, but I didn''t know how much. And I don''t mean to keep reminding you of it or anything."
"It is fine," Derivan said, his exasperation fading into an amused fondness. Had someone else done it, he might have been frustrated but with Vex, he knew the lizard was being genuine. He changed the subject quickly, before Vex could ruminate for too long on it. "Could you teach me how you approach magic? I would like to see if practicing it will allow me to increase the associated stat."
"I... approach magic a little differently, because of my ss." Vex hesitated. "But... that might actually be more helpful with your stat? I''m not sure. I get [Expert Mana Maniption] and [Spell Analysis] as building blocks to my skills. Maybe you can start with trying to get [Mana Maniption]? Could you feel mana, when I was channeling into you?"
"Yes." Derivan paused, considering the sensation again. "It felt... warm. Rather pleasant, actually."
Vex nodded. "You should feel your own mana pool as something simr; try to move it around, see if you can shape it. That''s the most basic level of mana maniption."
"I will try," Derivan said.
"I''ll channel mana into you while you do this," Vex offered. "It should help you train up both slime and your mana pool while giving you a feel for mana."
Derivan nodded. He sat on the floor, with Vex sitting behind him; the lizard took a seat at his desk, his tail curling around Derivan''s shoulder and supplying a steady stream of mana. The armor watched his mana tick up steadily, even as he tried to get a feel for it. It was a strange, slippery thing. As much as he tried to move and shape it, it slipped out of his grasp; he could feel it, but moving it seemed to be a task beyond him.
Still, he kept at it. The sound of Vex''s quill scratching against parchment soon filled the air, even as Derivan concentrated on making progress.
It was slow going; even after half an hour, Derivan felt he had only managed to move his mana a tiny bit, down along his arm. Vex''s scribbling, however, had slowed to a crawl. Derivan could practically feel the wizard working up the courage to speak.
After a moment of silence, he spoke.
"...Hey, Derivan?" Vex asked. His voice was soft. Worried. "You don''t have to answer this, but..."
Vex paused, seeming to hesitate; the trickle of mana from him slowed just slightly, matching his mood. He turned in his chair to look at Derivan, who sat calmly on the floor, looking at him.
Even with Vex on the chair, they were pretty much at eye level. It was rare that Derivan really noticed how small the lizardkin waspared to him. Or howrge he waspared to others, he supposed.
"It is okay to ask," Derivan prompted.
Vex swallowed; he nodded, then shook his head, then nodded again, seeming to change his mind three times in a row. It took him a moment to actually gather himself to speak.
Really, Vex was shy about the strangest things.
"What is it like?" The wizard asked. "You say you don''t feelfort the way we do. What about touch? Sleep? Do you get tired?"
He paused, and Derivan waited; the lizard looked like he still had more to say. Vex hesitated for a moment more, then blurted out his thoughts. "And are you the only one? You said the system gave you instincts, and I think there was too much going on for me to really think about it at the time, but does that mean this is true for all monsters? How many monsters how many people do we think are monsters, when they are not?"
Ah. That was... a good question. Derivan could see why it bothered the wizard so much. He seemed almost agitated, his ws twisting over one another as he fidgeted in a surprisingly human gesture.
"I will answer your second question first, I think," Derivan said. "Or I will try. But the truth is, I do not know; I have my guesses, based on what I have seen in the dungeon that gave me life, but they are only guesses."
Vex opened his mouth, as if to ask a question, only to close it again. Derivan gave him a small, grateful smile. He was almost certain that the wizard had many questions to ask him about his dungeon, and that it was taking a significant effort of will to focus on the topic at hand.
"I do not know if I am the only one," Derivan started softly. "Nor if there are others struggling with instincts that are not their own. I remember only a small part of my existence, for the magic that animates an armor is a form of growth magic, and it took time for me to grow into a being of my own.
"But in the time I spent in the dungeon, yearning to see what else there might be and yet unable to leave... I watched. Many of us patrolled, and as we grew, we would begin to wander, searching out the confines and limits of our prison. But there were those of us that never seemed to grow that stuck to rigid routes and perfect patterns, never once deviating from their programmed path.
"This might mean nothing. It might simply be a failure of that animating growth magic to properly grow; perhaps the magic did not fully take on their armor. Or it might simply be that some of us prefer that rigidity and routine. But we spoke amongst ourselves, those of us that could speak, and found our experiences the same; those that followed the paths never returned our greetings, never spoke, never moved, even when prompted. If moved by force, they would return to their positions. It was... strange. Ufortable.
"This was true even for the other species within the dungeon. Even among the unintelligent beasts, there were those that would react and respond hiss and scuttle away if we got too close. There were others that never seemed to notice our presence, and would patrol the walls of the dungeon like they themselves were guards.
"You are right to be concerned, I think. It is one of the answers I wished to seek, when I first left that dungeon, and I had not realized until now that I could share that goal with all of you." Derivan smiled at Vex, that little curve to his eyes, and the lizardkin offered a surprised but genuine smile in return.
"As for what it is like..." Derivan pondered the question. "I have very little topare it to, so I do not know, exactly. I feel pressure, not touch; I know how light or heavy something is, and I feel pain if I am injured. I do not need sleep, explicitly, but long periods of concentration leave me feeling sluggish. I believe this is a close approximation to feeling tired. I would say I do not sleep at all, and that a break is enough for me to recharge, but now that I am reminded, I believe I may have sleptst night."
"Last night?" Vex asked, curiosity piqued. Derivan did his best impression of a shrug.
"It is difficult to exin," the armor said. "My consciousness felt like it was drifting. I believe I experienced something in that span of time, but my memory of that event has faded. I heard voices, I think, and I felt as though I was somewhere else."
"Huh," Vex said, andpsed into silence for a moment before speaking. "It sounds like sleep? Are you sure you can''t remember anything about that dream?"
Derivan frowned, concentrating but it slipped frustratingly out of his grasp every time he reached for the memory. "I do not," he said apologetically.
"Might be worth trying to keep a dream journal," Vex said. "It''s normal to have a lot of difficulty with remembering dreams. It helps if you keep a notebook nearby so you can write them down before you forget."
"I see. Do you follow this practice?" Derivan asked curiously. Vex''s eyes widened almost imperceptibly in fact, Derivan was quite certain he would not have noticed without the newfound Physical Empathy stat.
"Uh, no," Vex lied. His tail reached out to flick something beside Derivan into the space beneath his bed. "Definitely not."
Derivan paused. "You keep one, but you are too embarrassed to admit to it, and have opted instead to lie badly on purpose so that I know that you keep one, but will not press you on it."
"...Yes."
"You are a veryplicated wizard, Vex."
"Thank you," Vex muttered, looking a little embarrassed. He changed the subject quickly. "Hey, so uh, how''s your mana maniption going?"
Derivan realized, to his own surprise, that he''d actually managed to grasp the mana while he was distracted. He''d been prodding at it in the back of his mind, trying to get a grip on the strange energy inside him; now that he had it, his hold on it was firm, and he found he could both shift it around as well as push it out of his hand in a vague, nebulous shape.
"...It seems I have it," he said, pleased. He nced at his status to check for any changes. "And it appears that I can still obtain Skills. [Intermediate Mana Maniption] is now in my Skill list, although there was no notification for it. Slime and magic went up to five and six respectively."
Vex blinked. "That''s... good," he said. "That means you''re up to 500 maximum mana? And you skipped straight to intermediate on Mana Maniption."
"I am not sure how," Derivan admitted. "I was having trouble earlier."
"Mana maniption is tricky," Vex said with a shrug. "Every mage does it slightly differently, and requires a slightly different state of mind; for most of us, concentration helps, but it seems like it''s easier for you to move it by instinct than with deliberate concentration. Your skill should do most of the heavy lifting now, though."
Derivan considered this, and tested it, finding he could move the mana easily whether he concentrated or not, as long as he allowed the skill to be active. He hummed. Convenient. He''d never been able to just... gain skills this easily, back when the system considered him a monster.
He didn''t know what the system considered him now.
"Which means we can start learning how to actually cast," Vex said, distracting Derivan. The wizard''s brows furrowed slightly as he considered. "Which... is difficult. I''ve never taught anyone how to cast before, and my method of learning spells and casting is pretty different from what most people consider wizardry."
"It is better, I am sure," Derivan said, and had to wait patiently as Vex went red and abruptly choked on nothing. He coughed his lungs out for nearly a minute, and red at Derivan with no heat when he finally recovered.
"You did that on purpose," Vex used, grumbling.
"Iplimented you on purpose, yes," Derivan agreed.
Vex huffed. "Anyway. Normally, wizards study their spells from spell scrolls. Studying is kind of a misnomer, though they don''t really need to understand the spell. As long as the system recognizes what they''re doing as studying, the spell eventually shows up as a skill in their status."
"That seems rather... mundane," Derivanmented, hesitating. Vex shrugged in agreement.
"I don''t like the system''s simplification of magic," Vex said. "It feels like it should be something more. I tried to study the scrolls, but before I got my ss, a lot of the ideas described in them didn''t really work properly." He frowned.
"That said, I have some scrolls you can take a look at. It''s normally a requirement that you have some sort of magic ss before you can ''study'' scrolls at all, but given the state of your system, you might be able to pick them up just from looking at them." Vex hopped off his chair, going over to a pack hidden in the corner of the room and rummaging through his scrolls. "What spells would you like to learn?"
"Something that allows me to create barriers, I think," Derivan said, pulsing mana out of his hand; this time, it hovered above his palm and began to swirl around itself. It was strange to have control over a new force. It was strange to be able to change at all, to learn new skills and have them acknowledged by the system, the way others did.
Derivan smiled; though a part of him missed the strength he once had, he relished even more the opportunity to actually grow, in any direction he so chose.
"To divert blows your armor can''t block?" Vex considered the idea. "Smart. Okay, I think I have just the thing for that."
He pulled out a scroll, and Derivan reached for it with a mixture of interest and trepidation.
It was time to see if he could learn magic.
Chapter 11: Bonding
Chapter 11: Bonding
Derivan could, as it turned out, absorb spells from spell scrolls just as a wizard could. He''d made an attempt to study the actual contents of the scroll, but most of what it was describing flew quickly over his head; there was a lot of runic theory embedded in the scrolls that he''d need to study for months to really understand.
"There are thousands of these symbols," Derivanmented, staring at the scroll, then looking up at Vex. "You have all of them memorized?"
"Well. Not memorized. My ss helps." Vex seemed a little embarrassed, though he was rapidly being energized by the discussion of magic. "New ones are being discovered all the time. They interact with each other, and the system helps set them up for the skills you learn, but it''s all just so..."
Vex sighed, leaning back into his chair; he''d already expressed this exact thought several times while Derivan had been reading the scrolls.
Derivan''s voice was amused when he responded. "It''s not magical?"
"It''s not magical!" Vex threw his hands up in the air. "Even my ss doesn''t feel all that magical, for all that it gives me ''root ess'' or whatever. And don''t get me wrong: I love my ss. It lets me do so much more with magic than most wizards. But it still feels like I''m just setting up instructions."
Derivan chuckled softly. Over the past few hours, the lizard had opened up significantly, and he had no problems with expressing his opinions on the nature of magic. He rather regretted that he had never taken the time to seek Vex out to talk to him before. He enjoyed the lizard''spany, he found.
He''d have to do that more with all of hispanions, he decided. Get to know them better. It was surprising how much clearer things were without the system''s instincts hanging down over him, trying to force him to be as inconspicuous as possible.
"It does feel that way, from how you describe it," Derivan agreed. "What do you think magic should be like, then?"
"I don''t know," Vex answered. "It just... feels like it should be something special, you know? It feels like it should be an art. I love deconstructing it and learning more about it, I do, but I can''t help but feel like there''s something missing. Something I''m not seeing. I know all these runes affect mana in specific ways, but I don''t know why."
The lizard let out a little huff, and sat on the floor in front of Derivan. He''d run out of mana to channel into Derivan a little while ago, and was now meditating to regenerate. He didn''t need to sit still or keep quiet for the skill to work, apparently; when Derivan had asked, he''d told the armor much to his amusement that he wouldn''t have been able to gain the skill at all if that had been a requirement.
"I knew very little about magic before today," Derivan remarked. "I did not think much of it beyond its use as a tool. But..."
Derivan hummed in consideration. He lifted a hand, allowing his mana to channel through the [Barrier] spell he''d learned. He didn''t have nearly the same understanding of spells and magic that Vex did the runes that formed in his hand as the skill came into being were inscrutable to him.
But what he did see was the way the mana flowed.
As much trouble as he''d initially had with feeling for it and grasping it, now that he had, it was astonishingly simple to see. And Vex was right. There was a beauty to the way it moved, the way it almost seemed to dance through the runes, shing into shapes it seemed intimately familiar with. It flowed and it danced, and flickers of almost-ss came into being shards of force to ward away his enemies and their blows.
But there was something missing.
It moved in a mockery of what should have been happiness. It was almost like he should have felt the manaughing joyously as it moved from one form to the other; instead it was silent, dead. A corpse being puppeted on strings of joy, if he wanted to be macabre. Something within him ached in sympathy.
"You are right," Derivan agreed softly. He met the lizardkin''s eyes, saw the way his tail curled nervously, as if he was expecting his ideas to be scorned. Rejected. "Something is missing. I would like to find out what it is. That is your goal, yes?"
Vex looked back at him. Derivan saw a glimmer of surprise in his eyes, at first, like the lizardkin hadn''t expected that from him. "It''s one of the questions I wanted to answer."
"Then let us find the answer together, once all of this is settled," Derivan offered. "I am sure Misa and Sev would be eager to help as well, if you told them."
Vex was silent for a moment.
"I''d like that, I think," the lizardkin agreed, smiling a soft smile. "I''d like that a lot."
Afortable silence followed. Vex seemed to lose himself in his thoughts briefly, before he prompted Derivan to continue casting [Barrier]; he wanted to see if there was anything different in how the spell was cast, given Derivan''s strange state within the system. He gave the armor tips, too with his understanding of how the spell worked, he could see the way Derivan''s mana flowed, checking for inefficiencies.
He spoke at length about how the system interpreted a wizard''s thoughts, allowing modified spells to be granted if one''s understanding of the spell changed. Spells were more than input and output, for all that the runic system of spell casting seemed to emphasize only that. Spells were intent and understanding. The two schools of thought hadn''t yet beenpletely reconciled yet, he exined...
Just like that, hours passed.
"Hey, guys." Misa greeted them with a loud knock on Vex''s door before poking her head in. "Figured I''d check in since Sev''s not in the lobby yet. Made any progress with the training?"
"We''re about to wrap up, actually, since we''re both out of mana." Vex inclined his head with a smile. "You''re wee toe in."
Misaughed. "What, me? Come in? You must be in a really good mood. You don''t let anyone get near your shit. Especially me." She grinned teasingly at the lizardkin, who flinched.
"I I mean, because they''re my notes! And you might have been able to figure out my ss if you saw them..." Vex deted a little, and Misa relented, stepping into the room with a chuckle.
"Rx, I''m just teasing. I get it. I didn''t tell anyone about my ss for the longest time, either." The half-orc''s grin became briefly brittle.
"Is it dangerous to speak of sses?" Derivan asked curiously. He''d never had asion to speak much of it. Sev and Misa had given him a cursory warning not to reveal any sses if he could help it, but such a thing was considered impolite anyway, so he''d never put more thought into it.
"Kind of," Misa answered, wiggling a hand in the air in a ''so-so'' sort of gesture. "At low levels, in the Iron or Bronze range, yes. The Prime Kingdoms will want to conscript you. At high levels? They won''t bother unless you''re really special. Their tinums have better things to do than try to capture someone in the tinum range, especially if they don''t know what you can do."
"I know very little about the kingdoms, admittedly." He''d picked up on the ranking system easily enough over their travels it wasn''t anythingplicated. Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, tinum, each representing a 20 level range. The Prime Kingdoms were moreplicated to ask questions about, given he didn''t know what was consideredmon knowledge. "Are they such terrible ces?"
Derivan found that the idea of people being forced to fight for anyone rankled him.
"No. Or at least, most don''t see it that way," Vex said. His tail swung about slightly as he considered the question, but his brows furrowed in mild consternation. "For most people, being conscripted guarantees that they''ll have a good life. The Prime Kingdoms haveplicated leveling programs in ce that allow you to get levels at minimal risk, and once you hit tinum, nothing''s really left to threaten you except other tinum rankers. Which happens... very rarely."
"You know a lot about their training programs." Misa raised an eyebrow. "All the Prime Kingdoms refuse to talk about how much risk is actually involved when they train someone to tinum."
"I lived in Elyra for a while," Vex said, hunching forward slightly; seeing Derivan''s look of confusion, he borated. "It''s the southmost Prime Kingdom on the continent. Known for dungeon research and magic item production, mostly."
"Ah." Derivan nodded. "But why avoid conscription, then? It does not sound like it has many downsides."
Vex grimaced. "A few reasons, some of which I don''t really want to talk about right now sorry. I''ll tell you guys eventually. But one of them is that all the Kingdoms have a strict poption limit. They know exactly how many people their resources can support, and they stay strictly below that line. For me to stay, someone else has to leave."
"I think that might be an Elyran thing. I''ve heard Anderstahl tries to expand its harvest to support more citizens as much as possible, though I guess I don''t know how much of that is propaganda." Misa frowned slightly. "But it felt wrong for me to join any of the Kingdoms. My vige struggled to survive without help from them. We wanted to be independent. I wasn''t going to give up that dream and fuck off to live out my days in a Kingdom."
"I see," Derivan said. He fell silent, turning over what they''d said in his mind. "It is... difficult for me to understand the sacrifices you have made, I think. I sympathize, but I do not know that I truly understand."
Misa chuckled, giving him a friendly nudge. "No one said you have to understand everything immediately."
"I suppose," Derivan agreed. "Home is a strange prospect for me. The dungeon I came from is the closest thing I could call a home, but the word does not seem appropriate. I hold no affection or regard for it. But for what it is worth, I am d the two of you are here."
He paused.
"Sev as well," he added. The human wasn''t there, but it felt wrong not to mention him. Both Vex and Misa chuckled at that inclusion.
"Yeah, the guy''s a smartass, but I like having him around," Misa grinned.
"I thought I was the smartass," Vex said. He managed to actually sound a little hurt, and Misa snorted, throwing an arm around the lizard and dragging him close in a half-hug; Vex yelped as she did so, toppling over against her side.
"You''re too proud of being a smartass, is what you are," Misa said, entirely unrepentant. "Sev''s rubbing off on you."
"He is not!" Vex protested, his voice barely a squeak as Misa kept him grappled.
"I believe he is," Derivan said, carefully keeping his tone as serious as he could. "In fact, I am worried he may be turning into a second Sev entirely. Perhaps we should find another cleric to check?"
"Derivan," Vex squeaked, sounding outraged and betrayed; the armor chuckled and gave in, reaching out to pull the poor lizardkin free from Misa''s unrelenting grasp. He squinted at Derivan''s perfectly steady expression, then huffed. "You''re getting better at jokes."
"I have always been good at jokes," Derivan said, incorrectly. Misa and Vex stared at him, and he let his eyes curve upwards in a smirk. "I ept no other reality."
Misa snorted in augh. "Sure, buddy."
"I support your delusions, whatever they may be," Vex added.
"Alright, Derivan sighed, conceding. He smiled. I suppose I deserved that.
There was a small silence, then, but it was thefortable sort of silence; the kind borne of quiet camaraderie. Vex broke the silence first, his tone curious as he lounged back, using his tail to prop himself up. "What about you, Derivan? Could you tell us more about the dungeon you''re from?"
Derivan paused. It struck him quite suddenly, really how normally his friends were treating him, despite what they now knew about his origin. He''d never really thought it would matter, but he found that it did. eptance was a strange beast, he mused.
"I can," Derivan said, and he was surprised by how honest those words were. "Let me see what I can remember..."
Chapter 12: Of Dungeons and Priests
Chapter 12: Of Dungeons and Priests
"It was a castle," Derivan began. He remembered that much. "A ce of cold stone and dark skies. I did not know it at the time, but it is what I now know you call an open dungeon the kind with unclear boundaries, that draws adventurers in without their realizing. The kind that never breaks, and only grows. The dungeon had secrets, I believe, and a fabricated tale involving an old lord of the castle. But I was not privy to many of those secrets. Before my upgrade to infiltrator, I was considered a low-rank monster. A guard, meant to stop the first waves of adventurers."
"...Aren''t you kind of... unreasonably strong?" Misa said, nkly. "You were level 86. You could absorb skills. Or did that happen after you left the castle?"
"No. I started at level 86, though the skill you speak of came to me with my elevation to Elite. The dungeon itself is... ancient, and it is deep in the Outskirts; though I was stationed to guard against adventurers, and the dungeon itself was set up to draw them in, the truth is that we did not encounter a single one before Sev." Derivan shrugged slightly. "It is for the better, I think."
"It was in the Outskirts?" Vex asked, sounding horrified. "That''s... no one goes to the Outskirts!"
"What the fuck was Sev doing there?" Misa muttered, looking slightly aghast. And maybe a little bit jealous, actually. Derivan saw the way her eyes gleamed.
"He may have been searching for me," Derivan said. "He mentioned that he was left with fragments of knowledge, yes? It is... the impression that I got, although I have no true knowledge of this; I have never asked. At the time, I considered it my good fortune to have encountered someone that could help me escape the dungeon; I never considered why he was there. Now that I know what I do..."
"You think it''s part of the knowledge he was given?" Vex frowned. "But that doesn''t exin how he survived. The Outskirts are... they''re the Outskirts. They''re the ces we gave up on."
"We did?" Misa nced sharply at Vex. "Why?"
"You don''t know?" Vex blinked. "It''s... the Outskirts form the border of our continent. They''re where a bunch of dungeon breaks happened and merged, and became too dangerous for even our tinum rankers. It''s the whole reason we haven''t explored past our continent. I mean, I guess we haven''tpletely given up the Kingdoms send in teams to try every so often but we haven''t made any progress for years."
"Shit," Misa said. "No, the Outskirts were too far away from my vige for us to really care about. We heard about them, but I assumed we were making progress. Beating them back or something, I don''t know. I don''t like the idea that we''re trapped."
"The Kingdoms don''t, either," Vex said, grimacing slightly. "But... sorry. I didn''t mean to interrupt, Derivan."
"It is fine." Derivan inclined his head. "The Outskirts are foreign to me, too. It is good to know more about them. As for Sev... I do not know how he was able to reach the dungeon, and I did not think to wonder. It is something to ask him, I suppose." Derivan shrugged slightly. It was a mystery, and now that he thought about it, it was something he was curious about as well. "He was remarkably stealthy, however. I found him hiding in one of the secret passageways of the castle; one I was designated to patrol."
"Did you attack him?" Misa asked, and Derivan shook his head.
"By that time, I had already acquired [Disguise Status]. I simply pretended to be another adventurer and offered to escort him out, on the premise that the dungeon was too dangerous for either of us. He epted immediately." Derivan paused. "I suppose I should have found that suspicious. But I was new and inexperienced and eager to leave, so I did not."
"You couldn''t leave without him?" Vex asked.
"I could not," Derivan agreed. "Monsters do not travel far past their dungeons, if they originate from one. They are unable to; it is a rule of the system. Infiltrator types are the sole exception, but even then, it only works if there is a party to infiltrate." A small, rueful sort of tilt to his head. "I waited a long time for that opportunity. I was eager."
"Why did you want to leave so much, anyway?" Misa asked. She and Vex had apparently an unspoken agreement to take turns asking questions, a fact which Derivan noticed and found amusing. He hesitated a little bit before answering.
Part of it was that he wanted to see more of the world, it was true. As the magic within him grew, he found more and more that he wanted to see beyond the confines of the castle; he could see so much, from the top of the walls, and it made him wonder what more there was to see. That sight and yearning had been what allowed him to transition from a simple Enchanted Armor into an Infiltrator in the first ce, the system answering to his wishes in a way he hadn''t even known was possible.
But wanting to see the world wasn''t the true reason wasn''t the big, driving force. He sighed, casting about for the words to exin how he felt.
"I was... not alone, exactly, in the dungeon," he began haltingly. He''d already exined this part to Vex, but he repeated it here for Misa''s benefit. "There were other enchanted armors that grew in mind and body over time, and I enjoyed theirpany. They are quiet, but thoughtful; when they speak, it is with measured words and careful certainty. The ones that speak and grow, anyway. Each of them are different, with different thoughts and insights. And yet I was different. Though we always began our journey curious, we would find ourselves confined by the dungeon we were in.
"The others all grew to ept that reality." Derivan paused again, trying to remember the intensity of emotion that had initially prompted his evolution. It seemed so far away, now. "I did not. I suspect that desire to leave is part of the reason I evolved where they did not."
"Seems we''re all the type of people to reject what the world gives us," Misa offered with a wry smile but there was a deeper understanding in it. She''d felt the same way, if not about the same thing.
"It does seem that way," Vex agreed. He sighed softly. "I have so many questions, Derivan. But I think there''s an important one that I haven''t asked yet, and I''m sorry I didn''t ask it sooner. What did you do? Outside the view of adventurers and researchers, when left alone in your dungeon?"
"What do you mean?" Derivan didn''t quite understand the significance of the question.
"What do you do?" Vex repeated. "You''re... you''re people. You, specifically you''re a person, and you always have been, no matter what the system tried to tell you. You think and speak, just like I do; you just told me that you''re all individuals. But you can''t tell me that all you do is walk in predetermined patterns, talking whenever you happen to pass one another."
"That is what we did," Derivan said, still unsure where Vex was going with this, though he thought he almost understood. "Most of us, anyway."
"But there should be culture," Vex insisted. "Art. You must''ve created something, right? Invented something."
"Oh!" Misa suddenly said, her back straightening. Her eyes narrowed. "Oh. Shit. I see where you''re going with this."
"You had instincts," Vex pressed. "Instincts from the system that were preventing you from even considering telling us about what you were. It''s barely even that; it''s mind magic. It takes the possibilities that your mind can see and narrows them down for you, preventing you from growing. You were a people, but you weren''t allowed to grow, and that''s..."
Vex shook his head. "I don''t have the words for it. But it feels wrong."
"Ah." And now Derivan saw where Vex was going with this felt that he understood, at least. He had never reflected much on culture or art, having never felt a particr urge to create himself.
And yet those words struck a chord within him, and made him wonder what he could have been. Perhaps it wasn''t toote?
"I... cannot say that you are wrong," he said cautiously. "Though I do not know that you are right, either."
He didn''t know what it would mean if that were true. There were implications, for sure, but those implications were out of reach for him; his home, if it could be called that, was too far away and too dangerous to try to reach again. Not as he was now.
"And it''s not just your dungeon," Vex said quietly. "How many dungeons are like this? What if the dungeons in the Prime Kingdoms... I know you said earlier that the beasts were still beasts. But there have to be other intelligent species out there that the system categorized as monsters, right?"
"If that''s true, that''s fucking bullshit," Misa dered. She saw the distress in Vex''s eyes, and the concern in Derivan''s, and she amended her words just slightly. "But... we can''t do anything about it now. We''ll just have to look into it, like everything else."
Her eyes hardened. "And if it''s true, then we''ve just got another shitty system we need to break. Nothing new for us, right?"
"...Yeah," Vex said after a moment. Derivan nodded in agreement.
"It''s gotta be pretty high fuckin'' priority, though," Misa added.
"We''re relying on getting a lot of answers from the dungeon," Vex said. "If we don''t get it there..."
"We''ll find it somewhere else," Misa said with a shrug. "Break into the Outskirts if we have to. Sev did it, I''m sure he can teach us how."
Vex snorted a weakugh. "I can''t imagine just going up to him and demanding he take us into the Outskirts."
"I mean, if we have to..." Misa trailed off, frowning. "Where is Sev, anyway? Think he''s in the lobby? We might have to go down and meet him."
"He''d probably send us a message if he was down there already," Vex said, checking the system. "I don''t see anything."
"Perhaps we should look for him?" Derivan suggested. "We will see if he is in the lobby, and find him in the temple if not."
"I don''t think anything bad''s happened to him," Misa said. "So we don''t need to." Then she grinned. "But you know what, I don''t think I''ve ever seen Sev talking to other priests. The guy reacted to a god by deciding to hang out with him. We should definitely spy on him."
"Misa!" Vex said, shocked. Misa''s grin only widened.
"I''ve known him longer than you have, and if there''s anything I know about him, it''s that he is very annoyed by people being preachy. I''ve literally never seen him talking to another cleric, and I''ve just now realized that this is something I really want to see. You can decide whether you want toe with me or not, but you can''t stop me from going."
"...Now that you mention it," Derivan said, his eyes flickering with amusement. "I think this is something I wish to see as well."
"Derivan," Vex said, although with much less heat. Then he sighed. "...Okay, yeah, I want to see it too. Let''s go."
Sev had a headache.
He''d had a headache for a while now, except it was refusing to go away, and unlike most clerics he couldn''t simply heal away his headache. It wouldn''t matter if he could, anyway; not when the source of his headache was still there, talking to him.
He hated saying no to people, but this was really getting to be too much.
"...for it is only within Hystia''s Light that we can see the truth," the priest continued enthusiastically. He didn''t seem to notice Sev slowly massaging his head, trying his best to ignore what the priest was saying. "It is only with Her Light that we may scour away sin. So if the system told you to repent, you must turn to Hystia, and allow her Light to burn away your sins! Do you not see, my friend? You follow a heretic god, an untrue shadow!"
The poor man was staring at him so earnestly, too, like he was expecting Sev to... give a shit.
He did, really. He was doing his best to give a little bit of a shit. He made it a point to care about what people had to say, even if he didn''t really agree, or like people preaching at him. But the priest had just insulted a friend that he''dst seen hurt and dangling from chains, and his patience was fraying.
"You need to leave," Sev said bluntly. "I have a very big stick, and I''m not afraid to use it."
The priest opened his mouth to speak, and Sev promptly shoved the tip of his staff into it.
Gently.
He wasn''t looking to hurt him. Just to make him leave. In all fairness, he''d expected the priest to flinch back, but the man''s reaction time had been terrible. The poor man sputtered, looking bbergasted and looking increasingly furious and then, as Sev raised his staff again, decided this wasn''t worth his time, and promptly left.
Sev wiped it off, grimacing. Sometimes he really hated how well-informed priests were. They didn''t get prophetic dreams, exactly, but their gods did their best to keep their most devoted followers up-to-date on important events; apparently, many of the gods had decided whatever happened at the dungeon was an Important Event, with capital letters.
Except the gods had apparently left out the very crucial information about what had happened with Onyx. He wondered if that meant that they didn''t know perhaps all the priests were approaching him precisely because they needed more information about what had happened?
What a shit way to get information out of him, though. They could have just asked. Then again, most of the gods were more limited in the ways they couldmunicate with their followers... The priests here had probably only gotten a vague impression that they should approach him.
"Holy shit," came a familiar voice along with the scandalized looks of several nearby priests. Misa smirked at him as she approached. "I can''t believe you actually did that."
"He was preaching at me," Sev grumbled.
"And he was rude about Onyx!" Vex said, with a little more heat than he intended; when the other two turned to stare at him, the lizardkin shrunk into himself slightly. "...Sorry. Onyx seemed nice. And it was rude of him to call him a heretic."
"I mean, you''re not wrong there," Sev said with a small smile. His headache was already starting to abate. He nced at Derivan, who was standing slightly behind Vex, expressionless. "What, nomentary from you?"
"I would have picked him up and ced him within a barrel," Derivan told him. "I believe you handled it better than I would have."
Sev snorted out augh. "I kinda wish you did. Maybe I should ask you along next time, get your help to stuff priests into barrels."
"There''s still time," Misa said with a grin. "I can help. You haven''t gotten all the potions yet, have you?"
"No," Sev said with a groan. "The priests keep approaching me. Apparently they all got some kind of vision and they all think it means I need to be saved or whatever."
Sev grumbled under his breath, then looked up. "Okay. We''re going straight to the next stall. If the priest tries to preach at me... Wait, are there even any barrels here?"
"No," Derivan said, sounding amused. "For the record, I do not actually think that doing that would be appropriate. We will have to use our words, I am afraid, and not your big wooden stick."
"It''s a staff. Staffs are cool," Sev huffed, ring around just enough to make some of the nearby priests rethink their decisions to approach him. It was really too bad this branch of the Guild didn''t have a dedicated alchemy section. There was a multi-faith temple nearby, so all the potion supplies were handled instead by that temple and their priests. Healing was the domain of the divine, after all, so that made sense, but still...
"Honestly, I''m surprised they''re not bickering more," Misa said, ncing around in mild amusement. "They all believe in different gods, right?"
"They believe in looking united in front of adventurers, so most of them don''t preach openly while we''re around," Sev said. "That''s why they don''t usually bother me. Unless their gods decide to send them visions. I guess."
"You''re very grumpy," Vexmented. Sev just stuck his tongue out at the lizardkin.
Okay. Next stall. Hopefully this vendor would prove less of a problem.
Chapter 13: Tales of a Different God
Chapter 13: Tales of a Different God
"I need eight healing potions and five mana potions," Sev said. He hadn''t even looked up at the vendor yet, his eyes too busy flicking over the wares they had avable surprisingly high-quality potions of all kinds, actually. The divine mana emanating from them was stable, rather than fluctuating like wasmon in lower-quality potions. Priests made good potions, but they weren''t typically this good. "How much will it cost?"
Then he actually looked up. And... kept looking.
"Wow. He''s tall," Vex said. The poor lizardkin, the shortest of the four of them, had to practically crane his head directly upwards to meet the gaze of the stone elemental that stood in charge of the store.
The elemental wasn''t just tall, either. He was huge, many of his body parts made of what seemed to be actual boulders boulders that had been pared down over time, as all stone elementals did as they grew, sculpting themselves into a shape that would allow them to better interact with the world. They were one of the few species that grew smaller over time, eventually stabilizing into intricately carved specimens of rock.
"It will be two gold," the elemental spoke, his voice the rumbling grind of stone against stone. He chuckled quietly. "I must say... In all my time amongst adventurers and priests, I have never once been approached without having been noticed."
"Yeah, uh, sorry about that." Sev handed over the two gold, not bothering to haggle. It was a fair price. Actually, it was probably a little too cheap, given the quality. "I usually pay more attention, but I''ve had other things on my mind."
"As I have seen," the elemental replied. His amusement sounded like a small avnche of tiny pebbles rolling down an infinite slope. He took the money and began packing the potions away into a bag for them, enormous hands acting with remarkable precision as they manipted the ss bottles the potions came in. "It seems you have the gods in quite a stir."
"You have no fucking idea," Sev muttered with a sigh. "I''m surprised you''re not trying to convert me, too. No offense."
"I have received no vision from the goddess I follow," the elemental said with a hum. "It seems she does not consider this as important as the other gods do. Or perhaps I simply do not rank highly enough in her esteem, yet."
"I doubt it''s the second one."
The elemental smiled in the closest approximation of a smile he could reach, which was mostly a light shrug and slight tilt of the head, and the shifting of some earth that seemed to vaguely hint at a mouth. "Thank you for your kind words, little one. I am Velykos," the priest said, introducing himself. "Priest of Nillea, goddess of Earth."
Sev supposed he should have expected that a stone elemental would follow the goddess of Earth. The rest of the party quickly introduced themselves, and Velykos nodded to each of them in turn.
"You are also a cleric, are you not?" Velykos asked, looking at Sev questioningly. "You have not mentioned the god you follow."
Sev blinked. He was genuinely thrown off guard not once had a member of a clergy ever asked him who he worshipped. At best, there were attempts at converting him, as they sang praises of their own gods. This priest was actually interested in who he followed?
"I follow Onyx," Sev said after he realized he''d been silent for a little too long. There was a small, subtle twitch from the stone elemental, his movement seeming to stutter for a split second.
Then the priest shook his head, like nothing had happened.
"I am not familiar with that god, I am afraid," he said. He finished packing up their potions and handed the bag to Sev. "Thank you for your purchase. Perhaps I will see you again?"
Sev frowned, confused by what he''d seen. "Are you okay? You kind of twitched when I mentioned Onyx."
There was that stutter-stop movement again, like something in the magic that animated him had halted for a split second. "I... do not know what you mean," Velykos said, but he seemed hesitant, like he understood on some level that something was wrong.
"The god I follow," Sev said, now avoiding the name entirely. He was worried now; it wasn''t hard to catch on to the pattern. But this was new; saying Onyx''s name had never had this effect before.
Perhaps it was toote, though. Velykos seemed to try to reach for the memory, and that seemed to be enough; there was that briefest halt in his movements again. Vex''s eyes were suddenly sharp and faintly glowing, the wizard snapping into focus as he noticed something was off. Derivan and Misa, without that same attunement to magic, went silent and on alert anyway: they could infer well enough that this was serious, and prepared to respond should something happen.
"Something weird''s happening with his mana," the lizardkin said quietly. "I can''t tell what it is. It doesn''t look like a spell."
"Is it something I can block?" Misa asked, wary. Vex shook his head.
"I don''t think so." The wizard hesitated. "I haven''t seen this kind of magic before, but I''m not sure this qualifies as an attack, from him or against him. It looks like it''s built into the magic that''s animating him, somehow."
"What do you..." Velykos shook his head, stumbling slightly. Sev saw the divine magic around him ring briefly, like he was preparing himself to cast a spell, but before he had the chance that stutter-stop happened again.
Vex''s eyes went wide. "Catch him! He''s going to fall!"
Velykos began to tilt backwards.
Misa rushed forward, trying to stabilize the elemental before he fell; Derivan was only a split second behind her, moving to the stone elemental''s other side so he didn''t just roll away from her. Vex mouthed something under his breath, waving his dagger forward to create a cushion of force that tried to support the elemental''s weight.
Sev wanted to help, too. He tried, even, reaching into himself to call forth a basic [Barrier] skill to support Velykos'' weight. But the skill didn''t respond, and the entire temple began to tilt.
Sev realized a secondter that he, too, was falling.
And then he knew nothing at all.
One of the benefits to fainting in a temple full of priests, Sev quickly discovered, was that it was nearly impossible to actually die.
He''de rmingly close to death, apparently, with no warning at all his health had just dropped all the way down to zero, and then his heart had stopped. If it wasn''t for the fact that several nearby priests had immediately jumped in to help, including the one he''d previously borderline-assaulted with his staff, it was quite possible that he would be dead.
Vex''s eyes were faintly red, and even Misa''s eyes were misty. Derivan''s expression was a little harder to read, but the armor stood closer to him, hovering almost protectively.
"What happened?" Vex asked him, gripping his arm with worry. He only let go when Sev grimaced, paling and apologizing; Sev just waved it off. He understood Vex''s distress.
"I know you''re worried," Sev said. "But I honestly have no idea."
It was kind of terrifying to think that he''de that close to death and yet, at the same time, it didn''t feel real. He hadn''t felt any pain, hadn''t felt himself begin to slip away... Sev had always thought he''d go down fighting, when it came to death. Not against monsters or people, necessarily. If he survived long enough, he imagined that he''d battle the shadow of death every second of every day, until he either lost or won.
But there had been nothing to fight. There was no creeping sensation he could rally himself against, no specter with which he could argue and bargain. His body had simply shut down. It didn''t feel like he''de close to dying at all, and he wouldn''t have believed it if not for the redness in his friends'' eyes.
Sev... decided not to think too much about it. For now, anyway. He''d need time to process this, he recognized in a distant sort of way but he could do thatter, in his own time.
"I know it''s not much reassurance," Sev said. "But I know as much as you do, which is just that it happened when I started talking about..."
He paused, then frowned. Would it happen again if he said Onyx''s name again? A tendril of fear coiled around his heart. He''de close to dying before, apparently. But it was better to test it now than when he wasn''t surrounded by priests, surely?
Vex seemed to realize what he was thinking, because the lizardkin hissed and moved to press a hand over Sev''s mouth. "Don''t"
"talking about Onyx," Sev finished right before Vex tried to silence him.
"Don''t do that! We don''t even know what made that happen yet!" The wizard frowned severely at him.
"Sorry," Sev said. "I think I''m okay, though."
Then he started, remembering what else had happened. "Velykos," he said, his eyes wide. "Is he"
"He''s fine," Misa said. "I kept an eye on him for you. A couple of priests tended to him after we caught him, but he didn''t actually suffer any damage, he just... fell."
"The magic that animates elementals isplicated," Vex exined. He still looked a little upset, but seemed to be trying to focus on the issue at hand. "Part of it for stone elementals is an enchantment that makes the stones lighter. I saw that part of the enchantment suddenly fail, and that''s how I knew he was going to fall."
Sev frowned. "But I''ve talked to other priests about Onyx before. I''ve talked to you about Onyx before. Why would telling Velykos cause this?"
Derivan spoke, hesitant.
"Perhaps because he is an elemental? They are bound to nature in a different way, and you mentioned there were other followers of Onyx," the armor said. "Other followers that were forced to choose, and made to forget."
"You think he''s one of Onyx''s ex-followers?" Sev frowned, considering the idea. It wasn''t like he knew many of Onyx''s other followers, given that he never really engaged with the temple. He''d just treated the man like a friend, and Onyx had seemed to appreciate that. "Maybe?"
"What''s Onyx''s domain?" Misa asked, raising an eyebrow. "You never said. It''s something earth rted, I assume, so I can see a stone elemental choosing to follow him."
"Uh..." Sev paused for a moment.
Vex groaned. "Please tell me you didn''t forget."
"I didn''t talk to him about being a god!" Sev said defensively. "He wanted to know more about the world! Gave up a lot to be able to talk freely with his followers, he said. I told him about the world, we yed some chess oh! He''s a god of sculptures. Sculpting. One of the two. He made the chess board."
"Sev..." Misa sighed.
"We will have to speak to Velykos, I think," Derivan said. "Without mentioning Onyx. Perhaps he can enlighten us, if he tells us how he chose to follow Nillea."
"Is he... okay? I could go speak to him now." Sev ignored the protests of his friends and swung himself out of bed. He felt fine. He hadn''t had a near-death experience. He hadn''t been remotely aware enough for that to count as a near-death experience.
His friends exchanged worried nces.
"I''m fine," Sev insisted. He nced around for Velykos the elemental, thankfully, wasn''t exactly very hard to find. He was enormous, after all. Then, ignoring their protests, he started off towards the other priest.
"You are here," Velykos rumbled as Sev approached. The elemental was still lying down and facing the ceiling, but he seemed to sense Sev anyway. "Will you give me answers? The priests would not give me any."
"I''m not sure I have any for you," Sev said. "And I don''t think I can try to exin what we think happened without causing another incident. But I''m sorry about what happened."
"You were trying to tell me something, and I could not perceive it." Velykos was silent for a moment, the only sound he made the faint churning of rocks deep, deep underground. "If I try to remember... a part of the magic that enchants me falters. I can sense this now, I think."
"I don''t understand why." Sev pressed a hand against his temples, rubbing them in frustration. He sounded anguished and worried all at once.
"I have no answers for you," Velykos said.
"Maybe if you told me a little more about you?" Sev tried. "How did you decide to worship Nillea?"
Velykos seemed to smile. "I thought you were trying to avoid being preached at."
"But this is actually important," Sev muttered, sounding petnt, and Velykos chuckled.
"You mortal races. Always impatient, rushing for things." He hummed. "It is not unappealing, I suppose. Very well."
He told his story.
It wasn''t a long one, all things considered with the timescale immortal races operated at, Sev had been half-worried it would be a tale that would take hours. But it wasn''t.
Elementals, Velykos exined and indeed, immortal races as a whole weren''t big on religion. It was rare to find a member of an immortal race that wanted to follow a god. They just didn''t really gain anything from it; if they chose a god to follow, it wouldn''t be for the same reasons mortals did.
In his case, he''d found Nillea back when he was a young elemental still, as a priest of Earth visited the quarry that he''d spawned in. There had been no preaching, no sermons. The priest was a daemon, though Velykos would note to know this for a long time. Instead, he simply watched, curious, as the priest sat and began to carve.
The idea of art had been a foreign one to him until then. Stones just were, until they weathered away; for stone elementals, age was the same as erosion. Older elementals were often smaller than they had been in the past, the stuff that made them slowly wearing down over the centuries. They could replenish themselves, but it was often a point of pride.
Never before had he seen the act of erosion take on beauty.
The priest carved, shaving away at the rock he held using the point of his tail; where it touched the stone, it crumbled into dust, years of erosion happening in an instant.
It was awe-inspiring. It was terrifying.
And what was left... was a beautifully formed crystal. He''d carved a rock into another kind of rock! Velykos hadn''t understood humor, then, but he hadughed, and the brightness of that feeling had surprised both him and the priest.
A chance meeting turned into a friendship. Velykos had asked to learn, and so he had been taught; it was only meant tost the day... but that day turned into a week, and that week turned into months. The priest visited the quarry nearly every day, and Velykos awaited him with eager anticipation.
He hadn''t even learned that the man was a priest until eight months in. Their friendship was firm, by then; they were less mentor and student and more father and child, strange as it was for a mortal to be a father figure to an immortal, ageless being that was technically older than him.
Then the priest had vanished. Velykos had never found out what happened to him but he decided to start following the same path the priest had taken. He would be a follower of Nillea, for that was what the priest had cared about; he would honor him in that way.
It was a small way for him to hold on to a piece of the man that had made him who he was.
There was a heavy silence, as he finished telling his story. Sev didn''t know what he had been expecting, but whatever it was, it hadn''t been that. He was hoping for some sort of discontinuity, some oddness of memory that would tell him that the memories were false, created by the system. There was nothing so obvious, except perhaps the empty way the story ended, and the way Velykos told his story.
There was a sadness to the way he spoke, a deep pain that went beyond the loss of someone close to him. Like something more had been taken from him. It was hardly proof of anything, but...
Nillea was a goddess of Earth. Onyx was a god of sculpting. The conclusion seemed reasonable enough.
"Thank you for sharing that with us," Sev said quietly. It felt inadequate, for the story was far more personal than he had expected.
"Did that help you find an answer?" Velykos asked.
"I think it did," Sev said. "Though I can''t be sure. It''s... We''lle back and exin to you when we can. I promise."
"Thank you for sharing your story," Vex said. The other three nodded in agreement.
"It is an old story." Velykos'' voice was briefly wistful, as he pored over old, old memories. "But it is good to remember it, I think. Thank you for indulging me and listening."
Sev nodded. "We''ll visit again," he said, hesitating and ncing to his party; none of them seemed against it, so he nodded again. "Yeah. See you soon, Velykos. Take care of yourself and don''t uh... well, I guess I''ll just be careful not to mention that around you again. We''ll try to be back as soon as we know what happened."
"I thought I was too old for mysteries," Velykos said with a low, rumbling chuckle. "But I must admit... This is intriguing, if concerning. Find me again, young one."
"And be careful you came far closer to death than I, to hear the priests tell it."
Chapter 14: Break
Chapter 14: Break
It took a while to get away, for the priests wanted to question them on what happened. A nervous Misa had to fend them off and exin that even trying to talk about it was dangerous, and exining that had taken some doing. Eventually, the priests extracted a promise from them that they could be called on from the Adventurer''s Guild if they were needed for anything, and with that promise secured they quickly fled back to the Guild.
To Sev''s room, specifically, where they typically gathered at the end of the day.
"I''m sorry," Sev spoke first, shaking his head. "You guys were worried about me, and I think maybe I didn''t take that seriously enough."
"No fuckin'' kidding," Misa muttered, but she sighed, seeming to soften a little bit as she over Sev. "Are you doing okay, Sev?"
Sev gave the question its due consideration, then sighed. "Honestly, I don''t know," he said. "It''s hard for me to convince myself to take it seriously? It just doesn''t feel real. Maybe it hasn''t sunk in yet, and maybe it won''t ever sink in, but I know it worried you guys and that makes it a problem."
"Good," Vex said, letting out a breath he''d been holding. He gave Sev his best attempt at a stern look. "As long as you recognize that!"
"Believe me," Sev said, though he couldn''t help a small smile at the lizardkin''s expression. "That sucked for me too."
"I am d you understand." Derivan sighed out a breath he didn''t need, trying to calm the worried coil of emotion in his body. "And Velykos? How should we pursue that?"
There was a small silence as everyone thought.
"I hate to say it, but I don''t think there''s much we can do about it right now," Sev eventually said. "We''ll be there if the priests find anything, but I''m thinking we need a break."
"Haven''t we already been taking a break?" Vex asked.
"We haven''t left town, I guess, but in that time Derivan''s gained three new stats that we still haven''t entirely figured out and I almost died," Sev said drily. Vex paused.
"...Good point."
"Things keep happening and I think it''s bad for our health," Sev said, trying for a small, lighthearted chuckle. "So, how about it? Pic tomorrow? We''ll go check out that nearby forest, review our statuses and have zero world-shattering revtions."
"Fuck yes," Misa said. "I''ve been wanting to check the stupid thing since we had to fight the massive boss monster. I can''t believe we haven''t checked it already."
"You know why we haven''t," Sev chuckled. "And with how the system was acting, don''t be surprised if we don''t get any experience at all."
Misa paled, as if the thought hadn''t even urred to her. "Please no."
"I''m pretty sure we''ll get experience. That part of the system didn''t seem broken." Vex gave her a sympathetic pat on the back. Misa just huffed, then relented with a sigh.
"I''m honestly kinda d you guys made me stop checking all the damn time, but it still kinda sucks after battles like this," she grumbled. "But I think it sucked more when I checked after every battle and my level didn''t go up. Made our wins feel like nothing."
"That''s why we check it together, right?" Sev said with a small smile.
"Yeah," Misa agreed and though it was tentative, she returned the smile, a little more vulnerable than her usual ones.
As if to make up for the stress of the past two days, everything seemed to align perfectly for the trip to the forest. Sev had gone down to check if the scouts had returned with information about the dungeon, and had been informed that while they had, they wouldn''t be announcing the details of that dungeon today. Politics were involved, he was told, and the state of the dungeon would be announcedter the next day instead.
Which gave them plenty of time to prepare, even if it was mostly Sev doing the preparations. The weather was perfect not a hint that it might rain, or that some other strange weather event would tear through the area, as would sometimes happen when there was a rogue umtion of mana. The town was bright and cheery and weing when Sev went to gather some supplies, and though the markets were crowded, he was able to score good enough deals that he came back whistling.
Then they were off. The forest wasn''t actually particrly far away, and time seemed to pass quickly as they chatted with one another. For all the danger that they''d so recently been put through, it had broken down thest few barriers they had between one another, and it felt like there was much more now for them to talk about.
"I don''t really want to admit that I needed this," Misa said, stretching. "But damn, I kinda needed this."
"We all did, I believe." Derivan hadn''t realized how wound up he''d felt until now. The subconscious way he''d been hovering over Sev and Vex and even Misa, like he had to try to protect them it was something he''d put on himself for a long time, after all.
"No kidding," Sev said, taking in a deep breath of forest air, and then promptly deciding he didn''t particrly like the smell of forests.
Of the four of them, Vex was the only one that was actually taking a break, and not just ruminating about how much they needed a break. The lizardkin was ncing around the forest with absolute fascination Derivan would have wondered if he''d seen a forest before, if not for the fact that they''d been through many other forests in their travels.
"Is there something drawing your attention?" Derivan asked curiously, and the lizardkin froze for a moment before thawing.
"Oh! It''s just that the magic in this ce is really different. It''s kind of gathering together, and a lot more alive than in most other ces." Vex waved his arms animatedly as he spoke, gesturing to streams of mana that only he could see
Wait. No. Derivan paused in the middle of that thought. He had the ability to see mana now as Vex did, even if the mana wasn''t so concentrated as to be visible, like it had been in the Nucleus. He''d learned the skill alongside [Barrier] and [Intermediate Mana Maniption]; he just wasn''t used to having all these options avable to him. His skill list had been static for so long...
It was yet another thing to train, he supposed. He focused, and activated [Mana Sight].
Vex''s version of Mana Sight was a little moreplicated than his own, from what the lizardkin had exined to him the skill you obtained as a wizard depended on how well you understood mana, and Vex understood it a lot better than he did. His own meager understanding, however, was still enough to make him stop in surprise.
Above him was a canvas, and mana was the paint.
He didn''t need to be able to see the colors as Vex did in order to see the artistry with which streams of mana weaved their way through the branches, dancing merrily between leaves. He didn''t need to understand the mana in-depth to recognize the patterns that briefly formed in the air, runguage appearing and disappearing in the span of a blink.
Before, when he''d cast [Barrier] and watched the flow of the mana, it had felt like that mana was missing something like it was performing a rehearsed dance, and not truly free. This, then, was what had been missing; the sight of the mana dancing through the leaves was almost dizzying to look at.
"It is beautiful." Derivan stared upwards. Vex beamed at him.
"Isn''t it? I don''t get to see mana phenomena like these a lot... They''re not rare, exactly, but they''re very easily disturbed. I''m surprised it hasn''t faded yet with us here." Vex smiled, raising his hands and watching as a stream of mana twisted between his fingers.
"It is... disrupted by the presence of people?" Derivan asked.
"Best as I''ve been able to tell," Vex nodded. "I mean, it''lle back after a while, so it''s not permanently destroyed or anything. It just kinda feels like the mana''s shy, or something. Or maybe there''s something else I''m not seeing... Don''t try to cast a spell, though, that''ll almost certainly make it go away."
Derivan, who had in fact been about to cast [Barrier] to see if he could get the mana to dance in the same way, paused. "Ah."
"You guys are gonna make me jealous of your magic," Misa said with a smirk, teasing.
"Sorry!" Vex flushed slightly.
"Don''t be," Misa scoffed, chuckling. "It''d probably make me dizzy even if I could see it. I''m not gonna be angry that you have something you can enjoy, Vex."
"Oh." Vex took this in for a moment, then nodded, projecting his best, bright smile. "Right! Okay. Yeah. I mean, if I ever figure out a spell to share my sight..."
"Then I''ll ask you to share if we see something like this again." Misa smiled at the lizardkin. Derivan saw the look in her eyes, though, the glimmer of concern; it was one he shared. Sev had the same look, too, though he didn''t say anything.
Hopefully, Vex would share more about his past when he wasfortable.
"We''reing up on a grove," Sev reported cheerily. "Good ce to have our pic, I think!"
"Hell yeah," Misa grinned. "I''m fucking starving."
"What happened to ''adventurers don''t go on pics''?" Sev asked, raising a brow.
"That happened three months ago!" Misained. "You can''t keep holding that against me! Food is food!"
"Just admit you''ve been converted to the joy of pics."
"Never."
It didn''t take them long to set everything up the convenience of magic meant it wasn''t particrly difficult to set out an eating space. Vex took only a few moments to conjure tables and chairs made out of stone, and while it wasn''t the mostfortable setup in the world, it was enough. Sev began to unpack the food he''d brought, pulling out sandwiches, drinks, and snacks.
Derivan watched with interest, wondering idly what food tasted like. He''d tried using [Consume] on food once, out of sheer curiosity. It hadn''t quite worked out.
"Did you cook all of this yourself?" Vex asked.
"Nah," Sev said. "I like cooking and all, but we just turned in a grade 6 crystal. I splurged and got us the good stuff. Er... sorry, Derivan, I know you can''t eat and all."
"It is no matter." Derivan wondered, idly, if he would be able to acquire a skill that would allow him to eat as others did. "As long as you enjoy your food, of course."
"Don''t think that means we didn''t get anything for you!" Sev grinned at him, then reached into the basket again. "Misa, Vex and I all talked about it, and since you can''t eat with us we wanted to get you a gift of your own. So."
He pulled out arge container of what looked like armor polish and a cloth.
Derivan nked. "What?"
Sev just grinned at him. "Come on, when was thest time you had your armor polished?"
"I am the armor, so... never." He could hardly remove his own armor to polish it.
"Exactly!" Sev said.
"Maybe it''d feel like a massage," Misa grinned at him. "You never know."
Derivan reached out to carefully take the polish from Sev, almost reverently. "Thank you for the gift."
What a strange feeling. He''d never been given a gift before. Misa, Vex, and Sev were all smiling at him.
"Give it a try!" Vex said, his tail swaying excitedly. "I helped enchant it. You don''t even need extra tools; it does all the mechanical work by itself."
"I will try this away from the table," Derivan said after a moment, smiling at the wizard''s enthusiasm. He understood that polish had a... strong smell, so he took a few steps away, then sat on the ground, staring at the tub.
His friends stared at him, evidently waiting to see him try it. Derivan chuckled, picking up the cloth, and feeling warm.
Might as well give it a try.
Chapter 15: Ecosystem
Chapter 15: Ecosystem
Derivan finished off thest of the polishing with a bit of a flourish. The others were working through the massive array of food that Sev had purchased, with Misa absolutely demolishing everything that was set in front of her. They nced over at him from time to time, making sure he felt included, and that had been... nice.
"Well? Did it feel like a massage?" Sev grinned at Derivan. The armor chuckled faintly, ncing over his now-shining armor with a small amount of burgeoning pride.
"I am afraid I do not know, given that I have no experience with massages to begin with," Derivan said, flexing an arm and testing the smoothness of the movement. "It is...forting, I suppose. I feel refreshed, more easily able to move. There was a stiffness to my movements that I did not realize was there until now."
"Sounds like a massage to me!" Sev said cheerily, grinning.
"And I gotta say, you''re looking good after that polish." Misa gave him a thumbs up, Vex nodding in agreement.
"I never realized how much detail was hidden on your armor," Vex said. "Not that you were dirty before, it''s just the polish really brings out the detail, you know?"
Derivan hummed with pleasure. It certainly had. Most of the intricacies of his armor were engravings, rather than the gold or silver trims that were more typical for magical armor. They hadn''t been particrly visible until now, and while vanity was not something he was overly concerned with, he couldn''t help but feel a little pleased.
Vanity or not, it was a visual reminder that the others thought of him and wanted him to feel included. He''d never felt particrly left out at meals, but he was grateful, nheless.
"Shall we check our statuses, now?" Derivan suggested.
"Fuck yes," Misa dered. She nced at Sev. "I mean. I think now is a good time."
"Nice try," Sev said with a chuckle, but he waved at her to go on. "Yeah, let''s see if that battle did anything for us."
As one, they triggered the mentalmand that opened their status screens. Even Derivan, though more as an act of participation than any genuine need. His status hadn''t changed much it was still reporting errors but some numbers had gone up.
Derivan, Level
Health:
Mana: 600/600
Stats:
Slime: 6
Physical Empathy: 22
Magic: 14
Skill List:
[Intermediate Mana Maniption], [Mana Sight], [Fireball], [Barrier],
[Mana Sight], [Fireball], and [Barrier] were all basic wizard spells; he''d yet to study all of the scrolls Vex had given him. Instead he''d elected to improve his mastery and training of the skills he''d already managed to learn [Barrier], in particr, was going to be important as long as his health was broken.
"Yesss," Misa crowed, distracting Derivan from his thoughts.
"I take it you gained quite a few levels?" The armor nced up at her, chuckling.
"I''m level 42 now! Straight to Silver!" Misa grinned wide. "Got a new skill for it, too. Here, see for yourselves." She spun a copy of the box up towards the rest of the party with a thought, and they nced at it with interest.
[Every Last Drop] [Active] [Grade: 1]
You may choose to lose mana instead of health at a cost markup.
Sev whistled. "You can use that together with [To Fall Yet Hold the Line]?"
"Probably!" Misa grinned. "I haven''t tested it yet, obviously, but I sure fuckin'' hope so. It''s gonna be a pain in the ass to level, though."
"Do you have a lot of mana?" Vex asked.
"Weeeell..." Misa drew out the word, then blew out a sigh. "Okay, no. But every little bit helps!"
"We''ll have to see what counts as you losing mana," Vex said thoughtfully. "Like, if you''re holding on to a mana potion, does that count as ''your'' mana?"
Misa smirked. "I fuckin'' love you guys, you know that?"
There was a smattering ofughter.
"I''m up to level 37," Vex said, smiling at his status screen. "Almost Silver. I think I went up almost 20 levels, which is kind of unheard of. No new skills, but I got some upgrades to my existing ones improved rune recall, that kind of thing."
"Level 45," Sev said. "No new skills." He seemed to hesitate a little, like he wanted to add something, but changed his mind at thest minute. "Which is fine. Plenty of stat points to distribute."
"You''ll get some soon, I bet," Misa said cheerily, perhaps not noticing the cleric''s brief hesitation. "Silver''s the range for skills, Gold''s the range for upgrades, and tinum does whatever the fuck it wants."
"Is that the saying?" Sev asked with a faint grin.
"Ah, it''s close enough," Misa waved it off. She yawned and let out a stretch, evidently finished with her food. "What''ve you got nned for the rest of the day, boss? Can''t be just a pic."
"Why don''t we just explore?" Sev suggested.
"It''s a forest," Misa said, deadpan. "There are trees, and also more trees."
"It''s a lot more than just a forest!" Vex argued, then paused. "I mean. I guess it is, technically, literally just a forest. But there are a lot of interesting things in forests alchemical ingredients. Magical nts. Weird animals, sometimes."
"Each time we have been through a forest, our goal has been to trek through it," Derivanmented. "I know very little about the nt and animal life within one. Perhaps you can serve as a guide, Vex?"
"Oh! Yeah! I know lots of little tidbits about nts. Maybe a little less in this region, but still." Vex''s eyes practically gleamed.
Misa groaned. "You''re lucky I love you guys."
"She loves us!" Sev proimed with an exaggerated cheer.
"I''m going to hit you with my mace. And you''re a healer, so I know you can take it."
"...Lead the way, Vex!"
Vex grinned brightly. With a wave of his hand, the tables and chairs that he''d made out of stone crunched back into the ground; with it, the mana that had vacated the grove and was peering curiously at them through the trees rushed back in, seemingly joyous. Vex looked up at it like he was surprised, though his face rxed into a softer, happy smile after a second.
Then he scurried ahead, infectious grin returning even as Sev hastily gathered the remainder of their supplies. Derivan followed closely behind, and Misa took the back of the trail, waiting for Sev to go ahead of her. There was still a need for some caution, as safe as this area tended to be, and she would rather not leave their healer and leader vulnerable.
The first thing the lizardkin found and brought to Misa, of all people was a bit of moss.
"Found it!" Vex''s ws dug into the bark of the tree, easily tearing away a strip of it. On that strip of bark lived a strangely luminescent purple variety of moss, glowing weakly in a rippling pattern; to Derivan''s mana sense, there was no magic radiating from it. How strange. "This is Drunkard''s Beard."
"...You better not be calling me a drunkard," Misa said, narrowing her eyes yfully at Vex. "Also. What kind of drunkard has a beard that glows purple?"
"Honestly, herbalists just really like naming any type of moss after beards." Vex scrunched up his snout a bit as he thought about it. "I can name at least twelve varieties, I think. This one makes you drunk."
"It''s alcoholic?" Misa blinked.
"No. It makes you drunk." Vex poked at the moss. "It''s actually pretty weird. It doesn''t seem magical at all and there''s nothing in it that should make you drunk. But... that''s what it does. It''s not just an effect that''s simr to being drunk, either; all spells designed to test for sobriety will consider the person drunk, and species that have unique mental reactions to alcohol will all have the same unique reactions to Drunkard''s Beard. None of the physical ones, though."
"The fuck?" Misa peered at the moss. "Okay, that is pretty weird."
"And kind of cool, right?" Vex grinned at her, and she scoffed but not before she grinned back.
Just a bit.
Derivan was watching the moss closely. "We don''t know how it works?"
"Nope," Vex said, shaking his head. "One of the weird mysteries we''ve just kind of given up on for now. I''m sure someone out there is studying it, but there are much more interesting things to study still."
"Like this thing!" Sev called out, and the other three were startled to realize that Sev had wandered a good twenty feet away.
"Dammit, Sev!" Misa shouted back. "Don''t wander off on your own!"
"Bute look at this!" Sev waved the party over and they came, Vex absentmindedly tucking the sample of moss into his tailpouch. Sev was standing next to what seemed to be a cluster of crystals not dissimr to the mana crystals they found in Nuclei. "What do you think this is, Vex?"
"...Hm." Vex searched his memory, crouching down to peer more closely at the crystals. "Crystals in a forest are pretty unusual. There are a few varieties of nts that mimic crystals, but I''m bad at telling them apart. It''s probably a type of mana flower; feeds off the ambient mana in the air. Good for mana potions."
Curious, Derivan activated his [Mana Sight], crouching down by the crystals to watch the flow of mana. Sure enough, Vex was right where the mana tended to twist and breeze past objects, it went through the crystals, bing a little less bright on each pass. If he looked more carefully, he could see small sparks trailing down the crystals down towards the roots of the nt.
The sight was rather breathtaking, really. "Should we gather some?" Derivan asked. If they were useful for mana potions...
"Probably best to leave it for the herbalists," Vex said with a slight grimace. "They''re not easy to harvest without all the raw mana just spilling out."
"And these have nothing to do with the mana crystals we get from Nuclei?" Derivan nced at the crystal flowers again; they really did look alike.
Vex hesitated. "They''re rted in some way, if I had to guess," the lizardkin admitted. "Maybe mana prefers a crystalline form or something. We''d have to ask one of the wizards doing research on mana crystals to know more."
"I would''ve thought we would have uncovered all the secrets of mana crystals by now," Sevmented.
"History as we know it doesn''t extend that far back," Vex said with a slight shrug. "Too many gaps where we lost knowledge, and we haven''t had that much time. And mana crystals are...plicated. We don''t know why they exist and we don''t know why the system needs them. We don''t really know how it''s processed into the refined form we use, either."
"You said something about processing them being costly to do outside a Nucleus," Derivan mused, and Vex nodded.
"The methods we know of can''t be what the system uses. All we do is... pump mana into them. It''s unrefined and inefficient, and we have to do it in stages so it doesn''t explode." Vex paused, pondering how to exin it. "Mana attracts mana, but crystals have stable points where they stop umting mana. To stimte their growth, we need to artificially inject mana into them and push them past the stable point, then let it umte naturally until it hits the next stable point."
"You know a lot about this process." Misa raised a brow at the lizardkin, and Vex flinched slightly.
"...Yeah, I do," he breathed out, and went silent.
They walked on for a bit, none of them saying a word, until Misa eventually spoke.
"You don''t have to tell us, you know," Misa said quietly.
"I know." Vex looked to the ground. "I want to. Just... give me time."
The others could only nod. Derivan ced a hand on the lizardkin''s back, and he jumped a little before smiling gratefully at the armor; Derivan inclined his head in response.
It took time, but Vex eventually warmed up to talking about the forest again, full of trivia about every little minutiae. This was a webwood spider, he would exin; it was a type of spider that lived in trees and created webs out of that very same wood, using some sort of wood maniption and then applying a thinyer of sticky mana to it to catch prey. This small, unassuming stalk that looked vaguely like a dead root was in fact an illusion cast by a colony of tiny, ant-like creatures that Vex insisted were not ants. This tree was just a tree, but this other tree, right next to it andpletely identical to both the naked eye and to conventional [Mana Sight], was a tree mimic, a very particr sort of nt that would periodically uproot itself and copy a different tree.
Thatst one, the party decided, demanded exnation.
"How could you tell?" Derivan asked first; he was switching between his [Mana Sight] and regr vision, and finding no differences between the two.
"Look at the roots, not the tree," Vex exined. "The two trees are identical, and that points to a tree mimic. But what actually differentiates them is the dirt the dirt around the mimic is a lot more disturbed, and there are less nts around it, because there hasn''t been time for much nt life to grow."
"I have no idea why this exists," Sev dered, ring at the tree like it personally offended him.
"I think the mimic is the other one," Misa said, amused, and Sev switched his re to the other tree.
"What''s the point?" Sev asked. "I understand mimics; they exist to hide themselves from predators, or are otherwise ambush predators. But this one already has a perfect disguise; it''s undermining itself by walking off every so often."
"It gets bored." Vex shrugged, and Sev stared at him like he''d grown a second head. "What? Mimics are pretty sentient, like most other animals. They''re more patient than most, but all mimics move around. It''s just more obvious when it''s a tree moving around, because of the roots thing. Also, they''re not predators." He reached out to pat the trunk of the tree.
"What I want to know is why the system doesn''t register this one as a monster." Misa eyed the tree critically. There was nothing from the system most mimics would be tagged with a level and name as soon as they were identified as mimics. "Are you sure you got the right one?"
"Oh, yeah. Tree mimics don''t register as monsters. Honestly, what the system does and doesn''t ssify as a monster is still being studied." Vex gave Derivan an apologetic nce. "...It''s... definitely not infallible. But different kinds of mimics aren''t actually the same species, so most patterns can''t really be extrapted to all of them."
"Weird," Sev muttered, and Vex nodded, agreeing. Derivan remained silent, contemting on the nature of what the system registered as a monster. It had changed for him, but he didn''t know if that meant anything.
Too many answers they still needed, he decided with a sigh.
The party moved on.
It wasn''t long until the sun began to set and they had to set their sights on returning to the Adventuring Guild but the break had certainly done them good, they all felt. Derivan''s mind was somewhat preupied by the thought of systems and monsters, but even he felt more or less rejuvenated; the questions he had were questions that could be answeredter.
More importantly, they had timed their return to the Guild''s announcement of the fate of the recently-formed dungeon.
And there was a crowd.
Chapter 16: Dammit, Jerome
Chapter 16: Dammit, Jerome
"Where the hell did everyonee from?" Misa said, looking around in slight bewilderment. "There weren''t this many adventurers around when we left."
"Word got out, I''m guessing," Sev agreed, frowning slightly. "Means it''s a big announcement."
Vex was mostly silent the lizardkin didn''t particrly enjoy crowds, instead using Derivan''s presence to deter onlookers. Indeed, the other adventurers tended to give Derivan a bit of a berth. Something about his armor being intimidating, he supposed.
Everyone was gathered in the Guild''s lobby, and a restless sort of energy hung around amongst the adventurers as they waited. There was a makeshift stage where the questboard was normally stationed, and it was the only spot in the lobby that wasn''t already full, with just the one woman standing idly there. Derivan and the others, who had returned pretty much exactly on time for the announcement, had to stand near the door. There was no space anywhere else.
Derivan hadn''t actually seen the Guildmaster nor had he seen any of the leaders in charge of individual Guild branches, for that matter. As he understood it, they tended to be somewhat reclusive, rarely meeting with adventurers in person; when they weren''t resolving a crisis, they were handling administrative work. What that administrative work was he didn''t really know, though Sev had once exined it had to do with how the Guild handled individual teams, as well as each branch''s rtionship with nearby cities and towns.
Now that he thought about it, the fact that the Guildmaster was personally handling this announcement was probably some indication as to its importance.
"Greetings," the Guildmaster said, and Derivan blinked, the lights in his helmet flickering. It was like a switch had flipped in his mind. He''d seen that woman standing in the middle of the stage of course she was the Guildmaster. Who else would she be?
But he hadn''t made the connection, for some reason, and it seemed like he wasn''t the only one. Other adventurers seemed to be simrly startled, with several of them letting out a brief curse as their brains suddenly told them in no uncertain terms that the Guildmaster was there.
She was... she was a middle-aged, nondescript woman? Her features were indistinct, and try as he might, Derivan found he couldn''t pinpoint anything about her besides her identity.
"Some kind of perception-based Skill?" Vex muttered at his side. His voice was slightly strained, like he, too, was trying to see through it.
Derivan tried to watch her more carefully, but his attention slid off of her like it was water; there was nothing for him totch on to
No. Wait. He couldtch on to something.
You are circumventing a powerful anti-identification Skill.
He couldn''t get a read on her appearance, but he could still read her with Physical Empathy. He could tell he wasn''t supposed to, somehow; there was a strange resistance to it that required him to focus his efforts. Her skill should have masked everything from him, he suspected, even her bodynguage, but it seemed like the stat could go around it, somehow?
He could see that her eyes were sharp, the corners crinkled just slightly in amusement at the way the adventurers reacted to her. Her shoulders were hunched, just barely; deeper-set stress and irritation from something unrted to the adventurers muttering amongst themselves about her appearance.
You have partially circumvented a powerful anti-identification Skill. The owner of the Skill will be alerted.
Derivan frowned at the message. The system could have warned him about that earlier.
Sure enough, the Guildmaster paused in her announcement, searching the crowd with faintly narrowed eyes. Her eyes met his own for a moment.
Then, to his surprise, she winked.
No one else seemed to have noticed, though, and she continued her announcement like nothing had happened. Derivan realized vaguely that he hadn''t been paying attention, and sheepishly tuned in.
"Normally, a new dungeon forming would be something to celebrate," she said, her gaze sweeping impassively over the crowd. "And indeed, this dungeon is unique, even among the core dungeons cultivated in the Prime Kingdoms. We don''t know how or why this formed the way it did. We do know this dungeon is dangerous."
"It is a tinum-tier dungeon," she said, and whispers swept over the crowd of adventurers. Her eyes hardened. "Which means," she added, "no one below Gold will be allowed to delve it."
There were groans and loudints. The Guildmaster''s gaze was unrelenting, but then she sighed, holding up a hand; the adventurers quieted without really knowing why they did so. "But it doesn''t matter; I tell you this only to lighten the blow. Even Gold teams will not be allowed to delve it, for Elyra has imed it for their research."
"What?!" One adventurer in particr said loudly he was d in silver armor that was trimmed in gold. Some sort of pdin ss, Derivan assumed. He didn''t look happy, and neither did any of the adventurers he was with. "How is that fair? We were the ones that discovered the dungeon!"
"Technically," the Guildmaster said pointedly. "You didn''t do shit. I messaged you when the dungeon was forming, telling you that there was only a single adventuring team on site and they might need assistance. You were the only team that could get there and scout it within minutes. You said, and I quote, ''Get back to me when there are rewards that are actually worth my time.''"
"I didn''t know it was going to be a fucking tinum-tier dungeon," the strange man scoffed.
"That shouldn''t have mattered. You were hardly on an important assignment, and you were well aware that I had already allocated all the resources the Guild has avable to the task as a reward." The Guildmaster''s eyes narrowed again, and this time Derivan didn''t feel the resistance that meant he was circumventing her skill. This time, she wanted everyone to sense her displeasure, and most of the adventurers shifted ufortably. "Any morepensation would result in deaths in many of the viges that rely on us."
"And how''s that any of my business?" The man shot back. "The more I level up now, the more I can help you get your stupid crystalster."
Derivan felt Vex freeze next to him. He didn''t see it, but he knew Misa''s eyes were narrowed, and that Sev had taken a step forward, hands clenched around his staff. He, too, found that he felt disgust coiling around inside him.
But they held back. There was no reason to get involved now not when it was already being handled.
"And when will that ter'' be, Jerome?" The Guildmaster asked, her voice icy. "One year from now? Ten? How much do you want us to sacrifice for the sake of your upward progress, on the promise that you will eventually help, even assuming you survive the entire process? And you want me to believe that, having tread on bodies to get there, you would not do so again? Once you are too strong for anyone to deal with?"
The man Jerome, apparently red, and opened his mouth again. But the Guildmaster waved a hand, and no words came out of his mouth. He seemed furious, but she ignored him, simply continuing on with her speech. "On that note. I had nned to do this privately, but since you did me the courtesy of causing a scene, know this: I will be demoting your team."
There were shocked whispers, but she ignored them, even as the adventurer she was staring at grew even more angry than he already was. Her eyes were narrowed and intense. "Gold and tinum rankers in the Guild are held to a moral standard, not just a power standard. This was made clear to you when you joined. You may have been powerful within Anderstahl, and we gave you a rank matching your power and prestige as a professional courtesy but you are an adventurer now. You will be held to our standards and our rules. If you cannot behave like a Gold ranker of the Adventurer''s Guild, then you will not be one, until you have been judged worthy of the rank."
Here, Jerome paused. His fury seemed to double, and the adventurers around him that weren''t a part of his team quickly backed away, sensing danger.
Derivan, further away and not in any particr danger, frowned. Jerome had joined as a Gold ranker, instead of working his way up the ranks? That was unusual, in and of itself; the only people able to reach Gold and tinum were usually people who had powerful backing.
Which meant that this Jerome had been... what, kicked out of somewhere else? The Guildmaster had mentioned Anderstahl, one of the other Prime Kingdoms, if he remembered correctly.
His thoughts were interrupted when a low cry of fear rose up from within the ranks of the adventurers, and several defensive Skills activated as they rapidly backed away from the enraged man.
Brilliant flickers of light were gathering around him, mana so condensed and packed together that it became visible even without the benefit of [Mana Sight]. His party members stood behind him, their eyes narrowing. Two of them were women; archers of some sort, it seemed, and thest member waspletely hidden within their robes. All of them seemed to be getting ready for a fight. The air grew dense with power.
And yet... the Guildmaster didn''t react. She stood rxed at her position on the stage, unflinching and unblinking. The message was clear: You don''t want to do this.
Then something seemed to resolve within him, and the lights abruptly cut out. "Fine," the adventurer spat. "I''ll see youter, then, Guildmaster."
He spun and stormed out of the guild, brushing past Derivan and the others as he did so, his party members following behind him. No one stopped them.
"Bastards," Misa muttered, and Vex gave a shaking nod in agreement.
"As I was saying." The Guildmaster''s eyes were dark, even more irritated than before. "Elyra has imed the dungeon, and the Guild will not be allowed to touch it. For now. I was able to negotiate a partial contract with Elyra; once most of the dungeon''s secrets have been pried out, we will be allowed in. Elyra has first pick of any loot that drops, but will pay twice the value of the artifact to the adventurers that find it, with the value determined by Guild-issued evaluator."
"Negotiations with Elyra are ongoing, but they are very insistent about getting this dungeon, and the Guild doesn''t have the political power to fight them on this." The Guildmaster paused, her eyes surveying the crowd. "Most of you aren''t Gold or tinum ranked anyway, so it won''t matter for you in the short term. For those that are, we ask that you don''t endanger our negotiations by trying to force the issue."
"As for the adventuring team that discovered the dungeon." The Guildmaster spoke so smoothly that Derivan''s party almost didn''t register that she''d said it at all; it felt like just another part of her speech. It was deliberate, Derivan realized she didn''t want them to react obviously to the announcement. "I will be personally visiting your quarterster in the day. Please expect a visit."
With that, she left; the crowd began to disperse. Derivan''s party nced at one another.
"Well, let''s head back to our room, shall we?" Sev eventually said.
"That Jerome guy is a dick." Misa frowned.
"The Guildmaster said he is from Anderstahl," Derivan said. "I believe that is the northern Prime Kingdom? Perhaps he was removed for this behavior?"
"Probably," Sev sighed. "And he''s almost certainly neshifted. That name is very... Earth."
"Does that matter?" Vex cocked his head at their cleric.
"...No. I don''t know. Maybe." Sev grimaced, looking up briefly and then back down as a woman slipped into their room. "I don''t feel great about other neshifted, but I think that''s just because I haven''t really had good experiences with them."
"Well, the guy was an ass, though, we can agree on that much," Misa grumbled. "Kinda wanna kick his ass."
"He''s level 72. I checked. Please don''t provoke him," Sev deadpanned, and Misa huffed.
"I worry that he will do something anyway." Derivan''s voice was concerned; he stood leaning against a wall at the side of the room, unable to convince himself to sit. "He was very angry, and he did not stop because he realized his anger was unjustified. He stopped because he formed a n."
"There''s not much we can do about it," Sev said, shaking his head. "Especially since we don''t know what he''s nning. We''ll have to trust that the Guildmaster saw the same thing and is preparing countermeasures."
"I suppose." Derivan nced over his friends. The answers they needed were in the dungeon, but none of them could get in, and the only adventurer that did technically have the power to get in was loud and worryingly hostile. Sev looked withdrawn, Misa looked agitated, Vex seemed distressed, and that woman still seemed irritated, though now that irritation was colored with amusement.
Derivan paused. The woman seemed irritated. How strange. There was something about the way her shoulders were hunched...
One thought linked to another. He blinked, eyes flickering in his helmet. He didn''t know who that woman was, but the set of that irritation was familiar
Two notifications blipped out at once.
You are circumventing a powerful anti-perception Skill.
You have partially circumvented a powerful anti-perception Skill. Owner of the Skill will be alerted.
"The Guildmaster is here," he blurted, startled by how easily she''d slipped beneath their notice. To their credit, none of the others doubted him, though they seemed to interpret his surprise as a warning they reacted in a sh, Misa reaching for her mace and the other two preparing spells. They looked puzzled, though, unable to parse any kind of target.
"So that''s how you did it," the Guildmaster said, amused. "Not many can see through my Skills. I''m impressed. But you can put your weapons away; I''m not here to fight, and I apologize for startling you. I was just curious about how your friend saw through me. You have a skill that recognizes bodynguage, and somehow associated that bodynguage with me?"
All three of the others started as the Guildmaster spoke, then rxed, slowly putting their weapons away. Derivan nodded awkwardly it wasn''t a correct assessment, exactly, but it was close enough. He could hardly exin what was going on with his status.
"Yes," he said out loud, and she grinned at him yfully.
"Should''ve stuck with the nod. That''s a partial lie, but I''ll let that one slide; I shouldn''t have asked you in the first ce, and you shouldn''t be able to make that association at all."
"You have a crazy-ass set of skills," Misa muttered.
"Necessary, when you''re the Guildmaster." The Guildmaster chuckled, the irritation bleeding away. "To address your concerns yes, Jerome almost certainly has something nned. I''ve got eyes on him. They''ll try to stop him if he does anything stupid, but I''d appreciate it if you could keep an eye out, too."
"You are here for a different reason, though," Derivan said, observing her. She was being... cautious?
"I am," the Guildmaster nodded. "You''ve probably already figured it out, but I lied a little bit back there."
Her voice turned serious. "I need to know what system messages you got during that formation event. That dungeon is not tinum-tier. I''m not sure it fits any of our categorization schemes at all."
Chapter 17: Trust
Chapter 17: Trust
"...what do you mean?" Sev asked after a moment. He seemed wary.
"How are dungeons ranked, normally?" Derivan cocked his head to the side, helmet nking against his shoulder te. "I am afraid I am missing some context."
The Guildmaster gave Derivan a strange look, but Vex quickly took over before she could speak. "They''re ranked based on abination of factors, usually the difficulty of the dungeon''s challenges along with the level of the monsters inside. Usually, the dungeon''s tier is equal to the rank of the monsters within, but it can change if the challenges inside are more difficult, or if the challenges allow you to bypass the monsters."
The Guildmaster furrowed her brows slightly. "...That is correct, yes," she said, nodding tersely after a moment.
"So what makes this dungeon so different?" Sev asked, eyeing the Guildmaster. "That ranking system seems pretty flexible to me."
"The problem is consistency and content." The Guildmaster''s eyes narrowed slightly. "Dungeons don''t usually have flexible difficulty ratings, but this one seems to adjust based on the adventurers delving them. The challenges, for example, are as likely to kill a Bronze ranker as they are to kill a tinum ranker."
Vex frowned. "The challenges adjust their stat requirements?"
The Guildmasterughed at that, though it was a bit of a bitter one. "No. The challenges don''t seem to be stat based at all. They just... individualize themselves based on the delver. It caused a hell of a problem with our scouts, let me tell you; not a single one could agree on the difficulty of any given puzzle."
"But that''s..."
"It implies this dungeon is intelligent in some way, yes. Like the core dungeons in the Prime Kingdoms." The Guildmaster watched Vex for a moment, her gaze making the lizardkin shift ufortably. He wrapped his tail around to his front as if forfort, and her eyes softened just slightly. "That''s dangerous in and of itself. If it were known that there was a ''tinum'' dungeon that could be theoretically delved by Bronze and Iron rankers, there''d be a flood of demand and we''d have to deal with idiots trying to sneak in and getting themselves killed. But if it were just that, we''d probably rank this as an unusually dangerous dungeon, and that would be that."
"There''s something else," Vex said.
"There are a number of intelligent monsters in that dungeon," the Guildmaster nodded, ignoring the sharp intake of breath from all of the party except Derivan. The armored monster''s eyes simply narrowed slightly as he took in this information. Was that his fault? The dungeon had used him as a seed. "Monsters that can talk. Which is unusual, as I''m sure you''ll agree."
"Quite," Sev said smoothly, taking over before Vex could respond. The lizardkin couldn''t lie if his life depended on it. If the Guildmaster noticed, though, she chose not toment. "And these monsters are dangerous?"
"Very much so." The Guildmaster paused here for a moment, as if trying to find the words to articte the danger. "This is the first instance of a dungeon''s mechanisms being controlled by its denizens that we know of. The intelligent monsters, if you encounter them, can manipte and change the existing puzzles to make them more or less dangerous to you."
"Do they do that?" Misa asked. The Guildmaster looked up at her, and she rified. "Do they make the challenges less dangerous? That seems like a good thing."
"If they like you," the Guildmaster said with a shrug. "But more likely than not, they won''t, and they''ll just make everything worse for you and everyone else in your party. They definitely didn''t make things easier on my scouts; most of them are still recovering, except for the one that one of the monsters took pity on."
Sev and Misa exchanged nces briefly. Vex seemed very still. Derivan, for his part, still didn''t know how to react.
"On top of that," the Guildmaster continued, as ifrgely oblivious to the intery going on between the party members Derivan saw how sharp her eyes were in spite of it, however. "The monsters themselves break all the rules we know of. They''re not just intelligent, their difficulty doesn''t tend to match their level. Bronze ranked monsters have skills that would be dangerous to even tinum rankers. tinum ranked monsters sometimes pose no danger at all."
"There''s that much of a level range in the dungeon?" Vex frowned.
"Yes," the Guildmaster said. "Which is only one of the reasons I need to know what messages you got from the system when this thing was forming. We need to know if it has any more surprises up its sleeves, and if it does, we need to be ready for them. Or at least warn Elyra about them. I can''t imagine the level of diplomatic incident we''ll end up having if we withheld information that could have prevented a catastrophe."
"I It''s not that easy for us," Sev said with a slight furrow of his brows, ncing around at his party members. "We''ll need to discuss this amongst ourselves. Several of those messages contain some private information about our sses."
Which was an excuse, Derivan realized. Sev had expressed before that he didn''t care much for the privacy of the system he was more than happy to share whatever was needed for the benefit of the whole. The problem was just that his ss was unique, and no one else would ever have his ss.
"I do not ask this lightly," the Guildmaster agreed. None of them were trying to hide that they had secrets, at least; they were only hesitating in sharing them.
Derivan was troubled.
Physical Empathy told him many things; it told him that the others were worried, but not for themselves. It was almost subconscious, but the rest of the team had put themselves between the Guildmaster and him. It told him that the Guildmaster was rxed almost too rxed, given the nature of what she was asking of them. There was no hostility from her, and yet... his teammates were worried.
"I don''t suppose you''d take our word that there aren''t any messages that would exin this?" Misa half-joked, her voice strained.
"I doubted the system would give direct messages about the nature of the dungeon to begin with," the Guildmaster said drily. "We are looking for hints, notplete answers."
"This isn''t a decision any of us can make alone," Sev said. "We need to discuss this. We will try to work with you, and we would not withhold any information that would put anyone in danger; this much I can promise you."
"Of course." The Guildmaster smiled at them. "I will return in thirty minutes or when you knock twice on your door. I''ll even have a privacy ward cast on your room. Is that sufficient?"
Sev nodded once, and the Guildmaster got up and left the room; the door shut behind her, and a strange magic settled over them.
You have been ced under a privacy ward. Actions taken and words spoken will not leave the radius of the ward.
Misa stood up, walked over, and jammed a chair under the door handle.
Vex stared at her, bemused. "Why''d you do that?"
"So she can''t just walk in and have none of us notice that she''s there again," Misa grumbled. Evidently she''d been thrown off by how the Guildmaster had slipped beneath their guard.
"Can we be sure that she walked out?" Sev joked; silence greeted him, and the cleric somewhat btedly realized that they could not, in fact, be certain. He coughed. "Right. Well then. Operational security. Be vague enough so that we know what we''re talking about, but for all we know the ward extends out past the door and she can hear us, so..."
"For what it''s worth, my mana sight tells us the ward is confined to the limits of the room," Vex offered. "But it''s probably best not to rely on that. Um... That said, I think most of the system messages are fine to share, honestly. Anything rting to the formation of the dungeon. What I''m worried about are the messages regarding the excess mana."
The bonus rooms, he meant; the messages that had outright stated their levels and sses, and revealed their secrets to one another.
"We can see if she''ll allow us to be vague about it," Sev offered. "Take out the specifics of our sses."
"But you are not truly worried about your sses," Derivan said. "Only mine."
For a few breaths, no one spoke; then Sev sighed.
"It''s my biggest worry, yeah," he admitted; Misa and Vex both nodded slowly in agreement.
"I do not think we should hide it," Derivan said inly.
Sev hesitated. "Are you sure? The way she talked about monsters..."
"I suspect that she already knows what I am," Derivan said. "But more than that, I am worried that my presence is what caused the monsters in this dungeon to be intelligent. It may be crucial that we do not hide this."
"We can''t." Vex shook his head, distressed. "I mean... maybe we can tell the Guildmaster. She seems nice. But we can''t let Elyra know. I... I know Elyra. They wouldn''t just let Deri go."
There was a tremble of genuine fear in Vex''s voice that gave all of them pause. Derivan frowned slightly, moving closer to the wizard, and Vex seemed like he had to stop himself from shrinking back. Very gently, and giving Vex time to pull away if he needed, he ced a hand on the lizardkin''s shoulder.
Very slowly, the trembling stopped.
"We will tell her, but ask that she disguise this information when she gives it to Elyra," Derivan said. "Is that eptable?"
"I..." Vex hesitated slightly. It wasn''t perfect one only needed to look at their party and the dungeon formation data to realize something was wrong. But the Guildmaster clearly had some Skill-based way to disguise information, and the Guild itself had proven itself willing to try to do what was right, in that earlier confrontation. "...Okay."
It was the bestpromise they had. Derivan didn''t want to risk leaving out something crucial, though he epted it came at some cost to his safety.
"That isn''t the only thing I''m worried about," Sev said with a sigh, now that that had been settled. "There''s what happened afterwards. Thest battle we fought."
"There''s no way they don''t know about that one already. We shouldn''t hide it," Misa said bluntly.
"The battle itself, no," Sev agreed; a momentter, Misa''s eyes widened in realization.
"Ah, shit. Thest time you even talked about it..." she said, and her voice trailed off. Sev nodded slowly.
"I will exin it," Derivan said. "And I will stop if it seems that what happened with Velykos is also happening with the Guildmaster."
"Are you sure?" Misa frowned. "Sev almost died. He only didn''t because there were other clerics around that could keep him stable."
"That is why Sev cannot be the one to speak of it." Derivan nced at the cleric. "Our healer must be avable in case the worst happens. And my circumstances are unique enough that whatever affected Sev may not affect me."
He didn''t have Health, he meant. If the effect was Health-rted, he would be immune; if the effect stopped his heart, he would still be immune.
"...Okay," Sev said slowly. Vex looked like he wanted to protest, but ultimately kept silent; he seemed to understand that it was the most reasonable choice outside of just keeping silent on the matter entirely, and that didn''t seem wise. Whatever was happening affected even the gods. "So. We exin everything we can. Derivan can talk about what happened with the Overseer, and exin my use of [Divine Communion] that''smon knowledge about cleric sses anyway. Are we agreed?"
"Agreed," the others chorused; Sev stood up, and went to move the chair aside and knocked twice on the door. His hands were shaking only slightly.
The door opened. A woman stood behind the door; she walked through and closed the door behind her before her Skill dropped away and she once more became the Guildmaster. No deception this time, beyond what was necessary to stop others from realizing who was entering the room.
"We might not be able to tell you everything," Sev said without preamble. "But we will tell you as much as we can. Is that eptable?"
The Guildmaster smiled a rare smile. "It is more than I was expecting."
Chapter 18: Truths
Chapter 18: Truths
The Guildmaster was only mildly surprised to hear of the abundant mana concentration, and the way the deviation had rapidly swung right towards the end; if anything, the most surprising part for her was the weakness of the monsters they had fought in the final waves. A tinum-tier dungeon was expected to have tinum-ranked monsters spawn during its formation but then, this adventuring team had been in lower Bronze, and it was a miracle that they had survived a horde of upper Bronze to Silver monsters to begin with.
Then they told her about the bonus rooms. The existence of a bonus room was not a surprise to her; the scouts had discovered at least one of them before retreating, a strange, inset door in the corner of a room that they wouldn''t have noticed had they not been practiced with the anti-perception skills the Guildmaster liked to use. What did surprise her was that there were four of them; it was another abnormality, and it was a significant one. The most they had ever found in a dungeon was one.
"None of our scouts made it into the bonus room they did find," the Guildmaster admitted when asked. "They couldn''t find whatever mechanism was needed to unlock it. Maybe you''d have better luck, but..."
Their team was still Bronze ranked, she was thinking. Derivan nced at Sev.
"About that," Sev said. "We''re almost Silver now. Half of us are, anyway."
The Guildmaster paused. "You''re still low Bronze on the Guild records." She frowned, then narrowed her eyes slightly, like something had urred to her. Her voice was entirely too casual when she spoke. "That fight put you in Silver? It shouldn''t have been enough to do that. What happened?"
Sev hesitated, trying to structure his thoughts. "We need to talk about our sses first. It''s relevant, I promise," he said. He exined the rest of what had been in the boxes: their sses, and the ''intelligent monster'' that had shown up and taken Derivan''s ce in the selection process.
"Three of you have rare sses?" The Guildmaster twitched. "Fuck, I wish we''d known that. We would''ve promoted you sooner."
"Really?" Sev asked, blinking. She snorted.
"You have better heads on your shoulders than Jerome''s team does," she said. "And if you all have rare sses you can fight a tier up easily."
"What about the monster?" Vex asked, his tail twitching nervously. The Guildmaster snorted.
"You''re all terrible at lying," she said inly. "But you tried to be honest while protecting your teammate, and that counts for a lot. I figured that out earlier and ran all the diagnostics I needed to, so I believe you''re not a danger. I will tell Elyra a modified version of this story." She nced at Derivan, raising an eyebrow slightly. "You won''t make me regret protecting you, I hope."
"I will not," Derivan said firmly.
"Good," the Guildmaster said. "Be careful around anyone tinum-ranked. I''ll have an enchanted amulet made and sent to you; wear it, and it''ll make it harder for anyone to perceive what you are, even if they have the necessary sensory skills."
"You''re taking this surprisingly well," Sev observed. He seemed a little shocked, but also pleased.
"I''ve seen some shit in my time," the Guildmaster said with an edge of sarcasm, and smirked slightly when Vex and Sev stared at her in surprise. Misa just grinned wildly, like she''d found a kindred spirit. Then the Guildmaster slipped back into formality like nothing happened. "Trust inspires trust in return. You were worried, but you told me the important details anyway, and trusted me to do the right thing with that information. The Guild as an organization wouldn''t work if we didn''t put some trust in members that have earned it."
"So not Jerome, to be clear," Misa said, grinning.
"Not Jerome," the Guildmaster agreed, and theyughed, the room feeling a little lighter for just a moment. Derivan was, admittedly, surprised but... trust could be a simple matter, Derivan supposed, as long as those involved were willing. It was good to know that the Guild was what it purported itself to be.
"You still haven''t exined how your team went from low Bronze to Silver over the course of a single fight," the Guildmaster added after a moment of silence, arching a brow at them.
"There was still excess mana after the bonus rooms were created," Derivan started, hesitantly taking up the story when the others nced towards him. "It initially went to the mana crystal we were cultivating and upgraded it to a grade 6 crystal."
"This I saw," the Guildmaster acknowledged. "I wondered how you managed a grade 6 with only a few hours'' worth of processing. That crystal will help a lot of viges."
"It would have kept going, but there was... some sort of override. The excess mana was shunted to a summoning." The Guildmaster''s eyes widened fractionally at this, but she said nothing. "It called down a Mana Abomination with a title ."
"It called down a boss?" The Guildmaster stiffened, then cursed. "Jerome is a fucker. The only one close enough and he just... okay. What level was it?"
"We don''t know," Sev said, and the Guildmaster frowned.
"You didn''t see it?"
"No. We don''t know," Sev repeated. "We saw it, but the systembeled its level with three question marks. We don''t know what level it is."
"...100 is supposed to be the level cap." The Guildmaster paused, but Derivan saw something in her eyes that was strange. A flicker of hesitation? And there was something else, too, that bothered him. Nothing specific he could pinpoint. "If there were three"
"It was not level 100," Sev stated with an air of finality. "It was higher. Possibly much higher. We almost died."
"That should be impossible," the Guildmaster argued, but there was a trace of uncertainty in her voice. "There aren''t"
Derivan realized what he''d been missing. What she''d been missing. She didn''t seem surprised, just worried.
"You already know." Derivan spoke suddenly. "Something happened?"
The Guildmaster paused in the middle of her speech. Slowly, the uncertainty bled away, leaving only a tired-looking woman. "I was hoping it wasn''t true."
"What wasn''t true?" Sev asked, looking between Derivan and the Guildmaster. "What?"
"We had a problem," the Guildmaster said with a sigh. "One of the scouts came back delirious, shouting about monsters above level 100... none of the other scouts saw it, so we were hoping it was an illusion. Some kind of trap."
She paused, then stared keenly at all of them. "I don''t suppose you''ll tell me how you''re so sure?"
"Derivan was level 86 at the time," Sev said. "100 would have shown up, if that was the level."
"...Was?" the Guildmaster blinked.
"We broke his level," Misa said with a shrug. "The system thought he was a monster and that was stupid. So."
"You realize you''re the most abnormal adventuring team I''ve met." The Guildmaster rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I''m starting to think I should be worried about Jerome instead of you four. Is that how you beat the boss?"
Derivan shook his head. "It was too strong for me. We worked together to stall until Sev was able to cast [Divine Communion]."
The Guildmaster frowned and cast her gaze to Sev. "So you cast [Divine Communion] and your god helped you out?"
"In a manner of speaking," Derivan said; the Guildmaster looked at him, surprised that Derivan answered instead of the cleric. "You should know that thest time Sev spoke of his god, he almost died, and the person he spoke to could not register or remember the name. We do not know the specifics of the effect, yet, and so we are being cautious. The one he spoke to could not remember the name he spoke."
"I remember hearing about this. I didn''t think it was rted." The Guildmaster breathed out, then nodded. "Good of you to warn me. Give me a minute to prepare myself." The Guildmaster seemed to search through the air for a moment, consulting an invisible status screen. Then she used a Skill, and the air around her rippled.
"Okay. Go ahead."
"The name of Sev''s god is Onyx," Derivan said carefully.
The Guildmaster blinked once. She frowned. "Say that one more time, please. Just the name, nothing else."
"Onyx," Derivan said. He felt carefully at his soul, but nothing seemed to be happening, and nothing about his status had changed.
The Guildmaster tilted her head. "Why did you Ah. I see what''s happening." She sighed. "Ugh. This is going to nag at me. I hate this kind of magic."
"Don''t you... use this kind of magic?" Vex ventured. He was watching the Guildmaster with slightly narrowed eyes the mana was doing something strange, again but this time parts of the effect were bouncing off the Guildmaster.
"That is why I hate it, yes," the Guildmaster deadpanned. "I can''t correctly associate the thoughts you''ve presented me with. I know you were trying to tell me the name of a god; I also know that, for no particr reason, you brought up a type of rock. The link between these two facts should be obvious, and I know it is obvious, and yet I cannot hold on to the association even burning my best skills. It is infuriating."
The fact that she could even string the two facts along next to one another was already disying an adeptness with perceptual magic that couldn''t be matched by most Vex understood this, and was suitably impressed. Misa''s brows were furrowed, not quite understanding how it was that the Guildmaster couldn''t make the obvious connection, but taking her at her word.
"For now, let us proceed assuming that the name of the god is not relevant, and let us hope that you can tell me more."
Derivan nodded. He began to exin what happened the space they were brought into once Sev had managed to cast the spell but he had scarcely begun before the Guildmaster held up a hand.
"Stop." The Guildmaster rubbed at her temples; Vex was watching in rm. Whatever the mana was doing around her had spiked in intensity. "This is not going to work. I am walking away from this with the assumption that a god is involved in some way, shape or form. I need you to tell me if the god is an aggressor."
"No," Derivan said.
"Understood." The Guildmaster frowned, grumbling. "At least the magic allows me to remember this much. Infolocks are... rare. Not really known to anyone except the few tinums digging into our history. It''s some sort of system-level censorship. There are limits to it, but for the most part, they shouldn''t be tested. Your friend..." The Guildmaster''s gaze went to Sev, and she frowned slightly. "...The bacsh is not normally nearly as severe as what happened to your friend; there may be something more to what happened. But there is bacsh, often to your health and asionally in the form of skill restrictions. Be careful sharing information, if you find that those you try to share it with cannot listen."
"Why isn''t this more well known?" Vex asked with a frown. The Guildmaster raised an eyebrow.
"Ever tried telling people they can''t talk about something?"
"...Good point."
"Just to rify, there are monsters that use perception magic, and prevent you from alerting others to the threat. That''s not the same as an infolock. You''re safe to try tomunicate that any way you can." The Guildmaster hesitated. "From the story you''ve given me... do you need to investigate this dungeon?"
"Yes," Derivan said.
"Shit," the Guildmaster muttered. "Okay. I can work with this. You''ve given me a lot, and I can probably work it into our negotiations to get the Guild to send an envoy... You''re practically a Silver team and you can fight a tier up. That''s the only reason I''m even considering this, just for the record."
"You''re going to let us delve the dungeon?" Misa said, excited. The Guildmaster held up a hand.
"I''m going to try to get you on Elyra''s research team," she said. Vex flinched slightly at the words, but said nothing. "You might be called on to participate in the negotiations. Keep an eye out, be on your best behavior, and sell to them why you might be useful. They probably won''t call on you for delves, but that''s the closest I can get you."
"That''s... probably good enough?" Sev said, exchanging nces with the others. If they could find a way in... But it was a bit early to think about that.
"Well. Thank you for your time." The Guildmaster stood, evidently ready to leave; she offered them a small smile. "It is rare for adventurers to be quite as cooperative as you four. I hope to see you in the higher ranks soon. Preferably before Jerome makes it back to Gold, and then to tinum." She smirked a bit. "Though if I have my way, it will take him quite a while."
"I just hope he doesn''t stir up too much trouble," Vex said softly; something about his countenance suggested nervousness, his tail swishing slowly and dragging across the floor.
"It will not involve you. He does not know that you are the adventurers that found the dungeon, and we have been sure to keep that information secret." The Guildmaster offered Vex a reassuring smile. It didn''t seem to help much, but the lizardkin stood up straighter anyway. "Be ready to be involved in the negotiations. It will happen soon. Likely tomorrow."
A woman left the room. A slow exhale followed the sound of the door clicking shut, as each member of the team let out a breath they didn''t realize they had been holding.
Vex broke the silence first.
"If we''re going to be involved in negotiations with Elyra..." Vex ventured cautiously, taking a breath. "I may be able to help."
"Oh?" Sev nced at the wizard.
"I was born to a noble family in Elyra," the lizardkin exined; he didn''t look happy about it, but he did look determined. "There is a chance we can use my family name to press for our involvement. But I''m not exactly on the best terms with my family, so it might be a long shot."
"...We''ll see if we need to," Sev said softly. "But thank you for sharing."
Vex nodded silently. He still seemed nervous, but he seemed to be calming down, now that he''d gotten that truth out there.
"Let''s get some rest, shall we?" Sev suggested. "It''s been a long day."
Chapter 19: Negotiations
Chapter 19: Negotiations
Vex had told them the next morning that it likely wouldn''t take long for them to be summoned Elyra, he said, tended to try to throw money at problems instead of actually resolving them. The negotiations would reach an impasse, and they would call on the adventurers to break that impasse.
It wasn''t long before he was proven correct. Sev received the summons, asking them to the uppermost floor of the Guild.
"Moment of truth, I suppose," Sev muttered.
There were no stairs that allowed them to ess the uppermost floor instead, each room in the Guild had a magically reinforced, spatially expanded closet that doubled as both a safe room and a means of housing a transportation circle.
"I never thought we''d get to use this." Vex looked around in some wonder, examining the runes in the ground. The runes began to glow as soon as the four of them stepped within the circle before that, they had beenpletely invisible, even to Derivan''s [Mana Sight]. "Or need to, I suppose. Usually it''s meant for evacuation."
"Evacuation?" Derivan tilted his head. He couldn''t imagine it being necessary, in a building full of people that built themselves to fight. Vex gave him a wry, slightly sad smile.
"It''s saved lives. It''s rare, but dungeon breaks can still happen, and Guild branches are meant to be ast bastion of defense," he exined.
Derivan grimaced. That made sense.
The circle activated. Mana swirled around them, pulled in from their surroundings and from somewhere else then it shed inwards, impacting all four adventurers.
And then they were in the uppermost floor of the Guild. Just like that.
Impressive feat of magic aside and from the way Vex''s eyes widened and the way the lizardkin began to mouth off calctions to himself, whatever magic this was was the entire floor in itself was impressive. It was obviously built specifically to ept political delegations, with all the splendor and magnificence that the task required. The magic and wards alone were strong enough that Derivan could feel them without using [Mana Sight], and then there were the tall pirs of baster, fixed into ce with mana crystals, of all things...
...Derivan frowned. "Those are not actual mana crystals, are they?"
"They better not be," Misa said, narrowing her eyes slightly.
"No, no," Vex rushed to assure them. He paused, looking at them closely. "...They''re some variety of crystal flowers, like the ones we saw back in the forest. These ones are slightly more refined and it''s harder to tell that they''re just flowers, but they''re definitely not real crystals."
"Good, or I was going to hit someone," Misa muttered.
"Please don''t do that. We''re here for politics. That''s a terrible idea," Sev said drily. Then he thought about what he''d said for a moment, and amended his statement. "It''s a terrible idea for now."
"I did not realize the Guild was this wealthy," Derivanmented, ncing around. There were no windows, but the room was well-lit, light magic shining through crystal chandeliers to cast glimmering motes of rainbow light over the room.
"We''re really not." The dry voice of the Guildmaster cut in, and all of them jumped in surprise; she''d been standing right in front of them, unassuming and as still as a statue. She raised an eyebrow at them. "The mana flowers are there to look pretty, but they''re also there to power enchantments that suppress skills, so we can avoid diplomatic incidents. You are aware that the entire delegation from Elyra is here, yes? They can hear you. Please don''t threaten to hit anyone."
"Bring them here already!" A voice called, and the party finally focused their attention in the actual center of the room.
There was a table at the center; it wasrge, round, and decorated with an unnecessary degree of fine carving. The Elyran delegates were seated on one side, and there were five empty seats on the other for the Guildmaster and the four party members, presumably. Small runes sat on the table in front of each seat, glowing dimly.
Derivan''s gaze flicked over the delegates. They weren''t what he expected, though he wasn''t sure what he expected to begin with. There were two lizardkin, two humans, and one orc, each of them dressed in attire that the armor assumed wasmon for nobility in Elyra. He didn''t miss the way Vex flinched, just slightly, as his gaze touched upon the two lizardkin in the delegation but neither of them seemed to recognize him, and Derivan didn''t call attention to it.
In short order, they were sitting at the table. Derivan found himself seated across from the orc; he was a slight, lightly built man, dressed in pure-white robes, and he offered a small, polite smile upon seeing Derivan watching him. "Hello," he said. "I am Leben, of the Divine Order."
"You are a priest?" Derivan asked curiously. Leben nodded, and Derivan wondered why a priest would be sent on this delegation. What did the dungeon represent for the Elyrans, anyway?
Vex sat next to him, opposite a human woman who seemed unable to stop scowling at everything around her. She didn''t introduce herself, and Vex didn''t ask. The others took their seats at the table, too, though Derivan quickly stopped paying attention as the Guildmaster spoke.
"So," she said. "We have reached an impasse within negotiations, as Elyra keeps attempting to offer more money in return for less Guild interference, and that is far from the resource that we arecking." The Guildmaster''s gaze cut across the table into the lizardkin man she sat across from; he sat with his arms folded, wearing a decidedly unimpressed look. "The Guild has the right to have one team involved with your operation, and I am personally vouching for their ability."
"And I have the right to approve of that team. I don''t see anything that makes them worth the investment, so far," Tarilex rumbled in reply. He was a broad-shouldered lizardkin, Derivan noted, nearly twice Vex''s size; he could see Vex almost shrink away from him as he spoke. "You im these are the ones that discovered the dungeon? Four of them, surviving a formation event for a tinum-tier dungeon? Absurd. I am not a fool, Guildmaster."
"The dungeon formation was weaker than usual. There are many things abnormal about this particr dungeon, Tarilex; this is the entire reason Elyra cares enough to im it at all." The Guildmaster sighed. "There is no point in rehashing this. You asked for this team to be brought up here for a reason; do not waste my time with political games."
"And what game are you ying, Guildmaster?" Tarilex asked, arching a single brow. "Backing this team to this degree? Do you owe them political favors? It does the Guild''s image no good to pretend they discovered this dungeon, I assure you. They are what, Bronze? Barely Silver?"
Silence. The Guildmaster did not engage, and while Misa looked like she wanted to say something, she did not. Derivan simply tilted his head Tarilex seemed almost like he was fishing for information. Why? Was this not something that the Guildmaster had already exined to him?
"And you im that there is information in this dungeon that is, of all things, restricted under an infolock," Tarilex added, when no one said anything. "And that your adventurers are privy to that infolock, and can operate outside of its effects. But this hardly seems provable, and there is no benefit to Elyra, when whatever they uncover cannot be shared."
"Unless, of course, you are iming that your adventurers can secure a shareable secret out of this? That they can extract something?" Tarilex smiled a thin, sarcastic smile that seemed strangely empty. "The vast majority of adventurers I have met are thugs; I cannot imagine this group would be any different."
"Then you have a poor imagination." Derivan spoke without really thinking about it. It was strange Tarilex spoke with all the pompousness and smug superiority of a noble, but his bearing didn''t reflect that. He spoke with the hunched back of a man who pored over books, not the proud set of a man that lorded over others.
"Excuse me?" Tarilex swung his gaze to re at Derivan, though strangely, there was no true heat in his gaze. Derivan looked back at him, and realized that the rune beneath him was glowing Ah. Voice amplification magic, then. He poked at the rune set in front of his own seat experimentally; when it lit up, he spoke again.
"I said that you have a poor imagination," Derivan repeated. Tarilex''s brow twitched in irritation.
Ah. Derivan understood, perhaps btedly, that Tarilex hadn''t meant that he literally couldn''t hear him.
Derivan paused and decided his statement required boration. "You have only met us once, and you think to judge our capabilities based on the fact that we are adventurers. If you are only capable of imagining adventurers doing one thing, then you strike me as a man with a poor imagination." He shrugged. Vex, beside him, did his best to hold back a snicker; his shoulders shook, though, so he wasn''t doing it very well. Even the Guildmaster seemed vaguely amused.
"And who gave you leave to speak?" Tarilex frowned at him.
"...You did?" Derivan tilted his head, confused. "Why would we be called in for negotiations if our opinions were not of value?"
"Mm." All at once, any pretense at irritation seemed to slip away. "I suppose you have a point. And I thought you witless cowards, for all that you only seemed able to stay silent and watch." He smirked faintly. "But regardless of how capable you are, there may not be anything for you to extract from this infolock. We''re still against your participation, unless there''s more you can offer."
The Guildmaster gave them an apologetic nce. This was on them, her look said; the Guildmaster herself didn''t have any cards left to y.
"The infolock surrounds urgent events," Sev tried. "It may not mean much to you, but it is crucial that we are allowed to pursue more information rted to it."
"What, the fate of the world is dependent on it?" Tarilex scoffed, but there was something strange in his eyes, like he was surprised.
"No. Only the fate of a friend," Sev said, his tone subdued. The lizardkin frowned, staring at Sev for a moment.
"...Be that as it may," Tarilex said. He sounded less pompous for a moment, a little more sincere. "My hands are tied."
"You''re the leader of this delegation," the Guildmaster scoffed; Tarilex red at her.
"My hands are tied," he repeated, putting a strange emphasis on the words. "You will need to give us more."
The Guildmaster fell silent, brows furrowing slightly, like she was confused. Derivan watched her for a moment, trying to read the expression there was something she was concerned about, but that was about as much as he could tell.
"What about the bonus room?" Misa asked suddenly.
Tarilex frowned at her Derivan saw the way his eyes darkened, the way he was suddenly, more genuinely upset, unlike the false irritation of before. "What about it?"
Misa grinned. "Research costs you time and money, doesn''t it? We can help speed up the process."
"Indeed," Vex agreed, picking up on her train of thought. "Dungeons pick out information from their surroundings to generate challenges; this is especially true for bonus rooms. We know what the dungeon used to seed the bonus room. We can give you that information in exchange for being allowed to participate."
"...This might be a worthwhile trade if you were the adventurers that discovered the dungeon," Tarilex said, still tense, though he had rxed a little as they spoke. "But you are not."
"How are you so sure?" Sev folded his arms, a little irritated. "You''ve never seen us fight. You have no idea what we can do."
"I don''t, that''s true. Unfortunately for you, the adventurers who did discover the dungeon have already approached us, and we have verified their honesty with truth spells. This is why I wanted to meet your adventurers, Guildmaster; I wanted to see those that could convince you to engage in such a bold lie. I thought they might have been interesting." Tarilex leaned back in his chair. His anger rxed into simple disappointment. Derivan frowned; many of Tarilex''s reactions had been strange, now; there was something about the way he kept swinging between his apparent emotions.... "It seems I have only wasted my time."
"Fucking Jerome," the Guildmaster growled.
Tarilex frowned. "You cannot have expected a Gold ranked group to go along with your coverup."
"It is not a coverup." The Guildmaster looked very much like she was hanging on to the barest thread of control; any more, and she would nt her face on the table, decorum be damned. "And they are not Gold ranked. I have demoted them. They are Iron ranked, pending them learning basic manners. I have half a mind to kick them out entirely for this stunt. I don''t know what my people were doing, but"
"It seems harsh to punish a team of adventurers for simply speaking the truth"
Ah. The pieces finally snapped together in Derivan''s mind, and he realized why Tarilex was acting so strangely.
Chapter 20: Conclusions
Chapter 20: Conclusions
"Your truth spells were fooled," Derivan interrupted Tarilex. The lizardkin stopped mid-sentence, turning his gaze to the armor and staring for a long, ufortable moment.
"Exin," he said. His voice was hard.
"You have been running some sort of truth spell this entire time," Derivan said. "I wondered why you were acting strangely. You could not trust your spell or skill with the Guildmaster because she has perception-based skills that operate well enough to obscure her even in this space, when she is suppressed; that is why you wanted us here. You wanted to run the spell on us, to see what we revealed."
"Ridiculous," Tarilex tried to scoff, but his voice was uncertain, and the Guildmaster''s eyes had hardened. The other four members of the delegation were stillpletely silent and that was strange, too, wasn''t it? "You can''t prove that."
Derivan frowned at him. "You were not truly angry at me earlier, when I misspoke. The politics here matter less to you than the sincerity of the person you''re speaking to. You softened when Sev spoke to you, because he spoke only the truth when he spoke of the infolock, and of what it meant to him. It confirmed to you that we were being at least partially truthful, and that he had a friend he wanted to help.
"You did not truly feel upset until Misa spoke of a bonus room."
"Oh." Vex frowned, leaning forward a bit. He still seemed to be a bit nervous about speaking, but he was focusing on the problem at hand, now, following Derivan''s train of thought. "You wanted to give us the benefit of the doubt I mean, kind of. You didn''t trust us, but you wanted to give our story a chance. And since we were being deceptive when we talked about a bonus room, you picked up on that and thought we were lying about knowing anything about a bonus room at all."
"That''s why you were being such an ass?" Sev groaned. "You know you could have just asked. We wouldn''t have had a problem with being subjected to a truth spell."
"He couldn''t. If you''re prepared for a truth spell, there are a lot of ways around them, so you usually don''t want to let your targets know that you''re running one. If truth spells were more reliable, I would have pushed to have one active for all negotiations, just to guarantee that all participants were acting in good faith." The Guildmaster frowned. "No skills are allowed here. The wards on the pirs prevent spells of any kind. Even my skills barely work beyond securing my identity. I need to know what loophole you used so I can close it."
"We would never break the rules established by our esteemed hosts," Tarilex said, fidgeting ufortably.
For an individual that seemed well-versed in truths and lies, Derivan mused, he was rather bad at lying.
Vex blinked, and frowned. His eyes began to glow for a moment before they stopped, suppressed by the enchantments, and he had to blink away the sudden dizziness.
"I was wondering why four of you were so quiet. You have a delegation of five, but one person does all the talking." Vex frowned "This can''t be a real truth spell. It has to be something passive, or some sort of tandem skill..."
"Both of those should be suppressed by the enchantments," the Guildmaster said, then frowned. "But if they''re working cooperatively, they might be able to subvert it slightly. Maybe?"
"Maybe." Vex narrowed his eyes slightly. "Guildmaster, can I have permission to do something?"
"...Sure?" The Guildmaster stared at Vex for a second. "Sure."
Vex twisted around, digging into his tailpouch, then retrieved the bagged sample of Drunkard''s Beard he''d picked up on a whim. Then he tossed it at Tarilex, who yelped, reaching out almost instinctively to catch it.
Almost instantly, he swayed in his seat.
No almost instantly, all five of them swayed in their seats.
"What..." Tarilex groaned slightly, shaking his head. "What?"
"Okay, give that back to me now," Vex said, reaching out for it. Tarilex blinked blearily at the other lizardkin, then obediently handed the little pouch back. Almost instantly, he seemed to recover, his eyes sharpening.
"What the hell was that?" Tarilex said, and Vex flinched again.
"Sorry. I didn''t think it was fair to engage with you while you werepromised," the lizardkin apologized. "But I needed to test that. You''re from the Wisfield house, aren''t you?"
"How do you know about that?" Tarilex frowned at him.
"I''m from the Ashion house," Vex answered, ignoring the way Tarilex paled and stared at him like he''d grown a second head. "I''ve worked with your house before. Last I heard, you were trying to find a way to turn your mental skills into some sort of biologically-based bloodline. Did you actually seed?"
"I that''s privileged information, si that''s privileged information," Tarilex managed, but failing to have any real heat in his voice.
The Guildmaster was just watching, amused. Derivan saw that she was rather enjoying this, actually. Presumably, she enjoyed seeing them caught on the back foot.
"You''re in some kind of mental amalgam," Vex said, frowning a little bit. "That''s always been dangerous with your magic. So you''re still partially suppressed, and you''re doing this to boost the skill?"
Tarilex shook his head, seeming to strain for a moment as his emotions built, tooplicated now for Derivan to read until something seemed to snap, an invisible, taut tension abruptly vanishing.
"Shit," Tarilex gasped, and at the same time the human woman who sat two seats away twitched and scowled.
"I told you this was a bad idea," she said, looking annoyed.
"We were under orders to try," Leben offered, the orc looking a little guilty.
"Perhaps you are the adventurers that discovered the dungeon," Tarilex said. He just looked... tired.
There was a momentary silence.
Then the Guildmasterughed.
"I should be kinda pissed that you got around our wards," the Guildmaster said, grinning. "But I have no idea what the fuck all of that was, and I kind of loved it. What did you throw at him?"
"It''s Drunkard''s Beard," Vex said, a little embarrassed. "I remembered that I had some, and I realized that if the Wisfield house got the skill to work without a mana cost, then it might not be a mana-rted effect at all. So I sort of guessed it would work."
"You threw moss at him and you didn''t even know it would work?" The Guildmaster practically cackled. She didn''t seem to care much for decorum, now that the delegates had technically broken the rules they all sat there looking slightly ufortable, like they knew they''d messed up. "Holy fuck, I love your team. It''s such a refreshing change."
"Thanks?" Vex offered, still embarrassed.
"And as for you five..." The Guildmaster settled herself down a little. "I do believe this buys us some favors from Elyra. Really, now, you can''t even trust us enough to tell you the truth?"
"You still have not proven that you are telling the truth" Tarilex tried.
"Nope. Do your mental hivemind thing again. Come on," Sev interrupted.
"Are you sure? You don''t actually need to prove anything to them," the Guildmaster said, turning to Sev.
"Yeah. I want them to know." Sev stared at Tarilex, who seemed to slump a little, like he felt guilty.
The lizardkin sighed. "...Alright. Go ahead."
"We were the ones that discovered the dungeon," Sev enunciated clearly, staring directly at Tarilex."There is an infolock, and we are likely the only ones directly able to investigate it.
"And the lie"
"Oh, I didn''t technically lie, really." Misa finally spoke up, shrugging and smirking slightly. "But I was being deceptive, and you picked up on it."
"How were you being deceptive?" Tarilex asked, but the look in his eyes was defeated; he didn''t truly expect an answer.
"I see no reason to tell you," Misa grinned. She winked at him. "Maybe if you''re good, we''ll share?"
"As I''m sure you''re aware," the Guildmaster cut in smoothly. "This... incident... could be quite damaging to rtions between Elyra and the Guild. I''m sure you could offer a small favor so we can keep things quiet? Say, allowing these four to join you in your research?"
"Fine," Tarilex groaned. "Clearly I''ve underestimated you four, and clearly that... other adventurer... of yours figured out some way around our methods." He grimaced slightly. "Or you four have. But on bnce, you seem more likely to be telling the truth."
His gaze slid to Vex just slightly as he spoke. The wizard pretended not to notice.
"Jerome is a Gold ranker, even if the Guild no longer recognizes him as such," the Guildmaster said drily. "One does not achieve such a rank without backing. But... I am concerned. My men never identified that he might have spoken with you."
"So he got around your spies?" Sev asked. The Guildmaster twitched.
"Not spies," she said. "...But yes. Maybe."
"I''m concerned as well," Tarilex said with a sigh. "There are only a few known ways to get around our particr method of truth detection, and they''re all worrying. Self-deception is maybe the least harmful of them."
"...I''m assuming your truth detection methods aren''t vulnerable to the exceptionallymon trait of narcissism," the Guildmaster deadpanned.
"No." Tarilex managed a wry sort of smile. "It would have to be magically enforced in some way for direct lies toe off as truth. There are artifacts that do this, but none of them are particrly good for your mind, in the long term."
"You think he''s got something like that?" Vex frowned. "Does he know the dangers?"
"Does he seem like the type of person to care?" Misa pointed out.
"There is another problem," Derivan observed; Tarilex''s bodynguage was still... reserved. Like he was afraid of saying something? "What have you not told us?"
"I work with mental magic and somehow that''s more unnerving," Tarilex muttered to himself, then sighed.
"Look. I said my hands were tied because I we already made a deal with Jerome, and part of that deal involves connections he still had with some of Anderstahl''s suppliers. He''s on the delving team for the mission."
"Can you remove him?" The Guildmaster asked.
"We can." Tarilex paused, clearly ufortable. He winced. "He came to us under false pretenses, so... we can. Do you want us to?"
The Guildmaster nced at the team of adventurers in the room with her. "I think that''s up to you. This is enough of an offense for him to be ejected from the guild, too, on top of the demotion."
There was a short silence.
"...I''m not sure that''s a good idea," Vex said slowly. "He might have a mind-altering artifact on him... and does he actually have anywhere to go?"
"He was kicked out of Anderstahl," the Guildmaster said. "So he''d have to find somewhere on his own. I''m sure many viges could use the help of a Gold ranker to gather crystals."
"I don''t think I trust him to hold a position of power in a vige," Sev said.
"I... would offer to hold him, but there would likely be some resistance on this matter." Tarilex grimaced slightly. He seemed reluctant to speak, but he shrank under the weight of their gazes, and eventually forced himself to do so. "Elyra has had some recent problems with food production, and the suppliers that Jerome has connected us to would pull out if we were to renege on this deal. Incarcerating him might cause even more pushback. We''re already partially reliant on those suppliers."
"And the Guild doesn''t really do prisons." The Guildmaster frowned for a moment. "It''s a drain on our resources to hold and suppress people for that length of time. If an adventuring team is a problem, we usually give them minders, and split them up if need be."
There was a long pause.
"I think we gotta let Jerome stay on the delve, guys," Sev eventually said. "The food deal is the clincher for me here."
"It''s kinda shit," Misa said. "But I think he''s gonna cause more problems if we let him run around or keep him in a box. He seems like the kinda guy that would just build resentment. And I don''t wanna be the one to push him into that. If we keep an eye on him, make sure he doesn''t get into trouble... At least we can actually supervise him if he''s going to be delving."
The Guildmaster sighed, not disagreeing. "Jerome is... we epted him because he had nowhere else to go, but we have not had nearly enough time to work with him. He is shallow and vindictive, and it will take effort to undo this. Effort and time that we have not had yet. But it still feels like a failure on the part of the Guild, and I am sorry for that."
Tarilex seemed relieved. "Jerome''s team is mostly interested in delves; hopefully there will be minimal interaction between you two. I do not wish to exin why I took on a second adventuring team."
"It''s best he doesn''t find out which team actually discovered the dungeon," the Guildmaster agreed. "In any case, I think that more or less concludes negotiations on this matter. I''m sure we all have a lot to think about. Tarilex, if we are to perform further negotiations, I look forward to all participants actually... participating."
The other delegates had the good grace to look vaguely ashamed, at least. Derivan looked over them of the four, Leben, the orc priest, seemed to feel the most guilty.
"You should leave first," the Guildmaster added, directing the statement to Derivan and the others. "I need to go over the wards to see if they can be tweaked to ount for this, and then we''ll see what we settle on regarding Jerome. I might need to send people to keep an eye on him, on top of having you four there."
"I''m getting increasingly concerned with how you''re talking about this man like he''s going to murder us because we found a dungeon and he got scolded for being an ass about it," Sev said mildly, getting up from his chair.
"Transportation circle is that way," the Guildmaster said, ignoring him and pointing.
Sev eyed her for a moment. "You realize you''re supposed to say something reassuring."
"I''m sure Jerome won''t find out."
"That''s even less reassuring." Sev sighed, striding towards the door; the rest of his team filed after him. "Okay!" he called back to the Guildmaster as they stepped on to the transportation circle. "We''re all going to fill out ourst wills and testaments! Wish us luck!"
The Guildmaster, amusingly enough, gave him the finger though from theck of reaction from the rest of his party, Derivan thought he might have been the only one that caught it. Anti-perception skills were strange. She winked at him, though, so he assumed she expected him to see it.
What a strange Guildmaster, he thought.
The transportation circle shed.
A silver-armored pdin stood in their room, leaning against the door.
"Hello," Jerome said.
Chapter 21: Confrontation
Chapter 21: Confrontation
"Uh," Sev said. He nced at the rest of the team, and they all seemed equally stumped. Except for Misa, but the expression she was wearing was her ''punch this problem until it goes away'' expression, which more or less tranted to being stumped. "I don''t suppose I can convince you you have the wrong room?"
"With a mana surge like that?" Jerome chuckled. His tone was almost casual. "I doubt it."
The pdin wore an easy sort of smile but it was a smile that carried with it an edge of danger. His stance was casual, with his legs crossed and his arms folded, and yet his sword was within an inch of his fingers. Sev had no doubt that he could draw his sword and attack them almost faster than they could react, and he also had no doubt that the sword wasn''t Jerome''s real method of attack. It was intimidation.
Attacking at all would be a terrible idea, of course. The Guild was enchanted against exactly that sort of thing, and while Jerome likely had ways around enchantments at his level, there was always some kind of bacsh from ripping through high-level enchantments. He wouldn''t get away scot-free even if he tried. Even a tinum ranker wouldn''t.
The threat was there, though. And the threat was more than enough, in most cases: The protection of those enchantments didn''t extend beyond the grounds of the Adventurer''s Guild, so they weren''tpletely reliable.
Whether that threat would work on this team was a different story.
Sev had no idea what Jerome wanted with them. Presumably, he wanted to learn who it was that had actually discovered the dungeon and then... what, intimidate them into keeping their mouths shut about it? But he''d only found them after they''d joined the meeting with the Elyran delegates, so that didn''t make any sense.
Then again, Jerome didn''t have any way of knowing how the meeting went.
...Well, when in doubt, confuse the enemy. De-esction 101!
"Well, alright then," Sev said with a shrug. "You wanna hang out?"
"Why do you thi" Jerome started, clearly expecting a different response. He stopped mid-sentence as he parsed what Sev had actually said; the cleric could almost hear the gears in his brain slowly clicking into ce. "What?"
"I said, do you want to hang out?" Sev repeated. "If you''re going to be in this room you might as well, right? We were going to help Derivan here train a bit. Derivan, why don''t you introduce yourself?"
"Hello," Derivan said. He didn''t see a particr need to repeat what his name was, so he opted to wave instead.
The ng of his armor sounded awkwardly in the room as he did so.
"...Are you an idiot?" Jerome frowned. "That''s not why I''m here."
"I had to give you the benefit of the doubt. Personal policy." Sev grinned, shrugging like he wasn''t at all concerned about the very dangerous man in their room. There were four of them, and Misa had her skill... and if Jerome was a pdin, then he''d have a rather unique advantage. "It''s not like we''ve actually spoken to you, so there was always the chance you could actually be kinda cool, you know? Are you sure you don''t want to just hang out?"
The pdin paused. He frowned slightly, then straightened up so he wasn''t leaning against the wall anymore. "...I am here to talk about the dungeon."
Almost at the same time, Vex blinked and furrowed his brows, staring closely at Jerome. Sev nced at his friend. Good. He remembered.
"What about it?" Sev asked, raising an eyebrow. "And will you get morefortable? I don''t know about you, but standing in a closet and talking is kind of ufortable for me."
As he spoke, he was already climbing out, the rest of his team following suit behind him. Truth be told, he had no idea what he was doing his heart was hammering in his chest. Where were Jerome''s teammates? He was, in a way, grateful that they weren''t here; they''d almost certainly be outmatched in a four-on-four fight. But he was also worried that they weren''t here.
That said, four-on-one, they had a bit more of a fighting chance, depending on the specifics of Jerome''s ss. But he still didn''t want this to get to a fight.
Fortunately for him, Jerome seemed to have no idea what Sev was doing, either. He''d been knocked-off bnce, and was off his game. He actually let Sev and the others take up various seats around the room, like the premise of this entire conversation wasn''t an implied threat.
Every single member of his team made sure to sit in a way that made their weapons still easily essible, though. Sev was proud of them for that.
"You just came back from speaking with the Elyran delegates," Jerome finally said. "I''m sure you have questions."
"Like why you pretended you were the one that discovered the dungeon?" Misa raised an eyebrow, her voice challenging.
"I needed ess to the dungeon, and political weight only carries me so far." Jerome shrugged. "They wouldn''t even have heard me out if I hadn''t said I found it. Which means we have a problem here, wouldn''t you agree?"
"I''ll say," Misa muttered.
"I''m prepared to offer your team a thousand gold to tell them you didn''t discover the dungeon, and to give me all the information you have on it." Jerome''s offer was straightforward; Misa promptly choked, a sympathetic Vex patting her on the back as she coughed violently.
Jerome waited patiently for her coughing fit to finish before he continued.
"Frankly, it''d do a lot of harm to my reputation if they find out that I lied about it," Jerome said wryly, which was such a tant lie that Sev had trouble not snorting out loud. "You gain a thousand gold, and you get to not have a team of Gold rankers as an enemy. So, how about it? We both benefit from this deal, no?"
"Just to be clear," Sev said. "You''re iming that one of the benefits to this deal is that you won''t be our enemy."
Jerome nodded. "Yes."
"That''s a threat, not a benefit," Sev said tly. "Just so we''re on the same page."
Jerome frowned for a second, like he wanted to argue, then paused. "If that''s how you want to look at it," he said with a shrug.
They''d been paid a hundred gold pieces for the grade 6 mana crystal, and that was a one in a million sort of mission. This payout would be ten times that; over a thousand times what they earned on a typical quest.
If money were the sort of thing they cared about, Sev mused, this would be the kind of deal that would have bought them over instantly.
"Unfortunately," Sev said and Jerome tensed, a flicker of an ugly, vicious sort of anger crossing over his face. It was gone as fast as it appeared. "I don''t think that''ll work."
"And why the hell not?" Jerome''s words were a half-growl; silver light began to coalesce around him, and Sev felt his team tense in response.
"They already know we found it," Sev answered. "And they believe us. If we go back to them now, they''ll just get even more suspicious."
"They believed you?" Jerome looked outraged, though this time the anger was thankfully not directed at them. It was still unpleasant, though. "Fucking shit-pissing Elyrans. They need a truth spell to listen to me, but you newbies just bber on and they believe you instantly."
Good fucking lord the man''s mood had pivoted in an instant. What an asshole. He had a problem with Elyrans, clearly; he saw Vex flinching a little bit in the corner of his vision, and decided to end the conversation as quickly as possible.
No need to tell the pdin that they''d been under truth spell too. No doubt he knew about the enchantments in the upper floor; telling him that would no doubt lead to a whole slew of other ufortable questions...
"Fine," Jerome growled. "Just tell me what you know about the damn dungeon. You were there. That dungeon has a bonus room. I want to know what''s in it. Or at least what it''s based on."
Sev paused.
"No?" He decided. "No. I''m not interested in your gold."
"I never said it was a fucking choice." Jerome red at them, the pdin''s body beginning to shimmer with silver power. Sev felt his teammates tense, ready to try to defend him; Misa could defend from a few hits with her skill, but after that...
Jerome paused suddenly, and a nasty smile spread across his face.
"Fine," he said. "You said you wanted to hang out? Help your armored friend train?"
The pdin stepped forward.
"[Divine Suppression], [Golden Aura]," he intoned, and the air around him shed from silver into a brilliant gold. The same gold threaded out from the man''s eyes, too, casting his face in an eerie, almost inhuman glow; at the same time, a weight pressed down on all of them.
Sev found he couldn''t move. Couldn''t cast.
Jerome stepped forward until he was right in front of Derivan, who didn''t move. The armor seemed frozen, too. The pdin pressed a hand to the living armor''s chestte. "[Golden Geas]. You''re going to tell me everything I want to know about the dungeon."
There was a sh of light that shot into Derivan''s armor, suffusing it in a glow that slowly settled into motes of light. The moment seemed to stretch on entirely too long, and a beat of horror thrummbed in Sev''s chest.
Then the pdin smirked. "I don''t have to attack you to make your lives miserable. Don''t think these wards are perfect. You''ll have a few days to fulfil that condition, or your friend over there will slowly turn to gold."
Turning around, Jerome left, pausing just before he strode through the door. "Have fun with that," he said sarcastically, mming the door shut behind him and after another moment, whatever suppressive ability he was using switched itself off.
Almost instantly, Misa flung herself at the door. "That fucker!"
"Don''t!" Sev said, trying to pull her back; Derivan reached out for her, too, grabbing the struggling half-orc by the arms and hauling her away. "Don''t go after him. It''s not worth it right now."
Vex was pale. "Derivan, are you..."
Derivan cocked his head. "I am fine, I think," he said, sounding slightly... amused?
"You... don''t sound worried," Sev said, furrowing his brow. The horror in his heart lessened just a bit.
The armor paused, ncing at the door. "Yes, well," he said. "I suspect that skill of his will not do what he believes it will."
"Are you sure?" Misa said sharply. "This is important."
"Not certain, perhaps," Derivan said. "However..."
He flicked them his status screen. In gold letters, hovering underneath Physical Empathy, was a new stat entry.
Golden Geas: 50
"I am reasonably certain that that should not have manifested as a stat," Derivan said.
Sev stared.
"What," he managed.
"What does it... do?" Misa asked. The four of them sat on the floor, with Derivan in the middle. Vex hadn''t stopped fretting, even knowing that whatever skill Jerome had used apparently hadn''t attached correctly to the living armor. The wizard was casting all sorts of diagnostic magic even now, just to make sure that there was no trace of Derivan being forced to turn into gold.
Derivan had pointed out in turn that even turning into gold wouldn''t necessarily harm him the way it would anything organic. He''d be a lot softer, which might have been a problem, but it didn''t seem to be something they needed to worry about even after waiting for a while, Vex could detect no change.
"I am unsure," Derivan said. "I believe it gives me a sense for where Jerome is."
"...I don''t even know where to begin with that," Sev said with a groan, burying his hands in his face. "Are you serious? Why would it I have so many questions."
"I think I understand, sort of," Vex finally said softly, though his voice was still timid and a little shaky. "I mean... I was checking Jerome over for magic while we were talking. Remember how Tarilex mentioned that to fool the truth spell, he needs some sort of mind-altering magic?"
"Right," Sev said. "Did you find something?"
"It was a little hard to tell underneath all his protective enchantments," Vex said with a frown. "But I think he was under some sort of geas, too. Maybe even the same type of geas. If he is, then that''s probably what you''re sensing."
Derivan frowned, then nodded. "This seems correct," he agreed. "I sense... other, smaller presences, I think. They are less noticeable than Jerome."
"So we have a Jerome detector now?" Misa said. "I don''t know how to feel about this."
"I would prefer not to know where he is at all times, yes," Derivan said. "From a cleanliness perspective, you understand. From a tactical standpoint, knowing where he is is quite useful."
"We''re really lucky he went for you," Sev said with a frown. "I''m sorry, guys. I feel like I kind of fucked up that whole interaction."
"I honestly feel like this is one of the better oues," Misa muttered. "Now we know where he is, and... I dunno. Is he under a geas? Should we worry about that?"
"Honestly," Sev sighed. "I don''t know."
Chapter 22: A Path Forward
Chapter 22: A Path Forward
The four of them tried to speak for a while, but it didn''t take long for them topse into silence, each lost in their own thoughts. Vex was still trembling slightly, clearly upset, and so without a word Derivan went to do what Vex had done for him, not so long ago he sat down next to the lizardkin, offering a quiet show of support.
He didn''t say anything. There weren''t any words for what had just happened; not really. The immediate worry was dealt with by sheer fluke, Derivan understood, and while it was amusing that Jerome had failed so utterly in what he had set out to do, there was a grim realization settling in.
That realization was the fact that they weren''t prepared to deal with threats from people.
Monsters were one thing. Monsters moved in predictable patterns, for the most part; they had skills that were mostly known, and very rarely did any of them have skills that could just lock down an entire room. What Jerome had done to them struck them hard because they had no solutions for it. The suppression hadn''t been an attack, so Misa couldn''t deal with it, and once suppressed, she couldn''t block the geas.
She''d tried, ording to her.
But they had an advantage now that they didn''t have before, at least against the man that presented a threat to them. Derivan had a rough understanding of Jerome''s position at almost any given time. That was useful. That was something even the Guildmaster''s people hadn''t had, if they''d managed to lose track of Jerome long enough for him to secure the deal with Elyra. And that might be only the beginning of what the stat did.
"We need to update the Guildmaster on what happened," Sev finally said. "Regardless of anything else, she needs to know that Jerome tried this. And then... I don''t know. We need to deal with Jerome in some way, right?"
"I''d sure fuckin'' like to," Misa growled. Her anger was still a little subdued, but she was rapidly getting her spirit back but she held herself back when she saw that her anger made Vex shrink backwards slightly.
"We need to be sure he is not a threat to us," Derivan said. "The Guildmaster may be able to ensure such a thing, I suppose. But we run into the same problem we had before."
"Elyra loses those deals on food," Sev said with a sigh. "I didn''t miss how relieved all of the delegates looked when we didn''t ask for them to break that off. I''m guessing they''re in more trouble than they indicated. Do you... I hate to ask, but do you know anything about that, Vex?"
The lizardkin shook his head. "I haven''t kept up with events in Elyra," the wizard said in a small voice. "I... I could check, maybe. Send a message to one of my brothers. Just just give me a moment."
Vex reached out topose the message, letting out a trembling breath as he did so but he still shook, and his ws kept missing the keys. It was only when Derivan reached out and ced a hand on his shoulder that he steadied slightly, like he needed the reminder that his friend was fine.
"...Yeah," Vex said after a moment. He seemed almost surprised that his brother had replied so quickly. "Elyra''s undergoing some serious food shortage issues right now. He says that growth magic isn''t... working anymore? Or at the very least it''s suppressed, or twisted in some way. They can''t figure it out. But that... that doesn''t make any sense."
"It''s not working?" Sev frowned. "This seems like an entirely new problem."
"Can we get the Guildmaster to supply the food instead?" Misa asked.
"I can ask," Sev said. He was already in the middle ofposing a message to the Guildmaster. "But I honestly don''t think so. The Guild is already stretched thin trying to keep all the smaller viges supplied with crystals. Then again... maybe if we get all those small viges to pay us in food instead of coin..."
Sevpsed into silence, thinking. "I''ll ask," he said eventually. "It depends on how widespread a problem this is, I guess. We haven''t heard of any food shortage problems recently, as far as I know..." Sev frowned at the screen in front of him, thenposed the rest of his message, firing it off to the Guildmaster.
Derivan, in the meantime, had been mostly silent but now he frowned, looking around at his friends. "There is another solution here, yes?" He said cautiously.
"What do you mean?" Sev asked, ncing up at him.
"He is under a geas. Some sort ofpulsion, at least, that keeps his mind in whatever state needed for him to lie under a truth spell. Can we not just... remove it?"
There was a short pause. A small intake of breath from Misa.
"Oh," Misa said softly. She sounded surprised and yet there was an edge of something else in her tone, like there was something that she''d forgotten, and she''d only now remembered. "You want to help him?"
"Deri, he... he wanted to hold you hostage," Vex said. He fidgeted, his tail coiling around him nervouly.
"Vex is right," Sev said, shaking his head. "Jerome''s dangerous. If we let him run around, we might not be his only victims. And there''s no guarantee that he''ll be any better even if we do somehow manage to remove it."
"There is a guarantee that he will not get worse. And the alternatives seem cruel, if we do not first try this," Derivan offered quietly.
Derivan understood their concerns, to a degree. Physical Empathy was helping him out here, letting him see details he ordinarily wouldn''t lines of stress and tension in the faces of his friends. They were worried and angry and frightened, and he understood in some way that they wanted to see Jerome punished.
But it was an abstract sort of understanding. Something he was ''missing'', perhaps, as a monster, or as a creature created from magic. He was upset, certainly, but that emotion felt distant from him.
They were facing a pdin that was a Gold ranker, which was rare enough as is someone that could do so much good, but did not. They had the option here to end the threat he represented to them, and there was a wide chasm of possibility in front of them for just such a thing. With consequences, perhaps, but solutions for those consequences, too.
And yet over that chasm was a thin, fleeting bridge. A possible solution that didn''t feel as steady and as reassuring as the others, but would get them all across intact. Even Jerome.
Who ever said the only choices avable were endings?
"I think Derivan''s right," Misa said softly.
Vex looked conflicted, and seemed almost betrayed when Misa spoke up. He looked over at the half-orc, almost pleading. "He''s dangerous."
"Well," Misa said, and this time she grinned, just a bit an attempt to be reassuring. "So are we. We just gotta figure out how to deal with his particr brand of nonsense, right?"
Vex hesitated. "We got overwhelmed by him once..."
"We were not prepared," Derivan said. "But we have some sense of what he can do, now, and he still does not know what we can do. And he does not know that I have escaped his geas."
"What about the Guildmaster?" Vex tried. He seemed reluctant, still, and the way he was leaning into Derivan for reassurance told the armor that he wasn''t over what had happened yet.
Sev spoke up. "She''s going to send us someone to help with whatever we want to do. She''s busy. Whatever we choose, she says, get her operative to help us do it."
"We will need your help, too, Vex," Derivan said, the words gentle. "None of us are as versed in magic as you are, and whatever this new stat of mine does, we need to know more about it if we are to confront Jerome. If it gives us some advantage over him, however slight..."
Vex sighed, his tail curling in on himself. "I don''t want to help him," he said, his voice small. "I know I should. But... it sucks, and I don''t want to. He''s just been..."
"He has been, as Misa would say, a giant asshole," Derivan said calmly, the sudden expletive making Vex snort in surprise. It seemed to lighten his heart, though. "He has lied and he has assaulted us. But the deals he made with Elyra helped them, even if it was to his own benefit. He came to us with an offer first, when he could have just done this from the beginning. So let us try, and bring down the hammer only if we fail. Only if he fails."
"I don''t have to like that we''re doing this, right?" Vex asked. He seemed almost pleading, but resigned.
"You do not," Derivan said. "I would not ask you to."
Sev sighed. "I haven''t shared my thoughts so far, but... yeah. This sucks. I want to be angry. I want to burn him down, damn the consequences. But fuck, we don''t know how much this geas does, I''m not Derivan''s right and I hate it. I know how you feel, Vex."
The lizardkin only nodded. There was some relief in his eyes, like he was d that he wasn''t the only one that felt this way.
"But if we''re doing this, then we''re going to do it taking as little risk as possible. Vex is right, too; he overwhelmed us. We need to know more about what he can do. We need strategies. We need a way to beat him, and hold him long enough to pull off this geas, and we need to know how to do that."
There was a knock on the door.
"I think I can help you with that," a voice called through the door. The four adventurers exchanged nces.
"Is that Max?" Misa asked, incredulous. "The clerk?"
"That''s me!" Max said, sounding surprisingly bright and cheery. Nonplussed, Sev stood up to open the door, and Max strolled in with a bright grin. "I hear you''re plotting revenge! Let me help you with that."
"We are explicitly not plotting revenge," Sev said.
"Yeah, but that was more fun to say than ''I hear you''re nning to hold down Jerome and extract a magicalpulsion that was apparently forced upon him and I don''t know anything more than that so you''ll need to brief me''," Max rattled off. She smiled. "Guildmaster sent me. What can I do for ya?"
"Uh..." Sev nced at the others, still looking perplexed. "I guess we brief you on the n, first? I don''t know what''s going on, to be honest."
"I moonlight as a clerk when I''m not spying for the Guildmaster. It''s a tough job, let me tell you," Max said with a dramatic sort of sigh. She seemed to gather herself a momentter, though. "Seriously, though, give me some sort of briefing. I know the basics of what Jerome did, but I want to know how he got through you four, how he got through our wards... Everything."
So they did. They exined what had happened, and Max listened attentively, frowning when she heard that Jerome had shown up in their room with no exnation the wards were explicitly supposed to prevent mana surges for teleports from being even visible, much less allow the man to track them to their room. Her eyes darkened when she heard that Jerome had worked around the wards, and she made a quick note to get all their enchantments updated, though she knew it wouldn''t help adventurers outside the Guild branches.
And then they came to the geas, the wording of it, and what had happened to Derivan. They even exined how it had shown up on his status, with Derivan sending her the box as proof. Max''s eyes widened when she saw it, and she almostughed out loud.
"Oh," she giggled. "Jerome isn''t gonna know what hit him."
"What do you mean?" Sev blinked at her.
"You could tell him pretty much anything and he''d probably believe you," Max said with a grin. "The guy thinks he''s holding one of your members hostage. You hold an advantage on him in terms of information, and he''s primed to believe almost anything you tell him, and I can get you Guild resources on geas removals and binding spells, and you''ve got me to help you fight."
"You can fight?" Misa grinned at her. "Oh, I think I like you."
"I''m a level 81 [Adventuring Clerk]," Max said flippantly. Then she grinned back. "It''s an Elite ss."
Chapter 23: Planning with Max, Clerk Extraordinaire
Chapter 23: nning with Max, Clerk Extraordinaire
"So!" Max pped her hands together. "Let''s get nning, shall we?"
"Wait, wait, wait," Sev said. "How long have you been what? Why are you level 81? What kind of ss is [Adventuring Clerk]? How did you even get Okay, I know I shouldn''t ask that question, but also I have so many questions."
Max cracked up. "Oh, I love revealing that to people. The reactions are priceless every time," she said, grinning wide. "It''s a littleplicated, but I got that ss after I started working as a clerk here for a while."
"Do all of the Guild''s clerks have this ss?" Sev groaned. "Have I been surrounded by tinum ranked clerks the entire time?"
"Is that a bad thing?" Max asked, still amused. "Ignore the conspicuous way in which I am not answering your question in an attempt to make the Guild look either more or less powerful than it is."
"No!" Sev threw his hands up in aggravation. "But yes? I don''t know! I''ve just had a lot of shocking things happen today! I don''t know how to begin to parse the second part of your statement!"
"Today has been a day," Misa agreed with a smallugh, her mood slowly recovering now that the immediate danger had left, and no permanent harm had been done. "So, [Adventuring Clerk], huh? And this lets you help us fight?"
"I mean, kind of," Max said with a shrug. "It''s a mix between abat ss and a utility ss. Pretty neat, actually. You wannay out what you waaaait. No. Hang on. Hang on." Max paused like she''d just remembered something, then grabbed Derivan''s box out of the air and stared at it again. "What the hell is going on with your status? What the fuck?"
Sev paused. "Were you so eager to tell us about your ss that you didn''t... process the fact that his status was broken?"
"I thought he had some weird skill! I didn''t look at it closely!" Maxined. She waved the box around in Sev''s face, though with it being visible only to her, it mostly looked like she was pping her arms at Sev. "What is this? What happened? You didn''t tell us about this!"
"Uh..." That was a good point. Sev nced at the others. The Guildmaster already knew that Derivan was, technically, initially a ''monster''... but they''d sort of forgotten about the broken status part. It was safe to tell Max about it, surely?
Yeah. It was safe to tell Max. She was apparently a high-level Guild operative, and he''d known her for a while.
So they told her about it.
There was a long silence after the whole situation was exined. Max paused, then looked at Misa. "You have a skill that blocks anything?" she asked, as if she needed it to be confirmed.
Misa nodded.
"That''s a Rare skill? Not Elite?" Max asked. "Or Unique?"
"I mean... It has disadvantages," Misa said with a grin. "But yes. It''s pretty badass. I don''t really know how the system decides rarity, but I''m not going toin. I''m hoping it and my ss will be upgraded when we hit Gold."
"When, not if, huh?" Max said with a small grin. "That''s some confidence. And you!" She whirled to Vex. "You have a ss that can analyze any magic?"
"Kind of?" Vex offered, looking a touch ufortable; Max instantly adjusted, lowering her intensity just a bit.
"That''s fuckin'' cool," she offered. She nced at Sev, who seemed like he was waiting for her to have an outburst about his special bullshit, but she just stuck her tongue out at him. "Sev, I''m not even going to touch on your bullshit healing. Your healing is already bullshit. I''ve always known your healing is bullshit."
"I think I love this girl," Misa stage-whispered to Vex.
"But you!" Max pointed at Derivan, almost dramatically. "You''re just living armor? That''s so cool! I always wanted to meet one, but they don''t actually spawn in dungeons very often. Can I climb inside you? Is that a thing you can do?"
Derivan paused.
"Um," Vex said, ncing to Derivan, and then to Max, and then to Derivan again.
Misa cracked upughing. Sev grinned.
"I have not tried," Derivan said, considering the idea. "I am not certain it would be a good idea? Many of the enchantments within me are inscribed across armor tes; if they were to separate, the animating magic may fail. I suppose it is likely to reactivate when those enchantments are realigned, but I do not know if my personality would be maintained."
"I feel like there''s something you can do with that," Max said with a grin. She turned a little bit more serious. "But I''ll leave you guys to figure that out. Let''s talk about a n of action for Jerome, first."
"Can we split them up?" Misa asked immediately. "Fighting all four of them at once seems like a bad idea."
"That''s a good call," Max said with a nod. "You might be able to. They''re all pretty high level; Jerome is 72, and the other three I believe are in the low 60s. Still Gold, but not as far into it as Jerome. Jerome is a pdin of Aurum, if you didn''t guess that already."
"Do you know the specific ss?" Sev asked, and Maxughed.
"I shouldn''t, but I do, because he boasted about it when he was joining. It''s [Gilded Pdin]. It''s an Elite tier ss thates with suppression and binding abilities, as you''ve seen." Max paused for a moment. "He''s got some offensive abilities, but they''re mostly things like projectiles that try to turn what they hit into gold. It''s a progressive status effect, basically."
"What''s with the turning people into gold thing?" Sev muttered.
"That''s what I said," Max grinned. "It''s pretty fuckin'' weird. But it seems like it''s the core of his ss."
"Do we have a way to counter that?" Misa frowned. "I mean, besides me blocking him, obviously. If he shoots a lot of those I won''t be able to stop him."
"Yes," Derivan said. "Me."
Max nced at Derivan and nodded. "Yeah. Gold is actually pretty amenable to magic overall magic-neutral, you could say. The enchantments that make you alive shouldn''t be affected by a transition from whatever metal you''re made of into gold. It''s kind of ironic, really; gold is one of the few materials that would have almost no effect on you. And that''s if his spells work on you at all; the interaction might be strange without the health buffer, or you might absorb it into your status like you did his geas. It''s hard to say."
"Good," Derivan said simply.
"But the rest of the team might be a problem," Max said. "None of them are particrly talkative the elves just talk to Jerome. They say he rescued them or something? No idea. But I don''t really know what they do, and I never really saw much even when I spied on them. I think they tend to provide support from the back; we''ve seen them fight every once in a while, and I know they''re archer types, but those are some of the hardest sses to figure out."
"Why''s that?" Vex asked curiously.
"I mean, you wizard types are pretty easy, because you have a bunch of spells you can just throw at a problem," Max said. "But it''s harder with arrows. Archer sses usually have specific effects they can put on their arrows, and those arrows can otherwise lookpletely mundane. It''s a lot harder to notice from a distance."
Misa paused. "If there aren''t too many of them at once, I could block those. As long as Sev keeps me healed up. I''m assuming they don''t have any rapidfire or arrow-multiplying skills, or you would''ve seen them."
"I mean, they might just not have used them. But we can only n for what we know, so for now you''re on arrow duty," Max said. "And Sev is on keep-everyone-alive duty."
"I''m always on keep-everyone-alive duty," Sev said, sighing dramatically.
"Vex, we''re going to need you to remove the geas," Max said, ignoring Sev. "I''ll get some resources on geas magic brought up to your room so you can look them over. We''re going to have to disable whatever protective enchantments Jerome has, too."
"Sure," Vex said automatically.
"Derivan..." Max eyed the armor critically. "We''re going to have to figure out what that broken stat of yours does. Don''t get me started on it letting you know where Jerome is. I mean, that''s kind of creepy, but it''s also really useful for this. But..."
Max frowned. "It probably does something more than that," she said eventually. "I don''t understand it being a stat. That should describe something about you, right? You''re not under a geas, you are the geas. But I don''t know what that means. Can you use the skill? Can you take it away?"
"I believe we can test that," Derivan siad.
Max blinked. "What? How?"
Derivan stood up and walked over to Max. "May I?"
"May you what? Do not put a geas on me or I swear to all the gods" Max started.
Derivan tapped her gently on the forehead, and when he pulled his finger away, a string of gold came with him. It was a small, light thing, and Max stared at it.
"What," she said.
"It was a very light effect," Derivan said. "So I was not sure, and I was trying to understand it while you were speaking. But Jerome got past you in order to talk to the delegates, did he not?"
Max frowned. "...Shit. He did."
"I suspect the skill does more than threaten," Derivan said. He held the thread gently, tempted to crush it but instead he held it out, knowing Vex could examine it. The wizard was already running analytic spells, slowly turning more pale as he saw what it did.
"That''s... that''s a broken skill," Vex said eventually, shaking his head in a sort of horrified awe. "It''s one partpulsion, one part threat. It looks like at small scales he just needs physical contact, and he canpel people to do certain things, like not notice his movements in specific circumstances... This is dangerous. Did he know you were spying on him?"
"He can''t have. And I never touched him. The only person on that team that touched me was" Max narrowed her eyes. "The fourth one. Shit, I forgot about them. They brushed past me once, on the stairs, and I didn''t pay attention to it at the time."
There was a short silence.
"Is [Golden Geas] even... Jerome''s skill?" Misa asked.
Max hesitated. "I maybe. I haven''t heard of skills being shared like that, but anything''s possible."
"Okay," Sev said, taking over. Max looked like she was trying to figure out how she should feel about having a minorpulsion ced upon her, but she was looking steadily more pissed. She kept well under control, though. "Does that mean Derivan can remove it? Then Vex can focus on breaking Jerome''s enchantments instead."
"I want to examine this part of the spell more, too," Vex said. "I should figure out protections against it. Especially if it''s not his skill, and other people have it. Derivan, you said you sense other, smaller presences?"
"Yes. Max was one of them, now that I know to recognize it. And there are..." Derivan frowned. "Quite a few more, some quite far away."
"We need to put a stop to this now," Max decided. "If we take it off of him, hopefully he can break the other instances. And even if he can''t, or he''s unwilling, we can find out more about it now, before it bes some kind of existential threat."
"Here''s the n. You''re going to ask him to meet up with you. Get him to agree to do it alone if possible; make something up about the infolock. Derivan, you need to act like part of you is cast in gold walk stiffly, or just don''t move your fingers on a hand, or something. If you can, tell him that ess to a bonus room requires someone to be free of any magical residue or something, so no enchantments. I think it''s mostly his armor that''s enchanted. I''ve got a ce you can use for the meeting; I''ll send you the location."
The other four nodded, looking a bit stunned.
"You have a few hours to get ready," Max said bluntly. "I need to check with the Guildmaster and make sure the rest of us aren''tpromised. We have our own ways of breaking this kind of magic, especially since it''s the Guildmaster''s specialty, but she''s been off and distracted and I think I know why. I''ll be back soon. Be ready by then."
Max got up and opened the door then hesitated for a second, right by the frame. "I don''t like leaving a room on a downer note," she said, offering them a small smile. "I''m kinda pissed now, not gonna lie. But you four are great, and we wouldn''t have caught all this if you didn''t handle it this way. So... thanks. The Guild will get through this."
She slipped out. The four of them nced at one another.
"Okay," Sev said. "Let''s get ready."
Chapter 24: Jerome
Chapter 24: Jerome
Jerome grumbled. To think they had the gall to tell him they wanted to meet him alone.
He''d already been kind! He''d offered them a thousandgold in exchange for some information on a dungeon! Dungeon scouts didn''t even get paid that much. He wouldn''t have considered paying that much for it at all, but it was some very important information, ording to Aurum. It would help them delve the dungeon.
Jerome didn''t know why they needed to delve the dungeon, but he knew it was important, and the thought of delving it consumed his waking mind.
It consumed his sleeping mind, too. His dreams were images of twisted corridors and broken walls, of strange, broken machinery scattered around. Sometimes there would be a shadow, or a monster that he couldn''t y, and he''d wake up with the panicked, scattered thought of maybe he shouldn''t go near the dungeon; but just as quickly that thought would vanish, reced by an iron determination.
He wouldn''t fail Aurum. How could he?
The god was just a child.
If the fucking Guildmaster hadn''t gotten in his way, he wouldn''t have had to lie. Wouldn''t have had to get Histre to ce that geas on Max, the damnable clerk that seemed to know everything he was doing. Even with that geas, her eyes followed him around, even though she wasn''t quite aware of it. It made him shudder.
But he was getting sidetracked.
[No,] he answered over the System, eyebrow twitching in irritation as he read Sev''s message again. Really, asking to meet him alone. [My full team will be there to back me up. Don''t fucking try to trick me. I can activate the geas from here if I want to.]
He could not, in fact, do that. But what did some Bronze adventurers know about what he could do?
Jerome grabbed his hammer. The System pinged him with a response; some whimpering nonsense that was agreeing with him, no doubt. He didn''t bother reading it in detail; he just scanned it for a time and location, marked it for deletion, and called on his team.
Time to learn what was so important about this damn dungeon.
"Hello?" Jerome called out, annoyed that he''d been brought to this dpidated looking house at the opposite side of the town. It made sense, he supposed doing anything inside the Guild would likely bring the Guildmaster down on his head, and he was damned lucky that she hadn''t already figured out what he could do. He kicked open the door, feeling vaguely pleased at the fact the wood splintered under his heel.
It was nice to live in a world where he could just put numbers into a stat sheet and get stronger.
The first thing he noticed was that the inside of the house was spatially expanded in some way. Jerome frowned. That was strange; spatial expansion enchantments like these weren''t necessarily expensive, but they weren''t necessarily cheap, either. The cleric was seated at the table, next to his massive armored friend and the two others he didn''t really care about. His eyes zeroed in immediately on Derivan''s movements it was subtle, but every time the big man shifted, his fingers weren''t quite moving properly...
It meant he''d tried resisting the geas, and been punished for it. Good. He''d be worried if they hadn''t tested the geas at all.
"Ready to tell me everything you know, yet?" Jerome said with a cocky smirk he didn''t really feel. He gestured for his team to take up positions Eleisse and Syra both took up spots in the corner of the room, far enough away that they wouldn''t be in range of anything stupid these adventurers tried to pull. Histre did... whatever Histre did when they were told to get ready. Jerome didn''t know and didn''t care.
The cleric red at him like he''d personally offended him, though. "Not like you gave us a choice, did you?" he said sarcastically.
"I gave you a choice of a thousand gold," Jerome said with a shrug. "Not my fault you chose the hard way."
The cleric just grunted at that, like he was annoyed that Jerome was right. "There was a message that popped up about a bonus room"
"No," Jerome interrupted, frowning at Sev. "I don''t want you to tell me. I want him to tell me." He pointed at the massive, armored man. What species was he, anyway? He looked too tall to be human. An orc? In armor like that?
"We have names, you know," the cleric scowled at him, and Jerome snorted. Why should he care?
"Fine," he said impatiently. "Derivan. Tell me what you know about the dungeon."
"...Very well," Derivan said. The man sat up in the chair, though not without difficulty; Jerome wondered how hard he''d fought the geas before they''d given in. It had only been a couple of hours, and would only progress this quickly if they tried to remove it... But of course they''d try to remove it. It only made sense. "When the dungeon formed, we received several messages through the system. One of them was about a bonus room that had been seeded from one of us me in particr."
"Stop," Jerome interrupted, sneering. "I want to know why this damn dungeon is so important, first. I said everything you know. Why are the gods so interested in the damn thing?"
Derivan looked at him, surprised. "...I do not know," he said eventually. "There were no system messages about this."
"Useless," Jerome grunted. "Fine. Tell me what that message said."
"I wear enchanted armor, you see, but it is cursed enchanted armor. I cannot take it off. I suppose the dungeon found a twisted sort of irony in that, because the message I received implied that any form of enchanted armor is not allowed into the bonus room; in fact, if even a hint of residual enchantment is left on your body, the room will not manifest." Derivan sounded frustrated, and rightfully so; Jerome couldn''t imagine being locked out of a bonus room like that.
But Jerome himself was just pleased. An entry condition like that meant he''d have lesspetition. He wasn''t really worried about losing the protection of his armor he didn''t need it, but Aurum seemed to prefer that he wear it, and so he did.
"There you go," Jerome said. "Was that so hard?"
If it was a requirement that he give up his armor for the dungeon, and that there were no magical traces left on his body... none of his party members could directly manipte magic. But this other party had a wizard.
"You," he said impatiently to Vex, and rolled his eyes impatiently when Sev scowled at him. "Vex. Wizard. I need you to cleanse the enchantment residue off of me."
"Uh," Vex said. He blinked at him. He''d been thrown off, like he hadn''t anticipated that. "Okay? Do you mean... now?"
Jerome paused.
"Well, yes," he said, annoyed. "Of course I do."
Was he going to take off his armor in the middle of a room full of enemies that very much didn''t like him? He was confident enough that he could take them all on, especially with his party members ready to ambush them if they tried anything. And he wasn''t going to get a magic-cleansing service in the Guild, especially not when the Guild''s members could be set against him.
It was only really safe for him when he had something to hold over other people''s heads. And he did have something on their heads; the geas on Derivan was still active until he chose to remove it. It would go inactive for now, unless the man discovered something new about the dungeon, and then it would activate again; but he could offer to remove it in exchange for Vex removing the residue... And the party thought he could activate the geas at any time, so he still had that threat dangling over their heads.
Yes, he decided. That would work.
He started stripping off his armor.
"Um," Vex said, staring at him.
"Sh," Misa said. "Don''t stop him. I wasn''t expecting a show today but I''ll take one where I can get."
"You do realize he threatened our lives," Sev said mildly.
"My life, if we are to be urate," Derivanmented.
"Bah," Misa said. "You guys have no appreciation for the finer things in life."
"Like Jerome?" Sev asked, a little incredulously.
"Obviously not," Misa said, rolling her eyes. "Don''t tell me I have to exin this to you."
"I''d rather you didn''t."
Jerome studiously ignored the back-and-forth within the other adventuring party. He was still wearing plenty of clothes underneath his armor.
"I''m done," he said impatiently once he''d kicked off all the pieces of his armor. "Strip me."
Vex stared at him.
"Of the enchantments," he added.
"Right, right, of course," the lizardkin said, his tone somewhat strangled. "Uh. Turn around?"
"Why would I have to turn around?" Jerome frowned at him.
"Because you''re intimidating and I don''t really want to have you staring at me while I work?" Vex tried.
"Nice try," Jerome said. "But no."
The wizard sighed, stepping forward to approach him, albeit a little nervously. "Okay," Vex said. "This might tingle a little bit."
Vex reached forward and ced a cold, scaled hand on his chest. Jerome saw his party members tense, and rolled his eyes internally. What could this party do to him, even if they wanted to? Vex himself wasn''t even Silver. He was still Bronze. It didn''t matter how rare his ss was; a Bronze had no chance of touching a Gold. He himself had only gotten the powerful skills he used now when he''d reached upper Silver.
The old ones weren''t worth thinking about. They weren''t as rare; ergo, they weren''t as powerful.
"Are you done?" Jerome asked impatiently.
"Wait," Vex said, tense. "This is... harder than you think it is. Whatever enchantments you had are powerful. Derivan, can I get some help?"
Jerome rolled his eyes. Of course the Bronze ranker needed help. He waited impatiently as the armored man walked over to him honestly, he wouldn''t have assumed that someone built like that could do any magic at all, but he''d seen stranger things and ced a hand on him.
Then, all at once, everything went wrong.
Jerome doubled over as a wave of sickness washed over him, dizzying him and making him stagger. Part of him wanted to shout in anger, to scream something vile about being betrayed but Derivan was pulling his hand back, and why was his stomach glowing
A long, long string of gold began to unravel. It pooled in his stomach, and the armored man glowered at him how had he not realized how Derivan was? The other man towered over him, and yet he''d failed to realize this when he''d ced the geas on him
The world snapped back together. Histre''s hand was on his back, and they were breathing heavily. They were... trembling? Frightened?
Derivan seemed to narrow his eyes, and Vex was gritting his teeth, an enormous amount of mana suddenly ring out from within him No. An impossible amount of mana for that level.
Two arrows flew out from the corners of the room, cutting unerringly towards the pair in front of him. Jerome knew the skills Eleisse and Syra were using; they should have been unblockable for anyone not in Gold. They were fast, and could cut through anything. But the half-orc girl was suddenly there midair, a strange-looking baton striking one arrow and then the other with enough force topletely alter the course of the arrows, leaving deep gouges in the ground.
[Divine Suppression], he thought, but he knew before he even tried to use the skill that it wouldn''t work. Threads of foreign divine energy filled the air, having flooded into it almost as soon as he''d been disoriented, and Sev was staring at him with a look of angry determination.
Jerome was angry. Angrier than he''d ever been. But he didn''t know why. He couldn''tprehend anything that was happening.
Histre screamed behind him, an agonized, foreign sound, like the endless ticking of a broken clock.
"Got you, you little shit," Max said.
Chapter 25: Plans, Plans
Chapter 25: ns, ns
Sev was surprised the n was going as well as it was.
Always n for things to go wrong that was his motto, though he couldn''t remember when he''d decided on it, or why. He preferred his ns to have backups on backups, and for the longest time his final backup had simply been [Divine Communion]. That wasn''t an option for him anymore, and so he''d called for them to be very, very sure the n would work. They hadn''t faced a team of intelligent opponents this powerful before, and it seemed stupid to go in blind, even with Max on their side.
Fortunately, everything went... somehow far better than they could possibly have anticipated. The original n had actually called for their team to ambush Jerome and his team during the delve, when Jerome was no longer in his armor and could have the geas safely removed. It hadn''t ounted for the possibility that Jerome would just strip off his armor in front of them, effectively negating the need for the entire second phase of their n.
Because why would he do that!
Their incredulity yed well into their deception, though, and Misa had helped cover for any obvious ws in their acting with her banter.
And then Jerome called Vex over to remove the residual magic, which was an insane decision that disregarded any danger the mage might pose to him. He let Vex bring Derivan over to help. The fact that Jerome apparently didn''t even pause to consider that they might be a threat was something Sev would have found offensive if it wasn''t also incredibly useful.
Derivan, obviously, used the opportunity to try to take the geas out of Jerome.
They were expectingbat to happen. They''d nned for it, even; in the off chance that Derivan somehow had the opportunity to remove the geas from Jerome while they were in this meeting, it was decided that he would. They assumed a fight would happen as a result, and they would have to defend themselves while giving Derivan the time to fully extract the geas, and even that went pretty much exactly as they''d expected.
Mostly, anyway.
Misa blocked both of the arrows fired by the archers, having readied herself to block even as Derivan was approaching Jerome. Histre, too, was an element that they''d ounted for; when Max had returned, she''d talked about what she thought Histre was, and how the Guildmaster might have beenpromised. The prevailing suspicion was that Histre was some sort of demon they were creatures outside the context of the system, and could often copy and twist skills for their own use. It would exin how the Guildmaster herself hadn''t noticed all of this, if her own skills were stolen and used against her. It would exin how Jerome and Max had a geas on them, too.
It didn''t quite exin why there were multiple other instances of the geas that Derivan could sense far away. The other tinum members of the Guild had been cleared and then dispatched to deal with that, across all their various branches; if there were powerful,promised individuals around, they would find them, and break thepulsions on them.
And so the n was that Max would deal with Histre, here. Demons were incredibly rare, and so there was little in the way of contingency ns for them. They didn''t interact with the system in any real sense, and had no health or level values to speak of. They were particrly difficult to kill or get rid of because of that.
Fortunately, there were divine weapons Max could borrow from the Guild vault to deal with exactly this problem and when they asked how she''d get to Histre without being suspicious, she''d grinned at them, like she''d been waiting for someone to ask. "You''re not the only ones that can do broken shit," she''d said.
To be fair, she had a reason to be smug.
[Right ce, Right Time] [Active Skill] [Maxed]
Cost: Time, Opportunity
Like the best adventuring clerks, you find yourself in just the right ce, at just the right time.
Sev''s reaction of "What the fuck does that mean" was all he could get out before Max used the skill and disappeared.
Now she appeared again right as Derivan tried to draw the geas out of Jerome, right as Histre appeared out of the air and grabbed for the pdin almost possessively, and right as Misa blocked both of the arrows that would have hit Derivan and Vex.
And then too many things happened all at once.
First was Jerome. The geas ced on him was obviously a lot stronger than the one that had been ced on Max, and it seemed to manifest as a ball of energy, glowing within his stomach. When Derivan drew his hand back, the light moved up his throat and out of his mouth in a way that looked distinctly ufortable, and in a way that Sev suspected felt just as ufortable as it looked.
Second was Histre. The demon if that was what they were, though it was difficult to tell beneath the cloak had appeared again out of the shadows at almost the exact same instant that Derivan began drawing the magic out of Jerome. They pressed a hand into Jerome''s back, hissing angrily in a cracked, wednguage.
Third was Max.
Her reaction was instant. As soon as she appeared and saw Histre, she was grabbing for them, divine gauntlet already on her arm; Histre had no time to react to her.
And the moment that concentrated divine magic touched them, they screamed.
The sound was wrong, an impossibilityyered on top of reality. The progression of a broken mechanism. A gear clicking into a slot that couldn''t exist.
And that was when everything went wrong.
It was almost a relief, with how well everything had been going. Something had to go wrong, and now that it had, he could act.
Because as Histre screamed in that broken, ticking voice, Jerome screamed too.
"We need to end this fast! Extract the geas!" Sev called.
His team, to their credit, moved.
Derivan slid smoothly in front of Vex, a barrier shimmering into existence in front of him even as Jerome''s sword swung down with rage-fueled anger. The barrier broke almost instantly, of course, but not before several others appeared below it, each angled a little more to the side; it redirected the sword just enough to have it skitter harmlessly off of Derivan''s armor. There was no guarantee it would do damage to begin with, but it was better to be safe.
Vex used the opportunity Derivan created to run back the lizardkin was faster and more nimble than he''d been before, with his newfound stats. The archers tracked him unerringly, however, and the arrows fired were so fast they were a blur in the air; Misa had to cut in front of one of them to protect him, and the second one thunked into the wood of the chair he threw himself behind and tore through it, the barest edge of the arrow cutting across his scales. Two more arrows split from the first, but they had scarcely begun to tear into him before Sev reacted; the magic of a heal rippled through him, shredding the arrows before they could do any real damage.
Good thing arrows counted as a foreign object, even when they were still moving.
"Sev! I can''t keep blocking these!" Misa called out, and Sev gritted his teeth, redirecting the focus of his heal. There was a strain there as he used more power than he meant to an echo of the injury firing back up towards him, almost catching him off guard with the sensation of three arrows burying themselves into him.
Not real ones, thank god. But he staggered anyway, the pain flickering across his vision.
"We''re trying to help Jerome, dammit, stop fighting us!" Misa yelled though she knew it would be fruitless. They''d checked. They had a scrap of the magic used to put a geas on Max, after all, and Vex had taken the time to study that as thoroughly as he could. There was a lot he could learn in a few hours, it turned out; the mechanism of the gold transmutation, the effects of the geas in the long term... They even figured out whether or not Derivan could sense the nature of thepulsion tied into it.
He could not. But he could sense the strength of thepulsion, which didn''t necessarily have anything to do with the strength of the geas itself, and he''d felt the strength of thepulsion on the archers while they were still approaching the building. The hope of convincing them to stop fighting was low.
Then Vex was zing with magic again. There was one more trick they had nned.
The lizardkin exhaled, mana pouring into his breath and forming arge cloud around him; a sleep spell that Sev and Misa had already been inocted against. At the same time, Sev shot off a small bolt of divine light at a small, almost unnoticeable rune that connected the interior of the house to the spatial enchantment. He didn''t need to break it, just adjust it slightly and that was exactly what happened.
Arge spatial interior shrank. Both archers, situated in the corners of the house, were immediately shoved forward with almost backbreaking force as the walls abruptly closed in on them; they stumbled forward, trying to recover, but the new interior space was small enough that the cloud Vex was exhaling enveloped them.
They struggled against the oing sleep or at least they tried. They didn''t seed.
Jerome was another story.
The sleeping mist had reached him, but the pdin seemed to be in some sort of berserker rage. Derivan was fending him off, small, well-ced barriers deflecting most strikes of his sword; where he failed topletely block a strike, his armor seemed more than capable of handling it. The problem was that this seemed to be making Jerome more and more angry, and Derivan couldn''t get a hold of him for long enough to rip that geas out of him.
"Dammit, Jerome!" Misa yelled, and she gritted her teeth. "Derivan, I''ll take him! You grab the geas out!"
She tried. Misa blocked one of Jerome''s attacks, interposing herself between the angry pdin and Derivan; the living armor stumbled backwards at the suddenness of it, but tried to correct himself immediately, darting around Misa to grab on to Jerome''s arm. But the pdin was a Gold ranker, even if he was in some sort of berserker rage. He couldn''t fight as effectively, but he could certainly throw off two adventurers, one of which didn''t even have any Strength.
Third contingency, then, Sev thought, preparing a heal; this was the most dangerous strategy they''d thought up. "Derivan!"
"I will try!" the living armor called back, and he reached out to Jerome and pulled.
Derivan couldn''t remove the geas from a distance. He needed physical contact to be able to do that. But he could do something else at a distance, using abination of his mana maniption skill and the runic pathways Vex had identified from dissecting a small piece of that very same magic. He could activate it.
Jerome imed he could do it at a distance, but that was a lie; one that they''d known. Derivan, on the other hand...
But it was delicate. They didn''t actually want to kill Jerome; they needed to shift him only enough to restrain him, so the geas could be properly
"No," an angry voice hissed, the sound reverberating through the house. It sounded like the grinding of gears. Like the ticking of a watch. Sev''s eyes automatically went for the source of the noise, and he found Histre standing unsteadily, staggering forward towards Jerome. Max, behind them, was frantically trying to tug back the divine gauntlet she was using but it seemed almost stuck, fused to the cloak that Histre was wearing. "No. No. No. You will not take him. You cannot. He is mine. He is ours."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Max yelled, kicking at the cloak. She finally pulled her hand out of the gauntlet, though the gauntlet itself stayed stuck to Histre; she stared at the blisters that were left on her hand, her eyes wide. Sev shot a heal in her direction without thinking about it, but his mind was on something else.
Divine magic. They thought Histre was a demon. Why did they think Histre was a demon? Jerome was a pdin. They''d assumed in the back of their minds that Jerome''s magic wasn''t strong enoughpared to the artifact, perhaps, but...
No. They''d been wrong. They''d been very wrong.
"It was you. You areing for him," Histre hissed. "You areing for all of them. You cannot touch them. We will not let you."
The cloak around Histre fell only it wasn''t a cloak at all. They were wings, masquerading as rough fabric and dirty linen, wrapped around a frame that wasn''t remotely human. Golden cylinders hung in the air, twisted together in a haphazard shape that only guessed at reality.
There was a long pause. Even Jerome was frozen, staring in confusion at the figure in their midst.
"Guys," Max said. "I don''t think that''s a demon."
"Gee," Sev said, a touch of sarcasm in his voice. "I couldn''t tell."
Chapter 26: Fear
Chapter 26: Fear
Histre hung in the air, vibrating with fear and paranoia and anger.
Derivan wasn''t sure how he knew. Physical Empathy, likely, though he couldn''t begin to guess at how he could read the bodynguage of a creature that was more windchime than person. Histre floated in the air in front of them, wings spread in a way that was unnaturally still almost like they were hung from invisible strings in the air. Golden cylinders rotated agitatedly around one another, swinging back and forth and producing, strangely, that same sound of a ticking clock.
And then he realized that Jerome was moving to the same ticking of that strange beat.
The system screen flickered in front of him; a notification. He barely spared a nce for it he knew what it would say, based on everyone''s faces as they stared at their own notifications.
"You''re an angel?" Max asked; she was the first one to find her voice, and she seemed almost indignant that this was who Histre had turned out to be. She was the least affected, too, by the strange pressure the angel seemed to give off. Derivan himself could feel a distant sort of version of it, but Sev, Misa, and Vex all seemed more strongly affected. He could see the way they winced slightly every time the angel ticked, one second passing over into the next. "Why the hell are you here? What are you doing with Jerome? What do you want with the dungeon?"
"You im you do not know," Histre growled, the words reverberating against the walls and crashing into them. There was no physical force involved just pressure, fierce and twisted and wrong.
And yet... afraid.
"But it is you. It must be. You are taking them. You want to take him. You cannot. You will not be allowed."
"We don''t know what you''re talking about!" Misa finally burst out, the words a half-growl from her position. She''d been forced halfway to the ground by the force of the angel''s words, each one of them searing their way into her mind. But now she forced herself to her feet and red, standing strong in the way that she usually did.
Below the angel nearby, but not attacking Jerome stood. He was still twitching in sync with the angel, in a way that was frankly rather ominous, if Derivan chose to pay much attention to it. He decided not to.
"We''re not we don''t want to take anyone," Vex offered from his spot. He''d copsed, and he didn''t bother trying to get up but his words were sincere. Kind, even. "We just wanted to undo what you did to Jerome."
Histre wasn''t attacking. They had revealed themselves, using shock and awe to freeze all of them in ce, and indeed their very existence seemed to scrape against their minds. And yet... they weren''t attacking.
Even Jerome wasn''t attacking, seemingly at Histre''s behest, though no words were exchanged between them.
"We helped him," Histre said. "You will not turn me against the Gold. No. You will not take him. We will defend. We will protect."
"You are afraid," Derivan said softly.
"We have nothing to fear!" Histre''s words were screeched in response, and even Max winced at that sound; Derivan wasn''t affected quite as strongly, and stared instead at the angel.
What was Aurum''s domain? Gold, obviously. But there was something secondary there, something in the angel''s movements and sounds. Something about that endless, mechanical ticking.
Time.
"No. You are afraid," Derivan muttered softly, the words gentle, like he was speaking to a frightened animal instead of the eldritch spawn of a god. "And it cannot be your fear alone. Aurum must be afraid, too, or he would not send out so many..."
The angel swirled aggressively, chiming but then it paused, peering at him more closely. He got that impression anyway; Histre didn''t have the eyes for him to tell. They didn''t answer him, but they seemed to be waiting for him to speak.
"Does he see what will happen?" Derivan mused aloud, then shook his head. "It does not matter. You must stop this. We cannot be divided against whateveres."
"Then you know about whates," the angel dered, as if triumphant.
"Only because we have seen it with our own eyes," Derivan said. "We have seen a god wrapped in chains and hung for disy. We have seen the form of his prison and fought against it. Won, if barely."
Histre swung forward suddenly, rapidly; the movement was so quick that Derivan almost didn''t catch it himself. The angel suddenly converged on him, away one moment and right in his face the next, and the armor had to take a startled step backward to avoid being hit. "You have seen," the angel hissed at him. "You have seen past the end. You have seen past the Forgetting. We need to know what it is. Tell us!"
"I... that is all we know," Derivan said, startled. "The god was in chains, kept within an abomination of mana. He told us we would find answers in "
Ah. That was why Aurum was so desperate to send Jerome into the dungeon.
"Yes," Histre said to him, hissing out the worlds; liquid gold dripped out of the cylinders as they spoke, hissing as it touched the ground. Derivan wondered briefly if it was actually molten gold. "You understand. You have seen. If you are not the ones that wish to take Aurum, then you see why we must know."
"But you cannot do it this way," Derivan said. He nced at Max, who was frantically gesturing, and also seemed unable to speak. "...Did you silence all of my friends?"
"I needed to know," Histre said. "I need to know your words. You who have seen a Forgotten God. You who are linked to that which has been taken."
"What?" Derivan said. Max gestured even more frantically. "...Please allow my friends to speak."
"As you wish," Histre told him.
Just like that, the oppressive aura that seemed to stagnate the air around all of them seemed to fade away. Max gasped for air, seemed to genuinely consider giving an angel the finger, then gathered herself and spoke with authority.
"Aurum is infringing on every treaty the mortals have with the Gods," Max said. "You need to withdraw the geases you have ced. The one on Jerome especially, but all the others, too."
"We need our answers!" Histre didn''t seem to like the words; they swirled into the air, chiming with a terrifying anger. "We must know"
"Jerome as he is right now is a threat to any dungeon delving operation we could possibly consider conducting, even before Elyra is involved!" Max snapped out the words so harshly the angel actually flinched back. "I don''t know what the damn geas is that you put on him but I want it gone!"
"Aurum gave him the help he wished for!" The angel argued. "He wished for confidence!"
"Confidence doesn''t mean you just make him think he''s right all the time! That''s not how that works!" Max groaned. "And did you consider just asking him for help with the damn dungeon?"
Histre paused.
"Please tell me you at least tried to ask," Max said.
"There was too great a risk that he would refuse," Histre eventually said. For an eldritch, terrifying angel, it now sounded all too awkward.
"Did you consider that that might have been because you made him think he was right all the time?" Max groaned.
"You were right about the magically reinforced narcissism," Misa whispered to Sev.
"I fucking knew it," Sev whispered back.
"Look. Let us take the damn geas off, and then if your pdin still wants to worship and help Aurum after all that, we will see. It depends on how he acts once it''s removed. He is not cleared for the dungeon until the Guild approves of it and did you consider just asking these guys what they find once they get into the damn dungeon?"
The angel was silent.
"Seriously! They''re terrible at keeping secrets!" Maxined.
"Max, this feels like a bad time to roast us," Sev tried.
"We admit that we may have made... a mistake," the angel said.
Sev sighed. "They''re both ignoring us and this is definitely somehow working."
"Good! Now let us take the geas off, pull back your damn agents, and we can figure out how to get you what you want." Max seemed all business; she gestured for Derivan to go to Jerome. The pdin was still frozen in ce, and he didn''t seem to be focusing on anything. Was it something about the sight of Histre?
Or... apulsion of some sort rted to Histre.
Derivan shook his head, touched his gauntlet to Jerome''s chest, and pulled.
Just like before, the geas present in Jerome began to glow, originating from deep in his chest and stomach and just like before, as Derivan began to pull out the geas, the effects of it on Jerome''s mind seemed to begin to fade. The change was less prominent than before, since the pdin''s expression was more of a nd nothingpared to the arrogance he''d previously held, but the lifeing back into his eyes was a good sign.
That life was quickly apanied by a retching sound, as Derivan began to pull the geas the rest of the way out of the pdin.
For a Gold ranker, he didn''t seem to have a very strong stomach.
This time, nothing new happened to interrupt them. Histre simply watched Derivan as he pulled out the geas the armor suspected the angel could have done it themselves, but had elected to watch him to do it instead, perhaps out of some petty sense of spite. What he ended up with in his hand was less a thin thread of gold and more a solid block.
It crushed just as easily between his fingers, though.
Golden Geas: 103
The stat increase Derivan wasn''t particrly surprised by he kept his eyes on Jerome instead as the pdin began to heave. It took Jerome a moment to finally gather himself, and he slowly got to his feet, staring at the Silver rankers that had bested his party.
There was a long pause. Derivan waited for Jerome to be angry, or scared, or any number of emotions he expected someone to feel after having such a strongpulsion removed.
"Uh," Jerome said, a little awkwardly. "Do you guys mind if I put my armor back on? I feel kind of naked without it."
Well... he didn''t seem like that much of an asshole.
Jerome was, as it turned out... less of an asshole without a geas messing with his brain.
Not . He''d leered a little bit at Misa, then immediately lost all confidence when she raised an eyebrow at him. He''d made a bit of a shitty remark about Elyrans, but seemed suitably cowed when Derivan spoke up in Vex''s defense. He''d worried about Eleisse and Syra, his elven teammates, until he found out they were just sleeping and had had their geases removed from them as well.
He didn''t seem to be a paragon of humanity, and was perhaps a little bit more of a dick than not, but he didn''t seem...
He didn''t seem like the kind of person to threaten lives to get what he wanted, basically. Or to take credit for someone else''s discovery. Mostly, he seemed kind of awkward.
"You don''t seem to mind that Aurum put a geas on you and turned you into a giant dick," Misa said, raising a brow at him.
"I''m trying not to think about it," Jerome said. He fidgeted. "It doesn''t really feel like I did those things."
"I''ll get him a Guild therapist," Max sighed.
"Why is Aurum so scared, anyway?" Jerome asked. He nced at Histre, who floated ominously and refused to answer him, or even look at any of them.
"...I think he''s next in line for the system to erase," Sev finally answered. "It would exin the fear."
"What?" Jerome stood very still for a moment. It was very clear he had no idea what Sev meant, but ''erase'' didn''t invoke good feelings in this context. "No. We gotta stop it."
Histre twitched, a bit guiltily.
"Uh..." Sev nced at Jerome. It wasn''t that he didn''t agree; he was just surprised that the pdin seemed to care so much.
"Aurum''s just a kid!" Jerome said indignantly. "I''m not going to let a kid be erased!"
Chalk that up for another mark in the ''not a dick'' category, Derivan supposed.
Though what was a ''kid'', in the timescale of the gods?
Chapter 27: Dungeons
Chapter 27: Dungeons
It was decided that Jerome would be sent back to the Guild, along with the sleeping members of his party. The Guildmaster would personally debrief themter, once the pdin and his team had a little more time to absorb what had happened to them. Sev understood this to mean that the Guildmaster would stand in the corner of the room and stare at them under the full effects of her anti-perception Skills for a solid few hours, making sure that no one was reapplying any geases.
But she would also be making sure that they were okay, and understood the depths of what they had gotten themselves into. There was a good chance the team would split, she said, but the Guild would provide them with all the resources they needed to continue adventuring if they wanted to, including Guild-mandated therapy.
For that to work, though, Histre had to be separated from the party. Jerome had protested this a little, but it was a halfhearted sort of protest; remnants of the part of the geas that urged him to trust the angel, perhaps. Derivan''s ability to partially circumvent the Guildmaster''s skills came in useful here he could warn them if the angel seemed to be using a skill of some sort.
These were allrgely just precautions that they were taking because it made sense to take them. Jerome seemed genuinely apologetic for all that he''d done (and was getting moreso by the minute, as he processed more and more the extent of what the geas had done to him), and Histre seemed... appropriately chastised.
Mostly, this meant that the angel was floating listlessly around the room, like they weren''t quite sure what to do with themselves.
"Are you... doing okay?" Sev asked after a moment, a little awkwardly. He''d never spoken to an angel before.
"Yes. No. I am between." Histre paused, like they were considering saying something more, but didn''t continue.
"Do you know if Aurum is... upset?" Sev asked cautiously.
"He is calling me." The angel swirled, perhaps a little guiltily again. "...He has been calling on me for a while. But he needed protection. I did not go."
"Oh my god," Sev groaned.
"I think maybe you should answer that call," Max said, raising an eyebrow at the angel. Histre shifted, a little agitated, golden cylinders nging haphazardly against one another.
"Jerome," the angel said in protest. "I failed him. He needs"
"He doesn''t," Max said, but she said it as gently as she could; her eyes searched as if to find a ce where she could pat the angel on the shoulder, but she ended up settling for awkwardly patting a wing instead. "He''ll be fine. The Guild will handle making sure he''s okay. You made a mistake, and that''s okay too. Come back when you understand us mortals a little bit more, and we''ll throw you a party, okay?"
"Aurum might be calling you because he needs you," Sev added, quietly. At that, Histre froze.
"Tell Jerome. I am sorry," Histre said.
Max wouldter exin that what Histre performed then was a neshift the exact same kind that brought people from Earth over into Obreve, though those shifts often happened out in the wild, where few people were around to observe it. Angels and demons, it seemed, traveled in much the same way, except whatever kind of neshift they were doing required vastly more energy.
Which was probably why it made all of them stagger backwards. Max and to a lesser extent, Derivan were the only ones that seemed rtively immune to the cracks in reality that mmed outwards; ripped into the air was pure and utter void, then an impossible, radiating light, then glittering gold
And then Histre was gone.
Sev breathed out, slowly. Max just sighed.
"That''s that for a while," she said softly. "Gods almost never send down angels like that. It takes too much energy, and calling them back takes almost as much. He won''t be able to do that again anytime soon, and by that time..."
"He must''ve been desperate," Sev said quietly. "Probably still is."
"I feel bad for him," Max agreed. "But... it doesn''t change the fact that he went around putting geases on people. And what Histre did here is one thing, but all the other individuals with some form of geas on them... It''s going to take him a lot of time to win back any trust. And if you''re right, he doesn''t have much time left at all."
"People are dangerous, pressed into a corner," Sev mused quietly. "And I guess gods are people too, here."
"In light of all this..." Max frowned. "I''m tempted to get the Guildmaster to push for more Guild involvement in this dungeon. But you four might really be our best bet on finding out what''s in there, and why Aurum was so interested."
"I think..." Sev paused, then groaned. "No, wait, you''re right. All the gods are interested. That''s why I was bombarded with all those clerics when I went to the temple they''re all worried about something. Why is this happening now?"
"That," Max said. "Is a good question. When you find out, please let the rest of us know, too."
"That''s if we can," Sev muttered, ncing at hispanions. All of them wore severe expressions. "Okay. First we get some rest, but then we need to finally get into that dungeon."
Everyone nodded. And then Derivan paused, a little awkwardly, and stared at his screen.
"So," he said. "It seems four was not the limit on my stats. I now have something called... Shift?"
Everyone groaned.
Shift, they decided, was something they''d have to figure outter. The dungeon was their main priority right now, and ''shift'' was vague enough that there was very little they could do to test the stat; the obvious corrtion was that it was rted to whatever Histre had done to shift back between nes, but that was the limit of the guesses they had.
Derivan could not, for instance, shift himself between nes. Perhaps because the stat was so low, but Max seemed convinced that it wouldn''t give him control of neshifting in and of itself; that skill, she said, waspletely outside the system.
But if the dungeon had answers, then maybe it would have answers for this, too. So it was decided that that would be their next destination.
They immediately ran into a problem.
"The first delve team is already in the dungeon," the guard informed them. They''d approached the Elyran camp that was set up just outside the newly-formed dungeon, and stopped just before entering good thing, too, since the errors when trying to enter a dungeon that already had people in it were... unpleasant. "It''s closed until they''re out."
"You''ve gotta be fucking kidding me," Misa groaned. "I want to get into this damn ce already. Can''t you get them out or something?"
"That''s not my call," the guard said somewhat apologetically. To his credit, he seemed like he was being genuine. "You''re gonna have to talk to the research lead. He''s a bit further in camp. He''s pretty friendly, though, so he might help you out?"
"He''d better," Misa grumbled, and the guard looked abruptly pretty worried, especially given the way she was fingering the mace on her belt. Sev snorted, leaning in to stage-whisper to him.
"Don''t worry. She''s just grumpy. She wouldn''t actually hurt a fly," he said, winking. The guard swallowed once, watching Misa.
"Except that time she did hurt a fly," Vex mused to himself. "But it was a big one and it was trying to eat me. So I think that''s fair."
"I do not think that is helping," Derivanmented, his voice tinged with amusement.
"Misa, leave the poor man alone and let''s go find the guy he''s talking about," Sev chuckled. She was putting on a bit of a show, he knew she had a tendency to do that whenever the team was feeling low, leaning into an archetype so that the people that really knew her would smile, just a little bit. For all that she pretended at gruffness, she had a good head on her shoulders for understanding the people around her.
And so, when they turned to leave, Misa turned around and gave the guard a friendly wave. "Thanks for the help!" she called back.
The poor guard just blinked in confusion.
Thankfully, the way the research camp was set up, it didn''t actually take very long for them to figure out who the research lead was. There was a massive control center set up in the middle of the camp, with stone structures jutting out of the ground to act as a physical back for [Scry] screens. On every screen were different angles of what Sev assumed was the delve team; four individuals, led by a human captain that seemed to specialize in melee. Five total.
"This... is a hell of a setup," he muttered. "Is this how Elyra does dungeon delves?"
"Elyra''s interested in figuring out what makes dungeons tick, so they use a lot of analytical tools and spells to understand the inner workings of a dungeon," Vex answered. He seemed at least a little distracted, and his tail swung around anxiously. "Normally scrying spells have trouble prating into the dungeons in the first ce that''s why we send scouts. But Elyra figured out a way to anchor scrying spells to their delvers, and now we''ve got this setup..."
The researchers were muttering to themselves about spatialpression and dungeon geometry. Below every scrying screen, Sev noticed, were knobs and dials that seemed rted to...
... he had no idea. This was Vex''s area of expertise. All he saw were knobs and dials, which he hadn''t actually expected to see anywhere in this world to begin with.
"What is the point of the stone?" Derivan asked curiously.
"Light bleeds through the kind of illusory spells we use for this," Vex said with a shrug. "Actual full illusion spells are more costly. Stone is an easy cast-and-forget, and then cheap illusion spells let us see what''s going on without expending too much mana."
"You sure know a lot about us!" Someone called down to them had he heard them? He wasn''t anywhere near them. The person in question was a lizardkin that wore sses and what was clearly abcoat, though why he was wearing abcoat at all when everyone else was dressed in more practical field attire was a different question entirely. "Wannae up here and introduce yourselves?"
"Uh," Sev said, staring at the tform that the lizardkin was standing on.
It was a giant, very tall stone tform.
With no steps.
"...Yes?" Sev tried.
The person who was obviously the research lead grinned at them, waved a hand, and there was a vague feeling of consent, like a spell was asking to lift them up and he had to say yes. But he did, and evidently the rest of his teammates did too, because they all found themselves carried up onto the tform and deposited rather unceremoniously on the floor.
The researcher grinned at them. "I''m Kestel. Head of research. You''re the adventuring team from the Guild, right? I hear one of the teams pulled back, but they didn''t really tell us why."
"It''s kind ofplicated," Sev deadpanned.
"As long as we keep the food aid deals, we''re not really worried about it," Kestel said with a shrug. Sev exchanged nces with the rest of his team; as far as he knew, the Guild was handling that now. The reveal that geases were involved hadplicated things, but not as much as they''d expected; as much as people were angry about their geases, they were also grateful for them being removed. "We just started a delve, so there isn''t actually much for you to do right now, but we can put you in for the next one. You wanna stick around and watch? We could always use some adventurer feedback, and this will give you a sense of what the dungeon is like before you go in."
"I''d rather be in the dungeon," Misa muttered, but her eyes were already tracking the images on the scrying screens.
Vex, Derivan, and Sev settled in to watch, too.
It wasn''t long before they noticed something was wrong.
Chapter 28: Researchers
Chapter 28: Researchers
It was technically Vex that noticed it.
The scrying screens disyed the delve team going through and mapping out the dungeon. Each screen showed them from a slightly different angle, keeping track of both the team themselves and what they were surrounded by. A [Mass Telepathy] spell kept the team hooked up with the researchers, allowing them to be alerted to any dangers that the researchers spotted.
The problem was that the scrying screens were wrong.
It was nothing obvious the researchers themselves would have spotted it if it had been. But Vex had training on this, too, and his penchant for detail and his more practical experience with dungeons helped him pick up on it quickly.
The scrying screens didn''t quite line up with one another. One was slightly dyed. Which was weird, for a scrying spell that was supposedly happening in real time. It wasn''t possible to miscalibrate a scrying spell like that.
"Uh. Kestel?" Vex tried, ncing at the head researcher and then back to the screen that he''d noticed was off. "I think you should take a look at this. This isn''t created by a different scrying spell, by any chance, is it?"
"No, no, all the scrying spells we use should be functionally identical. We need consistent results. We can put the spell through different filters, but... Anyway. Why do you ask?" Kestel interrupted himself while speaking, like he knew he would keep going if he let himself.
"This one''s slightly dyed." Vex paused. "And the spell resolution looks a bit off."
Kestel paused, frowning, and took a closer look. "Are you sure?" He asked. "I''m not sure I see it..."
"It''s pretty subtle and it''s hard to tell since the angles don''t line up between the different screens, but yes." Vex frowned. "The question is why. That shouldn''t be possible with scrying spells, should it?"
"Definitely not," Kestel muttered. "All information is sent in real time, and there''s no timepression that we''ve noticed..."
"Try switching all of them to the [Mana Sight] filter," Vex suggested.
"You know a lot about our operations." Kestel looked at Vex strangely for a moment, then peered a little bit closer, as if he recognized something about the lizardkin but then, when Vex took a step back, he shook his head and looked away. He spoke again, but this time he was clearly speaking into the [Mass Telepathy] spell, and only verbalizing his words for the benefit of the adventurers. "Switch all screens to [Mana Sight]. Simultaneously, please."
It took a moment, but every scrying screen spontaneously lit up with magic. The dungeon was filled with it, dark, glittering stone suddenly lit up by swirls and whorls of mana. This mana didn''t quite dance or move in the way that magic normally did out in the wild. It moved with purpose, marching to an unseen rhythm, touched by chaos.
Almost like a heartbeat, Vex mused. He''d seen it before, but it was always a sight to behold.
"Whoa," Misa said out loud. Vex blinked; he''d forgotten that she didn''t have the ability to see magic the way he did. The way his own sight worked was still different, and didn''t look exactly the same as it did on the scrying screens, which had only the basic [Mana Sight] filter. "Does it always look like that?"
"It''s usually a little more lively," Vex offered with a small smile. "But yeah, more or less."
Misa watched it for a moment. "I can see why you like magic so much."
There was something noticeably wrong now, however. The researchers were still fiddling with the screen that had seemed time-dyed mana still wasn''t visible in the filter, and now the discrepancy was obvious. It flickered a few times, even, traces of mana appearing in the air, but in patterns that were obviously different from all the other screens.
"It looks confused," Derivan muttered, his voice odd. "It... is confused?"
"What do you mean?" Vex asked, his voiceing out sharper than he intended. He winced, but Derivan didn''t seem to notice.
"Physical Empathy is picking up on it," Derivan said. "Whatever is causing that, it is something alive."
That was not, it turned out, something that could be said without an immediate response. Kestel didn''t speak, but it was apparent that he''d barked out some kind of order by the way he tensed and the way the other researchers immediately sat upright. The delvers in the dungeon responded almost instantly as well, reaching for their weapons and standing back-to-back warily.
There was nothing apparent in the corridor. But then they nced up and to the right, where the [Scry] spell was watching them. One of them the captain narrowed his eyes, like he''d seen something or was peering at something that was indistinct then there was some shouting that they couldn''t hear over the scrying screens, one of the delvers reached for a spear, and
the screen cut out.
That one did, anyway. The other scrying screens were still operational, and one of the delvers walked over to where the spear was lying with a frown. On the tip of the spear, impaled, was... something strangely indistinct. In the scrying screen, it looked almost like a distorted cloud of static, with mana oozing down the spear in a distinctly un-manalike fashion.
When the [Mana Sight] filter was turned off, the screens showed nothing on the spear at all. Vex frowned, watching it carefully; he couldn''t conduct any spell analysis at a distance like this, but had that been a monster that was made of mana?
Like the Mana Abomination they had fought. But nothing nearly so visible, because it was a small distortion rather than arge one; it wasn''t created of so muchpressed energy that it could be seen by the naked eye.
"Good catch," Kestel said to them, a little bitte and a little bit distracted but there was a manic sort of gleam in his eye, and a small grin was spreading over his snout. "Looks like we''ve discovered something new! I''ve never heard of a dungeon monster like this before, have you?"
"No," Vex said cautiously, ncing at Kestel and then back to the screens. "It looks like some sort of creature made out of mana. Given what it was doing to the [Scry] spell... some sort of spell parasite, maybe? It took over part of the spell and tried to mimic it?"
"That''s our main theory!" Kestel beamed. "It''s even named Mana Feeder in the kill notification, so we''re thinking that''s exactly what that is. You''re good at this. Have you ever considered joining one of Elyra''s dungeon research teams? I could put in a good word for you."
"Ah. No." Vex flinched a little bit at that, but he rxed slightly when he felt a metal hand on his shoulder. "I''d prefer not to. But thank you."
"Pity, pity," Kestel said, though he seemed too distracted to press Vex about it. The head researcher nced through the screens again. "It looks like the rest of the spells are fine... I wonder what would have happened if it kept going. How does it feed, anyway? It was feeding the spell output back to us, but at a slight efficiency loss..."
Kestel continued muttering to himself, wandering away from them and over to the other thing that sat on the stone tform a ratherrge stone tablet, with an illusory spell oveid on top of it that seemed to be his notes. It wasn''t particrly visible to the rest of them, though. Vex saw a thin veil of white mana strung across the screen, and deduced that it was some sort of privacy function tied into the spell.
He nced at the rest of his team. "That thing is... a little bit too much like the Mana Abomination we fought for me to befortable."
"Kestel said it''s new, right?" Misa frowned, worried. "You think it''s something rted?"
"''New'' can mean a lot of things," Vex said, hesitating. "The Adventurer''s Guild doesn''t really bother keeping a log of all the monsters we encounter because we encounter them all the time it''s not umon to find new monsters, or new variants of a monster, every time we discover a new dungeon. Elyra does try to keep a log of everything, but their dataes from a more limited set of dungeons."
"So it''s new to Elyra, but we don''t know if it''s significant," Sev grumbled.
"Organisms that interact with mana in some way are prettymon," Vex said. "It''s an abundant resource, and it''s everywhere. But not ones made out of mana."
Kestel chose that moment to wander back over to them. "I made a ton of notes!" He said, in a voice that implied that he expected to hear apuse though he didn''t seem particrly bothered by the fact that no one apuded. "Hopefully we find another one of those. We know to keep an eye out for them now. They''re hard to spot even with [Mana Sight], because there''s so much mana around in dungeons... Tricky. Bodes well for this dungeon! Who knows what else we''ll discover."
"Looks like you''ll be discovering something else soon," Misa said, gesturing to the screen.
The delving team hade up to a door. That door stood out, looking like an old, decrepit nk of wood pressed flush against the polished ck stone of the dungeon.
"Ah! A challenge room!" Kestel grinned. "Perfect. We wanted to get to at least one of these before we pull back the delve team; they can take a break after this, and we can send you in next. What do you say?"
"I don''t know" Sev began.
"Sounds perfect!" Misa dered loudly, ring at Sev. He smirked at her, and she grumbled. "Smartass."
"Good!" Kestel pped his hands together, turning to the screen.
"How do you know it is a challenge room, and not a bonus room?" Derivan asked curiously, ncing at Vex. "I have always just thought of them as... rooms."
Vex opened his mouth to answer
"Ah! Good question!" Kestel said, immediately turning back from the screen while Vex blinked rapidly at how suddenly the head researcher had inserted himself into the conversation. "Challenge rooms force you to go through them to progress. Bonus rooms don''t. Sometimes bonus rooms don''t have physical entryways at all, and have entrance requirements that automatically transport you in when you fulfill them."
Kestrel nced at the screen as if ordering the delvers to pause while he rambled. "Those ones are always strange. I love them, because I don''t understand how they work, but some researchers hate them because the patterns between different rooms make no sense. I''ve seen it require specificbinations of spells, or spoken words... Sometimes you need to replicate a specific situation?"
"Ah," Derivan said, sounding a little bit stunned at the block of information Kestel had just thrown at him.
Vex chuckled a bit, and patted him on the arm. "Some of Elyra''s researchers are pretty enthusiastic. You get used to it."
Misa grinned at Vex. "You do know that''s just what you sound like all the time, right?"
"No it isn''t!" Vex said, looking offended.
"I understand it when Vex says it," Derivan said.
Misa smirked at that, shaking her head, and turned back to the screen as Kestel seemed to wave them to go ahead. The delve team opened the door into a strange, rocky cavern. All six of them streamed in, looking cautiously around the room challenge rooms like these were never really clear about what needed to be done toplete them. Littered about the floor were what looked like mana crystals.
"Are those crystals, or flowers?" Misa asked, squinting at them through the screens.
"If it''s a dungeon? Probably crystals," Vex answered. "But if it''s a challenge room? Almost definitely a trap."
"Don''t worry!" Kestel said cheerily. "We''re prepared for all the traps a dungeon can throw at us."
Misa peered at him. "It''s never a good idea to say that out loud."
"Bah! Confirmation bias!" Kestel said, clearly enjoying the opportunity to use the words ''confirmation bias''. "Things will happen the way they happen regardless of whether I say they''ll turn out well. I just remember all the times they don''t turn out well, because it''s usually terrifying."
"Well," Sev said. "In this case the dungeon adjusts itself to delvers, so if you''ve prepared for a lot of things..."
A strange orb formed in the center of the room, floating.
"...You might create a problem you can''t deal with," Sev said, eyeing the orb suspiciously. "Is it just me, or is that orb kind of menacing?"
Kestel paused. "Definitely not just you," he agreed.
Chapter 29: Its just floating there. Menacingly.
Chapter 29: It''s just floating there. Menacingly.
Misa frowned as she looked at the screen. There was something bothering her, and it wasn''t the strangely menacing orb, floating in the middle of the room which in and of itself was rather concerning, considering it should really have garnered all of her attention.
There was something else. She couldn''t quite ce her finger on what it was, though. Everything seemed fine, and none of the others seemed to have noticed anything...
Misa kept her mind sharp, and her eyes focused. Something about this was ringing danger to her, and the fact that it might be triggering her [Danger Sense] when she wasn''t even in the dungeon was worrying.
"Is anyone else''s [Danger Sense] going off?" Misa asked quietly. Sev and Kestel both looked back at her, but they each shook their heads; they didn''t sense anything.
"It''s definitely some kind of trap," Vex said cautiously. "But I''ve never seen anything like this before. I don''t know what it is."
"It''s something new!" Unlike everyone else, Kestel seemed rather enthusiastic about the discovering-something-new aspect of all this. Misa suppressed the urge to re at him. It wasn''t that he wasn''t concerned about the safety of the team, she told herself; he loved discovery, but that didn''t mean he was disregarding safety.
At hismand, the delve team approached the orb cautiously. When nothing happened, the captain carefully took off his pack, gesturing for the other delvers to stand back; they each stood a respectable distance away from him, keeping an eye out for any other dangers. He had several tools in the pack, Misa saw what they were she had no idea,
All in all, a well trained team. They more than likely had their own version of [Danger Sense] and there was no reason they wouldn''t have said anything if they had sensed anything. So was the danger not to them?
Or was it not [Danger Sense] at all that was giving her this sense of foreboding?
Misa had one more skill that she''d never quite been able to figure out the text on it was vague, it was a passive skill, and as far as she knew it had never been triggered.
[Guardian''s Premonition] [Passive Skill] [Grade: Maxed]
You know when the gate might fall.
There were other strange things about that skill, too, like the fact that it was a Unique skill for her otherwise Rare ss, and the fact that it had been maxed right from the get-go, no skill leveling needed. There was only one gate that she could think of that it might be rted to the gate into her vige, the one that had been trampled and crushed and, well...
...That gate had fallen a long time ago.
The point was that if it wasn''t [Danger Sense] that was pinging her, then it was that skill, and she had no idea what that meant.
"I have another skill that''s warning me something might be about to happen," Misa said out loud, just to make sure she wouldn''t get anyone killed by keeping this information to herself. "Keep an eye out."
Sev, Vex, and Derivan all nodded; Kestel gave her a bit of a strange look, but seemed to take her warning seriously. "What tier is your skill?"
"...Unique," Misa answered after a moment, and Kestel''s eyes sharpened.
"I''m going to link all four of you into our [Mass Telepathy]," he said. "Please consent."
There was a moment of pressure, as a new skill wrapped around her mind and asked her permission to enter. The moment she epted, that feeling of pressure vanished, and she heard Kestel speaking clearly across the mental link.
We have a Unique precognitive skill warning that there might be a problem in the near future, Kestel said without preamble. I want you to do a full check. Run through all the surveince skills you have.
Something still seemed wrong. Misa leaned forward with a frown; the others were still talking, but the noise faded into the background. This wasn''t even [Guardian''s Premonition] or [Danger Sense], just her own instinctsing into y; one of the delvers was moving a little strangely, and something about the movement fired off an old memory
"Skills are useful when ites to learning," V''karro told her. "But pit two fighters against one another, and the more experienced one will still win. Skills tell you how to do something, but experience tells you how you can change them. Tweak them to suit your needs."
"Oooh. I bet I can use that!" Misa grinned up at V''karro, her eyes bright. She was eleven at the time, and had a reputation for finding small little tricks that people could perform with their skills. "That means inexperienced fighters are gonna be using the same instincts, right? So if I watch how they move "
"That''s a risky game to y," V''karro interrupted, shaking his head and hiding his small grin of amusement. Misa saw it anyway, though, because she was observant. "If possible, don''t fight people at all. And if you do, don''t assume they''re inexperienced."
"Show me some anyway," Misa demanded, a little petntly, and he chuckled and obliged.
It was an old, old memory.
But one of the delvers was moving in a way that was familiar to her a subtle twitch of the fingers, shifting towards the belt, in exactly the way an inexperienced user of the skill would activate [Stealth Bolt]. She knew what V''karro had said; never assume that anyone was inexperienced, and yet...
Even if she was wrong, that delver was definitely activating a skill of some kind, and there was no reason for anyone to be activating a battle skill. Every other delver was looking around cautiously at the edges of the room, and they weren''t looking at themselves, at their own team; and
and there had been five of them, hadn''t there? Not six.
Fuck, she said, and then cursed again mentally when she realized she''d identally transmitted the word into the telepathic link. It didn''t matter. Convey information in as few words as possible, she told herself. Look out! Headcount!
To their credit, the delvers immediately jolted, ncing at one another but no one quite noticed the one among them reaching for a crossbow bolt. The captain shouted something that was indistinct through the telepathic link, that sounded like he was demanding for the team to take off their helmets so he could verify their identities, and then several things happened almost all at once.
The man who had been reaching for a crossbow bolt narrowed his eyes, looking not at all concerned, and moved quickly to load the bolt and aim it not at any of the delvers, but at the orb.
The captain nced at him and saw what was about to happen his hand snapped out and he lunged, trying to interrupt the path of the arrow.
The other delvers nearby reacted with startled surprise, then cursed, reaching for their weapons, but by that point it was toote; her warning had helped, but only a little. Only enough that they had the time to watch it all happen, because whoever the sixth delver was certainly not a delver at all he was monstrously fast.
The man''s finger pressed down on the crossbow''s trigger mechanism, and the bolt fired from the crossbow. It glowed with raw, imbued magic.
The captain''s hand brushed just the edge of that magic in his attempt to stop it. His flesh rotted down to the bone almost instantly, like his health didn''t even exist. His face was still contorted with determination he hadn''t had the time to react.
And [Guardian''s Premonition] finally, finally fully activated for the first time since she''d gained the skill, and she saw what was about to happen.
The bolt would strike the orb, charged with what seemed like necrotic energy. She didn''t know what the orb was, or what it was made of, but she saw the way that silver-ck mana raced across its surface like fire taking to oil until the entire thing was enveloped in impossible magic.
Then it would destabilize. It would explode, flinging that necrotic energy all over the room in a wave so intense that there was no defending against it. The entire team would be dead, reduced to bones and a few scraps of rotting flesh, for the few that had defensive Skills that would serve to protect some meager portion of them.
Misa saw this, and she spoke.
"No."
[To Fall Yet Hold the Line]
And there was, perhaps, some part of her that knew that this was a truly ridiculous extension of the skill. That she shouldn''t have tried. She felt the skill resist, even as she leveraged her will against it; she briefly saw the blue boxes that speared across her vision.
Nearby, Derivan started, like he''d seen something strange. He turned to her and reached out
But the impossible happened, and she vanished from the room.
"We need to get in there! That''s our friend!"
Derivan was listening to Vex yelling with a strangled sort of panic in his voice. Whatever had happened with Misa, she''d been disconnected from the telepathicwork. So had the rest of the delve team, for that matter. The scrying screens had been taken over by a static interference, something that they hadn''t thought was possible before they''d discovered the mana feeder; now no one knew what was happening inside the challenge room, or if any of them were still alive.
We can''t get in even if we want to, Kestel''s response was clipped and through the telepathicwork he didn''t bother speaking. He paced, tense, even as he rapidly cast several diagnostic spells to try to restore the scrying magic. You know that. You should know that.
"There has to be a way," Vex argued, but from the defeated look on his face Derivan knew that the lizardkin didn''t know of one himself.
Derivan himself was distracted, because one of his stats had increased. He wouldn''t have checked, if a brief error message hadn''t popped up and obscured his view; it had happened right when Misa seemed to tense, staring at the screen.
And then when he''d checked his stats...
Shift: 2
He wondered. What was a ''shift'', exactly?
Vex had subsided, looking frustrated; he had no solutions. But Derivan''s mind was racing.
Dungeons became locked off after a team entered. There were other rules, too, governing what locked off a dungeon, but this was the single one that could not be circumvented.
Except. Maybe it could be? Misa had clearly circumvented it. Whatever means she''d used to circumvent it likely her skill, knowing her had to be in some way rted to the stat gain she''d triggered for him. And there was the fact that he had started this life as a monster, too, and monsters were rarely prevented entry into dungeons. For them, it was the reverse.
The chatter on the telepathywork became about fixing the scry interference. Derivan shook his head; this was nothing he could help with. There was only one thing he could do, as far as he was concerned.
"I am going to try to enter the dungeon," he said. Vex and Sev both looked up at him, startled. "My status might allow me ess," he added, and Sev''s expression cleared; Vex''s expression changed, looking briefly hopeful.
"Can you bring us all through?" the lizardkin asked.
"I do not know," Derivan said. "But we can make the attempt, I think. It is better that we do. But if I cannot..."
He saw the worry in Vex''s eyes.
"I will still need your help," he added, partially to try to ameliorate Vex''s concerns; the lizardkin looked troubled, but he seemed to try to focus as Derivan spoke. "I trust your knowledge of magic. And I suspect that will be needed, for what we face here. But let us try to enter the dungeon first."
"We''ll need to equip you all with the scrying anchors," Kestel said out loud this time. He was staring at them in a mixture of wariness, hope, and interest. "We need to be able to see what''s going on in there, and there are spatial anomalies in the dungeon. If you really can get in, then you should be able to follow that path and not have to fight a single monster."
"Hit us with it, then," Sev nodded, and Kestel cast the spell. There was a slight tingle, and that was it, but the three of them were all suddenly visible on the scrying screens.
Nothing to it. They ran for the dungeon, and when they arrived the guard had already been informed, and stood aside for them Derivan held on to his friends'' hands, and pushed against the barrier.
ess deni
And then the notification vanished, and the three of them stepped through.
Chapter 30: Unstoppable Force, Immovable Misa
Chapter 30: Unstoppable Force, Immovable Misa
As a general rule, almost all skills had some sort of range limit, even if that range limit wasn''t stated. A fireball''s range depended on its strength; the further it traveled, the more the fire or the magic that maintained it would dissipate, and the weaker the spell was. A melee skill''s range depended on the size of the weapon you were using, and how much you could physically extend yourself.
More esoteric skills from rarer sses tended to bend the rules; they tried to obey the rules as they were written in the box. And while Misa had to be aware of an attack in order to block it, she was, in fact, aware of this attack.
But she was separated by the dimensional boundary that dungeons that were being actively delved had around them; she was aware of the attack only because of the particrly strangebination of scrying magics used to view what was happening in real-time across that boundary.
As far as anyone knew, physically crossing the boundary should have been impossible. It was an uncrossable boundary, dictated by the rules of the system.
And so the question became this: What were the rules-as-written, in this scenario?
Misa didn''t know. There were strange interactions, sometimes, between skills; rarer ones especially rarely had a predictable result when tested against the boundaries presented by the system.
Misa rolled the dice.
There was a bare fraction of a heartbeat''s worth of time that passed where the system seemed to freeze, uncertain. There was a moment that was stretched into eternity.
And then she was in the dungeon, in front of the necrotic bolt, her mace already raised in defense. The bolt nged uselessly against the metal, but she still felt the bite of an impossible, shearing pain as the system ripped away her Health; almost as if in punishment for the abuse of her Skill
but it wasn''t done yet. Her system was going wild, notifications pouring through the air in front of her.
Theoretical range limit for skill exceeded! Attempting topensate...
Reality-discement boundary found between user and skill target! Unable topensate
Boundary weakened by unknown effect. Proceeding with skill...
Skill conflict detected! Skill [Inexorable Bolt] conflicts with [To Fall Yet Hold the Line]. Resolving skill differences...
Multiple errors detected during skill use. Resolution failed. Compensation failed. Local boundaries degrading. Engaging fallbacks...
Fallback resolution determined.
Skill [Inexorable Bolt] has seeded. Skill [To Fall Yet Hold the Line] has seeded. Averaging results along local reality axis.
What the fuck?
Misa scarcely had the time to think the question she got her answer.
She blocked the bolt. She didn''t block the bolt. The skill both failed and seeded, and the average was picked between two possibilities; Misa was only half-present, one version of her blocking one version of an unerring bolt. The other version was never there, the bolt mming into the orb, and what had happened in her vision immediately came true necrotic energy washed into it like a ck tide, turning it pitch ck and exploding outwards in a searing wave of energy.
In one version of events, the delve team was unharmed, and Misa was there, having blocked the [Inexorable Bolt]. In the other, the bolt struck, and necrotic energy ripped through the entire team, and Misa had never been there.
A ripple pulsed, bringing together both possibilities into a single result and every member of the delve team staggered and copsed. Their flesh faded away like it had never existed, leaving behind only bone and empty sockets.
For a single, horrifying moment, it looked to Misa like she had failed. Like the only thing she''d seeded in doing was bringing herself into the dungeon, with no backup and a dead team to show for it.
They''re skeletons, Misa thought, dazed. I I didn''t block it? But I swear I fucking...
The skeletons moved.
"What the fuck," one of them shouted in horror; a skeleton of a human staring at his own hand with a morbid sort of fascination. "What the fuck"
"Calm down," the captain barked at least, Misa thought he was the captain. All she had to go off was the fact that he was closest to her, and to the pack on the ground. She''d seen two versions of him, both standing in slightly different ces, and she still hadn''tpletely reconciled what had happened.
Were they all... undead, now?
The sight was horrifying enough to make her feel vaguely nauseated, and the fact that any of them had the presence of mind to stay calm was frankly astonishing. "Look at your notifications," the captain added. "And more importantly."
"Miss." The captain directed his gaze at Misa; she didn''t know how to react, staring into empty eye sockets where she''d once seen life. "You''re in a high-level dungeon now. No matter what happens, you need to keep your wits about you."
"I... Yeah. Okay. I can do that." Misa swallowed once, her eyes hardening. They were skeletons. But they were alive? She could work with that. But...
...no. There was a bigger problem. A bigger danger. She''d almost forgotten.
"He''s still human," Misa hissed, pointing at the man that had fired the bolt. He was staring at the delve team in bemusement. Her senses screamed at her this man was dangerous, he''d orchestrated the death of the entire team and hadn''t changed in the resulting explosion, he didn''t seem shocked or bewildered or even the slightest bit concerned
"Well, of course I am. You think I''d do that if I couldn''t make sure I stayed alive?" He yawned, bored. "But now you''ve gone and ruined my ns. I guess it wasn''t aplete waste, though. This is pretty interesting."
"What the fuck," Misa said, gritting her teeth. All her worry about danger instantly vanished, reced by anger. Treating lives like they were ythings? Fuck all of that. "Exin, or I swear to the fucking gods"
"What, you think I''m just going to monologue at you?" The man smiled at her. "I got over that impulse two or three centuries ago. It''s fun, but it''s not really worth it." He sighed dramatically.
"That said, it looks like that thing is going to finish transforming any second now, so maybe it''ll do my job for me, eh? I''d say good luck, but frankly, I kind of just hope you all die." The man waved, starting to step backwards
The captain shed forward in an impossibly fast movement, his de sweeping out to catch the man''s neck. The strike hit, Misa was certain it did, and yet the de passed through the flesh like it wasn''t there at all; instead, he finished stepping backwards, through the wall; the captain''s followup strike mmed into the ck stone and skittered off ineffectually.
They were left with an orb that was an average of two possibilities which, as it turned out, meant that the necrotic energy wasn''tpletely taking over the orb. It was trying, stuttering in waves as it began to flicker over whatever the rest of it was, but then it would fail.
And cracks were forming along the orb almost like it was starting to hatch.
The entire team was tense, staring at it as the magic gathered and became almost palpable. Misa repositioned herself or more urately, she had been repositioned near the back of the line. The captain was grateful for what she''d done, but her level still made her a liability in the uing fight.
Misa didn''t argue. He was right. At best, her Skill allowed her to run interference. As powerful a skill as [To Fall Yet Hold the Line] was, Misa reflected, it had severe limitations.
She was grateful she had it. Whatever just happened wouldn''t have been possible without the skill, and though the oue was questionable, no one on the delve team seemed to be reacting strongly.
Yet, anyway. It was possible they were saving the hysteria for when they were out of a crisis.
But the limitations of the skill were showing themselves almost immediately. The delve team didn''t have a healer on hand; they were all built with self-healing, self-sustaining skills, given the penchant dungeons had for separating people. Misa was a dedicated damage-soaker without any of those skills any damage to her, for the duration of this fight, would be permanent. She could keep charges of her skill for emergencies, but it got progressively more dangerous to use it each time, and once she was too low on health she would be nearly useless in the fight.
She had a couple of health potions, and there was [Every Last Drop] to soak up some mana instead of health, but even those wouldn''tst forever... It was too much to think about. Misa shook her head; better to focus on the fight.
The orb cracked in half.
A blinding energy that wasn''t quite light erupted from within. Mana, Misa thought, dazed; it didn''t interact with her eyes in any way, but they still watered from the sight. She saw streams of red from where the mana was so dense that it distorted light, saw the way it flowed outward in a mockery of the humanoid form in an eerie reminder of the Overseer.
Two arms, then three, then five. Three on one side and two on the other; the bnce of the new creature was lopsided. Three arms were made out of red, arcane energy, the original color of the orb; two were made from the darker necrotic energy.
The torso was a thin, wispy thing that barely existed save to hold the limbs together, and the legs were barely present at all two protrusions jutting out from below its torso, brushing against the ground. They weren''t holding up any of the creature''s weight, appearing to exist solely because it was mimicking some vaguely humanoid form.
"Get ready," the captain said, his voice grim.
The mana-creature, or whatever it was, screeched. A system disy fizzed into being, oddly reluctant, above its head.
Level 73 Aberrant Arcane + Necrotic
A level 73 typed elite. It was the sort of thing you heard about heroes fighting, every time there was a dungeon break of some sort and the monsters flooded out; not the type of monster Misa expected she would face for many years, yet. But she was here now, surrounded by a team of soldiers much stronger than her.
Soldiers that had just been turned into skeletons through a paradoxical skill interaction. Misa grimaced slightly. There was no telling if that would affect their fighting abilities; it shouldn''t, but then nothing about that skill interaction should have happened. She felt guilt for what she''d done to them
She put the thought aside. She could feel guiltyter, as long as everyone was alive, for now. As long as she made sure everyone stayed alive.
Breathe. Watch. React.
The Aberrant attacked.
It moved in a clumsy, shuffling way that should have been uselessly slow; indeed, for a second or two it seemed to genuinely be tripping over itself. Then that movement turned into a fall, and the fall''s momentum was somehow redirected and boosted, and it shot with blinding speed towards the lizardkin captain.
The captain blocked. Arms filled with arcane energy crashed into the edge of his des, and the monster screeched again, a painful surge of sound that bled into Misa''s health. It didn''t seem to take any damage from his des, even though he tried to twist and slice; the des skated off the arcane energy like it was nothing, and then the Aberrant twisted, plunging both necrotic arms straight into the center of his chest.
A pause.
The Aberrant and captain both seemed briefly confused and then something seemed to click. He somehow grinned, though his head was nothing but skull and bone. "Necrotic damage ain''t gonna do shit to us now. Didn''t think of that, did ya, ya bastard?"
The Aberrant screeched again, not understanding a word and yet still managing to sound just a touch rmed. It understood enough to know that the fact that its prey had survived a hit made it dangerous.
The captain, of course, pressed his advantage. A de spun and twisted in his hand, even as the other kept the arcane arms upied; the second de mmed into the Aberrant''s center mass, directly towards the cracked ss orb that still hovered in the center.
But it skittered off yet again. They were almost at an impasse, except the Elyran delvers were all still vulnerable to the des of arcane mana that masqueraded as arms.
Misa saw three other delvers lunge at the Aberrant, trying to score hits with their own enchanted weaponry; just as before, the des seemed to deflect off the creature''s body. It saw that its opponents couldn''t hurt it, and the mana in the upper portion of its torso parted in a strange crescent
Was it grinning?
Fuck.
Chapter 31: Trigger
Chapter 31: Trigger
The Aberrant seemed to regain any confidence it had lost. It swept itself in a dancing circle, creating a st of arcane energy that knocked back every one of the delvers that were lunging at it; while they staggered, off-kilter, it lunged itself at one of them and mmed him into the ground. There was a shout, half panicked and half determined, trying to fend off the blow but arcane energy plunged into his chest and he screamed.
React, you idiot! Misa roared the words at herself. She''d been frozen, still off-bnce from what had happened to the soldiers when she tried to save them. Before she could do anything, though, another one of the delvers did; he switched out his des for a il, and brought the weapon swinging directly into the creature''s center mass.
For all that it seemed imprable, it was still light, its body mass nothing more than a collection of mana. The force of the strike sent it flying and crashing into a nearby wall. But that was hardly enough thews of physics seemed to bend around the creature; how did it exert so much force, if it had almost no mass behind it? Even now, it was getting up like nothing had happened...
"We need to retreat!" The captain called. The Aberrant seemed dazed, but mostly unharmed; if the blunt force had done some sort of damage to it, it wasn''t obvious. "We can''t damage it! Back towards the main hall, now! We need to see if we can get back in contact with the research team!"
Normally, the research team would give them an analysis of the enemy and a strategy but they''d been cut off.
And the Aberrant did not want them to retreat.
Misa saw what it was nning to do a second before it acted, and this time, she reacted.
She''d reserve her skill for when it was necessary; along with the extra damage she''d taken from the thing''s screams, she was down to about 70% of her health. She could take six more hits with [To Fall Yet Hold the Line], and a few more with [Every Last Drop] and her mana; for the most part that was better than tanking the hits herself, because any hits this monster dealt would no doubt wipe out all her remaining health, given their level difference.
But the monster was light, and she could use that.
She swung her mace directly into the Aberrant''s leg as it sailed over her head, the monster apparently nning to copse the exit before they could escape. Forward momentum turned into torque, and the monster was sent flipping over backwards into the upper edge of the doorway.
When it wasn''t actively applying force, it seemed to be vulnerable to having forces applied to it. Useful to know, but only good for keeping it knocked back, perhaps. The captain was already moving,unching himself toward the Aberrant before it could recover. "I''ll keep the bastard upied!"
Then he kicked the monster, hard. He''d evidently figured the same thing.
It mmed into the opposite wall of the cavern and screeched.
Misa winced. The sound alone was enough to chunk her health again, but it didn''t help that the soldiers didn''t move to retreat quite as quickly as they should have.
"He''s telling you to retreat, so go!" Misa roared, and the shout was enough to startle the other delvers into moving. They weren''tpletely used to their bodies yet, she could see without flesh and muscle, their bodies were just a lot lighter than they usually were. That discrepancy kept throwing them off.
What Misa was wondering was why none of them seemed to have any skills for the situation. They seemed to be all physicalbat fighters, but surely that wasn''t a good setup for a delve team?
There was no time for that, though. The Aberrant could see them retreating, and while the captain was slowing it down, he couldn''t stop everything it did. It blew past him in a sudden, flickering movement, charging straight at the retreating team; two of them tried to block it, but they were tossed aside like they were made of paper, and it mmed into a third
Nope, Misa thought. Fuck that.
She didn''t have a lot of health left. But she didn''t need a lot of her health.
She blocked.
It screeched at her, loud and painful, and that one she didn''t block since the damage it did was minimal; the skeletons that had been tossed to the side scrambled back to their feet. They looked like they wanted to help
"Fucking go!" Misa yelled, right as the Aberrant tried to spear her with an arcane de; she didn''t react in time, momentarily distracted, but right before the de would have pierced her the captain body-checked the Aberrant out of the way.
"Listen to your own advice, miss," he said, and then seemed surprised. "Huh. Well, what do ya know. I''m usually more out of breath after that."
"Are you going to be okay?" Misa asked, her voice steely. The captain chuckled, even while the Aberrant circled them from farther away, still grinning that manic grin.
"We''re about to find out, I s''ppose," he said, perhaps a little more cheerily than he should have, given the circumstances.
"What''s your name?" Misa asked, because it felt wrong to just run without knowing the name of this person, and she wasn''t sure she wanted to run at all.
"Name''s Harold," the captain said easily, but his eyes were sharp, and tracing the Aberrant''s movements. It was twitching sporadically, like it was about to attack.
Just as it darted forward with incredible speed, Harold reached back and pressed a hand to her shoulder
And suddenly she found herself in the corridor outside the room, among the other delvers; they visibly started at her appearance, bones rattling.
He''d figured her out, then. But what kind of skill was that?
"We need to get backup," one of the now-skeletons told her, and she nodded, a little hesitantly. She wasn''t the only one, either; they all had some experience with dungeons, and while it was necessary to retreat sometimes, dungeons never liked it when they did.
Especially when retreating from a challenge room. There would almost certainly be a trap, in fact, but they were all on the lookout for it; as long as they were careful they''d probably be able to work around it.
That thought was, perhaps, foolishly optimistic.
Misa only barely caught the glimmer of a trap activating in the corridor ahead of them, along with a flicker of a familiarugh. It gave her just enough time to respond. The others were reacting, too, but they didn''t seem to have skills they could do it with they just sort of gathered in front of her, as if they could protect her from the mes of concentrated night that were spewing forward from the opposing wall.
Misa did the only thing she could do she blocked it with [To Fall Yet Hold the Line]. She mmed a glowing mace into the ground, and a shimmering shield appeared in front of all of them, blocking the mes.
One of the soldiers tried destroying the trap, dashing forward and mming his il into it, but it took barely a scratch of health as damage, and he quickly retreated back into the range of the block.
"The fire''s filled the corridor ahead, too," he told them. He sounded worried. "And that fire does a lot of damage."
Misa wasn''t paying much attention. She gritted her teeth. There was a problem here, and the problem was how the skill worked with sustained attacks. She''d tested it before, but the results had been rather useless. It was as likely to tick multiple times during a sustained attack as it was to only tick once. There was some metric by which it operated, but she hadn''t figured it out.
And the secondary problem was that she couldn''t move while she was doing it.
"I can''t hold this for long," Misa said grimly once she saw her health tick down twice. "Run back. I dunno if you heard thatugh, but this trap should have stopped by now; it''s the fucking guy with the crossbow again. Whoever that is."
The soldiers tried to help, using a variety of skills to try to smash apart the traps, but they just had so much health, and they kept having to run back into the range of the block to have the time to heal and recover
33% left.
"Go back," she said. She knew her team they would be on the way. Not a single one of them would give up on her if she just vanished, and they were exactly the types of fuckers that would find a way into the dungeon, rules be damned. They''d find a way to help the soldiers, too.
Her job now was to keep them alive. She''d done this same thing a very long time ago, though it was more battle-fraught than just this. This was what she did. She protected. It didn''t matter who.
"I''m not going to see anyone die on my watch," she said, her voice firm. "Go back. Backup will being."
"But you" A delver protested, but her health hit zero, and the block flickered out
Activation conditions for the bonus room The Vige''s Last Defense> have been met.
Transporting: Misa, level 42, [Fallen Guardian]
The vige of J''rokksur will soon be besieged by monsters following a dungeon break. The defenders of the vige cannot stand up to such a siege by themselves. Help the vigers mount their final defense, or die trying.
There was a long, long pause.
Misa didn''t read the entire message. Her eyes focused on a name she hadn''t seen for far too long.
The world faded away around her, and another world faded in. One that was too familiar to her; one that she''d lost before, except now it was standing proud and strong; the vige she had failed to defend, once upon a time.
She''d almost suspected it, given what the dungeon had called this room. But it hadn''t seemed possible, and the mere idea of it had seemed so cruel... She''d heard of it before, dungeons that replicated events from the past. Dungeons that required you to take on historical events. They were one of the few ways tinum adventurers were able to uncover new aspects of their broken history.
But this?
What were her choices, here? To fail and fall one final time? Or to seed, and be forced to endure a vision of what had never been?
She stared at her old vige. She could hear the sound of childrenughing, could smell her favorite stew cooking in themunal pot. She heard the sound of her own mother, loudlyining about the quality of the fish she''d been given.
The fact that she''d been so close to death her health had hit zero meant almost nothing to her. Not in front of this... this mockery of what she had lost.
Misa fell to her knees and wept.
Derivan had been a fraction of a second toote. Vex and Sev were behind him, screaming something but he didn''t quite catch the words. He was too busy staring at the scene in front of him, a dim horror flickering in his soul.
Misa had been there. Not strictly visible, around the bend of the corridor, but he knew the sound of her voice, the glow of her skills. He knew what it looked like when that skill failed.
He''d seen the dark mes zing in front of him and known something was wrong, but even pouring on all the speed he could, he just didn''t have the stats. His des mmed into the weak stone that was emitting the mes just a second toote, and whatever health they had didn''t matter, because health didn''t matter for him. They shattered, and the mes guttered out.
Vex had tried to cast a spell. Sev had just tried to heal. But range and line of sight were factors, and neither of them had quite been able to destroy the trap or heal their friend in time.
It took them a moment to actually read and understand the messages that appeared, announced for all of them: the activation of the bonus room, and the transportation of one Misa into an old, painful memory.
But they did, and a grim determination settled in their souls.
"We''re not letting her do that alone," Sev said.
"No," Vex and Derivan both agreed.
Chapter 32: Aberrant
Chapter 32: Aberrant
Derivan would have frowned, if he could have. The lights in his armor dimmed to show his worry.
Helping Misa was, of course, easier said than done. None of them had any idea how they could get to where she was, and Kestel was frantic through the telepathic connection, telling them to find the delve team.
That telepathy faded into a horrified silence as the mes faded and revealed a corridor full of ckened skeletons in front of them.
Sev, Derivan, and Vex all tensed. The fact that all those skeletons were upright didn''t bode particrly well for them, since it meant they were more likely to be monsters, but none of them seemed like they were about to attack if anything, they looked about as depressed as skeletons could look.
So much so that Derivan couldn''t help but speak. "Are you... alright?" He asked, cautiously.
What are you doing? You need to find the delve team, someone on the research team snapped. Kill them and get it over with.
Derivan ignored whoever that was, focusing instead on the skeleton that stepped forward a lizardkin skeleton, judging by the snout and tail. The defeated slump of its shoulders turned almost angry when he spoke, and it snapped at him. "What do you think? If you''d been just a second faster"
"They still saved us," another lizardkin skeleton pointed out, putting a hand on the first one''s shoulder.
"We could have survived if we ran back into the room! And if they''d just done it faster"
"That''s not how it works and you know it, Ixiss," the second skeleton said.
Ixiss?A voice came through the telepathic connection, sounding horrified. Was it Kestel speaking? The emotional bnce was different, and made it harder to identify.
"Are you the backup?" A third skeleton asked.
There was a short pause as the adventurers and the research team, really processed that this was the delve team.
What... happened to them? That was definitely Kestel; still emotionally off-bnce, but slightly clearer.
"We are," Derivan replied, looking down the corridor. He was worried. He could hear fighting in the distance.
"How did you get in?" The first lizardkin skeleton Ixiss, Derivan remembered asked suspiciously. "That shouldn''t be possible. I swear, if you''re another dungeon trick"
"Ixiss," the skeleton that had a hand on the lizardkin''s shoulder hissed again. "Give them a chance to exin before you start threatening them!"
"Uh," Vex spoke up, raising a hand. "One of us has a skill that lets us... get through dimensional boundaries like that. But we''re still in contact with the research team, so if you need to verify anything"
"Tell me what our delve team code is," Ixiss immediately said.
AA63, Kestel said over the telepathic link, sounding tired.
"AA63," Vex repeated dutifully. Derivan had no idea what that meant. Some kind of numbering system? Vex seemed to know, though, with the way he sagged slightly.
Ixiss... had eye sockets, and so couldn''t narrow his eyes at them. He still managed to give off the impression that he was narrowing his eyes at them, stepping forward and rattling his tail in a threatening sort of way, which was astonishing considering he couldn''t have been a skeleton for long. "Fine," the lizardkin hissed at them. "But if I so much as smell a hint of betrayal"
"You''ll have to forgive him," the other lizardkin skeleton finally said, using her grip on Ixiss'' shoulder. Her posture was significantly friendlier than his, and she gave them a rxed, evaluating sort of look. "He''s a little on edge. On ount of the whole being turned into skeletons because a dungeon monster snuck in and posed as one of us."
"It''s better than" Ixiss started, and the other skeleton smacked him on the snout. He looked stunned.
"Shut up. They can hear us, idiot," she said. "My name''s Iliss. This idiot''s my brother. We''re like this because a half-orc appeared and saved our lives, but there was some sort of skill interaction that messed with it. We have the notification boxes to prove it."
"Who was that half-orc, anyway?" One of the others asked. "She just... showed up. And then..."
They fell silent briefly.
"She''s our friend," Sev said quietly. His grip on his staff was tense. "We need to get to her."
"You''re going to have to deal with the challenge room first either way. I don''t think we''ll be replicating the activation conditions for that bonus room, so your best bet is to use one of the dungeon rewards to get there. Our captain is still fighting in the room ahead," Iliss briefed quickly. "There''s a monster we can''t damage. We were going to try toe back and contact the research team, get them to reapply the scrying and telepathy spells. See if they can figure out why."
What kind of monster is it? Kestel asked, and Derivan ryed the question.
"Level 73 Aberrant. Arcane and Necrotic types," Iliss said.
"What?" Vex frowned at that, and Kestel made almost the same noise over the telepathic connection. "That shouldn''t be possible. Those mana types are ipatible."
"Well, we''re also all skeletons now, so," Iliss said drily. "I think impossible flew out of the window a while ago."
"You are remarkably calm about this," Derivan observed.
"We''re a delve team. We''ve been through some shit," Iliss said bluntly. She nced back at one member of the skeletons, though, one that still hadn''t said anything and was staring at their own hands, trembling slightly, and she sighed.
"...Most of us, anyway," she added quietly.
Get to the challenge room. We need to see what we''re dealing with, Kestel said. Derivan nodded.
"We are going to check the challenge room," he said out loud, perhaps unnecessarily. Iliss just shrugged and fell into step behind him, and the other delvers did as well; Derivan led the way, with Vex and Sev following close behind him.
The captain of the delve team still in skeleton form, with his equipment loosely hanging off a body that it was no longer fit for was still holding off the Aberrant. To his credit, he didn''t seem to be the slightest bit exhausted. "I can do this all day, ya bastard!" He told the Aberrant, who screeched uprehendingly at him.
Iliss, somewhere behind Derivan, sighed. The captain seemed to notice, though he didn''t look their way or give any indication that they were there. He spoke at the same volume, still shouting as if he was shouting at the Aberrant. "I hope ya got some kind of solution! I can keep this up for a while yet, but not forever!"
Clever. He was even maneuvering the fight so that the Aberrant was focusing on him, and the rest of them wouldn''t be in its field of view though given it didn''t really have eyes, it wasn''t exactly clear what sort of field of view it had. It certainly didn''t seem to notice or care that they were there, though.
"I hope the miss is alright! I saw some notifications but I couldn''t check ''em!" He continued yelling. "And if anything happens to me, I want ya to know, my team was great! Ixiss is probably the best fighter I''ve got"
"Oh by the gods," Iliss groaned. "He''s gonna keep talking. Figure out how to kill that thing quick, please."
Vex was staring ahead, concentrating on the Aberrant. It''s weird, he said over the telepathic connection. The necrotic and arcane mana aren''t interacting at all. It''s just sort of... there. It''s like there''s an invisible boundary between the two types of mana. Some kind of metastable barrier? Reminds me of...
He trailed off, not borating.
There shouldn''t be one, Kestel frowned. That''s not how that works. Arcane type mana attracts and transforms into most other types of mana on contact.
Yes, well, it looks like there is. Can''t tell you why. Vex''s eyes glowed slightly as he focused in on his mana sight, but it didn''t seem to give him too much more information. It has some type of mana core... I''m assuming that''s its weakness. There''s a crystal in the center holding its body together. But physical attacks can''t seem to get to it.
Yes, it''s an Aberrant. But physical attacks are what Aberrants are weak to, Kestel said. It shouldn''t be immune to them.
Aberrants are a known type of monster? Derivan asked.
Yes. We''ve encountered them in a few dungeons. They''re always immune to magic and have a physical core that we need to hit for them to take health damage. They have a skill, [Ethereal Body], that makes other hits just whiff through them if you don''t hit the core.
"Great," Sev said out loud. "An aberrant Aberrant. Do we need to try magic?"
Bad idea, Kestel said quickly. Aberrants are a problem because of the arcane mana. They''re able to absorb and transform most types of magic.
"Don''t you have something you can do about that?" Sev said, raising a brow at Vex. "You did it to the Overseer."
"...I might be able to," Vex said, frowning slightly. "But it might not be a good idea. We need to understand why it''s immune to attacks, first."
"Do you think it''s a system glitch?" Sev asked suddenly. "The system''s obviously been more unstable than usualtely. And there''s whatever happened with the delvers..."
Vex was silent for a moment, but then his eyes sharpened a bit. "...I think you''re right. My spell wouldn''t work. Derivan, we''re going to need you for this."
It took more time than Misa wanted for her to be able to gather herself, but gather herself she did. She wasn''t sure how much time had passed, really. An hour? Maybe two? Probably not nearly that much, but she had no real concept of how much time had passed; she was still trembling slightly when she got to her feet, but she took a breath and tried to let her emotions pass through her.
Meditation. Vex had taught her how to do it not too long ago. She''d thought it was a waste of time; who knew it would be proving itself useful here?
There didn''t seem to be any way out of the... bonus room, if it could be called that. The whole ce just looked like a perfect replica of her vige and the field surrounding it. Which meant that the only way to leave would be to seed or to fail.
Illusion or not cruel or not Misa was not going to let her home be destroyed in front of her a second time.
Part of her did wonder, though, what would happen if she traveled away from the vige. There were open skies above her and no walls that she could make out. She knew what direction the monsters hade from the first time around. Would it be the same this time? Could she go there, and see what had happened?
Vex would know. He always knew the little intricacies of how dungeons worked. Misa abruptly realized that her team must be wondering what had happened to her, and, feeling a little frantic, tried to check the message interface through her system.
Time differential is too significant for system-based messages to operate in real-time.
...Huh.
There was a message waiting for her from Sev, blinking in the system; it was just four words. [We''reing to help.]
Her heart still stung a bit from the situation she was in, but she couldn''t help but smile slightly anyway. No hint of hesitation, no hint of doubt. They didn''t even know how they were going to do it, but they were going to do it anyway.
Well, if anyone would figure out how to join her, it would be them. Hopefully they''d find a way to deal with that Aberrant, too.
Feeling a little better, Misa took onest deep breath, staring fixedly in the direction of her vige, before finally heading towards it. She could still hear the sounds of her friends and family all faces she hadn''t seen for what felt like a lifetime. She was bracing herself for it, really. She''d long assumed that she''d never see these faces again...
If nothing else, it would at least be an opportunity tomit them to memory, onest time. It was an opportunity she didn''t think she''d ever have.
Chapter 33: Past Pains
Chapter 33: Past Pains
Misa hadn''t actually spawned very far away, and it took only a minute or so of walking for her to reach the walls of her vige. She felt her heart tightening as she approached there were guards stationed near the gates of the vige. Those guards had been the first ones to...
"Name and purpose, miss?" a guard asked as she approached. Misa recognized him immediately; it was V''karro. How strange was it that she''d remembered him not too long ago, and now she was seeing him again? The old guard that had taught her about skills, once upon a time...
He''d probably saved the delvers'' lives, even if he didn''t know it. It was because of his training that she''d spotted anything at all.
For the first time in a long time, Misa reached back into her memories, trying to ce what she remembered of him. He had always been kind to her. He''d always wanted a daughter, apparently, but he never really had the opportunity and while he wasn''t a recement for her father, he''d always been like an uncle to her.
V''karro now was as kind as she remembered. Most guards were more suspicious of people they regarded as neers. What made her hesitate was the fact that she didn''t know whether or not he would recognize her, and she didn''t know which one she preferred.
She''d been so much younger when this had happened.
"...It''s me. Misa," she eventually replied, her voice rougher than she intended. Part of her wanted to pretend like everything was normal but she couldn''t. She couldn''t stop remembering that very same face, covered in blood, stiff after death had taken him.
She tried to wipe the thought away. She wouldn''t let it happen again. But V''karro saw the change in her eyes, she was sure; the guard''s eyes softened a little more as he studied her.
There was something that might have been a flicker of recognition, but it seemed to disappear almost as soon as it appeared.
"...I''m afraid I don''t know anyone by that name, miss," V''karro said apologetically.
Misa took a deep breath. She didn''t know what she''d expected from the dungeon, and didn''t know if it was worse or better that the orc didn''t know who she was. "Sorry," she said. "I must''ve mistaken you for someone else. If you''re not him, then you must be V''karro, right?"
"That''s right," V''karro grinned at her; part of him seemed relieved that the apparent distress in her eyes had faded. "You''ve heard of me?"
"You could say that," Misa said with a chuckle. She didn''t know how he could possibly expect anyone outside their little vige to know who he was. They were in too remote a ce, their adventurers barely strong enough to keep their vige stable and connected to the system. But she saw the way he brightened at the thought that his antics might have spread some ways outside the vige, and she didn''t want to take that away from him. "That''s not important, though. Can you bring me to talk to Orkas? It''s important."
"The vige head?" V''karro asked, raising an eyebrow, and shrugged when she gave a determined nod in response. "Well, if you''re sure. He''s been a bit grumpytely, though, so you best be careful."
"I think I know how to handle him," Misa said with a light chuckle.
Her heart still ached. But a part of her was looking forward to seeing her father again.
Misa had spent so many years thinking about what she could have done differently what everyone could have done differently. This was her chance to put it all into action.
The only wrench in her ns was that if the vige didn''t remember her, it''d be far harder to convince them to listen to her. They were all rather stubborn. So, first things first, she needed to convince the man whose word the entire vige trusted.
The only problem was that Orkas had been her father, and he was... sort of an asshole. Sometimes. Not all the time, and mostly not to her but to strangers?
Well.
"You''re telling me that we''re going to be attacked soon, and we need to prepare our entire vige for it." Orkas'' voice was disbelieving, and his arms were folded across his chest. He''d done much the same every time he reprimanded her. "You understand why this is hard to believe, right?"
"Yes," Misa admitted. "But it wouldn''t hurt to prepare even if you didn''t believe me."
"It might." Orkas narrowed his eyes at her. "Our vige barely has any visitors; certainly not enough for me to believe that any outsider would know enough about us to ask for me right off the bat. The Kingdoms are very vocal about their desire to track down rare sses, and though we have always turned their emissaries away, getting us to prepare for some nebulous, impending disaster would surely reveal any trump cards we have."
Misa sighed.
Her father had always been paranoid about the Kingdoms. It wasn''t his fault, really he''d lost his older brother to Anderstahl, long before he''d joined this vige. From what she''d heard, the man was a powerful warrior and Guardian, not unlike the ss she''d eventually achieved; Anderstahl had taken him, and her father had never heard from him again.
He refused to believe he might be still alive. Arval, he said, would have done everything in his power to get back to him. A long time ago, Misa took his words at face value; now, she wondered how Arval would have managed to find him in the first ce, considering everything he did to keep the vige hidden.
Maybe her uncle was still alive somewhere, she thought suddenly. She''d never really thought about it the memories of her home were too painful. But if Arval was still alive...
He deserved to know what happened to his brother, didn''t he?
"Got nothing else to say?" Orkas'' eyes were still narrowed at her.
"I don''t have any way to prove that an attack ising," Misa admitted with a frustrated re. "And you''ve created a situation where anything I tell you could just be another lie used to try to get you to reveal your secrets. What else am I supposed to say?"
She couldn''t tell him that this was a dungeon''s test, could she? She had no idea how he''d take that. She couldn''t tell him that she was his daughter, or at least the daughter of another version of him. She didn''t even know what was different in this vige. Was Orkas still with her mother?
"Then we agree that there''s nothing more for you here," Orkas said with a derisive snort. "Tell whatever kingdom you came from"
"I''m not from another Kingdom!" Misa exploded. "For fuck''s sake, just listen to me and get everyone ready! We don''t have time for this!"
"Not until you tell me the truth!" Orkas thundered at her, and Misa fumed.
"You wouldn''t believe me if I told you!"
"Try me."
"Fine."
Fuck not talking about it. Misa had no idea if this was the right thing to do, but it was toote; the words were already spilling out of her mouth.
"All of this already happened, three goddamn years ago, and I couldn''t do shit to protect it! Do you want to know how I felt when I woke up surrounded by the corpses of everyone I ever loved? Uncle V''karro''s body was right next to me! You were dead in the fucking doorway, a pile of monster corpses in front of you! You killed everyst shit that tried to get into our house and you died doing it, and it still wasn''t fucking enough because mom was dead anyway! And now this stupid dungeon is making me relive this shitty fucking day, and I just want to fix it, and you won''t fucking listen!"
Misa''s chest was heaving. Her eyes were wet; she couldn''t see her father''s expression clearly through the film of tears in her eyes. She hated the fact that she was crying again, but she didn''t know what she''d expected ing face to face again with all these long-dead souls, looking and sounding exactly like the people she''d known for most of her life...
There was a long silence, broken up only by the sound of Misa''s shuddering breaths.
"...I thought it was strange that your name was Misa," her father said softly, his tone suddenly quiet. The hostility was gone, reced by a strange sort of distant pain. "That was what we wanted to name our daughter."
Misa didn''t answer. She tried to get her breathing under control so she could, taking slow, shaky breaths. There was a dim realization that her father was saying something important, and she took it in slowly, wrestling her own emotions under control as he spoke.
"She was stillborn," Orkas continued. He didn''t look at Misa. Instead, he stared into the distance, painful memories reflecting in his eyes. "Charise was never really the same after that."
Charise. Her mother. Misa was quiet for another moment as her breath steadied, and Orkas seemed willing to give her all the time she needed to calm down. When she did, she spoke with a quiet voice.
"How is she?"
"As fine as she can be." Orkas shook his head. "Some days are better than others. When you... when our child died, she would not stop saying that the world was wrong. That this was not supposed to happen. I thought it was mere denial; that she was speaking with the grief of a mother... and yet now you''re here, telling me a story much along those same lines.
"And today, of all days, she woke, and told me that things would be better today. That the world was right again. I did not know what she meant, and I did not want to believe, when I first heard your name..."
Orkas'' eyes hardened. "You understand, of course, that if you are lying about this, there will be consequences."
Misa nodded slowly. "...I wish I was," she said softly.
Orkas nodded. He stood abruptly, brushing his cloak to the side as he stepped around the table. "Daughter," he said, as if tasting the word. He ced a hand on Misa''s shoulder. "...I wish I could be more of a father to you. But some truths are difficult for the heart to ept, and even if Ipletely believed you, I do not know you. This version of me never saw your childhood, was never able to help you grow nor make the mistakes that I am certain that I made.
"You im this to be a simtion by a dungeon. I can only say that it does not feel that I am a mere simtion. Whatever this dungeon has done... Perhaps it is cruel, to give us both a glimpse of what could have been. Or perhaps it believes it is being kind. I cannot say.
"But for what it is worth..." Orkas'' voice grew briefly rough, though he was facing away from Misa and would not meet her eyes. "I am looking forward to seeing who my daughter could have been."
Misa swallowed, feeling a lump in her throat. She would not cry a third time. Instead, she nodded, and Orkas gestured for her to follow.
"Come. I will prepare the vige, and set up the traps as you outlined. But you should meet your mother."
Chapter 34: A Mothers Intuition
Chapter 34: A Mother''s Intuition
As it turned out, the decision to not cry for a third time was a stupid one. Misa decided to give herself a pass. Her mother was holding her again, sobbing into her shoulder, and as much as she hated seeing her cry, she was alive.
She never thought she''d be able to hold her mother again. Of course, she''d never imagined her mother being the one to cry, either.
"Mom," she said softly. "It''s good to see you." Again, she wanted to say, but then she''d never seen this version of her mother before, had she?
"Misa," Charise cried, clinging tightly to Misa''srger form and refusing to let go. "I knew you were back I knew as soon as you were here But I thought I might have been going insane..."
"You weren''t." Misa''s tone was gentle, and her voice was steady, though her eyes were still wet. Orkas had said it was difficult for him to truly be her father, since he''d missed so much of her growth; by contrast, with her mother, it didn''t seem to matter. Charise was just... d to have her there.
It hurt her heart to see the way her mother trembled. Misa was used to seeing her mother as a whirlwind of energy; she was a woman who always seemed to know what she wanted and what she needed to do to get it. It had something to do with her ss, from what Misa understood she''d never been told exactly what it was, but it seemed to give her a powerful and unmatched intuition that paired perfectly with her attitude.
From the stories she''d heard, Charise had been the one to pursue Orkas, back when they first met. She''d beaten him in a duel to do it, and when asked what she wanted for a prize, she''d requested a kiss.
Apparently, no one in the vige had ever seen Orkas blush before. Or since.
That was the confidence that Charise once had. Misa had never seen her mother like this, on the cusp of breaking down entirely.
"I knew something was wrong," Charise told her. "I had a skill. I saw the world split, when you died... and something impossible happened. But I didn''t understand. I still don''t."
Misa hesitated. Orkas hadn''t exined anything when he dropped her off, only said her name.
"It''s...plicated," she hedged at first but she saw the way her mother sagged. She needed answers; she''d gone twenty years without them, working only with an intuition that told her what had happened was impossible. It was a wonder that her mind had stayed intact at all.
So Misa gathered herself, and exined what had happened. Less angrily than she had with Orkas, of course. Charise was mostly silent as Misa spoke, but rather than distressed, she seemed relieved. Her tears abated somewhat during Misa''s exnation, though she continued to hold her daughter close.
"It... doesn''t answer all my questions, but it exins a lot," Charise said. She smiled gently, wiped her tears away, and then sat down on the mossy ground; she patted the space next to her, and Misa took a seat. She didn''t fail to notice the way her mother still shook slightly when she moved, but she was rapidly regaining her confidence, at least. "My skills... Did I ever exin my skills to you?"
Misa shook her head. "You always said you would one day, but you didn''t want to do it yet."
"Yes, I wouldn''t have." Her mother managed a weak smile. "[Intuitionist] is a strange ss, and talking about it will sometimes grant listeners the ss directly. It''s not something I wanted to inflict on you. I wanted you to be able to get a ss of your own."
"There''s a ss you can spread just by talking about it?" Misa asked, sounding a bit rmed. Her mother chuckled, though the sound was a small.
"I know what you''re thinking. It''s a self-solving problem. It doesn''t work if you''re intentionally trying to spread it," Charlise told her. "It has... an intuition about it, you could say."
"Mom," Misa groaned.
"It''s amon ss, but people don''t talk about it much because it''s mostly uninteresting, besides its ability to unintentionally spread. I don''t know for sure, but my intuition tells me " here Charlise gave her a wry smile "that the ss is granted to you if you intuit something about it. Or if you intuit its existence, which is how I got the ss, even though I didn''t want it."
"It still feels like some kind of trap," Misa mumbled. "Wouldn''t there be some way around it? What if you told someone to go talk about it in the middle of a vige, without telling them what talking about it does? What if you put up posters about it? What if"
Charise blinked as Misa rambled, and then openlyughed.
"You always did love exploiting the system," she said with a grin. Misa smiled back at her, momentarily feeling like everything was normal and right in a way that it hadn''t been for years
and then her mother just paused, as if struck. Realization hit her, Misa stared at her, too, feeling like her heart had stopped for a split second. Her mother blinked once, twice, fallingpletely silent; she seemed to strain, reaching for something Misa couldn''t see...
And then a tear fell from her eye. "Ah, shit," she said to herself, shaking her head. "I almost had it."
"Mom?" Misa asked softly.
"[Intuitionist]es with a skill, [Intuition of Truth]. It''s not a lie detector, exactly, but it gives you a gut feeling about the underlying nature of things, and I''ve trained mine carefully. It keeps... trying to give me the ''true'' version of events. What really happened, not what happened here, wherever ''here'' is. But it''s an intuition skill, not a knowledge skill; it can''t tell me everything. It can just give me... glimpses."
Charise blinked, then sniffled. "...I want to know what your childhood was like very badly, Misa. I want to know what kind of mother I was. What kind of father Orkas was. But that knowledge is so distant to me, and yet it is just out of my reach, and I feel like if I could just grasp at the truth..."
Her mother sighed, looking tired. "At least now I know I was right," she said softly.
Misa reached out to take one of her mother''s hands into her own. She didn''t say a word. This woman was her mother she wore her face, her mannerisms, her clothing, and yet she didn''t know this version of her mother at all; she didn''t know what she had been through.
Charise shook her head. "Everyone told me I was lying to myself, when I said that you should be alive. And the truth is that I, too, thought that that was what I was doing. It didn''t make any sense. In any ordinary situation, [Intuition of Truth] would have forced me to confront the truth of your death. But... whatever the nature of the skill is, it seems that it doesn''t care for simted reality, only the true one."
"I mistook the voice of the skill for my own voice, and I didn''t understand why my skill wasn''t helping me confront what happened to you. It was... difficult to stay sane in the face of that, let me tell you." Her mother gave her a small, weak smile. "Though I''m d I did."
"I can''t imagine," Misa admitted.
There was a small silence, and then her mother spoke, her voice soft. "Once this is over... You don''t know what will happen to this ce, do you?"
"I wish I did," Misa said, tightening her fists. She''d sent a message to Vex some time ago, but there was no response yet. "But I don''t."
"Then I better say what I never had the chance to say in either lifetime," Charise said, slowly getting to her feet. She smiled the warmest smile she could muster, through the tears glimmering in the corners of her eyes. "I am proud of the woman you became. You did everything you could then, as I know you will do everything you can now; no matter what happens now or what happened then, know that I love you, and that you will always be my daughter."
Misa swallowed the lump in her throat. Did this count as another pass to cry?
...Fuck it. She felt the tearse, and saw her mother lean down to gather her into a hug.
Just a few minutes, in the arms of someone she never thought she''d see again. She''d thought it was a cruelty, that the dungeon was doing this to her.
But perhaps it was something of a kindness, too.
"Now, before you help save us all," Charlise said, smiling gently at her. Misa''s heart ached at the sight it was so familiar, but it was so much more tired than she remembered. "Do you want some fish stew?"
Misa choked back a tearfulugh. "Yeah. Sure. It''s been a long time since I''ve had any. It was my favorite, you know."
"How could it not be?" Her mother said with a chuckle. "It''s mine, too."
And when she took her first sips of the stew, she had to stop briefly. The rich smell brought her back to the days of old, when everything was simple, and at the same time...
It made her think of her home. The new one, the one she''d found with Vex, and Derivan, and Sev.
"Hey, mom?" She asked, her voice rough. "Can you teach me this recipe?"
Charlise looked at her, surprised. "You like cooking?"
"No," Misa chuckled. "But... I want to share this with some friends. A little piece of home."
"Ah." Charlise paused and smiled. "Of course. And I''m d you found some friends. If you get a moment... Perhaps you could tell me about them?"
Misa looked to the horizon. The vige would take time to prepare for everything, and if she understood the timeline right... they had almost a day left before they would be attacked. She had her ns, and she''d given them to Orkas; she''d had her ns for years.
So she had a little bit of time.
"I''d like that," she said quietly. "I''d like that a lot."
Everything was prepared.
Misa had told Orkas everything that she remembered of the invasion that woulde. She''d exined the countermeasures she''d thought of, in the days and weeks following the attack, when she was wandering listlessly and carrying the vige''s store of mana crystals on her back. She''d further exined the details of the dungeon they were in, and how that might change the attack.
They''d both agreed that if they were meant to fight off tinum monsters, they would have no chance, no matter how good their preparations were. The original horde that had attacked their vige had been Iron-ranked, with the elite monsters in the low tiers of Bronze. With their best warriors and mages only at low-Bronze, they''d been very quickly overwhelmed.
This time, with Misa at a higher level and this being a dungeon... whatever it was, the horde might be up to Silver. That was as confident as they were about the array of traps and walls they''d made. The horde would, if everything went the same way they did the first time, abate by itself within a couple of hours. Misa still had no answers about what had triggered that attack, for there had been no indication that a dungeon break was near nor did she know where the monsters had gone after it.
But the information they had was enough. It meant that at worst, they simply needed to endure and keep the walls of the vige strong for a few hours.
The first signs of the attack would happen soon, Misa knew. It had started with a bright beam of light in the sky, apanied by a tear in space that felt wrong, even as far away as their vige was from that tear. Then there was a great rumble of the earth, and a darkening of the sky.
Hopefully, they were ready.
Hopefully, Sev and the others would be here soon, too.
Her grip tightened on her mace, and she watched the horizon, waiting.
Chapter 35: To Make a Difference
Chapter 35: To Make a Difference
"Whatever''s allowing that arcane and necrotic energy to stay apart is only barely stable. I don''t know exactly what it is, but I''m guessing that any amount of physical disruption will destabilize it," Vex exined. "That''s why you can''t damage it."
I''m not sure I follow, Kestel sent over the link. He sounded... slightly calmer, but also strangely out of breath, for someone on a telepathic link. How does that link to it being invulnerable?
"I think it''s invulnerable because of health and [Ethereal Body]," Vex said. He watched the Aberrant closely as it shed with the captain; it still hadn''t noticed any of the team on their side of the corridor. "[Ethereal Body] prevents it from taking any damage to its health, an effect that manifests as allowing physical strikes to whiff through its body unless we directly strike the weak point. But it can''t do that second part of the effect if it did, you''d be able to destabilize it."
And that would kill it, Kestel summarized. You think that because we can''t physically strike it without destroying it, the health system is preventing us from hitting it at all?
"Pretty much, yes," Vex nodded. "If you look carefully, nothing the captain is doing is touching its body. It''s skittering off just before it touches it."
In the challenge room, the captain roared as he mmed his des down onto the Aberrant, and the Aberrant raised all five of its arms to block; the impact forced its body partially into the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust. But Vex was right the captain''s des were hovering a millimeter away from the Aberrant''s arms, like there was some invisible barrier that couldn''t be breached.
"Normally it would still take some damage to health, even if we weren''t allowed to actually touch it... but it has [Ethereal Body], and that skill technically prevents damage to health." Vex paused. "Any spell I cast would have the same problem. It wouldn''t hit the Aberrant at all. Mana would disrupt that system, too. It can move itself, because it''s in full control of its own mana, but..."
"We could throw a rock at it," Sev suggested. Vex blinked and stared at him. "What? A rock doesn''t have health, does it?"
"Well, no, but if you throw it you''re attacking it, so it bes part of the system," Vex said.
"What about the floor? It''s stepping on the floor," Sev said. "Can we make it stub its toe?"
"I don''t know what that means," Vex said, raising a brow.
"...Do you not does toe-stubbing not exist here? Does the system prevent toe-stubbing? How have I not known this all this time Wait. I have an idea. We throw Derivan at the Aberrant."
"I believe I can throw myself at it fine," Derivan said.
Iliss and Ixiss were both staring at the adventurers in abject confusion. "What are you talking about?" Ixiss said. "You''re acting like you face something like this every day."
"I mean, not every day," Sev said. "But a lot of days? It just feels like this kind of stuff keeps happening recently. I''m not really surprised at this point, I''m more worried about getting to Misa. And apparently we need to deal with this problem first, so..."
"I have a skill that allows me to strike past health," Derivan added helpfully. "That is why they suggested throwing me."
"You''re a shit liar," Iliss said automatically, and then she paused, frowning. "Wait, shit. Are you? Fuck. I actually can''t tell."
"He''s definitely lying," Ixiss said, doing the thing where he narrowed his eyes, except he had eyesockets and was really just conveying the impression of narrowing his eyes very well. "...Wait. No."
"I am definitely not lying," Derivan said, with no conviction whatsoever.
"Anyway," Iliss said. "I''m going to ignore the question of whether or not you''re lying and address the bigger problem here, which is that destabilizing it is dangerous. That''s what happened the first time there was an orb made out of arcane mana, and a monster hit it with some sort of skill infused with necrotic mana. Your friend tried to block it, and she... half-seeded?" Iliss hesitated. "I''m not really sure what happened there. But I''m worried that if you mix the same two types of mana again..."
"It''ll explode violently?" Vex guessed, and Iliss nodded. He grimaced slightly. "Yeah, it might do that. On the plus side, it''s going to be mostly necrotic energy, which means your captain and you four will be immune to it, and as long as the rest of us stay out of range we should be fine."
"Except for your friend," Iliss said, jerking her skull towards Derivan.
Vex hesitated. He''d avoided saying that Derivan would be immune to it, given he wascking any kind of organic matter. The enchantments anchored in his armor were unlikely to be affected by anything except powerful dispel-oriented skills.
"I''ll cast a spell on Derivan to protect him from necrotic energy," Vex finally said, stepping forward. He reached forward a little hesitantly, looking up as if to make sure Derivan was okay with it and when the armor nodded at him, he ced a palm on his chest and cast.
It was nothing more than a basic light and illusion spell, causing a ripple of dark-gray light to surround Derivan before dissipating. But it was a sufficiently convincing illusion, it seemed; no one questioned it.
"There. You should be fine now," he said. "Derivan, you should just need to let it hit you... but that seems dangerous, so try to hit it first? Even better if you can hit through the joint where the arcane and necrotic mana is."
Derivan nodded. Vex looked like he wanted to say something else, but he didn''t speak as the armor stepped through into the challenge room.
As Derivan stepped in, the Aberrant stopped and turned, as if it could sense him stepping into the room. It screeched at him, a sound rang throughout the room and reverberated against his armor. If he''d had health, Derivan suspected it would have hurt him; as it was, all that happened was that he cocked his head slightly.
The captain looked over at him in a way that seemed distinctly worried. "Ya got a n?"
"I need to hit it," Derivan said. It wasn''t much of a n.
"Well, ya ain''t gonna have much of a choice there," the captain muttered. He was watching the Aberrant carefully as it staggered, a falling, twitching movement that seemed incredibly out of ce on its frame
Derivan wasn''t prepared for the sudden attack as itunched itself at him, all momentum suddenly changing so that itunched itself straight at him. He braced himself, knowing he didn''t have time to dodge, but the captain grit his teeth and threw himself into the Aberrant to knock it off course. It screeched in anger, tumbling across the ground.
"Move!" the captain shouted at him. "Yer too close to the others!"
Derivan moved, rushing in closer, angling himself so that the corridor wasn''t in the Aberrant''s direct line of sight. He wasn''t as fast as he wanted to be, but he was still rtively fast, the enchantments that animated him firing rapidly through his armor. The captain yelled out a warning that Derivan barely managed to hear through the Aberrant''s screech and threw himself to the side, barely avoiding the ball of coalesced energy that streaked past his helmet.
It could fire projectiles. Good to know.
It didn''t seem to like doing it, though. The Aberrant seemed angrier than ever that even that strategy had missed, and it charged at him as though in a frenzy, a relentless flurry of strikes; the captain tried to stop it, hooking a de between its feet to try to trip it but the thing barely cared for gravity to begin with, and stepped nimbly over even while assaulting Derivan.
It took everything the armor had to deflect those blows. [Barrier] could only do so much; every time an arcane or a necrotic arm struck at him, he had to twist out of the way, using only the barest flicker of a [Barrier] to deflect the blow. With the arcane arms he could barely even do that, for it seemed to suck up his mana and grow a little stronger.
All he needed to do was slice through that space between necrotic arm and arcane body, and yet for all that he tried, the Aberrant twisted and danced out of the way with incredible speed. Even the captain barely seemed to be able to fight it off now; despite its singr focus on him, it knew what it needed to do to avoid being thrown, or shoved, or pinned.
It was learning. And it seemed it knew that, too, from the way it was grinning.
Derivan had a thought.
Health wasn''t allowing other people to interact with the Aberrant meaningfully, because its skills meant it both could not take health damage and that it could not be disrupted without risking instant death.
He didn''t have health. He could act outside that system.
He also had [Intermediate Mana Maniption].
The Aberrant was made of mana.
Why did he need a sword at all?
He reached out with the skill, touching on both the arcane and necrotic mana at the same time. One felt like change and vtility, the other like death and rot, and he twisted them together with an effort of will
There was a moment of resistance.
And then the two types of mana met.
Arcane mana decided it would have a better time being necrotic, instead, and the rippled across the Aberrant''s entire being; in a moment, it was made out of only necrotic energy. A sh of light flickered over its body. Health wouldn''t protect it anymore the mere act of disrupting its body wouldn''t instantly kill it.
Though it was, of course, already in the process of dying, because the nature of that change was violent. Energy rushed across the monster''s entire form in an instant, exploding outwards in a brilliant disy of light and dark, churning through the room in a way that sent even the captain flying back; Derivan, who had significantly more mass, was pushed back several steps before he caught himself.
Then that energy washed away, leaving Derivan feeling oddly tingly.
Your p#ar##ty has killed a level 73 Aberrant! XP awarded.
On the ground, perfectly intact,y a single crystalline orb the core of the Aberrant.
"Dungeon reward," the captain said softly. "Well, what do ya know. You did it."
Very carefully, Derivan picked up the orb, watching light glimmer through it as he moved it around. It looked like it was made out of ss, but it diffracted and stole the edges out of any light that went through it, giving the inside of it soft, changing hues. He walked back towards the corridor with the others as he did so, hearing the ck of the captain''s bones against the stone floor as they walked.
You need to bring that back to us, someone said over the telepathic link, sounding excited. Kestel was oddly silent. That''s the least damaged reward we''ve seen. I don''t know what you did back there, but
"Smash it," the captain said.
What?! The voice was outraged through the telepathic connection. But
"I looked at my notifications. Misa''s your friend, isn''t she?" the captain said. "If she unlocked a bonus room, then you can use the dungeon reward to get there. Use it. Don''t listen to whatever the research team is saying."
There was a frustrated silence over the telepathic link.
"And we''ll help you," the captain said suddenly, projecting his voice loudly enough that his team could hear it. "Or I will. The rest of you get a choice. But you know damn well what Misa did for us." He hesitated, like he wanted to add something else, but he nced to Derivan and refrained. "Break the orb."
Derivan did, crushing it in his fingers. A notification popped up, one in front of each of them, though the armor only saw his own.
You have beaten the Crystal Challenge and defeated the Aberrant it produced, despite . Congrattions.
The bonus room The Vige''s Last Defense> was unlocked during the battle. Entry to the bonus room has been unlocked as an additional reward category.
Randomizing rewards...
Rewards offered:
[ess to The Vige''s Last Defense>]
[Epic-Grade Equipment]
[Stat Boost]
There was silence for a moment, as Derivan looked at the four soldiers beside the captain. They seemed to be contemting the choice, but one of them broke the silence first.
"I''m sorry," one of the soldiers said. For all that he was a skeleton, he looked... tired. Maybe a little bit broken. "I can''t." He gestured, helplessly, at his own body. He seemed guilty, though Derivan felt he didn''t have an obligation to help. Misa''s rescue had not been a transaction; he knew her well enough that he could say that on her behalf.
"I''ll help," Iliss said, and Ixiss huffed beside her.
"I''m going to have to if you do it," he grumbled.
Thest soldier a thick, broad-shouldered orcish skeleton grunted. "I will help."
"Come with us anyway," the captain ordered the one that had refused and when he began to protest, he shook his head. "I won''t make you fight. But whatever blew up that orb is still out there, and I''m not leaving you to go through the dungeon alone. You''ll sit back and be defended like all the rest."
That quieted him. He nodded.
Derivan looked at Sev and Vex. "Shall we?" he asked.
There was no answer; there was no need for one. They each reached for the button on the notification at the same time, and a whirl of light surrounded them, zing into a brilliant white as it transported them into the bonus room.
Chapter 36: Intuitions
Chapter 36: Intuitions
Misa watched as light cracked open the sky.
Something was wrong, she knew. It was too early. The first time this had happened, it had been in the middle of the night; it was part of the reason it had taken so long for their vige to respond. It wouldn''t have been enough even if they''d managed it, of course the fact of the matter was that they simply didn''t have enough people to fight off a horde but it had contributed to how quickly they''d been run over.
Maybe that was for the best. She couldn''t imagine what it would''ve been like if they''d been taken out slowly, over a long, protracted battle. Losing the people she loved one by one over a period of hours instead of minutes...
...Misa swallowed, put her mind off of the memory, and watched.
The earth shook. The air sparked. There was that long-familiar sensation of a tear in space, although this one felt different
the beam of light was in the wrong ce.
"Stop!" Misa shouted, running towards it. The guardsmen and her father looked at her, bewildered; they were already preparing to fire in that direction. But this wasn''t the dungeon break it couldn''t be. Too many things were wrong. [Danger Sense] wasn''t even going off.
Orkas, thankfully, trusted her, and shouted for his men to hold their fire. In the distance, as the light faded, she saw eight figures slowly resolve in the distance three of them particrly familiar to her. Her heart raced. Relief. They''d found their way, and they''d managed to do it before the break started.
Misa slowed down as she approached, and grinned at her friends, keeping the relief out of her voice. "Shit, guys. Almost thought you wouldn''t make it in time."
"We were always going to," Sev smirked at her, though his smile dropped a bit when he noticed the redness in the corners of her eyes. It didn''t take much to put two and two together. "Are you doing okay?"
"No," Misa answered honestly. "I want to know what the fuck this ce is. I want to know why my vige is here. I want to know why my parents are here, and why they don''t remember me"
Her voice cracked slightly as she spoke.
Vex came up to her and gave her a hug without saying a word; she had to crouch down slightly, but Misa hugged him back, letting the rest of her words stay unsaid.
Too many questions. Not enough time.
"I cannot tell if this is a cruelty or a kindness," Derivan murmured out loud, mirroring her thoughts from before. But he looked at her, and then he added, "But we will find out, one way or another. And if there is a way to preserve what lies here..."
Misa''s heart skipped a beat. She hadn''t even thought about it. She''d been afraid to. But Derivan watched her, a steadiness she didn''t have flickering in his eyes, and even Sev and Vex seemed ready to do whatever it took
"Don''t give me hope," Misa said, almost too soft to hear. "Not about this."
She didn''t even know if they were real. She didn''t want to acknowledge the fire of hope that had been burning in her heart ever since she''d seen them.
She didn''t know what she''d do if she did, and that fire went out again.
"Watch out!" one of the guardsmen called at them as they returned, readying the bow. His voice was much shakier than his bow. "Skeletons! Behind you!"
"I know," Misa said, raising a brow at him. "They''re on our side."
"O-our side?" the guard lowered his bow slightly, but if he had any hackles to raise, they would be raised. "They''re skeletons. Monsters," he hissed. Misa looked back at the original delve team apologetically, but most of them seemed unbothered, except for one that shrank back into himself.
"They''re allies," she said. "They got hit with a bad dungeon effect. Stop being a dick."
"Are they going to be helpful?" Orkas finally spoke, having arrived from where he''d stationed himself tomand the battlefield.
"Four of them are," Misa answered, ncing back at them. "One just need a ce to shelter."
Orkas'' grip on his staff tightened. "I''m not putting them with the nobatants in the vige."
"Dad, he" Misa cut herself off, gritting her teeth and ignoring the flinch that she felt when her father''s eyes tightened at the word. "Orkas. He''s a person like anyone else."
"He''s also powerful enough to ughter everyone in the vige with all of us outside," Orkas countered. "I can see his level."
"If he wanted to do that he could do it anyway," Misa said.
"But we''d have a chance to stop him."
"Orkas," a reproving voice said, and both Misa and her father jerked slightly, ncing to Charise; the woman seemed filled with life again now that she''d had an opportunity to talk to her daughter, and there was a fire back in her eyes that hadn''t been nearly so strong before. Misa didn''t miss the way Orkas'' entire posture softened when he looked at her. "He needs food and rest."
"He''s a skeleton," Orkas said, perhaps a little stubbornly. Charise rolled her eyes.
"Fine. He needs rest, then. I''m going to make sure he gets that rest."
"He might"
"He won''t," Charise interrupted firmly, and then looked over at the lone skeleton, who stood awkwardly away from the others, not quite looking at them. "Will you?"
Very slowly, he shook his head.
"Good," Charise said, apparently satisfied with just that. "I''m going to bring you into the vige and feed you some stew. It''ll do you some good."
"He is a skeleton," Orkas said, a little exasperated.
"I''m sure I''ll figure something out," Charise said dismissively. She waved for the skeleton to follow her, and perhaps a little nonplussed he did.
Misa watched both her mother and her father. It was so... like them. She didn''t have the words to speak, so she just watched as Charise led the skeleton deeper into the vige; that left them with the captain, the two lizardkin siblings, and the orc, who seemed to be taking Orkas in slowly.
"How long before the attack?" Vex asked, his tail swishing about anxiously. She nced over at him.
"A few more hours, the first time," she answered. "No guarantee it''ll happen the exact same time now, but it''s what we''ve got to go on. We almost thought it was happening early when you guys arrived."
"I thought the timeline might have been off, but it seems we''re still on track," Orkas rumbled. He sagged slightly. "I admit a part of me hoped that you were delusional; that you are my daughter returned to me through some odd quirk of magic, and not the tale you told me. But your friends are here now, and they bring with them men or monsters that could only be the result of a dungeon..."
He shook his head, seeing Misa open her mouth to respond. "No. Ignore my words. Focus on the battle ahead. We must n again now that we have more resources on hand."
"I''ll... strategize with my team," Misa said, strangling the rest of what she wanted to say.
"Then I will speak with the allies you brought with you," Orkas said, tilting his head to indicate the captain and the three delvers with him. They nodded back at him and he led them off, presumably to discuss how their skills could contribute to the fight ahead.
The guards left with them, leaving the four adventurers alone in the field just outside her vige. For a moment, they were silent, none of them quite knowing what to say.
Sev broke the silence. "That was your dad, huh?"
"And the woman was my mother," Misa said. "Or she still is. I don''t... know. It''splicated."
"We don''t have many examples of dungeons doing things like this," Vex said quietly, answering the unspoken question. "A few bonus rooms here and there, explored mostly by tinum rankers that don''t talk about their time in them very much, except to fill out the nk spots in our history books."
"Is the rest of the world still... here?" Misa asked. "What if we just asked everyone to leave? Get them to evacuate the vige, run somewhere the horde won''t find us?"
Vex winced. "Trying to do something other than what the dungeon tells you to do usually results in the dungeon dissolving the bonus room early."
Dissolving. Misa let that word sink in for a moment.
"We''re supposed to get answers from this dungeon," Misa finally said. "What do you think this will tell us?"
"I don''t... know. The answers we get might not be from this bonus room at all," Sev said. "But this is a dungeon break, right? What do we know about dungeon breaks?"
"They happen when no one delves a dungeon for too long," Derivan said, reciting the answer as if from memory. "The mana umtes in them, and eventually they seal themselves off. It is important to delve dungeons before that happens, and it is usually lucrative enough that adventurers are eager to do so. But sometimes dungeons are less noticeable, or disguise themselves well, and a dungeon break happens before we are able to head it off."
"We didn''t know about this one, or we would''ve delved it. Or at least moved," Misa said with a sigh.
"I guess I should''ve asked a different question," Sev said. "What don''t we know about dungeon breaks?"
"We don''t know why they happen," Vex said. "We know mana umtes in the dungeon, but we don''t know why the dungeon seals itself off after a while, or why it ''breaks'' and sends monsters flooding out. We''ve never been able... to..."
Vex trailed off. Misa nced at him, and she saw Sev and Derivan doing the same.
"We''ve never been able to figure out where those monsters go," Vex said softly. "It''s rare that we clear out every single monster that emerges from a break. We just hold out and survive, or we evacuate. So there''s always an excess of monsters after the break ends, but the monsters just... leave, and we don''t know where they go."
"No one''s tried tracking them?" Sev asked.
"We''ve tried," Vex said. "We haven''t seeded. Even scouting and tracking sses just lose track after a while."
"Is that what we''re supposed to figure out?" Misa frowned. "The task is to defend the vige. Once weplete it " she stopped herself mid-sentence, frowning, and then forged on, " are we going to get a chance to follow the monsters and find out what happens once weplete it?"
"I don''t know," Sev said with a sigh. "Probably not. But do we have any better ideas?"
"What happens when a dungeon breaks?" Misa asked, looking at Vex. "Physically."
Vex frowned. "A sealed dungeon starts to shrink into a ball of condensed mana," he said. "When the dungeon break happens, that ball of mana cracks, and it causes a rift in space that monsters flood out of."
"Has anyone ever gone inside that rift?" Misa asked.
"No?" Vex looked at her, blinking. "Dungeon breaks are bad enough as is. You don''t go into the ce the monsters are flooding out of."
Misa gripped her mace, saying nothing.
"Misa," Derivan said, and there was a touch of warning in his voice; no doubt he could read her. She grinned at him, though that grin was tense.
"I''ll be honest," she said. "All these ns I made, thinking that if I was just clever enough, there might have been a way for my vige to survive... I don''t think they''re enough. Not when the dungeon is setting up the scenario. Not when it wants to bnce it to be a challenge, and we have Gold ranked delvers on our team, Silver ranked adventurers, and Bronze and Iron ranked guardsmen. There''s no challenge here that''s bnced. There''s no way everyone''s going toe out alive."
"We can''t leave them to fight without us," Sev said. "That''ll make things worse."
"The traps will help," Misa said. "They''ll stall them. They''ll make the horde fight for every bloody step forward they need to take. We''ve set up enough defenses that they can hold out for a while, even without our help."
"So you want to just... dive into the rift that the dungeon break opens?" Vex asked, staring at her.
"I think it''s our only chance," Misa said. "We''re still going to be fighting the monsters. We''re not technically going off the objective. We can reduce the numbers they have to deal with and we can figure out what''s going on."
"Misa," Derivan said, sounding doubtful. "This seems..."
It seemed crazy, she knew. Even she thought it was crazy.
So why was she so sure that this was what they needed to do? Them, and only them?
In the corner of her mind, just barely beginning to stir, were the beginnings of what felt like [Danger Sense]. But she knew now that it wasn''t.
[Guardian''s Premonition] rang in her mind more clearly than ever.
"Trust me," she said. "Please. I don''t want to abandon them either. But this feels like the only chance we''ll have."
Chapter 37: Core
Chapter 37: Core
Misa stood with herpanions in the makeshift tent Orkas had constructed for himself, where ns and maps wereid out on the table and weapons were scattered to the side; this was his mand center'', though they''d really just lugged a table out of the vige and draped a cloth over the whole thing.
Orkas had, rather predictably, exploded when told of the n.
"You can''t go into the rift alone!" he thundered. Misa nced at Sev and the others, standing just nearby a touch awkwardly.
"I''m not alone," she said, though she should have predicted that all that would do was turn her father''s fury onto the rest of her team.
"You''re going to go along with this n?" Orkas growled at them. "It''s suicide. And the vige still needs your help."
"Misa has a skill," Derivan answered, stepping forward. "It tells her this is the path we must take for our survival. We do not mean to abandon your vige. But if this seeds, you will not have to hold out as long against this horde."
"We have Gold rankers with us now," Orkas said. "You brought us allies. We can win this."
"A dungeon''s challenges must always be difficult," Derivan said quietly. "You know this. We have brought Gold rankers in, but it will not make things easier."
"You" Orkas started, and then stopped, letting out an explosive breath. He grit his teeth together, not saying anything for a moment; Derivan watched him almost impassively, but when he spoke, his voice had a touch of sympathy in it.
"You are worried about Misa," he said.
"I don''t know her," Orkas answered. Misa frowned a bit, looking away.
"You feel like you should," Derivan said. "There is a part of her that is familiar to you."
Orkas seemed for a moment like he wanted to be angry; there was a twist to his expression as rage shed into his eyes. But that emotion vanished just as quickly, and was reced with simple tiredness.
"How could she not be?" he said. "I look at her, and I see traces of me. Traces of her mother. Even this skill you mention, urging her towards a path not many would walk... does that not sound familiar to you, Misa? Like a skill that Charise that your mother has?"
Misa didn''t answer for a moment. "Maybe?" she eventually said, hesitant. There was a definite simrity, but that simrity seemed distant to her. "But it''s not like skills are inherited."
"No," Orkas said. "They''re not. But who you are influences the skills you get, and if you were raised by someone like Charise, then you would have seen bits and pieces of her skill at work. Part of you would have learned to see things the way she does. To put things together, even when the links are not obvious. And sometimes that can turn into a skill."
"The skill''s never worked properly before now," Misa said, still hesitant. "It never seemed to activate, and I wasn''t sure what it did. The description isn''t clear. It just says ''you know when the gate is about to fall''."
"Hasn''t it?" Orkas asked. "Intuition skills are not always obvious. They can be, sometimes, in particrly crucial moments. But otherwise, they''re nothing more than a guide. A voice in the back of your head."
Misa fell silent.
She''d wanted to stay at the crater where the dungeon would form, hadn''t she? [Danger Sense] had been telling her to pull back, but there was another part of her that wanted to stay; a part of her that, she had reasoned, wanted to get a mana crystal of a grade that would make a difference.
She''d wanted Jerome to pay, even, until Derivan had spoken up in favor of helping him. She''d remembered, at the time, the rage she had felt shortly after she lost her vige she hadn''t been kind. She hadn''t been cruel, exactly, but there was an emptiness to her that echoed through everything she did, and it had taken time to patch over that hole in her heart. Even now, that wound ached.
It was still her choice, at the end of the day, whether she wanted to listen to that voice. For a long time she''d ignored it. That was what led to her endless days after her vige had been lost, the time almost a blur to her now. And the first time she''d chosen to listen to it, it had led her on the path that eventually resulted in her meeting Sev and Derivan.
All things that could be a coincidence, certainly, but the thought that she carried a piece of her mother with her was aforting one.
"Okay," Misa said. "Will you let us go, then?"
"I don''t have a choice," Orkas said with a sigh. He smiled at her; it was a tired smile, but it was a smile that reached his eyes, perhaps for the first time since he''d met her. "I''ve never been able to stop your mother."
Misa grinned at him. "Oh, I know."
"...Should I be concerned?"
"Don''t worry about it," Misa said, injecting a bit of faux-cheerfulness into her voice. She began to step out of the tent they were in, waving for herpanions to follow her. "We''ll see youter!"
Both of them knew that might be a lie.
Misa stopped right before she left the tent.
"Hey, dad," she said. "Orkas. Whatever you prefer right now. If it doesn''t look like you can win, if it looks like you need to run... then run. Please."
Misa stared ahead as the dungeon loomed before them.
Except ''loomed'' was the wrong word, really. It was quite literally stuck in a hole in the ground there was a massive chunk cut out of the earth, like a section of the dirt had simply been erased from existence; in the center of that chunk stood a small, ellipsoidal shape. The surface of it was almost crystalline with how solid the mana was, light reflecting and refracting off of it in a way that was almost beautiful, if not for the danger it represented.
"I''m d you told them to evacuate if they need to," Sev said quietly. "Dungeon scenario or not, it feels... wrong, to tell them to fight until theirst."
"It''s skirting the limits a little bit," Vex said. "But I think it''ll work. If they''re retreating after the break starts, it''ll be just another part of the defensive strategy. And we''re here to cut the horde off at the source."
"Can you sense anything from the dungeon?" Derivan asked.
Vex stepped forward, pinning his gaze on the sealed dungeon. "I''ve never seen a sealed dungeon up close before," he said softly. "I''m not even sure a lot of studies have been done on these. There''s usually other priorities, like running away."
"That''s the usual sensible thing to do, yes," Sev said.
"But this is..." Vex''s eyes glowed slightly again as he pushed his senses deeper into the core. He blinked once, shaking his head like he''d been smacked. "Ow. It''s a lot. There''s a lot in there. Compressed space, but something else. A link somewhere."
"A link?" Misa asked.
"I can''t tell where it leads," Vex said, sounding slightly frustrated. "There''s too much space inside."
"So we wait for it to open," Sev said.
"We wait," Misa agreed.
They didn''t have to wait long.
Up close, it didn''t start with a massive sh of light. It started with a crack.
A bright line of white travelled across the surface of the core, almost too painful to look at.
Then there was the sound of something shattering.
Searing light filled the air, almost enough to st them backwards if not for the shields that Vex had ced in front of them to stop the attack. The earth shook, and it would have been enough to knock them off their feet if not for the steadying magic that Sev threaded across the four of them. A sense of wrongness pervaded the air, climbing and culminating into what felt almost like an explosion
A dungeon break has begun.
The target of this dungeon break is the vige of J''rokksur. Directions will be made avable through the system. Defend the vige to obtain your rewards.
Misa suppressed a growl. The message was achingly familiar. It was the message they''d all woken up to. But she shoved that to the back of her mind, and focused instead on what had happened to the sealed dungeon.
Where the core had been, there was now a rift in space. The edges of it shimmered with distorted light. The center showed a dark void, with tiny, moving dots getting closer and closer towards the edge of the portal, and gettingrger with every second.
Misa recognized them. They were impossibly small, perhaps, but she still recognized them, because how could she ever forget the monsters that had devastated her home?
"Let''s go," she said grimly. She didn''t wait for the others to agree. She leapt,unching herself at the portal and through it before even the first monster could break through.
Shended in a field, though field was a poor word for it. Something brushed against her legs like grass, but there was nothing there when she looked; the ground was pitch-ck darkness.
Misa knew immediately that she couldn''t prevent every one of these monsters from reaching the portal. She knew immediately, also, thating here and stopping the horde at the source was the right decision because she could see their levels, now, and they were nothing like the ones they had fought before in the vige. What had once been Iron monsters and Bronze elites were now up by a full tier or more; the presence ofbatants across the range from Iron to Gold had changed up the math significantly.
Fortunately, they were ignoring her presence for the most part. The monsters terrible, insectoid things that stood on two legs and swung des with four were marching steadily towards the gate that shone in the distance. Inside the portal it was no longer some small, three-meter-tall hole punched out of space; it was a massive, horizon-spanning thing, shining brilliant light that cast harsh shadows behind every monster.
In the distance seemed to be the source of the monsters yet another enormous gate, though that one was not nearly as bright as the one she''d juste through. If anything, it was a void, devouring any light that dared to touch it. The monsters emerged from somewhere within, the void sticking to them like clinging shadows that fell away after a moment in the light.
Derivan, Sev, and Vexnded beside her; she heard two of them take in a sharp breath at the sight. Derivan merely lowered himself into more of a fighting stance, the light of his eyes flickering into a narrowed gaze.
"They are not attacking us," he observed after a moment.
"Not yet," Misa said grimly.
Most of the monsters were ignoring them but not all. A few had stopped, the ones closest to them, and had begun to circle their party; a chittering growl emerged from deep within their throats as they prepared to fight. Misa''s party prepared themselves, too, shields and barriers shimmering into existence in front of Vex and Derivan respectively; Sev had retreated once more to the center of the three.
Misa gripped her mace.
"Wee in peace?" Sev tried.
Misa snorted. "No, we don''t."
It didn''t matter, because at the sound of their voices, the monsters screeched and attacked. Not intelligent, then.
That made things easier.
Her vision flickered in the dull-ck of [Guard Stance], and she readied her mace. An old, old memory came to her. She''d talked about this with Orkas, and had demonstrated it as best she could; it was one thing that didn''t change, even though their levels had increased.
Their patterns were still the same. And as long as those patterns were the same, she could fight. She could hold them off. She was stronger than she had ever been, and though her vige was miles away, she could feel it like it was at her back.
A monsterunched itself at her, and she twisted in position right before it would havended a hit; she stepped forward in a shoulder-check, shoving it backwards, and then stomped. It jerked beneath her feet, chitin cracking as it let out a screech of anger, and scurried backwards.
It wasn''t enough to kill it. But she did far more damage than she hadst time, and she had her friends by her side.
"We need to get to the source and end this," she said. "Let''s go."
Chapter 38: Stone Heights
Chapter 38: Stone Heights
Vex was realizing that getting to that dark, oozing gate on the other side of the core-space was easier said than done.
That was what he''d decided to call it for now, since he had no other words for it, and there was no literature to exin what it was. Core-space an intermediary space between the world and whatever it was that created monsters during a dungeon break.
Not that he''d had all that much time to figure out the name.
"Watch out!" Sev shouted. Light blue red across their vision as he cast, divine magic flickering into existence in front of them; a Gold-ranked Elite insectoid mmed into them just a second after the barrier formed. Thin, needlepoint legs stabbed into the surface of the barrier, poking holes through it easily but not quite tearing the whole structure down.
Derivan sliced through the limbs that poked through the holes, eliciting an angry screech. Vex tore through it a secondter with a [Mana st], concentrated into thinsers that burned holes in its chitin. But he could already see a problem: they needed a way to clear away arge number of enemies; fighting through them like this was slow, and would exhaust them long before they managed to reach the gate.
Fortunately, he''d had time to figure this space out. He''d had time to understand, thanks to Misa and Derivan''s efforts in protecting the two more fragile casters. This space wasn''t filled with ambient mana, not in the same way the Nucleus had been.
But there was something else he could take advantage of.
They were in an area that was highly spatiallypressed. Now that they were inside the core-space, they, too, were being spatiallypressed.
So what if he undid thatpression at the moment his [Fireball]nded?
That couldn''t be the only thing that he did, was the problem; if all he did was increase the size of a [Fireball], then all he would do was agitate far more monsters than the team could handle, for a single spell would be far from enough to kill all the Gold and Silver ranked monsters the spell would undoubtedly hit. He needed to scale up the damage, or else modify the spell so that it took out the monsters it hit in some way.
Manaburn would be useless. These insectoids were warriors, not mages, and unlike a lot of lower-leveled creatures they didn''t rely on mana-based attacks to do damage; they had raw stats to fuel their strikes.
Sleep had no guarantee of working on monster physiology.
Which meant a different route. Something he''d seen before, even.
"Misa," he said calmly. "I''m going to make a [Fireball], and I''m going to need you to hit it with a [Paralyzing Bash]."
"What?" Misa winced as one of the insectoid-creatures crashed into her right as she spoke; she swung her mace wildly, knocking it away as it tried to cut and slice into her. It was a good thing they were light. "Fine. Ready when you are."
"Almost," Vex responded, and focused on his spell. [Fireball] was still his favorite for modifications.
He hadn''t quite understood how the Overseer had managed to absorb and reflect Derivan''s [Paralyzing sh] back when it had happened. But now, with the fight against the Aberrant, he thought he understood.
Arcane mana was the key.
He finished the spell. It was a [Fireball], but it was not. The core was pure Arcane, and the inneryer of the spell was set to invert the spatialpression set upon it; the outeryer was linked to the core, to allow Misa''s [Paralyzing Bash] to propagate into the core
Unknown skill attempted!
Parsing...
Disying best approximation.
[Arcane Mimicry ### Fireball]
It was an imperfect attempt, he knew immediately. He saw in the corner of his eye Derivan cocking his head, as though curious, or like he''d noticed something strange. Perhaps his magic stat at work? All Vex knew was that there was still a key he was missing. But the spell was cast, and hopefully it would be good enough
"Now!" he shouted, stepping backwards, and Misa kicked off the monster she was fighting in a sharp, vicious movement; in the next instant, her mace crackled with the familiar ck lightning that was characteristic of any of the [Paralyzing] series of skills, and the blunt end of her mace smashed into the spell.
It soared into the air like a ball hit with a bat. For a long moment, everything seemed still; even the monsters paused, as if they had no idea what to make of the spell flying over their heads.
Then it struck the ground, and everything turned to chaos.
The spatialyer triggered, undoing the effect of spatialpression on the spell; just before it shattered, the spell expanded, growing to more than ten times its original size. Then thatyer of the spell shatteredpletely, unleashing what had once been Arcane mana in a spherical burst, except this was Arcane mana that had adopted the element behind Misa''s [Paralyzing Bash]. It wasn''t fire that exploded into the air, cooking everything it touched.
It was lightning.
Electricity zed outwards in a disy that looked bizarrely like a fireball, as if the spell was still trying to adhere to its original parameters; rather than smoke and fire, bright sparks of current scattered, branching out and then back in, trying to secure a shape that it didn''t quite know how to maintain. It ripped through the monsters that it stuck, not quite hitting them with the stun effect, and doing the damage that pure elemental lightning would do instead.
Which was a lot more damage than a fireball.
"What did you do?" Misa asked, her eyes wide.
"Piss off a lot of monsters," Vex answered grimly.
Technically, they''d managed to transform a fireball into a lightning storm; stripped of the stunning aspect of the [Paralyzing] skill, the spell had turned into pure lightning instead. The mana-to-damage ratio on the spell outstripped most of what he could do, even, because lightning was a higher tier element than fire.
So a small part of him was in awe, and was recording the details of what had happened for further investigationter.
The rest of him was far more concerned about the fact that while the lightning had brought many of the monsters close to death, it hadn''t killed them. The [Paralyze] effect would have been better. This was what he had been trying to avoid.
"Iing!" Sev shouted, because just as Vex had predicted, the range of the skill had been , and they now had a huge portion of the horde just running at them. One of them was faster than the others; a level 62 Eliteunching itself through the air at impossible speeds straight towards them.
Vex and Sev both tried to call up a barrier, but Derivan was suddenly there, and he used the sheer momentum of the monster''s own body against it, bracing his sword against a trio of [Barrier]s and his own body against another three
enchanted metal pierced chitin with ease, and where the health of the system would normally have reversed the damage, the monster simply died. The force was still enough to shatter all six barriers, sending him stumbling backwards, and it took effort for him to force the remains of the insectoid off his sword.
"We must run," Derivan said. "We are getting too distracted. They will not end until we stop the source."
Even Misa didn''t protest. "We''ll take out what we can on the way," she said instead.
It was Derivan that took the lead, this time, functioning as a first line of both offense and defense; Misa was at the rear, positioned so she could see any attacks that wereing in from the sides and block them. Vex and Sev ran side by side between the two, trusting Misa to cover them.
Together, they formed a sort ofnce, keeping the weaker members of the team protected while they cut through the monsters that tried to stand in their way but that didn''t mean it was easy.
More than once, Misa had to overextend, blocking two attacks at once in a way that left her panting for breath and exhausting her in a way that couldn''t quite be ounted for by stats. More than once, Vex had to rely on [Dagger Proficiency] and his protective barriers to fend off a monster long enough for Derivan or Misa to step in, for there were so many that neither of them couldpletely block all attacks. Even Sev seemed taxed to his limits, though healing was normally an easy task for him; the gaps between his healing spells grew and grew.
And there was no time limit here, unlike their time in the Nucleus. There was no defensive structure they could build; the barriers they had were instantly destroyed, because these monsters were smart enough to break them.
They needed to make their way to the gate at the other end of the core-space, and it felt like it was further away than ever. It didn''t help that the gate was only producing more monsters, and it felt like they were struggling against an endless tide.
"This isn''t working," Sev eventually said, his words grim. He was focused despite his words, though, divine magic flowing through him to keep Misa''s and Vex''s health topped up; at this point, it was more crucial to keep Misa''s health high than Vex''s, because she sometimes had to block as many as five attacks at once. "We need another n."
"We don''t have anything better," Misa growled out. The metal of her mace nged against an insectoid de, the monster letting out a frustrated chitter as it was blocked. "Derivan''s lost most of his skills and I''m a defender. Vex"
"We could do that lightning spell a few more times," Vex said. Aplicated spell construct hovered between his hands; he''d switched between a few different spells, now, trying to find one that worked best for the situation. "But I don''t want to risk drawing another crowd this big."
If there was just a way to get them all to the gate. But he didn''t have any teleportation spells, and they would all far exceed the amount of mana he had to him even if he had; teleports were the type of spell that required mana crystals to fuel. Prodigous as his mana stores and generation was, it wasn''t enough to handle teleportation.
If there was just another way...
Derivan''s eyes narrowed as two insectoids threw themselves at Vex at once, and the lizardkin watched in barely-disguised awe as the animated armor slipped between them both; for all that they were high-leveled, the chitin they were made of was just that ordinary chitin.
He didn''t slice. He punched, dropping his sword so that he could drive his fist straight into the chitin; insectoid armor cracked in a spiderweb pattern before abruptly caving
Vex averted his eyes, looking instead at the ground.
And he paused.
If he could reverse the spatialpression on a fireball...
An ordinary [Stone Wall] wouldn''t be enough tounch them. But it was a different matter entirely if the ground he was standing on was spatiallypressed, and he undid that spatialpression as the ground was rising
"Actually," Vex said. "I think I have a different idea. Stand close, quick."
The other three nced at him, looking briefly bewildered they were having a moment but didn''t actually need much convincing. A [Stone Wall] was, thankfully, a rtively quick spell to cast, and all he needed to do was cut a few runes in the air to disable the spatialpression the same way the lightning storm earlier had.
"Derivan, grab everyone, please," he requested politely, feeling a little foolish even as he said so but Derivan was thergest of them all, and it was better than the four of them being scattered as they wereunched. He squeaked a little as he was pulled close, with Sev on the other side of him and Misa in Derivan''s other arm
"Better be quick, Vex!" Sev called, sounding vaguely panicked.
He cast.
Stone sprang into existence beneath their feet, tilted towards the gate.
Spatialpression failed as his runes countermanded it, and they were , straight towards the void gate.
"VEX GODSDAMMIT I''M AFRAID OF HEIGHTS"
The monsters looked up, puzzled, as a screaming cleric soared through the air with three others.
It was a momentary distraction. Once the party left their sight, they returned to their original goal the bright, shining light that called to the anger that burned within them.
Chapter 39: Memories
Chapter 39: Memories
Misa had thought the space with the horde was a void. It had been an inky, dark space, lit only by the light of the portals on either side. Seemed pretty void-like to her.
She had never been wherever here was.
The space on the other side of the gate was somehow darker than even that, to the point where Misa thought that it was perhaps only this ce that could truly be called a void. Looking out into the distance left her feeling cold, almost, like the sight was enough to drag something vital out of her.
And yet somehow, everything here was perfectly lit; there were no shadows at all on her or any of herpanions. It was... odd, to see them like this. Some details stood out, and others were smoothed over; Derivan''s engravings and Vex''s scales were nearly impossible to see without the telltale shadows and light glimmering off the edges, but the otherwise subtle dyes on Vex''s leathers were suddenly entuated.
Vex had tried to cast [Featherfall] as soon as they were through the threshold of the gate; they didn''t know whether or not to expect monsters on the other side, but they wanted to be prepared. But he hadn''t needed to as soon as they were through the gate, their momentum fell away, and they were left... not falling, exactly. But notpletely still, either.
They were drifting, and here it seemed that their thoughts influenced the direction they drifted in. At first, they floundered, worried they would be attacked; Vex nearly tumbled into Derivan, and Misa almost shot off into the distance. But there was barely any indication that this space had monsters at all. There where whispers of insectoid shapes, perhaps, closer to the gate. Those shapes were near impossible to see. Misa could only feel them ghosting past her, like they were still immaterial.
She shuddered.
"There is something strange about this ce," Derivan said quietly, after they had all settled and drifted closer together. "I do not know what it is, but something feels... familiar. Except it is not familiar at all. I do not recognize the part of me that knows this ce, and the feeling is unsettling."
The armor fell silent. Vex nced at him, though he seemed pretty anxious about being in this space himself. "Are you okay?"
"I am fine," the armor said. "But I would like to leave this ce, I think."
"We need to hurry up anyway," Misa said. She was looking ahead, towards the only thing that existed in this space.
In front of them, in the center of this strange, inky void, was a single glowing spark.
It sat atop a pedestal of crystal that might as well have been attached to nothing, for all that it was just floating there. Sharp-looking flecks of metal were embedded into the top surface of the pedestal, serving no apparent purpose.
Above that spark, a strange, wispy beam of light that spiralled outwards from the device, twisting up into the air, and it was only when Misa followed it with her gaze that she saw the chaos up in the air. Pinpricks of light were scattered above, each nearly infinitesimal in size, though some wererger than others. Looking directly at any one of them granted her a scattering of impressions that she couldn''t quite parse one would be a forest, another a small city, and a third small vige set out in the middle of nowhere...
Thest one made her wince. It was the one that the trail of light led to, and it was the smallest amongst the others by far.
When she looked into the sky again, there was nothing there. She had to follow that trail of light with her gaze before it reappeared, and staring at it too long gave her a headache
"Misa," Sev said, interrupting her thoughts, and she blinked once, tearing her gaze away with a shudder of disgust.
She didn''t know why, but the sight felt wrong to her.
But there wasn''t time to worry about any of that.
"What is this?" Misa asked instead, gesturing to the shimmering blue spark sitting on the pedestal. "Is this rted to the monsters, somehow?"
"I haven''t read anything about this," Vex said with a frown. "There are theories about dungeons having a power source... but it''s never been located. Maybe this is what that is?"
"If it''s the power source, we''d just need to remove it to get the monsters to stop," Sev said.
"Perhaps," Derivan said. He leaned in closer, then jumped backwards when a system screen buzzed into existence in front of all of them.
X-51 ####### #####R
INTEGRITY: 7%
WARNING: DESTABILIZATION IN PROGRESS. EVACUATION HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Buzzed. They could all see it, and unlike the usual System screens, this one was flickering strangely, like it was unable topletely form.
"Let me..." Vex murmured out loud and then he visibly winced, pping his hands over his eyes. "Ah!"
"Vex?" Derivan was immediately by the lizardkin''s side, one hand on his back. "Are you alright?"
"I''m... fine." Vex grimaced, blinking a few times as if to get the spots out of his eyes. "I tried to analyze it like I do with some magical artifacts; I didn''t see any mana around it, so I wasn''t expecting it to be so bright. But there is a lot of mana around it, it''s just not visible in... whatever this space is. I guess however the various [Mana Sight]s work, it doesn''t work here? But my analytical skills still work, and when I tried to analyze it, the skill bombarded me with so many runes I couldn''t see straight."
"What does that mean for us?" Misa asked.
"I... give me a moment." Vex blinked a few more times, nced carefully at the artifact, and then quickly looked away again. "Okay. I don''t have a chance of interpreting whatever is going on in the runes. But I can sort of tell how the mana is moving based on the power in those runes, and it looks like there is a massive amount of mana flowing into that thing."
"Into it?" Sev asked.
"So it''s not the power source," Misa said. She narrowed her eyes. "We don''t have time to waste to figure out what this does. I''m going to grab it."
"Grab it?" Sev frowned at her. "It''s a glowing blue dot"
Misa grabbed it.
The crystalline pedestal below suddenly flickered and died, the color changing to a dull gray. At the same time, the spark became inexplicably heavy, and Misa grunted and stumbled, rotating in the air as she was suddenly forced to use both her hands just to lift the thing. "Shit," she said.
Above, the wispy trail of light began to flicker and vanish. It had been dying anyway, but now it was entirely dead, and those pinpricks of light above were no longer visible to them.
"Shit is right," Sev swore, staring back at the gate. "We better go. The gate''s closing."
"This thing was maintaining the gate?" Misa nced at it, then cursed when she saw it was rapidly shrinking. "Shit. Okay. Let''s go."
Fortunately, it wasn''t all that difficult to carry the spark when she could move through space with a thought. Misa didn''t have time to appreciate it, though, because another thought had dominated her mind.
If they seeded if unplugging whatever this was had stopped the monsters from appearing then her time with her vige wasing to an end.
Misa held the spark close. She didn''t know why, but she was getting the feeling that it was going to be important.
Orkas could taste blood in his mouth.
It was a phantom taste, really. The blood had vanished from his mouth as soon as it appeared, and he had taken a chunk of damage to his health instead; far preferable to the injury that had actually been dealt to him. He didn''t particrly fancy having arge chunk torn out of his face, or having one of his tusks broken.
So that wasn''t a problem. What was a problem was that he was pretty sure they couldn''t hold out against the horde as long as they needed to.
It had been fairly obvious from the get-go, really. As soon as the first monsters had appeared, Orkas had known there would be a problem. Everything they''d devised hoped that the horde they would face would consistrgely of Bronze monsters, with Silver elites at most; the fact that the majority of the monsters they had to face were Silver was already a problem.
They had the allies that Misa''s team had brought with her, as much as he couldn''t bring himself topletely trust them. They were proving extraordinarily effective, too; experienced delvers in all, they were cutting through the insectoid horde with a brutal efficiency.
But there were only four of them. Even if all five of them were fighting, it wouldn''t have been enough.
Their walls were holding for now, though, so there was that. Misa''s n had been pretty good he''d been impressed. She''d even drawn up a blueprint for him of the way all the traps and walls should beid out, and it had only required minor corrections on his part, because her memory of the vige didn''t quite match up with what they had.
A part of him wondered how much history had changed, without Misa here.
The rest of him was more concerned about the monster screeching in his face, acidic spittle flying into his eyes. Orkas grimaced and roared in pain, thrusting his spear blindly forward; he heard the crunch of chitin as the spear slid into its flesh
[Spearing Thrust] took over, and the shockwave from the skill tossed the monster back long enough for him to pour a bit of healing potion over his eyes. Fuck. That stung. They hadn''t been prepared for fucking acid spit.
The other guardsmen were struggling with much the same near him, he knew. And he could also see that they were tiring none of them were built for a prolonged fight like this. A lot of them were scared, too, because for all that they were guardsmen in the vige the vige itself had been rtively peaceful; there simply hadn''t been any reason to fight, until now.
He heard one guardsman scream as an insectoid de cut deep into his shoulder, and he felt something in his heart harden. Anger and resolve, of a sort; anger that this had already happened once to his vige, apparently, and that they were being forced to do it again. Resolve to beat the circumstances that had been forced upon him, because he''d already failed once, and he could not and would not fail now that he had warning.
If the timescale Misa had given him was correct and everything else she had given him had been correct so far then they would have to deal with this for at least another three hours.
Orkas was confident they could survive at least one. Some barriers and walls had fallen, but they had built them inyers, and were able to retreat back to the next when the first one was broken. The support of the skeleton crew that Misa had left him kept some of thoseyers holding strong for longer than they''d expected. Some of the monsters were arriving injured, easier to kill than the others; no doubt Misa and her team were doing damage to them. It lightened his heart to see it.
But he was worried.
His resolve could only bring him so far. Their walls would fail eventually, and at the current rate, even with the extra barriers they had built, they''d retreat to thestyer before two hours were up. They needed to end it early. Misa had been right.
So he needed to trust the woman who called herself his daughter, and trust that she and her team would end this before things went too far
Something in the air changed.
Orkas blinked rapidly; his vision had suddenly split into two, and he felt a pounding headache searing its way into his skull; when he touched his head, he saw his hande away with blood. How? Injuries weren''t retained, that was the entire point of the health system...
He stumbled. Was he missing a leg?
Part of him knew he should have been worried. He should have been terrified, even. Unexined, impossible injuries meant another monster, one that had [Injury]-style debuffs and was invisible
but that wasn''t right, either. He knew this, because these injuries were familiar.
He knew this because he remembered, and the pain of his injuries were nothingpared to the memories he now had; memories of having a daughter, of her firstugh, her first smile. He remembered the first time she''d picked up a mace he''d left lying on the ground and dered it hers, and then sparred him for the right to keep it.
He remembered losing on purpose,ughing as she pinned him down and dered her victory.
He remembered her fascination with sses and skills, and herint that it seemed unfair that some got rare sses, and others gotmon ones. He remembered her saying that she would find a way to use her skills well no matter the rarity, and how she worked with every member of the vige to better use their skills; sometimes for absurd, useless things, but she had such a bright heart that they all went along with it.
He remembered their arguments, the times they had fought, certainly, but in the pain of having lost his daughter before she was even born, those memories faded into the background. The joy was what stood out; the joy of having his memories back, of those lonely days reced with a happier family. His wife''sughter, her smile every time her daughter did something new or interesting. Her whispers to him about how their daughter would grow up to be someone brilliant.
He felt himself losing his grip on his weapon, but he couldn''t find in him the energy to care; his head ached, and his heart pounded, and his body was fresh with all the injuries he''d sustained when he went down fighting to protect his family. He hadn''t even known Misa was out there, fighting alone.
The monster he was fighting let out a victorious screech and sent a de careening towards his chest. He was too gravely hurt to stop it, but he forced himself to try; to react. To reach for his weapon. To do anything.
But before he could do any of those things, Misa was suddenly there, her mace tight in her hands. She swung it hard enough into the mantis monster''s face to send it flying backwards, mere seconds before the de would have pierced his chest.
Her gaze was furious.
Not at him; never at him, not truly. She was angry at the world, and if he knew her...
She was about to throw everything she could think of at it to fight it.
"We won," Misa dered to the air, ring at something at a very specific something, in fact. A system screen? "Like hell I''m letting you do this to my family. I am not watching them die a second time."
Chapter 40: Commonalities
Chapter 40: Commonalities
The boxes hovered in front of Misa, and she red at it like she could make it go away through sheer spite.
Congrattions! You havepleted the bonus room . The following rewards will be granted when you leave the bonus room.
Bonus Room Rewards:
[Unique Quality Gear: The de Arcane]
[Unique Skill: Heart and Home]
Bonus room dissolutionmencing. You will be returned to the Crystal Challenge room once dissolution isplete.
Errors have been encountered during dissolution. You may notice strange effects.
The notifications had appeared almost as soon as they had left and returned to the ''bonus room'', for all that Misa was loath to call it that. They''d raced to get back to the vige, even as the timer ticked down. She''d returned only just in time to stop that attack from touching her father, and even then, it had been a close one. If it hadn''t been for [Guardian''s Premonition] guiding her eyes and telling her where to look...
But there was something else that chilled her, and made a fire rage within her veins. It was how familiar all of these injuries were. She''d seen all these injuries before, on the bodies of her friends and family.
"Sev," she said, and there was a quiet steel in her voice. "Can you help with the wounded?"
He nodded once at her, and divine magic flooded to him. One small piece of it drifted off to heal her father; she watched as it stitched his wounds back together, and Orkas'' health rose again... But it was slowly ticking down, still. Sev had to move, and keep moving; the level difference helped, but there were so many he had to heal.
Misa would have gone to them herself she wanted to. But something else was ringing in her head, for [Guardian''s Premonition] had not gone silent, even after she rescued her father.
The gate would still fall.
She could see it now, even. Superimposed over the gate to their vige was the image of a fallen, wrecked one, sliced into ribbons of wood and twisted steel. She remembered the sight well; it was what had remained after the dungeon break had first destroyed their home.
Her mind raced for a solution. She didn''t understand why old injuries were appearing. But some of the guardsmen were looking at her in awe, recognition sparking in their eyes, and if she read her father''s expression right...
"I remember," he whispered to her, and she nodded. She fought back the urge to say everything she wanted to say now, when she still had the chance; there would be time for itter. She would make sure of that.
"I''m going to fix this," she said instead, and she saw the way Orkas looked at her.
Pride. Familiarity.
Resignation. But underneath that resignation, the smallest spark of hope.
"Vex," she said, ncing at the lizardkin. "This isn''t normal, is it?"
"No," Vex said, shaking his head. He looked vaguely horrified, and was looking around anxiously, like he was desperate to find a way to help but he didn''t have any ideas either. "It''s not supposed to be like this. The room just... fades away."
That had partially happened. The sky was nothingness, now, instead of the blue of before. The monsters were fading away, though there were still skirmishes here and there, mostly between the now-skeletal delvers and the remaining monsters as they fought to protect the guardsmen.
"We cannot solve this alone," Derivan said.
"Good thing we have a whole vige," Misa answered. She couldn''t quite bring herself to smile, but there was a grim ferocity to her words.
They needed answers they didn''t have; too much was unknown to them.
Fortunately for them and unfortunately for the dungeon it had given them the one person that could make a very, very good guess.
"I was hoping I''d see you," Charise said, grinning weakly at Misa.
Misa had found her mother not too long after barging her way past the gates Charise was already on the way there, as if looking for her. She was limping, grimacing with pain with every step, but there was that delver that was carefully helping her every step of the way. He wouldn''t meet anyone''s eyes.
For all the pain that she was clearly in, though, her mother''s eyes were bright and knowing.
"If things weren''t so urgent..." Charise began. She sighed, and looked at Misa with a small, fond smile. "I can''t convince you not to do this, can I?"
"No," Misa said, though the smile made her heart ache.
"Okay," her mother said once, epting it with a nod; her face grew more serious, as she leaned into her [Intuition of Truth]. Almost immediately, she frowned, and nced at Misa''s hand. "You have something with you. Something important."
The spark she''d taken from the dungeon. She''d almost forgotten about it. The weight of it had left her mind, and as soon as it had, it weighed almost nothing; now that she was thinking about it again, she grunted, straining to lift the thing. "Do you know what it is?"
"No," Charise said, shaking her head, but she frowned at it nevertheless. "But everything... bends towards it. I can''t even look at you without my attention being drawn there. It''s linked to why everything is happening this way. [Intuition of Truth] isn''t that detailed, but it doesn''t need to be for me to see that."
Misa frowned, opening her hand to look at the spark. Even now, to her eyes, it looked tiny and unassuming; she couldn''t imagine it holding the unimaginable amount of mana that Vex imed it contained. She remembered seeing the thin wisp of light emanating from it, drifting up into an endless sky full of those tiny pinpricks of light... there had to be thousands.
The one it was linked to had been her vige; she was sure of it. The sight would have been beautiful, if it hadn''t filled her with dread. Was that why? Was this thing doing this to the vige?
"You need to use your intuition skill, too," Charise said, interrupting her thoughts. Her mother peered at her closely, then took one of her hands in two of her own, giving her a gentle smile. "Breathe. Let it guide you."
Misa listened. [Guardian''s Premonition] pulsed in her mind. The gate was in the process of falling; she had to know why. She had to know what she could do to stop it.
She didn''t know why, but it guided her into memories of her childhood. She remembered the vige as it was, whole and intact, everyone hearty and whole.
X-51 ####### #####R synchronization has reached 50%.
The notification startled her when it popped up; at the same time, Charise let out a gasp that was something like relief, and she stood a little taller.
Not a coincidence. Was it reacting to her memories?
Dissolution of bonus room has halted. Unable to proceed.
Unable to resolve problem within local parameters. Calling for administrator assistance...
<>ROR>
######Y ###### is not valid loot. Please drop it and allow dissolution to proceed.
If anything, thest message just made her clutch the spark to herself even tighter. They''d clearly gone off the rails in some way, but if that was allowing her vige to stay intact...
Drop the ######Y ######.
That definitely wasn''t a normal system warning. Everyone else saw the messages, too, considering the way they stared at the air in front of them, startled.
Administrator assistance. That would make this the second time they''d encountered an administrator? The first time
Fine. You were warned.
The sky was pitch ck; it had been the first thing to disappear as the dissolution began. But now that pitch ck darkness began to move, the night sky undting in a way that should have been impossible, and again yet again the system ovey appeared, visible to anyone that dared to look up.
Which was pretty much everyone. They all stared at the window in the sky and swallowed.
"Ah, shit," Misa said softly.
But it wasn''t the appearance of the boss monster that worried her.
It was what she could see in the distance. It was not unlike what she had seen in the inner recesses of the dungeon; again, there were those small specks of light in the distance.
Only this time, they were growing, slowly but surely, and [Danger Sense] and [Guardian''s Premonition] were both ring at her.
"It''s a [Meteor Storm]," Vex whispered softly, terrified. "Misa, you can''t... we can''t block that. There has to be hundreds of them. I''ve never seen..."
"How long is that going to take to hit us?" Misa asked.
"I-I don''t know. A few minutes? Maybe a little less than ten?" Vex said, hesitant. The Serpent was still undting in the air; it seemed to believe that its spell was all that was needed, and it was content to wait it out. Misa spared a moment to wonder if there was another god trapped nearby, wrapped in chains.
"I can block it if I have enough mana," Misa said. "I have 1,162 health. Ten percent of my health is 116 health. The cost markup from [Every Last Drop] turns that into 232 mana. I don''t" she grimaced slightly. "I don''t have nearly that much mana. But we have a huge fuckin'' mana battery in this thing, right?" She lifted the spark they''d stolen from the dungeon, albeit with some effort.
"It is also what sustains this ce, if the system messages are correct," Derivan cautioned.
"It has enough mana," Vex said. "I... I think. It''s hard to look at it directly. But the mana levels in it are barely dropping even now. It should be fine. But I don''t think it''s as easy as calling that mana yours, Misa."
"Quick test?" Misa offered. They tested it.
It did not, unfortunately, count. The skill drained all her mana and then part of her health, and she winced at the strange feeling that flooded through her at the mana loss.
"I might be able to connect my mana pool with it, since I have [Advanced Mana Maniption], and that would make it ''my'' mana. But I don''t have any way to share my mana with you." Vex nced worriedly at the sky again; the meteors were getting closer. Brighter.
Rather than look worried, Misa''s face lit up, and she exchanged a nce with her mother. "Gabriel!"
"Gabriel?" Vex asked, puzzled.
"This way. Come on, we need to find him quick," Misa said. Charise seemed to know exactly where to find him, and was veering directly towards arge, portly man. He was staring at the sky, his mouth agape, and trembling; Misa winced. She''d forgotten that not everyone was used to dealing with... all this. "Gabriel," she said.
"Misa." His eyes went wide as he turned to her. "I-I died. Misa, I can''t I died. I''m going to die again."
"You won''t," Misa said softly. "But we need your help. Can you help us?"
"I''m going to die," he said empathically, and curled up on himself
Charise stepped in front of him. "No, you''re not," she told him, hauling him to his feet. "You''re going to help us all live, do you understand? But we need your help, and we don''t have time for you to argue."
"I need you to do a [Trade]," Misa said. "You still have that skill, right? The one that lets you trade resources?"
"I yes?" Gabriel sounded thoroughly confused, though a part of him seemed totch on to the conversation like it was a lifeline; anything approaching normal for him. He kept his gaze firmly on the nearby wall, like he could avoid the sight of the meteors that way.
"Vex, connect with the... whatever this thing is. I need you to [Trade] our mana, Gabriel. Can you do that?"
A short silence, and then a hesitant voice. "[Trade] between Vex and Misa. Resource: Mana. Quantity: Custom."
A window popped up in front of both Vex and Misa, and Vex stared at it, surprised.
"I''ll exinter," Misa said. She nced at the meteors; she imagined she could feel the heat of them on her skin already. "Just... trade me that mana for now."
[Trade]plete. 1,000,000 mana has been transferred to Misa Evergreen.
"Good," Misa said.
She''d spent a long time trying to figure out skills, after all, when she was a child. She''d even told her mother about it, not too long ago; reminisced over the childhood that Charise didn''t remember. [Trade] had fallen out of use a long time ago. It was far easier to just hand over what you wanted, and the basic degree of trust that people had in one another hadn''t been so harmed that the skill was necessary.
But she''d made the strange discovery that ''mana'' counted as a resource. She''d tried to trade other, silly things; concepts, stats, levels, health. None of those had worked.
''Mana'' had. There were nuances to the trade, and she''d abandoned it as useless when she found that the mana couldn''t be used to cast spells or fuel skills in the traditional sense; it ''belonged'' to you, but it wasn''t a part of you.
Except perhaps in this one very, very specific case, when the cost was applied to mana that belonged to her.
One more quick test, and when the damage pinged off the extra mana instead of her health, she grinned, nced at the Serpent in the sky, and gave it the finger.
"Fuck you," she said, and activated [To Fall Yet Hold the Line].
Chapter 41: To Hold the Line
Chapter 41: To Hold the Line
If there was one thing Misa had never really understood despite trying to, it was how [To Fall Yet Hold the Line] worked.
It was, by all ounts, an absurd skill there was no reason it should be possible to block every attack. More to the point, she''d seen the results of an impossible application of it not too long ago. When she blocked an unblockable attack, rather than one skill trumping the other, all of reality had sheared in half, and then chose the ''average'' of those two results.
She suspected, therefore, that whatever mechanism the skill operated by would be strained by what she was doing now, attempting to block hundreds of attacks simultaneously. Every single meteor counted as a separate attack, and every single one of them were attacks she would ordinarily fail to block. Not by slight degrees, like before, either. By massive degrees.
But she had [To Fall Yet Hold the Line]. So she would not fail.
There was another instance before, when she''d attempted to block something that was outside the realm of what should have been possible for her to block the intrusion of the system on Derivan''s mind. Her memory of that moment was faint and fuzzy, like there was some specific detail about it that she couldn''t quite recall in perfect rity.
Except now. When she used the skill now, straining it to its limits, that memory mmed into sharp focus, for the system couldn''t hide from her what the skill did while it was doing it.
She wielded nothing against the meteors, and she felt the skill reaching. Not a sword, for a sword could not strike down a meteor. Not a dagger. Not a staff or a wand or a focus, either, for there was no version of her no iteration of Misa that wielded any of those weapons that could strike a meteor down.
At lower levels, the skill forced her to move in physically impossible ways, adopting what would allow her to best block a skill. At higher levels when no amount of physical convolution would allow her to block an attack it began to reach for other versions of her; versions that were simr, but had a slightly different weapon. A sword instead of a mace, if that would be more effective. A wand or a focus instead of a sword, if she needed to counter some magic. She didn''t know any magic herself, but there was some version of her out there that did.
Shields were few and far between, but even at the outer edges of her possibility of self, those failed. There were no shields she could wield that would block all of these simultaneously.
All this knowledge came flooding into her mind, because however the skill operated, it was reaching. It was going out to the very farthest edges of everything Misa had been and ever could be, and it wasing up empty, for there was no version of Misa that existed or that ever would exist that would be capable of stopping an entire meteor storm by herself. There was no weapon, in the system-limited world where the level cap was supposedly a hundred, that could stop what was essentially an apocalyptic event.
And so, out of other options, the skill reached out to her and asked: What weapon could she wield, against a power such as this?
And Misa answered.
I am more than the sum of my parts. The effect I have on the world is more than the footprints I leave behind. I have carried my vige with me for years; their hopes, their dreams, and their prayers. I have met new friends, and they, too, are now part of my power. Because my power does not lie in what I do alone.
The weapon I wield is not sword nor shield, not staff nor wand. It is in the lives I have touched, with kindness instead of cruelty,passion instead of rage. It is in the strength ofmunity, in acting together to enact change that cannot be aplished alone.
The skill responded.
There was no version of Misa that could stop hundreds of meteors alone; a single one was an apocalyptic event, all by itself. But she would not fail to block this attack, and she had a lot more to leverage than just herself.
Thousands then tens of thousands of mana poured into the skill through the mana she had borrowed, stolen directly from the [####### A#####].
Ghostly versions of people manifested in the air most of them the people of J''rokksur. Each of them carried with them something special.
Not a ss. Not a unique skill. All of them had [Common] sses, and [Common] skills.
These were just versions of them that had had their lives touched by Misa. Variations that had learned to abuse their skills to truly absurd degrees. Not alone, perhaps, but working in concert, with maxed out skills. These were variations of them that had lived with Misa for years, and grown up with her. They were from a vige that had survived the horde, and learned to fight with everything they had.
[ssify], from the vige [Categorist], who very reluctantly ssified a group of meteors as a mannequin.
[Clothe], from the vige [Tailor], who worked together with the [Cobbler] to bestow a pair of massive shoes on the lowest two meteors in that group.
[Light Steps], from one of the guardsmen, who had a buffing skill that could make any piece of footwear tread lightly.
[Adjust], from the vige [Builder], who could move rocks slightly. ''Slight'', as it turned out, was quite astronomic when dealing with the scales and distances involved for meteors. The impact would still have done damage, if not for the [Light Steps] buff, which caused the entire set of meteors that had been [ssified] together tond with a move that could only be called dainty.
Those particr rocks rolled peacefully onto the ground, and struck some invisible border where the dissolution of the bonus room had begun; they vanished as they struck that invisible barrier.
Misa grinned at the sight. The sky began to undte in anger, but not even a second had passed, and they were far from done.
The vige pickpocket who had received the ss when he had once pickpocketed a friend as a joke and hated it, though no one judged him for it [Stole] several meteors, then [Trade]d it with the [Quartermaster], who [Store]d it.
There was a version of Derivan, here, who had learned to Shift and had boosted the stat to impossible numbers. He shed with a hand, and holes were outright torn in space; holes that sent one meteor crashing through and into another, and those fragments into another five, sending each crashing off course.
There was a version of Vex who had learned to master magic not through runes, not [Mana Maniption], but magic as he wished it to be. It was an art, in his mind, and this version of him had leaned entirely into it; he had discarded his dagger for a brush, and he painted strokes in the air. Each stroke of mana became a glittering panel of light, and the meteors that struck those panels shed into a dozen shades of prismatic color before shimmering down into nothing.
There was a version of Sev who stood, silent but behind him were figures, and one of them looked like the familiar form of Onyx. He gave Onyx a nod, and Onyx stepped into him; reaching out with a hand, half a dozen meteors were instantly crushed together, turning into a perfect sculpture of Velykos; the priest they''d met, not too long ago.
The skeletons each being highly leveledbat sses already had their own attacks they could levy against the meteors. Five attacks streaked into the sky, even from the one that had refused to fight; one of them was the captain,unching his entire body at a meteor. Another one was an arrow. The third physically leapt up with a greatsword that should have been too big to carry, the fourth struck with a mace that shattered the rock, and the fifth held up a shield that somehow held up against a meteor.
There was Jerome, or a ghostly figure of him, who appeared in front of a meteor and seemed prepared to convert it to gold only that meteor swerved, for some reason, and never hit him at all; it smashed into the side of the bonus room instead, and dissolved into nothing.
And with that, the sky was clear. Misa couldn''t help but stare in some awe. Some of those were things that she''d assumed was possible, but never tested; for obvious reasons, [Common] sses were rarely put intobat situations. Especially nonbat sses. Even the tests she''d done with the other vigers as a kid...
She nced around. Some of the vigers looked awed, too. Vex and Derivan were staring up at the sky, watching with a glimmer of something inscrutable.
"Can I do that someday?" Vex whispered.
"I am sure that you can," Derivan answered, gentle.
Others just looked afraid of what would happen next, which was... valid. Misa grimaced. This was just the opening salvo, and the sky was angry, rippling in furious coils as it prepared to strike again.
And then it did. It was a single attack, springing its head at the vige like a snake going for a bite, covering kilometers in an instant. Misa gritted her teeth and blocked the single attack her weapon this time was a greatsword of strange, fractal design, that seemed to suck all the kic force of the attack into nothing and then she was falling.
Vex caught her with a spell. Orkas and Charise were both running up, one demanding to help and the other asking her if she was alright; she nodded tightly to thetter, but didn''t know how to answer the former. She didn''t have any ideas. Just blocking the thing felt like it had drained her on a fundamental level, for all that she was supposedly still full on health.
At least the snake seemed stunned from having its attack stopped.
"I''m okay, mom," she said out loud when Charise didn''t stop worrying. Footsteps made her nce to the side, where she saw Sev running over.
"I think I have an idea." Sev''s words were half-panted out; evidently, he''d been running around for a while. There were lines of exhaustion around his eyes. Determination still burned in them, though, strong as ever. "I''m not sure if you saw, but some of those meteors hit the edge of the bonus room and disappeared."
"And the Serpent attacks ridiculously fast once it lines up for a strike..." Vex thought out loud. "You want to get it to hit the side of the room?"
"Exactly." Sev managed a fierce grin, despite his exhaustion.
"That might work," Misa said. She nced up and winced. "It better work, actually. I can''t keep this up forever, and that thing looks pretty fuckin'' mad."
Sev looked up, too, and grimaced. The Serpent was ring down at them in two glowing spots of light, looking like miniature suns narrowed into slits. If it had been stunned, it was already coiling around for another attack.
"Dad," Misa said, ncing at her father. "You need to evacuate the vigers. I don''t want them anywhere near where this thing is going to hit."
"There isn''t anywhere to run even if we wanted to," Orkas said, shaking his head. "But it''s focused on you."
Ah. Because of the ####### #####R, still held tight in her hand. She''d almost forgotten.
"Alright then," Misa said. The Serpent was already coiling up again, preparing for another strike. "I guess I''m going to be the bait."
Chapter 42: The Serpent of the Night Sky
Chapter 42: The Serpent of the Night Sky
Dirt and rubble exploded into the air as the Serpent struck the ground, the snake-like head snapping at them the same way a snake would. Misa hadn''t blocked it, this time the vigers, while notpletely clear, were far enough away that they wouldn''t have been hit by the direct strike. The Serpent itself seemed smaller, too; not so small that it could be dodged easily, but enough so that the impact smashed apart a few homes, and not the entire vige.
The force of that impact was still enough to flicker damage into their health, though. Vex, Sev, and Misa all grimaced; Derivan was the only one that escaped rtively unscathed. Four of the delvers were still fighting with them, though they had been further away and thus escaped rtively unscathed.
Their arrows weren''t doing much to the Serpent, though. The health bar of the Serpent had barely budged, for all the arrows they''d pumped into it, and they were running out. None of them were mages, either.
"Sorry we dragged you into this!" Sev yelled at them, maybe because he felt like he owed it to them, and one of them yelled back something about having been through worse.
Which was... concerning, actually. But they didn''t have time to think about it much.
Derivan ran forward while the snake was recovering from the impact of its own strike. He stabbed his sword into its side, and there was a roar of anger and pain in response the very ground shook, and prismatic blood gushed out of the gap he''d opened up. He had to jump back a secondter as the Serpent shook itself wildly, pulling back.
The living armor was their second best bet at ending this. His strikes didn''t affect the Serpent''s health, but it was still clearly injured. And it was certainly getting wary of him, with the way it reared back, sun-like eyes narrowing at him suspiciously.
Their best bet, of course, was still baiting the snake into smashing into the side of the bonus room. But that was easier said than done. It was far too easy for any one of them to get knocked in instead, and none of them wanted to test what would happen in that situation.
Misa stared up at the sky-serpent grimly.
Though it was more wary of them now, every so often, it would turn to re at her and that re would coincide with a popup of yet another blue box, demanding that she drop what she was holding. That she drop the [####### #####R]. She still didn''t really understand what it was, but she understood that it was the only thing keeping this ce together, so like hell she was letting go of it. Why let her grab it at all, if it was going to be a problem?
But if the Serpent was going to re at her every time she received a box, then maybe there was something more to it than that. A surge of anger that apanied an order, perhaps, or perhaps it was the Serpent that was sending her those boxes...
It struck again before she could finish the thought, headed directly for her once again. Misa tried to throw herself out of the way she couldn''t block, this time, she had to make it miss and strike the wall instead but it was still fast enough that it clipped her, and the angle of attack meant that it mmed into the ground instead of into the edges of the room. Derivan attacked with a stab again, slicing into the Serpent''s flesh-that-wasn''t-flesh, spraying the ground in more of that strange prismatic blood.
Misa, meanwhile, was sent careening backwards through the dirt. She stopped before she hit the edge of the room only because Vex and Sev both put a barrier up in her way, and she smacked into them both, groaning in pain.
[Every Last Drop] protected her with that borrowed mana, but only barely.
"I need to be higher up!" Misa growled out, biting the words out through the pain. The Serpent reared back into the sky, circling around again, watching them. "Anyone have any ideas?"
"Flight spells can''t move you fast enough to dodge that thing once it starts attacking." Vex watched the Serpent carefully. He was obviously nervous, but his eyes were bright and alert. "We need something different."
"A well-timed block, perhaps," Derivan suggested. "If we know the moment it is to attack..."
The Serpent seemed to want to attack her every time she received a box. If she could use that as an early warning
"Captain!" Misa called. "Harold, right? That''s your name?"
"Yes ma''am!" Harold called back at her. "Y''need somethin''?"
"I need you to fire an arrow into the sky, between that thing and the border. Do it when I tell you to," she said. "Then fire a second one near the ground, in any direction except the border."
Harold cocked his head, and Misa had the strange feeling that he was raising a brow at her, despite theck of any eyebrows. "If that''s what ya need," he said. "But we''re on ourst cou arrows, now. We gotta get this right."
"Believe me," Misa exhaled. "I know."
Drop the ####### #####R.
"Now!" Misa shouted.
An arrow flew into the air, almost directly upwards boosted by a skill, clearly, because it moved far faster than it should have been able to. Misa still waited for a second for the arrow to reach the right height, and then blocked the attack, ignoring the spike of pain in her head.
Her mace struck the arrow, and it splintered.
For a split second, she hovered in the air.
In that same split second, the Serpent narrowed its eyes at her, and struck.
She nced down, hoping that the captain had remembered the second part of her instructions she barely saw the flicker of the arrow crossing the ground. She blocked that attack, too, finding herself on the ground a secondter, another broken arrow shattering itself on her mace
above her, the Serpent tried to pull back its attack, but it was toote; it had gathered too much momentum
the Serpent smashed into the border of the bonus room.
There was a loud cracking sound. Unlike everything else that had struck the border, the Serpent didn''t outright vanish. Instead, it swerved, hissing angrily as it tried to stabilize itself.
It failed. It crashed into the ground, one burning eye staring at them. Its head was odd and misshapen for a serpent like chunks had been carved out.
"Did it work?" Vex asked beside her.
"It doesn''t look hurt," Sev said.
In Misa''s hand, the fragment burned. The spark. The [####### #####R], or whatever it was. Her head throbbed with two sets of memories; one in which the Serpent was whole, and one in which it had always looked like this chunks of flesh missing, an entire eye gone. It seemed just as angry as ever, and yet
"I think it worked," she said quietly. She didn''t know how to parse her memories yet, nor did she even have the words to exin what she thought might have happened. Vex and Sev didn''t seem to remember
"It did work," Derivan confirmed next to her. He looked just as concerned. Part of Misa felt a raw sort of relief, though, at least at having someone else to corroborate what she was saying.
"Understood," Sev said simply, and Vex gave a quick nod beside him.
"But I believe it is not over," Derivan added. The Serpent was on the ground, yes, but it was very much not dead; it was slower, and it seemed a little confused, perhaps. It wriggled awkwardly, then red ahead, like its gaze alone would be enough
"Magic!" Vex shouted, sounding rmed; a crystalline barrier formed in front of them as he sliced his dagger through the air. Misa prepared to block the attack as the snake''s mouth yawned open, and a beam of light zed forward; it scattered against the crystalline barrier, diffracting into a dozen weaker beams that burned the ground.
Misa lowered her mace. [To Fall Yet Hold the Line] wasn''t needed. Part of her was relieved; that skill had drained her.
The moment the attack broke was the moment they took to attack all four of them charged forwards, joined quickly by the other four delvers that brandished their weapons. Vex and Sev stayed a little further back, of course, but they still prepared to cast. Sev had light-blue divine magic ying around his fingers as beams of light shot from his staff, and Vex seemed to be concentrating on a spell of some kind; Derivan ran until he was close enough to sh into the Serpent yet again.
And then Vex cast his spell.
It looked almost directly inspired by the beam of light the Serpent had fired from them and equally bright ray of light shone from Vex''s dagger as he began cutting into the air, and it only shone brighter and brighter as he continued. The snake was flinching backwards, somehow, trying to get away from the light, but there was nowhere to go, and soon the whole ce was lit up like it was daytime
The Serpent copsed.
It didn''t appear to be dead it was breathing, albeit in slow, ragged breaths. But its eyes were closed. Perhaps even more telling was the fact that its skin, once the color of the night sky, now shone a rippling blue. Prismatic blood still oozed from its wounds, but it was still.
"What the fuck was that?" Misa asked.
"Uh... That was [Daylight], but mana-boosted a lot," Vex answered, sounding a little embarrassed. "It''s a [Serpent of the Night Sky], so I figured that might do something?"
"It still has most of its health," Harold reported. He wasn''t attacking it yet, apparently concerned that doing so would break it out of whatever trance it was in. "I don''t think any of us can take down all its health. Maybe that friend of yours." He nced rather significantly at Derivan.
"I am unsure I could do that," the armor replied, ncing at the monster.
Misa was angry, admittedly. But it looked in many ways broken, defeated, and it was lying down there on the ground... For all that it had health, they had clearly won, at least for the moment.
There were no more blue boxes warning her to drop the [####### #####R], at least.
"What do we do now?" she said quietly.
"I want to try something," Sev said. "Last time we fought an Overseer, it was keeping Onyx prisoner, right? Vex, you mentioned that the chains were burning with your magic the magic that you hit the Overseer with."
"Yeah," Vex nodded. "I still don''t really understand it. My best guess is that the Overseer is in some way directly linked to the chains..."
"I''m thinking these Overseers are prisons," Sev said, his words soft. "Living prisons. And I want to find out which god is imprisoned here, if anyone."
Vex blinked at him, surprised but Derivan didn''t seem nearly as surprised. "Misa''s skill showed me part of what I can potentially do, I think," the armor said. "I may be able to... I feel there is something here I can breach, in much the same way I did when we stepped into the dungeon. But..."
"But?" Sev raised an eyebrow at him. Derivan grimaced.
"The weakest point is here," the armor said. He gestured to the wound he had cut open in the Serpent, still oozing prismatic blood. "The journey might not be pleasant."
Chapter 43: A Prison of Broken Webs
Chapter 43: A Prison of Broken Webs
There were a number of things they had to do, of course, before they could stroll into what was hypothetically the prison of yet another god.
For one thing, they had to make sure the bonus room was rtively stable. The dissolution didn''t seem to be progressing, and no one was receiving any new boxes; the injuries of all the various vigers were healed, and now they were all trying to recover.
That was the good part. The bad part was that it was somewhat difficult to exin to them why they weren''t trying to immediately kill the Serpent, and in particr why they wanted to go into it.
There was, of course, also the concern that whatever effect was keeping the bonus room up would fail the moment they entered the Serpent.
That one, at least, was a concern that was easy enough to alleviate. Charise was there, shaking her head. "It will not," she said. "This space is tied strongly to what you''re holding. As long as it doesn''t break, this ce won''t break, either."
"[Intuitionist] at work?" Misa asked, and her mother grinned at her.
"You know it."
That was not, of course, actually enough for Misa to be satisfied. She had Derivan take her in and out of the prison a few times, quickly, checking if the dissolution had progressed while she was gone but it had not, and it seemed that Charise was right.
So that, at least, was fine; Misa coulde with them.
The second thing they needed to decide was if going into the prison was worth it at all. For that, they collectively decided that it was; they were meant to find answers here, after all, and all they had was the barest beginning of one. The pieces were all there, but they had nothing to put it together. No real idea of what it all meant.
...And, of course, if there truly was another god trapped here, it seemed only right that they try to do for them what they could not do for Onyx. Perhaps it would even be Onyx, again, and there would be a second chance to rescue him, though none of them really thought that would be the case.
Still, it was enough for them. They all linked hands, and Derivan found the part of himself that touched upon Shift; he brought them all up to the wound in the Serpent, where he''d already stepped through with Misa, and pushed at the now-familiar crack in space and time.
They found themselves in a prison of prismatic webs.
It waspletely unlike the nk, empty space they''d first found Onyx in, with nothing but a long series of chains trailing up to the figure in the center. This one was lit up by a fractal brilliance that would have been beautiful, if not for the way those very same webs clung to them, a sticky, off-feeling substance that couldn''t be easily ignored. It took effort to step through the webs, to make their way deeper into the prison.
And it was a prison that much was obvious. The further in they got, the denser those webs became; they were forced to stop before they reached the center, for a sheer drop appeared in front of them, the ground disappearing into endless prismatic light.
In the midst of the light, far into the distance, was a single, solitary figure. It was covered in so many dense webs that it seemed nearly impossible for it to move.
It was dressed in red robes that were adorned by golden filigree, flowing around its figure. More striking, however, was the head, orck thereof; a sphere of roughly-hewn gold sat in its ce, a strange, distorted hum rising up around it.
Every time that figure moved every time it breathed the light around it would shift and warp, every web twisting into moving and holding it down.
It was also enormous, dwarfing them in size. Onyx had been human-sized, but this god if it was a god at all was nearly the size of a small mountain. It was only the fact that the ground they stood on was far above it that they were able to stare down and look at it in full, or else it would have towered high over them, and yet...
For all that they''d made it in here, they realized they didn''t exactly know what they were going to do. This wasn''t like the chains, where they could weaken them and heal the god; this wasn''t like Onyx, either, who knew who Sev was and had been willing to lend them a hand. There was no guarantee this god would want to help them at all.
But there was only one way they could start, really.
"Hello?" Sev called out. His voice echoed strangely in this liminal space, the words somehow bouncing between the webs rather than being absorbed; small fragments of his own, distorted voice came back to him when he spoke, and he grimaced slightly. "We''re here to help."
The figure below them shifted. It seemed to nce up at them, though it was hard to tell if it did the golden orb it had for a head shifted slightly, but there was no face to indicate where it was looking. "Hello?" it called back.
Sev paused.
That was a child''s voice. Distorted, yes, and difficult to make out with the way the cobwebs repeated the sound, but that was almost certainly a child. That was thest detail that made it click the sphere of gold and the golden filigree, the state he was in, like the webs were still ripping away something vital from him.
The way the meteor had shied away from the ghost of Jerome that Misa had somehow summoned, instead of striking him.
"Aurum?" Sev said carefully. The god beneath them jerked then winced when the webs tightened around him.
"That''s me," the god said. "Can you help me? I''m I''m stuck."
The smallest waver in the god''s voice. Just the slightest hint that he was afraid, though he should have been bawling by now, if the age of his voice was any indication. But who knew how gods worked? Onyx had been humanlike, but he was one example out of many.
"Do you know where you are?" Sev''s tone was gentle.
"No," Aurum admitted. "I dunno... I don''t remember much, actually. I remember being scared. I''m less scared now. ''Cause I can''t remember what I''m supposed to be scared of, I think? I feel like that should be scary... but it''s not."
A short pause.
"It''s nice to talk to someone again," he added. "It''s been lonely here. I don''t have any of my angels. They usually take care of me. I remember one of them finally came back... they looked so worried. I was really happy to see them. And then... I dunno what happened after that."
Another pause.
"Can... can you keep talking?" Aurum said. "I just... wanna know that you''re there."
"...We''re here," Sev answered. He didn''t trust himself to say any more; beside him, he could feel how tense all of hispanions were. Misa let out a quiet fuck, and winced as the sound echoed more than she wanted it to.
"Oh, okay," Aurum said. "Thank you."
"He really was just a child?" Vex said quietly. "I thought maybe Jerome was just delusional. Or he was tricked. The way everything was coordinated..."
"His angels were probably just as scared as he was," Misa answered. Of the four of them, she was the most visibly angry, though she didn''t seem to know where to channel that anger. There wasn''t anything her to punch, or block, or...
There was just this. A lonely, scared child, wrapped up in prismatic webs that seemed to be what, stealing his memories? But Onyx had remembered who he was; he''d remembered Sev, and he knew enough tofort his cleric. What was different here? What made this different from what happened with Onyx?
They were in a dungeon simtion of a bonus room. Was this part of the simtion, or was this external to it?
"Can you tell us what you do remember? Anything about yourself that you remember?" Sev asked, before the silence could stretch on for too long already, he could see Aurum beginning to fidget beneath the webs, as if forgetting that they were there. Every so often he would move too much again, and the webs would tighten around him, and he would remember.
"Um... yeah! Yeah. I dunno. I don''t remember much." Aurum seemed to try to gather himself. "My name''s Aurum, but you already knew that. I''m a god, I guess? Never really felt like it. But I have a bunch of angels, and sometimes they tell me what to do, if I''m not sure. They y with me a lot, when I get bored, and they teach me things. Sometimes they get a little sad, ''cause they tell me I can''t grow up. They dunno why; they say it''s just the way it is.
"Sometimes I get people that pray to me, and I wanna help them. But I don''t know how to help them, and I think sometimes I hurt them instead... I try not to. The angels told me I can''t just give away powers. I gotta think. There are rules. I don''t remember the rules...
"I wanna see them again." Aurum trembled a little bit in his spot, the movement causing a dozen webs to shake along with him, scattering into fractal cracks. "I miss them. I miss the people that prayed to me, too. I like them, even if they''re not all very good, But I don''t remember any of their faces"
Aurum stopped talking, and began to cry.
It was an odd sight. He drew up into himself, breaking a few of the webs as he did so, and not seeming to care as some of the other webs tightened around him, and then he just... shook. His shoulders heaved. But he was quiet, no sound escaping from him.
"Aurum?" Sev said, and then when the god didn''t reply and just kept crying, he sighed. "Aurum, we''re going to figure something out, okay? Just... give us some time."
He turned to Derivan, and spoke quietly. "He''s not pretending, is he?"
"Not to the best of my knowledge," the armor answered. "I... we must find a way to free him. We cannot leave him like this."
"I agree," Vex said. His voice was small, and he looked on the verge of tears himself, but damn if the lizardkin didn''t also look determined.
"He''s also actually a child," Misa muttered. "How... why? A child shouldn''t be a fuckin'' god."
"We''re going to get him out," Sev said. "We''re going to figure out what to do with him after that, but for now... whatever this is, I want to tear it down."
"Easier said than done," Misa said. She rammed her mace into a nearby cobweb not difficult, considering the things were everywhere, and clinging to them even now and the weapon simply slid through, leaving the web intact behind it. "These things look fragile, but they''re not."
"When you attack them," Vex pointed out. "We can move through them fine. Aurum can too, a little bit. He broke a few just now."
"So they''re impervious to attacks, but not... movement?" Misa frowned. "That doesn''t make any sense."
"They are not impervious to attacks," Derivan said. "They are impervious to weapons." He demonstrated by striking through one of the webs near him; it tore apart easily enough as his arm struck it, and fragments of glittering light fell to the ground.
Vex watched for a moment, then began to strike out with his dagger. A series of quick, precise strikes not at the webs, but in the air, carving out runes and a spell circle glowed; from that spell circle came a burst of ice that sted forward, cutting through a number of webs...
...and leaving them intact and unharmed afterwards, having gone through the webs with barely a whisper. The wizard grimaced. "I was hoping that would work," he said. Derivan patted him gently on the back.
"Manaburn worked before, didn''t it?" Sev suggested.
"On the chains, and it spread through them all. I don''t want to actually set this ce on fire," Vex said with a grimace. "Aurum''s still trapped in most of those webs, and I don''t know if it''ll hurt him."
"We can''t run through every single one of these webs," Misa said. "If we go down there we''re going to be as trapped as Aurum is."
"There is what you are holding," Derivan said. "The spark that we retrieved from the dungeon. It was able to preserve the vige in some way prevent its full dissolution, yes? Perhaps it can serve another purpose here."
He paused, looking around. "Even if we are able to remove these webs... we do not know how to return Aurum to his ne. It is not a true solution. Nor do we know how to preserve your vige, Misa, so that we can return to the dungeon without them being destroyed.
"We also don''t know how to use this," Misa said, lifting up the spark to look at it.
She paused. The rest of them did, too, staring at what was in her hands.
It was pulsing with a golden light.
Chapter 44: Hints Towards an Answer
Chapter 44: Hints Towards an Answer
Misa stared at the spark for a moment, nonplussed and unsure what to do. Part of her almost instinctively searched for a system notification to exin what was happening but there was nothing. Just the gentle pulsing of the spark in her hand. There was no hint from [Guardian''s Premonition] here, either; her vige felt... safe. At least for the time being.
"Um... Do we know what it''s doing?" Vex''s tail swished nervously behind him.
"Nope," Misa said. "No notifications, either. It''s just... glowing."
"What did you do with it before?" Sev asked.
"I just... remembered my vige." Misa''s voice went soft for a moment. "Not as they were when they... when the dungeon break happened. Before that. I remembered what we were. What we should have been."
The glow pulsed brighter. And there was wind, Misa realized suddenly; wind that hadn''t been there before. Or something that seemed very much like wind, in any case. The prismatic cobwebs they were surrounded by were all swaying, like they were being pulled by some unseen force.
Misa shifted the spark experimentally, stepping to the left. The movement of the webs followed her.
"It''s... drawing in the webs?" she said hesitantly.
B-63 ####### #####R integrity failing. Conflict detected. Calling for administrator assistance...
Unable to contact administrator. No fallback mechanisms found. Unable topensate.
B-63 ####### #####R integrity is at 97%.
"That''s not ominous at all," Misa muttered. She nced to herpanions. "You guys can see those too, right?"
"Yup," Sev said.
"Definitely," Vex added, staring at them a little wide-eyed.
"They are rather concerning," Derivan agreed.
"d it''s not just me," Misa muttered, and then she nced away from the spark and back towards Aurum. "Hey, um... Aurum. Are you doing alright?"
There was no answer. The god curled in tighter on himself, if anything, and refused to give a response. Misa grimaced slightly he''d wanted any form ofpanionship not too long ago but she understood. She remembered where she''d been just after she''d lost her vige; this wasn''t exactly the same thing, but if Aurum was as much of a child as he seemed...
"We have to try something," Sev said softly, and Misa nodded.
"Even if we left now," she said out loud more to convince herself than anything, it seemed. "We''d be stuck in the bonus room. We can''t keep ourselves in there forever. We came in here to get answers, and so far all we''ve gotten is more questions..."
"We need a lead," Vex said. "And I think we might have to take a risk here. Just... slowly."
"If there is a problem, I can get us out of here quickly," Derivan said.
Misa finally nodded. But it was still with some trepidation that she reached out with the spark she was holding, and let the corner of the closest prismatic web touch the very edges of it
the pull that was drawing in all the broken fragments of color suddenly became much, much stronger.
It was strong enough that Misa felt herself getting dragged forward, even though she wasn''t holding a particrly tight grip on the spark; Sev, Derivan, and Vex were all resisting a pull of some kind, too, although it seemed to be strongest on her. But she couldn''t spare a thought for them, because she was suddenly filled with the impression that she couldn''t stop this even if she wanted to; that this would have happened the moment the spark began to glow.
No. Before that. The moment she had synchronized with it, and that notification had popped up. The moment she''d used it to save her family, and everyone in her old town.
She didn''t regret a second of it. She had no damn idea what was happening, but she still red up into the wind-that-wasn''t-wind.
"Bring it on," she whispered.
Those words, too, were lost to the wind.
X-51 ####### #####R synchronization has reached 75%!
B-63 ####### #####R integrity is at 72%.
X-51 ####### #####R integrity is at 29%.
There was a rush of those webs being drawn into the #####R she was holding, the glow growing brighter and brighter with every web that got sucked in. She got the impression that the spark was growing smaller, too not that it was getting weaker, but that it was getting morepressed. It was starting to feel heavier, too, with every web that was drawn in
"Guys?" Aurum''s voice suddenly cut through the wind. It didn''t die down, exactly; the wind was as strong as ever, and every web was still being pulled in with tremendous force. The sticky panels of prismatic light on Aurum were pulling away, though, peeling off and starting to soar through the air towards the spark. "What''s what''s happening?"
"It''ll be okay!" Misa called out, gritting her teeth. "Don''t worry! We''re going to get you out of here!"
Aurum looked up from where he''d curled up into himself. His frame seemed terribly small, for all that he was an enormous figure in the distance, and his voice echoed with a tiny hope. "Really?"
"Of course!" Misa shouted back. It was with a confidence she didn''t really feel. But Aurum seemed to be able to move more freely, now, so whatever was happening... it seemed to be a good thing.
She hoped it was a good thing.
The webs kept getting pulled in, and the notifications piled up; she dismissed the ones that all functionally said the same thing. B-63''s integrity was failing, whatever that meant, and X-51''s integrity was going up. Whatever that meant. Evacuation notices came and went, but all she knew was that X-51 was the shard she was holding on to, and that perhaps it being repaired was a good thing
B-63 ####### #####R integrity is at 5%! Sapients detected within B-63 boundaries. Initiating emergency evacuation and connecting all functional nodes to nearest ######## #####R.
The pull abruptly stopped. The spark in her hand shone with a light so bright that it was nearly impossible for her to look at it it zed like a tiny sun in her hands, and she had to force herself to look away. She knew without looking that whatever had just happened had repaired it.
She also knew that something was happening to the very fabric of the space they were standing in.
Derivan shouted something, but she couldn''t hear what he said; it was like her ears were filled with water. Vex''s eyes were wide, and he was cutting runes rapidly into the air, like he was trying to protect them against something. Sev''s eyes were narrowed in concentration, and a divine glow was rising up around them, like he was healing them with everything he had.
Misa tried to block. She didn''t know what was happening, but if her friends were reacting this way, then there had to be something she could block, right?
But nothing happened.
She didn''t know why she was having so much trouble processing everything that was happening, either. But she watched, feeling like she was moving in slow motion, as Vex cast not a shield but a tform, and Derivan ran down to grab just the edge of Aurum''s robes; she saw Sev''s magic encase all of them in separate, individual bubbles.
She saw ck, all-epassing cracks suddenly spiderweb through space, sparing only anything the four of them touched.
No reaction from [Guardian''s Premonition], though. She only hoped it meant her vige was safe.
Misa was... somewhere.
Or perhaps she was nowhere.
Her friends were with her, she knew that much. She couldn''t see them, but she felt their presence. One of them was anxiously coiled, another firm and steady, and thest one nervous but unafraid.
Someone spoke. They spoke in worried tones of gravel and granite; of roughly-hewn rock shaped into perfection. "You shouldn''t be here," the voice told them. "You aren''t ready for this. How did you... Oh, no."
"Another piece has been lost," a softer, quieter voice said. This one spoke with tones of falling water and refracted light. "They cannot see yet. They aren''t ready."
"Can you remember?" the first voice spoke to them. "You must try. The answers cannot be given to you, for those answers are already gone, and recently; you can only feel the shape of the holes they left behind. We had hoped things would be different in this pocket... that a piece of what was would help you find what used to be. But it does not seem to have worked."
Misa was silent. She had no answer.
Sev was less silent.
"Onyx, is that you?" the cleric''s incredulous voice echoed in the not-space of wherever the fuck they were. The words were like a jolt to her psyche; she felt herself return, her mind pulled back from the strangely dissociated space she''d found herself in. "You know I hate it when you''re cryptic. Just tell us."
"I I literally cannot do that," Onyx said, and he sounded like he''d been caught off guard, along with somebination of exasperated and amused. Maybe a touch of fondness, along with a hint of sadness. "I have tried. Three times."
"You have?" Sev asked, sounding confused. And then, perhaps a little less confused: "I thought I''d need to rescue you. Are you okay... here? Wherever here is?"
"I am still in need of rescue, s," Onyx said, a touch of dryness entering his tone. "But you have time to rescue me yet. Do not worry yourself about me overmuch. I know the sight of me must have been worrying, and I apologize, for there was little I could do..."
"Onyx, if you apologize because someone else chained you up, I''m going to find a way to save you just so I can beat you in chess."
"You have never beaten me in chess."
"That''s the part you find unbelievable?"
"Have you seen what you and your team have been doingtely?" Onyx''s voice slid back into that amused fondness.
"Enough of this," the second voice cut in the one that sounded like waterfalls and light. "We don''t have time for this banter. They can''t stay here long. They need to go back."
"Um... how do we do that?" Vex''s voice spoke up, this time, sounding timid.
"Your friend just has to wish for it," Onyx told them.
"Me?" Misa asked hesitantly.
"No," Onyx said, and he gestured to the steady presence that was Derivan. The gesture was more of a feeling than anything physical. "You. Shift."
"...Ah," Derivan said quietly. He sounded distracted, but his voice sharpened a momentter. "There is nothing more you can tell us?"
"Nothing more," Onyx said.
"We wille back for you," Derivan said, his voice sincere. He focused for a moment, or he gave off the impression that he was. And then there was a sharp pulse
and they were staring at the night sky. The moon hung in the air amid the void, staring at them in a way that was almost usatory.
The dungeon was gone. The research team was in the distance, and there were sounds of shouting and panic filling the air.
In front of them, a long string of notifications piled quickly, one over the other, almost too quick to read.
More important than anything else for Misa, though, were the dozens of people just behind them. She''d scarcely had the time to notice them at all before Orkas and Charise both burst through the crowd and grabbed her in a great hug.
And for a small, infinitely valuable moment, nothing else mattered.
Chapter 45: Aftermath
Chapter 45: Aftermath
For all that everything seemed to be fine for the time being, there were a lot of things that needed the adventurers'' immediate attention.
The first were the system notifications. Several of them were just strings of errors, but a number of them were distinctly ominous.
[B-63 ####### #####R] integrity has failed. Unable to sustain local dungeon. Examining dungeon contents...
Dungeon contents cannot be erased. Remaining R-fragments have been redistributed to all three major ######s. All system users will be notified of this change.
Local parameters that were previously reliant on [B-63 R###### ######] have been attached to the closest avable ######.
[X-51 ####### #####R] has no attached processing node. It will not be able to permanently sustain B-63. Estimated degradation: 5 months, 12 days.
Additionally, several local sapients were found to have no synced backup on nearby ####### ######s. These sapients will be reverted to the nearest backup if [X-51 ####### #####R]pletely degrades.
Thest warning made Misa flinch she didn''t need to know what the missing words were to understand what that meant, though there were certainly implications that she''d have to discuss with the others when they had a moment to sit down and talk.
But the implication that her vige was on limited time, even after what they''d gone through to save them... that left a cold chill in her heart. She nced back at the rest of the vigers, seeing a number of them staring in concern at what was presumably the same warning.
Strangely, Orkas and Charise were the ones that didn''t seem concerned at all. They nced at the notification, then seemed to scoff.
"Don''t worry about us," Charise said before Misa could find the words she wanted to say. She gave her daughter a smile. "A timer isn''t a death sentence, and you don''t need to solve every problem we run into. You''ve given us a chance, and I promise you we''re going to use it."
"You defied the odds once," Orkas added, his voice a low rumble. Then he nced back at the much more worried-looking vigers, and raised his voice so they could all hear him or perhaps he simply used a skill. "And now we will defy the odds. Misa has already shown us what we can do. It''s time we figure out how the system really works, and break the hold it has on us."
The cheer that started up was small at first. But it grew, and what caught Misa''s attention was that it wasn''t her father that they were looking at when they cheered.
They were looking at her.
There was a fire in their hearts that had been sparked by Orkas'' words, but the fuel that kept it burning was what she''d shown them they could do.
She wasn''t sure it hadpletely settled in to her heart that her family was alive again. They''d been gone for so long, and she''d only just begun to ept that she wouldn''t see them again and yet here they were, and there were still so many questions about how all of this could be possible...
"We should go check out what''s going on over in the research camp," Misa finally said, though her words were still hesitant. There was nothing she wanted to do more than to spend more time with her family now that the immediate crisis was over and there were a few more notifications hovering at the edge of her vision that she hadn''t focused on yet. Rewards for the bonus room, most likely. The shouting was getting intense, though, and while it wasn''t necessarily their job to head off trouble, she still felt she owed them that much.
"Before we do that," Vex hesitated, ncing at the spark Misa was holding. "I don''t think I''ve read any records of dungeon dives that talk about this. Elyra would love to do some research on it, but..."
He nced up in the direction of the research camp, then frowned. "It''s up to you," he finally said. "Elyra has a lot of resources they can pour into researching that thing, but their priority isn''t saving lives. I would hide it. We can always give it to themter."
Misa nced at Vex for a moment, then at her parents. Slowly, she nodded, and pocketed the spark. The shouting in the camp was getting louder, and there were ripplesing from it, that felt like the activation of strong skills
"The delvers," Misa cursed. They weren''t with them, and if they weren''t with them then they''dnded back in the middle of the research camp; the researchers themselves knew about what had happened, but the guards
and there was the fact that the head researcher Kestel? had stopped talking to them, and the damn telepathy had cut off
They''d assumed it was a matter of being transported to the bonus room, but they were no longer so sure that was the cause, as more of the research camp came into view.
The research team was split into two groups. One group surrounded what looked to be Kestel, though it was difficult to be sure; there was a figure lying prone on the ground, and a small group of researchers that had arrayed themselves protectively around him. They each looked nervous, and the glow of skills lit up their hands.
The second group of researchers, meanwhile, were standing safely behind the guards and exhibiting no small amount of hostility. They were practically ring in Kestel''s direction.
"Shit, this doesn''t look good," Sev muttered. He raised his voice slightly, interjecting just as one of the guards looked to be about to start shouting again. "What''s going on here?"
The guard that had been about to speak froze, hand twitching to his de before recognizing who it was that had spoken. "You four," he said, narrowing his eyes slightly at them.
"...Yes?" Sev paused after the guard didn''t continue, staring at him. "Congrattions on counting?"
The guard''s hand tightened on the hilt of his sword, clearly not appreciating the joke. "Step away. The situation isplicated enough as it is."
"It wouldn''t beplicated if you just let us fuckin'' exin," the captain Harold snapped.
"Don''t listen to him," one of the researchers standing behind the guards said. "We need to take them in for questioning."
And then they started talking over one another, raising their voices at one another until they were once again shouting. The adventurers exchanged nces with one another none of this was going anywhere. Vex cast a quick spell, flickering a rune over the tip of his dagger, and Misa spoke into it.
"Shut the fuck up," she said.
For all that she spoke at a normal volume, the sound echoed loud enough to make all three groups in front of them flinch and fall silent. Misa red at them hard. "This isn''t going anywhere," she said. "One at a damn time."
"And what gives you the right" one of the researchers began indignantly, but stopped when Misa turned her re on him.
"Guards first," she said. "What happened here?"
The guard that had initially told them to step back scowled, but answered the question anyway, having clearly realized that their own approach wasn''t going anywhere. "There was an altercation amongst the researchers," the guard said. "This group here said Kestel betrayed Elyra."
"He didn''t betray shit!" a human woman shouted. She was one of the researchers standing next to Kestel protectively. "He just wanted to figure out what happened before reporting everything back to Elyra!"
"One at a time," Misa repeated, though her voice softened a little when she looked over at the woman she looked frightened, but determined. The weapon she was holding was barely a weapon at all, just a dinky little knife she clearly kept more as a keepsake than for fighting. "Why would that be a betrayal?"
"Because we need to report anything that happens to them." It was the same researcher that was standing behind the guards that spoke a lizardkin sporting a dangerous-looking crossbow, though he wasn''t holding it correctly. He jerked his head towards the delvers, and Misa was fairly certain that if Harold had still been able to scowl, he would have. "House Varil will have our heads if we don''t."
"Okay. I don''t know what any of that means." Misa paused for a second, then looked at Harold. "It doesn''t exin what happened to Kestel."
"He was trying to stop us from reporting it, so we had to stop him," the lizardkin sniffed. Misa narrowed her eyes dangerously, then turned to Harold.
"I take it you know why this is such a big deal?" she asked.
The skeletal figure of the delver team''s captain didn''t respond for a moment. He stared at the guards long enough to make the researchers there shift awkwardly, self-consciously. Ixiss was the one that responded, stepping up beside his captain to give the answer.
"House Varil is in charge of producing many of the soldiers and elitebat teams in Elyra," he answered shortly. "They produce fighters that are obedient. They just don''t tell anyone how they do it."
"I''m not liking the sound of that," Sev muttered.
"Not many people do, so they just don''t ask questions. Out of sight, out of mind," Iliss said, stepping up next to her brother. "It''s usually toote for most of us once we figure out what''s going on. It''s not mind control or anything fancy like that, it''s just... emotional suppression. We''re not allowed to feel."
Iliss shook her head, shuddering slightly at an invisible memory. "Whatever you did back there broke the enchantment slightly. It''s degrading now." She nodded at Misa. "S''why we''re grateful to you, even if we''re stuck like... this."
"That and the saving our lives part," Ixiss added.
"We kinda helped save you guys back, though, so I figure we''re even on that front," Iliss said. Misa managed a small grin at that.
"If ya report us to House Varil," Harold said the captain was finally speaking up, stepping forward with a heavy weight to his voice. Even without eyes, his gaze was very firmly on the researchers that seemed determined to report him and his team, and the guards took a subconscious step back. "They''lle back for us. And I don''t know about y''all, but I ain''t going back to them."
"That''s exactly why we need to report this," the researcher that had been arguing for this hissed back. "If you don''t get punished, we will. The Housese down hard on anything they think is a risk, and this undermines their authority. Even if we didn''t say anything they''d know, because they track every one of their soldiers. They''ll be able to tell when you don''te back, and they''ll know that we helped you."
"Not if you just say we''re dead," the captain said, staring firmly at the researcher. "Varil doesn''t need to know a damn thing. Tell ''em we all died in action. For all intents and purposes, we did. We ain''t gonna be soldiers of Elyra anymore."
There was still tension in the air but even the guards seemed a bit uncertain now. The activities of noble houses seemed a bit above their pay grade, but the exnation they were being given was certainly damning.
"Kestel was trying to protect you?" Sev asked, ncing at Harold. The captain shrugged.
"Honestly, knowing him, it''s a mixture of wantin'' to protect us and wantin'' to do research on us," he answered bluntly. "He ain''t a bad man, but he''s very focused on the learnin''. Can''t say I get it, but he tries to do right by us, and I''m a mite pissed that he got hurt in all this."
The researchers were whispering amongst themselves, and even the guards looked uncertain. The one lizardkin man was still arguing very much in favor of telling Elyra and considering all it would take was a simple discreet message through the system...
"They''re not going to be able to keep this secret forever," Vex said quietly. "But I think if we can get the Guild to take them in, they''ll be okay. At the very least, House Varil will have a lot more trouble attacking adventurers."
"I think we can swing that," Sev said, ncing at the guards and researchers. The ones standing around Kestel were still looking around suspiciously, but they at least seemed a little calmer now. All of them were clearly in need of healing, though. "But also, I''m not going to wait for them to figure out what they want to do. I know where I stand here. I''m going to go make sure Kestel''s okay, and then we''re taking everyone back to the Guild so we can figure out what happened to the dungeon."
Chapter 46: Health and Healing
Chapter 46: Health and Healing
For the umpteenth time, Sev nced at the notifications hovering at the corner of his eye, even as he stormed closer towards Kestel. The researchers flinched back at his approach, but calmed when they saw his robes and the focus he wore around his neck; he was clearly a cleric.
The notification was distracting and persistent, though. He''d been doing his best to ignore it, with everything else that was going on, but...
No ######s are avable for Coalesced Entity to attach to.
Potential substitute found. Allow attachment of ?
ACCEPT / REJECT
Sev''s memories of what happened while they were in that not-space were still fuzzy, and while they were slowly bing clearer, there was too much happening for him to focus on. So he focused his attention on who needed him, instead, promising himself he''d look at it more closelyter, when he could discuss what had happened with his team.
And as he approached Kestel and the researchers surrounding him, he realized they were more badly hurt than had been apparent. It wasn''t just their health they had status effects on them that were still ticking away, no doubt from whoever had cast the spells on them in the first ce. Sev couldn''t tell what those status effects were not without casting diagnostic spells but he could tell that they were there. His eyes narrowed.
"Hey!" he shouted, and when everyone turned their attention to him, he red. "Turn off your damn spells. We''re not fighting anymore."
"That''s not for you to decide," the one lizardkin researcher muttered, his gaze still hostile but one of the nearby guards red at him, and he flinched. He didn''t seem quite as brave without the guards on his side. A quick twist of his wrist, and the researchers Sev was near sagged with relief.
"Please," one of them said a young man, by all ounts. He barely looked eighteen. Sev nced at him, ready to heal, but he shook his head and pointed to Kestel instead. "Help Kestel. We don''t even know if he''s..."
Sev nced over at Kestel and winced.
The man was dead.
Well, no. Not . But he was out of health, and the system had stopped his heart, a consequence of its nature; if health was the barrier that kept people in perfect health until theirst hitpoint, then running out of health meant...
Well.
Sitting on top of Kestel''s chest was a small artifact, pulsing and whirring. Two interlocking bronze and silver rings rotated gently around a grade two mana crystal at its core, and from those rings, three slithering lines of visible mana anchored themselves to Kestel''s chest. Sev recognized it; it was a [Resuscitator], an artifact meant to preserve the life of someone that had hit zero health, in the same way that cleric skills like [Gentle Repose] did. It would force Kestel''s heart to keep pumping, keeping his blood circting, but...
That only solved half the problem. The other half was oxygen.
And there was the fact that as long as Kestel remained ''dead'', in that his heart wasn''t pumping of its own volition, the system wouldn''t connect to him, and basic healing skills would have minimal effect. There was already the telltale blue, veinlike effect across his scales that spoke of system-sickness.
Not for the first time, Sev cursed his connection to the system. If he had skills that worked the way Derivan''s skills did if he could just work around the health problem, instead of being forced to work with it...
But there was no time to waste on idle thoughts.
"Vex?" Sev called, and the lizardkin scurried over. "I need a basic wind spell. Something to keep air moving in and out of his lungs."
Vex nodded. Soon enough, a light green rune glowed over Kestel''s ck jaw, and air started circting in and out of his lungs. It wasn''t the most ideal way to do things, but it would have to do for now. "How long has Kestel been like this?" Sev asked.
"A little more than half an hour," one of the researchers answered him, looking anxious. "Is is he okay?"
No he fucking isn''t, Sev thought, but he kept that thought to himself; he kept his voice under control when he replied. "He will be."
Healing magic was miraculous, but it couldn''t do everything. There was a reason it had taken so many priests to prevent him from dying, back when he''d copsed in the temple the system didn''t like that people could circumvent the whole zero health thing. It took a lot of healing spells, and powerful healing magic; he had [Divine Inhtion], but...
He nced at the skill box again, summoning it out of the air. It wasn''t a spell he liked using.
[Divine Inhtion] [Active Skill] [Grade: Maxed]
Granted by request. Take in injuries, absorbing them into your psyche. Inhtion limit based on avable memory.
He would have called it a cruel skill, were it not for the fact that Onyx had specifically withheld it from him. ''Heal anything'' was an ability he wanted of course it was and this was the closest skill that came to it. The associated cost, as far as he was concerned, was nothing.
Then again, that was how he''d gotten [Traces of the Lost] to begin with. A ss based around sacrifice shouldn''t have surprised him, given what he''d been doing with it.
But if ordinary healing skills wouldn''t work...
"[Divine Inhtion]," he muttered; not because he had to speak the name of the skill out loud, but because it helped prepare him for the experience.
No matter how much he prepared himself, though, he could never quite be ready.
The skill activated, and he felt what happened more than he saw it.
The first time, in the temple, when his heart had stopped he''d been thankfully unconscious for most of that experience. Now he couldn''t help but be aware, every facet of the experience embedding itself deep into his memory. He felt everything that Kestel would have felt had the lizardkin been awake at this exact moment, multiplied tenfold.
He felt the way his heart refused to beat on its own.
He felt magic threading itself into him like a foreign implement, forcing his heart to pulse, to send blood circting through his body.
He felt the cold grasp of death approach him, as cold magic threaded its way through his veins. There was a sense of betrayal, and a sense of... anger? Protectiveness. What Kestel had felt in the moments before he''d been attacked, perhaps; Sev had never exactly been clear on how this particr skill worked, especially for injuries such as these.
The skill ended, and he gasped for air, bending over and he wasn''t the only one.
For now, though, his mind was still half-focused on that experience of death, of being dead, and of having nothing but an artifact supporting his continued existence; it sat in his mind, refusing to dislodge itself, and fuck but he''d forgotten how bad this felt.
When he''d cast it on Onyx to try to heal him, while the god was still in his chains... he''d felt something simr. But it hadn''t been anything this bad, perhaps because whatever had been done to Onyx was outside the scope of mortal experiences; whatever had happened to him, whatever he''d absorbed, he hadn''t quite understood.
"W... what''s happening?" Kestel spoke in a voice thatcked the usual exuberance he had when he spoke; the lizardkin spoke with a slight waver, and his frame trembled. He looked around with bleary eyes, and Sev grimaced. Never good signs after a revival like this.
"Hey. It''s Sev. Take it easy. You got hit pretty hard back there." Sev kept his voice low and even, gesturing for the other researchers to give him space they''d crowded around Kestel in relief, which was understandable but patently unhelpful. Vex had cut off the wind spell almost as soon as the other lizardkin started breathing, and he''d taken a few steps back; it wasn''t the first time Sev had helped someone that had ''died'', though the circumstances were never really quite so... extreme. "Are you doing okay?"
"I... I don''t know." Kestel shook his head, still seeming disoriented. He blinked a few times, then stared at something in the air, frowning; the blue veins were retreating, at least, so he was reconnected to the system. Probably some notifications. Sev fired off a few quick, lower-power heals at the man, bringing his health back to full anyway. Just in case. Kestel didn''t react; he just continued staring at the air in front of him.
"Take your time," Sev said to him gently, then nced around at the other researchers. "I don''t want to keep him here. We should bring him back to the Guild, if possible; there are more priests there and they''ll be better at diagnosing the full suite of status effects he might have. Recovering from this kind of thing isn''t easy."
"You can''t heal them yourself?" one of the researchers asked, perhaps a bit timidly, and Sev hesitated.
The easy answer was no; he couldn''t.
The moreplicated answer was that he could, perhaps, but [Divine Inhtion] was not a skill he could use on mental status effects, and the other ss skills from [Traces of the Lost] would demand a greater sacrifice from him; some crucial aspect of who he was, perhaps, or yet another treasured memory.
"No," he finally said. "Status effects aren''t really my specialty. Other priests will be able to do it better than I can. We''ll get Kestel the help he needs, don''t worry." Sev tried to offer the researcher a reassuring smile he was the young man that had spoken earlier but that lizardkin that was hanging around the guards spoke up again.
This time, at least, he sounded a little guilty. Though not very. "We should bring him back to Elyra. We have better medical facilities there."
"Elyra is much further away, and unless you have a teleport circle handy, it''s going to take too long for us to get him there." Sev kept his temper under control, if only barely. The other thing was that Sev simply didn''t trust Elyra with this not after what he''d just heard about how House Varil handled their people. "The Guild is closer, and the temple''s priests are good at what they do. We''re taking him back to the Guild."
The Guild also had more adventurers, and they''d hopefully be willing to help with the situation. They''d need a few guards to prevent anything from blowing up...
"If you''re going to the Guild, then we''re going back to Elyra," the lizardkin spat at him, and Sev just stared.
"Okay," he said inly.
That would solve a lot of problems, actually. He wouldn''t have to worry about the Guild housing all of those researchers on top of the vigers, the delvers, and Kestel''s little group. And there''d be less of a chance of a fight breaking out.
"Bye?" he tried adding. The lizardkin just stared at him, looking vaguely infuriated, and then stormed off back towards the camp, muttering something about packing. Sev shook his head, turning his attention back to Kestel; the lizardkin still looked a little lost, and was staring listlessly into the air.
"Hey," he said gently. "Do you think you can walk?"
Mutely, Kestel shook his head.
"Alright. We''ll carry you." Sev nced around Misa and Derivan had approached and were standing by Vex, a respectful distance away; the remaining researchers on Kestel''s side were watching with worry, and one or two of the guards had decided to stay instead of apanying the rest back to Elyra.
Okay. That could work.
It was a farrger troupe than he was used to leading, though.
"Let''s get back to the Guild," he said. He nced at the notification that was still in the corner of his vision.
Was it just him, or was it glowing just a little more urgently?
Chapter 47: Of Gods and ######s
Chapter 47: Of Gods and ######s
They were leading the way back towards the Guild. They''d tried to get Kestel to tell them about whatever status effect he had, but the lizardkin seemed incredibly reluctant to talk about it, and Sev didn''t push the matter. There was the small matter of the entire vige that they''d brought with them, too, but the delvers were in on it, and the few researchers that joined them seemed to frazzled and worried about Kestel to question it too much.
Yet, anyway.
The group was muchrger than they were used to, though, and Sev couldn''t help but keep ncing back, worried that today of all days they would be attacked. Monster attacks in the wild weren''t necessarily umon, but this particr route should have been cleared many times over, considering how close to the Guild it was. It wouldn''t have surprised him if this was the one time they got attacked, though.
They''d be fine, he told himself. Orkas was more than capable of handling arge group through a journey, and the delvers had dispersed themselves throughout the vigers to try to help in case of an ambush. The researchers were huddled up near the front, anxiously hovering around Kestel, who was lying down in a makeshift stretcher and not really saying much of anything.
Sev had asked Misa, Derivan, and Vex toe with him off to the side they needed to discuss everything that had happened, and now seemed as good a time as any. Maybe more, because that notification was definitely shing more urgently at him. Oops.
"I''ve got a notification about Aurum," Sev said quickly, and Misa immediately paled.
"Oh, shit. I fucking forgot there was so much happening is he okay?" she demanded.
"I don''t know. I think he''s fine for now, but I have a notification about how he doesn''t have anything to attach to." Sev nodded towards the spark Misa was keeping in her pouch. "The text doesn''t appear correctly in the system, but I''m guessing he needs one of those."
"He can''t attach to this one?" Misa asked worriedly.
"Doesn''t seem like it. Can''t say I know why." Sev frowned, ncing at the notification again, then sending a copy to his friends to look over. "It''s asking me if I''ll let it attach to me instead, and I just wanted to talk to you guys about it first. It might be dangerous, so you''d need to be ready, but..."
"It might also be his only option," Vex said quietly.
"It is your choice, ultimately," Derivan said, ncing over the notification. "It sounds as if it may affect you the most, if it is asking to attach to you. But I believe Vex is right if it is his only option, then he is our responsibility."
"...I''m leaning towards yes," Sev said. "I mean fuck. He really did seem like a kid, and I don''t know what''s going on with him now, but if what happened at the end there is any indication..."
"Shitty fucking system," Misa muttered, then nodded to Sev. "I''m ready if anything happens. Go for it."
Sev nodded. He hit the ''ept'' on the notification, and paused as the text flickered.
Processing...
"...Okay. It says it''s processing," Sev said, feeling vaguely disappointed. He''d been expecting something more dramatic to happen. Maybe it''d happenter?
"Should''ve expected that," Misa grumbled. "Like I said. Shitty system. While we''re at it, though..." Misa gestured at where she was keeping the spark. "What the fuck is this thing? The system''s not disying the text correctly for any of you, is it?"
"It is not," Derivan said. "Though the text has been changing every so often."
"I''ve noticed that too," Vex said with a frown. "If something''s trying to hide the words from us, it''s not doing it very well. We''ve seen a few different letters already. First word starts with an R and ends with a Y, second word starts with an A and ends in an R."
"You were paying attention?" Misa blinked at the lizardkin. "There was... a lot of shit going down. I didn''t really note them down."
"I like puzzles," Vex answered with a slightly embarrassed shrug and grin. "There''s not a lot of words that make sense as the first one. I think ''reality'' makes the most sense, given what it''s doing. The second..."
"There''s a few that would work, I think," Sev said. "Uh... Author. Avatar?"
"Abuser," Misa suggested with a smirk. "Reality Abuser would fit."
"That feels a little on the nose," Vex said with a chuckle.
"Anchor, perhaps?" Derivan suggested. "[X-51 Reality Anchor] would make a certain amount of sense"
Derivan paused as he spoke, feeling a strange reverberation echo through his armor as he spoke the words, like they had some sort of significance. He looked at his friends carefully, worried that yet another infolock hade into y but they all seemed to have registered what he''d said just fine.
"[X-51 Reality Anchor]..." Vex tested out the words, frowning. "I guess that''s... right? Based on what the system is doing to the words? But I dunno what that means. That term hasn''te up in Elyra''s research into dungeons before."
"What would a reality anchor do?" Sev asked. "Theoretically."
"Anchor reality, based on the name," Vex said with a half-grin, making Sev frown at him. He chuckled, then shrugged. "I don''t know, but it''d exin some of the notifications we got. And maybe what happened to the dungeon? If every dungeon has one of those..."
"Perhaps the dungeon copsed because the anchor that was holding it in ce was broken," Derivan suggested. "But we do not know what the anchors do, precisely, Only that your vigers are now tied to it in some way."
Vex shook his head. "Let''s go back to the beginning and go over what we know. We can throw out ideas once we''re all on the same page, and we can make sure we all have the same information. What did you see, when we first found the reality anchor?"
"It was sitting on a pedestal of crystal," Misa said. "It was glowing, and there was a stream of light going from it into one of those specks of light in the void. Uh... I don''t know how to exin it, but it felt like the light led to J''rokksur? Or a version of it."
"There was a notification about how the reality anchor was failing," Sev offered. "Something about low integrity, and destabilization."
"The dungeon that that anchor was attached to was destabilizing, and that led to a dungeon break," Vex theorized. "Good enough for a starting theory, I think?"
"There''s more," Misa said. She shook her head slightly even now, the memories of what she''d seen were unpleasant. "You saw what happened with my family getting hurt. Those were the same injuries they had... the first time."
She grimaced a little, muttering to herself. "Fucking system," she said. "Or anchor. Whatever."
The others winced in sympathy. They''d seen the injuries, but they hadn''t known the cause, and certainly hadn''t known that the people in J''rokksur were re-experiencing the injuries that had killed them.
"You healed themter, right?" Sev asked. "I managed to keep them stable with my healing, but it wasn''t what did most of the work. How did you manage to reverse the effect?"
"[Guardian''s Premonition]," Misa answered. "It kind of... guided me, I guess, into using the anchor? I focused on my memories of the vige when it was still alive and well..."
She fell silent for a moment.
"I am sorry so much of this made you relive your past," Derivan said, his voice sympathetic. Misa sighed, not replying for a moment then forced herself to exhale in augh.
"I mean, it ended better than I could''ve fuckin'' hoped," she said, forcing herself to smile. "Yeah, some of that was kinda shitty, and I''m going to have some nightmares. I don''t give a shit. I''ll talk to the Guild therapist if you guys make me. But I have my family back again, and that''s..."
"Far more important?" Sev offered.
"So much more," Misa said, shaking her head. "Then there was a message about how I ''synchronized'' with the anchor, and that seemed to sort of... heal people. Or reverse their injuries. I dunno."
"We might have to talk to your parents a bit more for that one," Sev said. "Find out what it felt like on their end."
"So they''re [Reality Anchor]s and you can synchronize with them," Vex said. "Presumably, X-51 is linked to your vige in some way, and synchronizing with it somehow damaged the B-63 anchor. No two coexisting anchors, or something like that?"
"Something like that," Sev agreed. "Obviously they manipte reality in some way... maybe they anchor dungeons, let them have all the strange effects."
"It would not exin the people of J''rokksur," Derivan said, and they fell silent at that. Misa in particr seemed to be lost in thought for a moment, prompting Sev to look at her.
"You''re going to want to spend some time with your family, right?" he asked quietly.
"I mean, of course," Misa snorted. Then she red at him. "Don''t think you fuckers have gotten rid of me, though. Just because I have ''em back doesn''t mean I want to stay put with them. We gotta figure out this anchor thing, make sure we fix it in time for them, and we gotta figure out a bunch of other stuff too. Like the guy who attacked the delvers in that dungeon."
Sev smiled a bit as she started to speak, but he frowned when she mentioned the man in the dungeon. "I almost forgot about him."
Misa snorted. "I fuckin'' didn''t."
"Are we sure he''s still around?" Vex asked. "I mean, if the dungeon got destroyed..."
"But it didn''t," Misa pointed out. "The notification said the dungeon''s been redistributed, whatever the fuck that means."
"To the Major Anchors," Derivan said.
"Major Anchors..." Vex mused out loud. "...That''s got to be the Kingdom dungeons, right?"
Sev paused. "Now that you mention it," he said. "They''re the biggest dungeons we know of, and there are three of them."
"The dungeons on the outskirts are bigger," Misa pointed out.
"But those ones are broken," Sev said, shaking his head. "If we''re right about reality anchors, then dungeon breaks happen when those anchors start to fail. Those dungeons wouldn''t have working anchors anymore. Thergest functioning anchors would have to be the ones in each of the Prime Kingdoms."
"We did not get a dungeon break here, though," Derivan said.
"The anchor was broken suddenly," Sev said. "With the J''rokksur dungeon the anchor was failing, but it wasn''t broken, and the dungeon break was already happening. So maybe it''s just a process that starts when the anchor starts to break..."
"We''re specting too much," Vex said with a shake of his head. "We''ve got some answers, but not all of them. The notification said system users would be alerted, so I think we''ll know if the Kingdom dungeons are the ones that this dungeon was ''redistributed'' to."
"And whoever that was, it''s probably best to assume he''s not dead," Misa added grimly. "If he was telling the truth, he''s been alive for hundreds of years. A small snap in reality probably won''t kill him."
"He might even know what''s going on," Vex said quietly. He sighed. "We''re going to have to get authorization to explore every one of those dungeons, aren''t we."
Vex looked, perhaps unsurprisingly, quite reluctant. He hadn''t exactly hidden his distaste for Elyra, and the worry he had about it was clear. "And it''s probably going to have to be Elyra first, considering everything that happened."
"...Probably," Sev said with a slight wince. "Are you okay with that?"
"If you are not," Derivan said. "We will figure out another solution."
Sev red at Derivan a little over Vex''s head there wasn''t another solution; not really. Making promises they couldn''t keep wasn''t something they were in the habit of doing. Vex seemed vaguelyforted by the words, anyway, and leaned into Derivan as he considered it for a while. The armor didn''t seem to mind.
"...I''ll have to face it sooner orter, right?" Vex eventually said, his voice quiet. "It''s not going to go away. And I''m on a deadline as far as going back to Elyra goes, anyway."
"Do I need to punch someone?" Misa asked. "Because if you need me to punch someone, I am there."
Vexughed slightly at that, unable to help the slight smile that crossed his face. "Yeah, I''m aware," he said, shaking his head. "I don''t think punching anyone is going to help in this case.
"Uh... We might need to kidnap someone, though."
"Kidnap?" Misa narrowed her eyes, considering this for a moment, then nodded. "I mean, if you say we need to do it, I''m ready to do crimes."
"We should really be asking more questions," Sev said dryly, but he was notably also not protesting.
"If Vex believes we must do crime, then I am inclined to believe we must do crime," Derivan said without a trace of irony.
Vex couldn''t help butugh outright, the little bit of mncholy he had turning into mirth; what tension he had dissolved out of him.
"You guys have a knack for making me feel like everything''s going to be okay," he finally said, smiling a small smile. "Just... thanks."
Chapter 48: Rewards, (1)
Chapter 48: Rewards, (1)
"Though you wouldn''t actually kidnap someone without hearing my exnation first, right?" Vex asked, just to be sure.
"Well, no, of course not," Misa said, looking suspiciously willing to do exactly that. She nced surreptitiously at Sev and Derivan, then leaned in to Vex, mock-whispering. "I mean, those two won''t, but you just tell me who we need to kidnap"
"Misa," Vex said,ughing as he pushed her away. She grinned at him, sticking her tongue out, and he shook his head with a fond sort of exasperation. "It''s a , guys, I''m not actually that serious about it. I''m hoping we won''t have to, but..."
A small shadow crossed his expression, and he shook his head, changing the subject. "Let''s figure out everything we can about the reality anchor first, and then when we''ve gotten the chance to rest a bit I''ll tell you what I can. I... need a bit of time to get ready to talk about it, anyway."
"Take your time," Sev said seriously. "We''ve got plenty of time before we reach Elyra, if we go there by conventional means. And we''re going to have to convince the Guildmaster to take care of all the extra people, too..."
"J''rokksur can take care of itself," Misa interjected.
"Yes, but they still need the space to do that," Sev said dryly. "I guess they could try to go back to where J''rokksur originally was, to rebuild, but..."
"...Yeah, it''s pretty far from here," Misa acknowledged with a slight frown, shaking her head.
"It''s not practical for a whole vige to travel far, and even if we secure the teleportation magic to get them there, they''d need a protective escort the whole time while they''re rebuilding," Sev agreed.
"It''s up to dad, but I don''t think he''ll spring for that when he could just rebuild nearby," Misa admitted.
Sev nodded. "What I''m saying is, we have some time before we actually reach Elyra," he said, ncing back to Vex. "Don''t worry too much about telling us everything as soon as possible. Tell us when you''re ready."
"Thanks," Vex said. "I''ll, uh. Try to be ready before we actually reach Elyra."
"That would be ideal, yes," Sev said with a chuckle. "As for the reality anchors... I feel like we''ve gone through just about everything we know. Presumably they''re rted to why dungeons are able to do everything they do, and there''s clearly a link to the gods in some way..."
"We still don''t know how they do all that," Misa said with a frown. "It''s some fucked up shit. And what did it mean when it said backups?"
"Perhaps reality anchors keep a record of some sort," Derivan suggested. "It would exin..."
He trailed off before he finished speaking. It would exin how the dungeon was able to revive J''rokksur wholesale but it brought up other questions as well. Misa seemed to understand, given the way her eyes darkened slightly, but she didn''t say anything.
"What I don''t understand is why," Vex said, changing the subject. "Reality anchors are obviously a system construction, but why have them at all? Why have dungeons? Elyra doesn''t do a lot of research on this they''re more interested in the how of dungeons, or how to best take advantage of the effects but there''s obviously a purpose to it, looking at what we know is happening to the gods."
"A lot of people say that it''s the system''s way of giving us a challenge," Sev said. "But that''s..."
"It seems a poor way of challenging a popce, if the consequence for failure is death," Derivan observed quietly.
"I don''t think ''challenge'' fits," Vex agreed. "And there are too many things about the system that just... it''s bad. I''d argue it hurts more than it helps. The idea that the system exists to challenge and empower people is a popr line of thought everywhere, even in Elyra, but too many things don''t make sense."
"We should think about the rtionship between anchors, gods, and overseers." Sev hesitated as he spoke, ncing at the box that still imed it was ''processing''. "They might not all be linked, but they''re presumably all core to the system in some way."
"The fuck was the system doing to Aurum, anyway?" Misa asked. There was a touch of aggression in her voice, but it was soft, too genuinely concerned. "Kid was having trouble with his memories? Is that what happened with Onyx?"
"I... don''t know," Sev hedged, hesitating. "I wasn''t there with Onyx when the system was trying to erase him. I could feel the link between us weakening, though, and I tried to heal him through that. But if erasing a god looked like anything... I imagine it would look something like that."
There was a small silence at this.
"It was like he was being digested," Misa said softly. She frowned. "But that wasn''t happening with Onyx..."
"It might be different for different gods," Sev said.
"I can''t imagine," Vex said softly. "He was just having his memories slowly stripped from him, and he even realized it, but it took away his ability to care about it. If that can happen to a god..."
"We''re going to need to be especially careful moving forward," Sev said with a sigh. "If we can''t find something to protect our memories specifically, we need to know if we''ve lost something. We seem to be somewhat protected under at least one infolock, but..."
"There might be more out there," Vex agreed. "I''ll... have to try to research memory preservation magic. Or at least something that can alert us if something''s altered..."
"I may be able to help," Derivan finally spoke up, a contemtive nt to the glow in his eyes. "Though I am unsure. I have... suspicions, regarding what has changed regarding my status."
"I''m worried something''s already changed, and we don''t know it," Sev muttered, and to that, the others had no response. They were each silent for a moment, contemting the idea.
"...It''s a beautiful day out," Vex finally said after a moment, ncing up at the sky. The sun was shining brightly overhead, the sky a brilliant blue a strong contrast with the darkness of the dungeon and the chaos of the bonus rooms. They were walking along a path that had been roughly cleared in the grass using some basic [Pathmaker] skills, presumably.
It was all very in there was nothing but grass and the asional flower littering the field but it was beautiful, and it was a breath of fresh air after all the destruction they''d seen in the dungeon break, and even in the research camp after they''d returned.
"It is," Sev agreed. "That''s something positive we can focus on, at least."
"Speaking of," Misa said. "We should probably go over our rewards while we can? See what the bonus room gave us, preferably before a fight breaks out. And maybe see if there''s another hint about whatever the fuck is going on."
"Right, right. I''ve been too distracted by the thing with Aurum to check mine," Sev said with a grimace.
"I got... an item and a skill." Vex''s eyes flicked over an invisible notification, but his tail betrayed his anxiety; it coiled around nervously. "I haven''t epted them yet. I just... I don''t know, I have a lot of doubts about what the system is doing now, I guess. I don''t know if there''s a price to all of this that we''re not seeing."
"Like the possibility that it''s being powered by forgotten gods," Sev muttered with a sigh. He looked conflicted. "Onyx seemed like he was doing... I mean, not alright. But he was alive, and I don''t know what that ce was, but he was stable enough there... He''s obviously still working to help us out. I think he would''ve said something if he thought we shouldn''t ept system rewards."
"The system''s fucked, but we still have to work within its bounds," Misa said. She furrowed her brows slightly, ncing surreptitiously towards her pocket, where she kept the reality anchor. "For now, anyway."
"Coming from anyone else, that would be incredibly ominous," Sev said dryly, and Misa just shot him a half-grin.
"My reward notification is... strange." Derivan peered closely at the screen in front of him, then shook his head. "Mostly errors. Perhaps I cannot receive rewards from the system?"
Misa frowned. "We can just work on getting more stats for you, I think. Or we can try to figure out what your existing stats do, and find new ways to leverage them. Magic has a lot of potential. Geas... Uh, we probably don''t want to touch that. Slime is weird. You''re already using Physical Empathy. Shift?"
"Shift had a lot of potential, if your skill was any indication," Vex said thoughtfully. "Do you know what it does, exactly? It looks like you have more of a handle on it now."
"Watching... myself... gave me an idea of what Shift might be," Derivan said with a nod, though he nced at Misa as he did so. "Though I feel we should perhaps also discuss exactly what that was."
"I have no fucking idea," Misa said tly, then frowned, more at herself than at herpanions. "Or I mean... that''s not strictly true, I guess. I kind of know, but it''s hard to exin. [To Fall Yet Hold the Line] seems to work by trying to grab a version of me that wields a weapon capable of blocking the attack. There wasn''t a version of me that could block an entire meteor storm on my own."
"A version of you?" Sev asked with a frown. "What does that mean?"
"A version of me that made different choices, I guess?" Misa shifted ufortably. "Lived a different life. Wielded different weapons. Apparently I''ve been switching weapons this whole time when blocking, and the skill just kind of masked it from me..."
Misa paused, her voice trailing off, and frowned at a notification that appeared in front of her.
Your understanding of [To Fall Yet Hold the Line] has increased. Skill evolution to Epic is now avable.
"Guess I''ve got a skill evolution now," Misa said, staring at the notification a little suspiciously. "On top of the other rewards. I should feel happy, but... I think I''m with Vex on this. I don''t think we should turn this down now, but we should be careful."
"We should find out what the delve team received, if they are willing to share," Derivan said. "I believe that will alleviate some of our concerns."
"Yeah, that''s probably for the best," Sev muttered. "Uh... right. We were talking about our rewards. I think I have an item and a skill, too, but the box is grayed out until Aurum is done... attaching, I guess. Whatever that means."
"And I have the same," Misa said. "An item called [The de Arcane] and a skill called [Heart and Home]."
"I have an item called the [edere Root]," Vex said, furrowing his brows slightly as he looked over the name. "And a skill called [Delineate]. Uh... not sure how useful that one is."
"I''ll let you know once mine''s done graying out," Sev said with a wince. "Derivan? I know you said yours was errored out, but is there any indication of what might happen if you ept it?"
"I... do not think I have a choice," Derivan said with a frown, poking around at the air. "It seems it will not allow me to ess other aspects of my status until I ept this reward. But there is nothing specific in the notification about what I might gain, and there is no option to refuse." He waved a copy of the screen out to his friends his system still allowed him to do that, at least.
Congrattions onpleting The Vige''s Last Defense>! Here are your rewards, should you choose to ept them:
ACCEPT /
"...So we have no idea what''s going to happen if you ept it," Misa said, peering at the text.
"I suppose not," Derivan said. "But I do not believe it wise to wait, since I may have gained other stats. I did not particrly have the time to check mid-battle."
Misa grimaced. "You''re probably right. Uh... I''ll catch you if anything happens, I guess. I haven''t epted the skill evolution yet, so I can block anything hostile if that happens. You ready?"
"As much as I can be," Derivan agreed. He nced at the others neither of them stopped him, though Sev looked pensive and Vex looked outright worried.
Well, no need to dy any further.
He reached out and hit ''ept''.
Chapter 49: Rewards, (2)
Chapter 49: Rewards, (2)
The first problem appeared almost immediately Derivan found that he couldn''t move.
He wasn''t as worried about it as he thought he should have been, though he stopped mid-walk and that caused his friends to look at him with concern and rm.
The second problem took a moment to appear, and it was in the spate of notifications that immediately appeared to him.
Unable to find item .
Unable to find skill .
Rerolling rewards...
Item and skill tables arerger than expected. Results may be undefined. Contact an administrator if you have any concerns.
Insufficient energy avable to generate your rewards. You may be incapacitated while rewards are generated.
Generating rewards...
Part of the problem here was that Derivan didn''t really have a way tomunicate that he was okay. He saw his friends panicking slightly, ncing back towards the main group of people that were moving the delvers were looking over in concern, given the party had stopped in ce.
"I can''t get a foothold on anything to block," Misa said, frustrated. "It''s not an attack."
"He doesn''t have health, but I don''t sense anything wrong with him that I can heal, either." Sev''s voice was worried.
"His mana cirction..." Vex paused, sounding thoughtful, and peered a little closer at Derivan. His eyes glowed a bit as he poured more mana into the skill. "It''s being pulled somewhere. It''s pulling mana away from the runes that enchant his armor; that''s why he can''t move. I don''t know if I can just stop it. It might hurt him."
"Where''s the mana going?" Misa asked.
"I''m trying to trace it now," Vex said. "It doesn''t look like it goes anywhere, it just drains off into nothing... which doesn''t make any sense."
Derivan paused at that. Was it going off into nothing?
The Shift stat was still rtively new, but his understanding of it had grown tremendously. He was, if anything, a little bit concerned about what it did it seemed to weaken space around him, allowing him to shift between ces. Unsurprising, he supposed, considering he''d obtained it when Histre performed a neshift.
He''d used it subconsciously a couple of times, even. The first activation had been when Misa had blocked the attack that was headed for the delvers, essentially teleporting through the dungeon barrier; the second when he''d pushed through the dungeon barrier himself, together with Sev and Vex; and the third time had simply eased the transition slightly when he''d been brought into the bonus room.
Now he used it in a slightly different way he simply felt at the space around him. There was definitely something strange about it that he hadn''t noticed until he''d directed his attention right at it. He felt the way the system was pulling at his mana, and the way that mana sank into...
... a hole in space. A weakening in space?
It took a small application of Shift to bring that part of space back into alignment with the rest of reality.
"Oh!" Vex said, sounding surprised, then nced contemtively at Derivan. "I think he''s alright. He did something... I can see where the mana''s going, now. Uh... it''s going to your pocket."
Misa blinked. "My pocke Oh." She made the connection about the same time the others did, her eyes widening slightly.
The rewards chose that moment to finish processing.
Congrattions onpleting The Vige''s Last Defense>! Here are your rewards:
Item: [me of the #######]
Skill: [###### Night]
Derivan jerked forward as his ability to move was suddenly returned to him, startling Vex, who was closest to him and let out a little yelp as he flinched backwards. The armor reached out to catch his friend before he could fall, chuckling lightly.
"Thank you for keeping an eye on me," he said sincerely. He nced back at his notifications. The skill settled neatly into his status as he focused on it, and the item...
Out of the system box, a warm, amber-colored crystal appeared,nding in an outstretched hand. Where the light nced off of it, the light moved, shifting and flickering like it belonged to a living me; when he rotated it in his hand, it almost seemed to re, like a fire that had been fed with oxygen. Just as quickly, though, the illusion faded.
Derivan didn''t know what to make of it. They''d have to get it properly appraised; his attempts to pull up a box on the item just gave him more errors. And the skill...
[###### Night] [Active Skill] [Grade: 1]
...didn''t have a particrly helpful description.
He shared them both anyway, causing all of them to raise skeptical eyebrows at the box.
"Do you want to try using the skill?" Misa asked with a frown. Derivan shook his head.
"Maybeter. Away from others, except perhaps those that might be able to mitigate the effects of the skill, should something go wrong." The armor looked briefly ufortable. "I would like to ask the Guildmaster for assistance in this, if possible. Perhaps she would have a means of identifying what the skill does."
"That might be for the best," Sev agreed.
"What about..." Misa gestured a little bit to her pocket, referencing the way mana had been flowing between Derivan and the reality anchor in her pocket. "Is there a link there?"
"There was a notification about insufficient energy," Derivan offered.
"So the anchors power the system in some way?" Vex said with a frown. "Maybe?"
"That''s the best we''ve got for now," Sev frowned. "A lot of implications with that, but maybe we''ll bring it to the Guildmaster and see if she can make sense of it. Or to Kestel, if he''s... okay."
The four of them fell silent for a moment. Sev nced worriedly over at where Kestel was being kept the researchers were still tending over him, and there was always one of the delvers hovering nearby at any given time. Everyone was worried, and no one had been able to get Kestel to talk about what was on his status screen yet; no one knew what status effect he might have.
"Perhaps Vex can receive his rewards next?" Derivan suggested after a moment of silence. Better to have a distraction, he thought. He nced to Misa, who looked only briefly put out before she was once again excited by the prospect of new skills to abuse.
"Yeah, go ahead, Vex. I wanna see what you get," she said with a grin. Vex nodded, reaching out to the notification
Derivan had briefly prepared for the lizardkin to drop, in case the same thing happened to him, but thankfully that didn''t seem to happen. Vex instead received his rewards immediately; a strange, gnarled root appeared in his hand, and at the same time he nced into the air as his status updated. He sent a copy of the new skill he had out to the three of them a momentter.
[Delineate] [Active Skill] [Grade: 1]
Designate a desired location for use.
"It''s not very specific," Vex said with a frown. "Same category of skills as [ssify], I think, but hard to say until I test it out. I''m guessing the rarity means it''s more useful than it appears."
"[ssify] is as well," Misa said. Her eyes were practically gleaming. "We can definitely find some uses for this."
"You''re next, Misa," Sev said.
"I know," Misa said, grinning, and then reached out to tap her own notification. She shared the resulting box almost immediately, wanting to read the skill at the same time as the others in fact, she nearly dropped the sword that appeared in her hand as she gestured, having forgotten that [The de Arcane] was supposed to be part of her rewards. "Whoa!"
"Is that sword... made of arcane mana?" Vex peered at it, vaguely concerned.
"The de is, anyway," Misa said, waving it around. The hilt was aplicated thing of silver metal, twisting in on itself before coiling outward to form the edges of the hilt; it was very prettily designed, though it didn''t particrly look easy to craft. There were gaps in the metal that made it look like a single piece of silver had been bent and coiled into itself, rather than molded into the shape.
The de itself was made of dense arcane mana, just as the name suggested. It was a light-red energy that shimmered in the air as she waved it around. "This thing isn''t going to explode if it''s hit by certain types of mana, is it?" Misa frowned. "Like what happened in the room?"
"And with the Aberrant," Sev added, ncing to Vex.
"It... shouldn''t?" Vex frowned, looking carefully over the sword. "I''m pretty sure it won''t. Enchanted items have to be useful, and this thing would be useless if it exploded at the touch of the slightest bit of mana. I mean, except in very limited ways."
"Perhaps we should test it with a less harmful type of mana," Derivan suggested. "Just in case."
"We can," Vex said, considering. "It doesn''t react with ambient mana, which tracks with how arcane mana tends to work; there''s a triggering threshold it needs to cross to trigger. So if I generate a mass of light mana..."
The wizard stepped forward, holding a ball of light in his hands; Misa held the de out to him, and gently touched the ball against the tip of the sword.
Nothing happened.
Nothing obvious, anyway. Misa''s mouth formed an ''o'', and she blinked twice. "It''s prompting me to see if I want to change the de type," she finally said. She gestured slightly, pushing the de forward, and the orb of light vanished from Vex''s hand; at the same time, the de of arcane mana shifted into a light-yellow hue, with shimmers of arcane-red in the mix.
"And I can turn it off whenever I want..." Misa grinned. "This''ll be useful. We should still get it fully appraised, though, in case we''re missing anything. As for the skill..."
Misa nced at the notification box and frowned. "It''s processing that one," she reported. "You guys see that too?"
"Yup," Sev agreed. Vex and Derivan both nodded.
"Is the system just having a slow day or something?" Misa said a little skeptically, staring at the box.
"If the system is tied to the anchors," Vex said thoughtfully. "Then... maybe? We''ve just kicked out whatever anchor it usually relies on and reced it with this one, which the first anchor created in the first ce."
"That''s going to get confusing to think about," Misa muttered. "That anchor made this anchor, and then this anchor siphoned back from that one..."
As she was speaking, the skill finished processing, and all copies of the box updated at the same time.
Due to actions taken before receiving the skill [Heart and Home], the original version of the skill is corrupted and cannot be received.
However, a synergy has been detected between [Heart and Home] and item [X-51 RE##### AN####].
Synergy has been processed, and a new Unique skill has been awarded.
[An Anchor of Heart and Home] [Passive and Active Skill] [Grade: Max]
Cost: 10 units of
Home is where the heart is, and for you, the line has been blurred between these two things. You carry a piece of your home with you, just as your home will always carry a piece of you.
The passive effect of this skill is retroactive and permanent.
Chapter 50: The Only Adventurers With a Negative Killcount
Chapter 50: The Only Adventurers With a Negative Killcount
Misa stared at the wording of the skill, briefly speechless. The others went silent as well. It took a moment for them to process what it all meant the wording of the skill was vague to begin with, and there were a lot of things it could mean, but the fact that it had merged with an artifact that was responsible for apparently shaping reality?
That was a little outside the scope of what they''d expected.
Misa was the first one to speak.
"Is this the reason I didn''t die?" Misa said. Her words were soft, and she reached out to brush the edge of the box with a finger; the corners fizzled as she touched it. "When my vige was attacked?"
"Perhaps it is the reason you were able to stabilize your vige," Derivan offered quietly. "I do not know if it is the reason you were able to survive. The way you describe it..."
Derivan trailed off, like he was concerned his words would affect her. Misa shook her head. "Tell me," she said softly, but firmly.
Derivan nodded. "The way you described it before... your vige was razed to the ground. Pieces of it survived, certainly, so perhaps there is a possibility there that that is the reason you were able to survive because of that. Perhaps if any part of your home survives at all, you will survive as well.
"But that skill is vague, and that seems to me a dangerous thing to assume. And if it does work that way, it may mean that any damage you sustain will propagate back to your vige..."
Hardly a free pass to take damage or allow herself to be hurt, in other words. Misa grimaced a little as he spoke. She wasn''t sure that this skill was helpful. Her bread and butter blocking skill required her to sacrifice part of her health, and if that damage propagated back to the vige...
"You might be right," Misa said with a frustrated half-growl. "It''s hard to say for sure unless we actually test out the skill, and it''s taking a damn risk just to test it. And the description says there''s an activeponent to it, but we have no way of knowing what that activeponent does, and the cost is another error message."
"Until we test it properly, yeah," Sev sighed. "We''ll have to test a lot of things when we get back to the Guild, I think."
"At least we won''t be doing it alone?" Vex piped up softly. Sev snorted and grinned at the lizard, ruffling his nonexistent hair, to Vex''s yelps and protests. "You''re just rubbing my head! It''s weird!"
"Do you want me to stop?"
"...No. It''s kind of nice."
Which was, obviously, a cue for Derivan and Misa to join in.
There was predictably quite a bit of chaos when they arrived back at the Guild.
Sev and his team had decided to go on ahead they could move faster as a small group than therger travel team that wasgging behind and they decided to bring Kestel along with them, in case he needed the medical attention quickly. The lizardkin didn''t say much when they exined the situation to him; he simply nodded, allowing Derivan to pick him up. The four adventurers nced at each other, worried but not willing to voice out that worry in front of him.
So of course, the first thing the Guildmaster saw when they returned was Derivan standing with an incapacitated head researcher in his arms. She froze.
"Please tell me that''s not who I think it is," she said. "Max is out right now. She used her skill again and vanished. So I''m assuming this isn''t what it looks like, or she would definitely be here."
"It''s the head researcher," Sev confirmed. "But uh... we didn''t do this to him, if that helps?"
"That part I assumed," the Guildmaster said dryly. "Alright. We''re bringing him to the temple. I''ming with you." She walked briskly down the stairs to join them. "I''m assuming you came here to find me?"
"We came here to let you know there''s arge group headed this way," Sev said, a little awkwardly. "The poption of... an entire vige. Also some of the research team."
"What." The Guildmaster froze for a moment, then let out a muttered curse, bringing up her system interface so she could start typing outmands rapidly. "What happened? Quick exnation, please. You can tell me in detailter."
"I resurrected my home vige and they all need a ce to stay," Misa volunteered.
The Guildmaster stopped walking.
"You did what." Her words were t.
"I... resurrected my home vige and they all need a ce to stay?" Misa repeated, this time with a questioning sort of lilt at the end of the statement. She hadn''tpletely processed how ludicrous everything that had happened was yet, and...
...well, thinking about it, she really just wanted to go and talk to her parents. Stay with them for a day or two. She wasn''t about to leave the team, but she missed them, she realized.
The Guildmaster still hadn''t said anything, and it took her a moment before Misa realized it she''d been too busy reminiscing. "Um. Guildmaster?"
"Exin," the Guildmaster said with a long-suffering note of pain in her voice. "I know I said quick exnation, but you''ve apparently broken all the rules we know of, so I''m going to need to know how you did this. Especially if it can be replicated. And how much Elyra knows about it. I''m shielding Kestel from hearing the details, although I''m not sure he can process much of it right now."
"Uh..." Misa exchanged nces with the rest of the team who looked a little less surprised than she felt, so she was assuming she''d been the only one that hadn''t particrly considered the potential political fallout.
Fuck that, though. It was her home. Why would she?
She exined what had happened in a little more detail to the Guildmaster as they continued to the temple, leaving out the details of the reality anchor for now, though she made it clear that she was skipping something. The general gist of the tale she told was that the dungeon had generated her old vige from scratch, right down to every person that lived in her vige. As far as she could tell, they were nearly the same as the real thing, with one difference.
Even the Guildmaster grimaced as she exined the details of how she''d been cut out of the lives of the vigers. It hadn''t been done properly it had left a hole. And though many of the vigers couldn''t tell, Charise had the skills to feel the hole her daughter had left, every moment of every day.
"I couldn''t just let the dungeon take them away from me again," Misa said quietly. "So I stopped it. The specifics are a littleplicated, and I think it''s probably best if we exined that when we have some privacy, but that''s the gist of it."
"You just... stopped it." The Guildmaster rubbed the bridge of her nose slowly, which was rather monumental because Misa had the feeling that the only reason they''d seen her do that was because she''d allowed them to see her do it. That, or she was stumped enough to have forgotten about whatever skill she used to hide their perception of her actions. "You realize that''s not something people can do."
"I did it," Misa said, a littlemely. The Guildmaster snorted.
"You also know you''re the only team to evere back with a negative on the killcount," the Guildmaster said.
"I do now?"
"And does Elyra know about this?"
Misa hesitated.
"...I think it''s best to assume that they do," she eventually said. "We didn''t formally introduce the vigers to anyone who went back to Elyra or anything the ones we did introduce them to are alling here. But that doesn''t mean that they don''t know. The vigers are a pretty big group, and they''re a pretty big group that came out of nowhere. Even if they don''t know that they''re necessarily resurrections..."
"They know to keep it quiet, I believe," Derivan added helpfully. "But many of them are frightened, and several of them are children. I concur with Misa; it is best to assume that Elyra knows."
"Fuck," the Guildmaster grumbled. "It''d be better for us if they don''t. I''m hoping they don''t. It''ll be a lot harder to keep up security if Elyra''s trying to get past our defenses all the time."
"You''re going to help house them?" Misa asked, her voice hopeful.
"Of course we are," the Guildmaster said dismissively. "We have people that can build a vige quick, no problem. It might not be in the best shape to start with, but we can always improve it over time. Besides..."
The Guildmaster paused here, and her voice turned soft, regretful.
"...The fact of the matter is that the Guild failed your vige," she said. "We cannot help every vige out there, but we try to remember all the ones we fail. J''rokksur is on that list, and it is not a failure I have forgotten."
Misa was silent for a moment, staring at the Guildmaster. She''d never met the woman, she was pretty sure. But there was a nagging feeling at the back of her mind that maybe she had...
It was difficult to say, considering the kind of skills the Guildmaster had. But she thought maybe she could remember someone indiscernible that she''d met two years ago, when she''d been at the peak of her self-destructive phase. She''d been consumed by the loss of her home, and a stranger had given her a purpose.
A small one. A rtively useless one, even. Who the fuck asked people to clear out basement rats? But then she''d actually gone into the damn basement, because what else was she supposed to do, and the rats had been... well, enormous.
Adrenaline was the feeling she''d felt back then, and it hadn''t been exactly what she''d needed. It was what came afterwards when the owner of that house thanked her, thinking she was from the Adventurer''s Guild and paying her, and reminding her remarkably of her mom
"Did you set me up?" Misa demanded. "All those years ago. To join the Adventurer''s Guild."
"I did not," the Guildmaster replied dryly, ncing at Misa. "But if I did, I wouldn''t tell you."
...Well, she was honest, at least.
"What''s more important is what we''re going to do about J''rokksur," the Guildmaster said. "Even if we can hide them for now, it''s not going tost forever an entire vige appearing is something that''s going to show up on the Kingdom''s radars. It doesn''t sound like what you did can be replicated gods forbid the dungeons are hard enough to understand as it is but that doesn''t mean people won''t want to try."
"Elyra will want to try the most, I think," Vex said quietly. "Anderstahl is less interested in dungeons."
"That is likely," the Guildmaster agreed. "I''m anticipating the most trouble from Elyra, and Elyra has its own problems right now."
"The food thing," Misa said with a frown. "Is it that bad?"
"It''s getting worse," the Guildmaster said with a sigh. "Food production in Elyra barely keeps even with its poption to begin with. They had a stockpile they managed to build up, especially with people that had the relevant skills, but now even that stockpile is starting to decay the [Preservation] spells they''re using are failing, and they don''t know why."
"Is magic just failing there?" Sev wondered aloud, and Vex paled at the thought.
"A lot of things in Elyra are run by magic," he said, sounding worried. But he shook his head a secondter. "I don''t know. If all magic was affected... a lot more systems would be copsing. A lot more than just the food, at any rate."
"We''re headed to Elyra next anyway, right?" Misa said. "We can investigate it then."
"I''m not sure that it''s exactly our job," Sev grumbled.
"Oh, I can make it your job," the Guildmaster said brightly.
"What." Sev''s voice was almost as t as the Guildmaster''s had been when she''d been told about the entire vige being brought back.
"How would you like to be the Guild''s official delegation?" the Guildmaster grinned. "We need to send people to Elyra to help out with the food crisis anyway, and the kind of status we can give you here would help you a lot in gaining ess to their systems. Like their dungeon, for instance."
"...We do need to ess the dungeon there," Sev said, though he looked incredibly put out at the idea of being a political delegation. Misa didn''t me him she didn''t feel entirelyfortable with it, either. Vex mostly just looked a paler green than usual, and Derivan was about as stoic as ever.
"There you go," the Guildmaster said. "That''s settled, then! You''re going to be our new Elyran delegates, which means I can tell Jerome that he''s not cleared to go to Elyra, no matter how much he says that he''s much better now."
Sev blinked. "...Is he... doing okay?"
"He won''t stop flirting with Max," the Guildmaster said. "The two women he has with him don''t seem very happy about it, but he''s sort of oblivious."
Misa groaned. "Dammit, Jerome."
Chapter 51: A staff in the mouth is worth two in the... wait, no, what?
Chapter 51: A staff in the mouth is worth two in the... wait, no, what?
The temple''s activity stopped almost instantly the moment Derivan walked in with Kestel in his arms. Many priests had a basic [Triage] skill running at all times, and the fact that Kestel had immediately caught their attention was just as immediately rming; Sev winced slightly as he watched a few clerics practically pull the silent scientist out of Derivan''s arms, bringing him over to the corner of the temple they usually kept for the sick and infirm.
It was a small corner of the temple, admittedly,pared to therge marketce they kept for potions and other healing products. The problemy in the fact that it was rare for them to really have to keep patients for long; illnesses outside the scope of standard healing spells and the buffer of health were umon. Status effects that could not be instantly cleared were even more umon.
So that corner of the temple was a makeshift area, set up for those with no health left and were being kept on what was effectively life support, or those with cursed status effects like [Petrification] or [Inward Petrification]. The second one was strange, and poorly understood; neshifters had exined it once as an illness in which muscle turned to bone, and magical attempts to reverse it had only created ill-defined, loose pieces of muscle that were attached to nothing, and caused more harm than benefit.
All of which Sev thought about in an attempt to distract himself from the possibility that Kestel was hurt in a way that he couldn''t heal, or in a way that he could only heal at great personal cost. The rest of the temple''s infirmary was effectively empty; there were mattresses and vaguely crumpled, messy sheets, along with some healing artifacts that had collected dust.
"He has several concurrent status effects on him," one of the priests finally said as he walked over to them Sev recognized him, actually. He''d been the somewhat obnoxious fellow that had kept preaching to him when he''d been at the temple not too long ago. The priest clearly recognized him, too, but was staying professional. "What happened to him, if I may ask?"
"We don''t know the exact details," Sev said, ncing awkwardly at the rest of the team they should''ve brought one of the researchers with them. They''d at least be able to recount the story. "There was a fight of some kind and he lost all his health. He was kept alive with a [Resuscitator] for about half an hour before I was able to heal him."
"That exins some of those status effects," the priest muttered with a sigh. "Some of them will wear off with time effects like [Dazed] and [Nonresponsive] but others are going to take more work, and more mana crystals. Status effects are expensive to remove, and several of them are inter stages. We don''t have the mana crystals we need to heal himpletely."
"Shit," Sev muttered. The Guild was short on mana crystals as it was and, ncing at the Guildmaster, she seemed to feel the same way. She was frowning to herself, gesturing with her fingers like she was doing some mental math. "Will he be okay in the meantime? It''ll take us a while to get... how much do you need?"
"A grade four, at least," the priest answered, and Sev grimaced. So did the Guildmaster.
"And the price of the actual treatment?" he probed.
"We don''t charge," the priest said, shaking his head. "We get most of our gold from potion sales anyway, and we don''t actually need a lot of gold. Plus there''s been a pdin that''s been throwing around his gold a lot,tely."
"Actual gold, or currency gold?" Sev asked warily.
"Both," the priest said, his tone a touch exasperated. He''d clearly tried to exin the difference before. "We just pile up the non-currency gold in the corner."
"Someone needs to exin gold to him," Sev muttered.
"Not it," Misa said immediately.
"I don''t think that''s our job?" Vex said, though he phrased it like it was a question.
"We''re getting there," the Guildmaster said wearily. "He''s been a bit pampered in Anderstahl, up until he got kicked out, so."
"How much time will Kestel take to recover, once we provide the mana crystal he needs?" Derivan asked, bringing the topic back to the matter at hand. The priest frowned, considering.
"We can prevent the status effects from getting worse," he eventually said. "Until we get the mana crystal, that''s the best we can do. Even without it, he might be able to make a recovery on his own, but... it''s going to take a long time, if it happens at all. Right now he''ll barely be able to walk."
Sev sighed, ncing over at Kestel. The man was lying somewhat listlessly in the bed, staring up at the ceiling; it was a bed that had been modified for lizardkin, with a slit down the center of the mattress for the tail to slipfortably into. It was a testament to how out of it he was, then, that he justy awkwardly with his tail crumpled beneath him, until younger priest reached over and carefully nudged him into a position that wouldn''t hurt his back.
"I... will try to make room in the Guild''s budget," the Guildmaster said eventually, softly. She was staring at Kestel too, Sev realized, and there was a note of familiarity in her eyes; no doubt this was something she''d seen before. "But we have other adventurers in simr conditions, in other branches..."
"The mana crystal thing is really a problem, isn''t it," Misa said, ncing sympathetically to the Guildmaster.
"You have no idea," the Guildmaster said with a sigh. "But we should get going, if we''re going to prepare for that many people arriving. The priests will take care of your friend, and I think I might post a guard here too, just in case..."
The Guildmaster frowned for a moment, lost in thought. Sev picked up on the thread of conversation, turning a weak smile to the priest that had helped them. Velykos was nowhere to be found, and he wondered if he''d find the stone elemental again before they had to leave for Elyra; he hoped so. He wanted to make sure the guy was doing alright.
"Thanks for all the help, uh..." Sev trailed off, somewhat embarrassed, as he realized that he hadn''t ever actually asked for the man''s name. He''d probably introduced himself at some point presumably at the start of all the preaching but he hadn''t really bothered to memorize it.
"Ixome," the priest said, which was a strange name for a human, but Sev didn''t question it.
"Thanks, Ixome," Sev said. "And uh... sorry aboutst time. With the staff."
"Believe it or not," Ixome said and this time there was a touch of dry humor in his voice. "I''ve been informed by my colleagues that preaching at someone is not a good way to get them to repent. And I''ve had a number of informative dreams with my Goddess since then."
"Informative dreams?" Sev raised an eyebrow.
"They involved a number of staffs," Ixome said, his words still as dry as the desert. "I took them as the lecture that I imagine they were intended to be."
"I... see," Sev said, blinking once. Ixome didn''t seem like he was inclined to borate, so he decided not to ask.
"Regardless," Ixome said, changing the subject. "I do apologize for my behavior back then."
Sev nodded. "Water under the bridge," he offered, though Ixiome gave him a strange look at the idiom. "Meaning don''t worry about it. Do you know if Velykos is around?"
"He makes it a habit to pray around this time," Ixome said. He started to head back towards Kestel. "My mana''s back, so I''m going to go help stabilize those status effects. If you''re looking for Velykos, you''ll find him in the back gardens."
"I''ll find himter," Sev decided, ncing back at the Guildmaster. "There''s still a lot we need to figure out before we get to have some downtime."
"That''s an understatement," the Guildmaster said. She nced back at them. "You want to talk to Kestel before you leave?"
Sev hesitated, ncing at the others. Misa frowned, and Vex looked down slightly, like he didn''t know what to say. Derivan simply bowed his head.
"I think it''s best we let the priests work for now," Sev said quietly. "He''s going to be crowded enough as it is when the researcherse to see him... I''ll slip a message to him through the system, so he can read it when he''s awake enough, so he knows we all wish him well."
And he did. All four of them did, actually, adding their own little notes to Sev''s message of wellbeing; it was marked as unread when they sent it, and when they looked over, they could see that Kestel was sleeping. Probably for the best that they hadn''t gone to speak to him, then.
The Guildmaster led the way out of the temple, back towards the Guild. "I''m not sure we can spare the mana crystal Kestel needs," she said without preamble. "There''s been a spike in dungeon activity, everywhere that we know of. Elyra and Anderstahl have both sent correspondence to us about a strange notification from the system, about something being added to their dungeons, coinciding with the time dungeon activity increased. We''ve gotten reports from adventurers from Bronze to tinum about it."
Sev grimaced, and the Guildmaster leveled a re at him, though there was no real heat to it. "This is your fault somehow, isn''t it."
"In our defense," Misa said. She stopped.
"In your defense...?" the Guildmaster quirked a brow at the half-orc.
"Yeah, I got nothing," Misa said with a shrug. "We''ll do what we can to take pressure off the Guild. It''s the least we can do."
"I should hope so," the Guildmaster said with a sigh, but she didn''t really seem frustrated. If anything, she was contemtive. "It''s strange that all of this is happening now. Why now, of all times?"
"I think it''s..." Sev started, and then he fell silent, shaking his head. "Sorry. Can''t say. It''s probably under the infolock. We can try again, since this is new information, but... Derivan?"
Derivan nced at him. He gave the Guildmaster a moment to use whatever skills she needed she already seemed prepared for a headache and then began to speak. "Sev suspects that it is because the gods appear to have ns for this as well," the armor said out loud. Onyx had nearly said as much to them, along with the other individual, back in the space they''d fallen into before they''d returned to reality. He didn''t know who the other one was another god, most likely, perhaps one of falling water. "If what Aurum did is any indication, then the gods must be aware that they are being targeted, though they do not seem to know why."
"Targeted," the Guildmaster repeated in disbelief. "Max briefed me a little on what happened with Jerome, but she couldn''t tell me the specifics. If you''re saying gods themselves can be targeted..."
She shook her head and sighed. "And yet," she said. "Somehow, the part that I''m most worried about is the fact that you can tell me all this now, when you couldn''t before. Something changed, and until we know what... be careful."
Chapter 52: Discussions
Chapter 52: Discussions
They stepped through the doorway into the Guild, and the Guildmaster paused as she was speaking; she nced expectantly to the desk where Max usually sat as the receptionist, and frowned slightly when she saw the desk was still empty. "I hope Max is alright," she muttered.
"Is there any reason she wouldn''t be?" Sev asked, a note of worry entering his voice. The Guildmaster shrugged, gesturing into the air as she seemed to check through her messages; seeing nothing, she shook her head and dismissed it.
"[Right ce, Right Time] is a gamble," the Guildmaster answered. "She never knows for sure that it''ll take her where she wants to be; it''ll only take her where she needs to be. The nature of the skill should mean that she''s never put into a situation she can''t get herself out of, but it doesn''t guarantee safety."
"Do you at least have a way to keep an eye on her?" Sev asked.
"It''s called trust," the Guildmaster said dryly. "I''m pretty sure you know it already."
"I mean, you keep an eye on us," Sev muttered. "And if you know she has a skill that mightnd her anywhere..."
"We have some measures ofst resort if we need to track her down, but we only use those after a certain amount of time has passed without a message from her, and that hasn''t happened yet," the Guildmaster admitted as she climbed up the stairs. "She''ll be fine, Sev. We have more important things to worry about right now."
Sev agreed, conceding the point. Still as they strode up the stairs and back towards their room he couldn''t help but nce to the empty receptionist''s desk with a bit of worry.
Hopefully Max was okay. If she wasn''t... well, there wasn''t that much they could do for her right now. He''d have to trust the Guildmaster and her people knew what they were doing.
"I''ve already sent out orders to ask anyone with building skills to help build an extension to this town," the Guildmaster said with a sigh, once they were settled back in Sev''s room. Sev barely realized how much of a meeting room his room had be; he was starting to wonder if he should ask for a big table of some sort to be put in.
As it was, they just sat in their assortment of chairs in a circle around the room, privacy wards activated. "Luckily this isn''t really a full vige; more just a number of people decided to live around this Guild branch because of the rtive safety it offers... so we should be able to build an extension without anyints. Most of them will probably even be d for it. But I take it there''s more to your story than you''ve exined."
"Quite a lot," Sev said with a sigh. He nced at Misa. "Uh... Misa, you want to take this one?"
"Might as well," Misa said with a slight grimace. "I already exined half the story. Not really one for telling stories, but..."
She exined everything they''d been through, starting from the moment she''d reality-fucked her way into the dungeon. That was the exact term she used, even, which to her amusement made Vex cover his face in embarrassment and Sev grumble at her.
"I don''t think I was supposed to be able to just teleport into the dungeon like that," Misa said with a slight frown. "It''s the only time I felt the skill resist me. But something helped me through."
Derivan nodded. "Shift activated," he said. "I did not realize it untilter. But if Shift allows the weakening of boundaries in space, then I believe I subconsciously assisted your... teleportation."
That made sense. Misa continued on to exin what had happened when she tried to block the attack from an unknown assant, all the way down to the consequences and the way the perpetrator had vanished afterwards; the Guildmaster frowned at that, and took a moment to send out several messages. Most of them, she exined, were along the lines of ''please don''t attack any skeletons you see escorting a vige'', and two of them were warnings to both Elyra and Anderstahl about a potential intelligent monster appearing in their dungeons.
The rest of the exnation faced less interruptions, though the revtions were nevertheless severe, and the Guildmaster''s expression was grim. Vex watched carefully the whole time, looking for the fluctuation in magic he''d learned to associate with the infolock activating but there was nothing. They were able to talk about everything down to the reality anchor and the way it had seemingly altered reality, to the way they''d found Aurum trapped within yet another Overseer, to the way they''d managed to rescue him.
Thest part, Misa admitted, was more a stroke of pure luck than anything else and she wasn''tpletely sure that what they''d done there was a good thing. She was d that they''d saved Aurum, whatever that meant with the god of gold now in the process of being anchored to Sev but she was also worried about what breaking the new dungeon''s reality anchor might have done.
Last, but not least, they exined what had happened... after. No one had any idea what to call that, or how to exin what existing there had been like. There were simrities to the space they''d first found the reality anchor in, but it was so much less.
The conversation died there, the five of thempsing into silence once they''d exined what they''d heard from the two presumed gods they''d spoken with. It was hard to tell exactly what was going on with them were they hurt? They didn''t seem to be. Were they putting on some sort of front? That seemed more likely. Or it was something else entirely, and their guesses were way off the mark.
"It''s interesting that the infolock didn''t seem to engage at all," the Guildmaster said with a frown. "I''m actually a little worried. I was expecting you to be able to tell me almost nothing, and now I''m concerned that something else happened, and we just don''t understand it yet."
"Not much we can do about that, though," Sev said, and the Guildmaster acknowledged that with a tilt of her head.
"As far as the matter at hand goes, I''m almost tempted to say that this is an issue you should bring to the priests at the temple instead." Her brows furrowed slightly as she spoke, as if she was genuinely considering the idea. "They''re better equipped to deal with matters of the gods. Except... if all the gods are desperate, they may not be the best source of help."
"They also tend to see the gods as perfect and wless," Sev pointed out. "If we brought this to them it might cause a bit of a panic. I''m not saying we shouldn''t tell them at all that seems like a good way to identally create a rift between the Guild and the temple but I think we should be careful about who we tell. It shouldn''t be a public announcement."
"Gods forbid we make public an announcement like ''the gods are being targeted and stolen away,''" the Guildmaster said, grimacing at the very thought. "Yeah. On that, I think, we agree. And as much as this feels like it''s over our heads, I don''t think we can afford to ignore this."
She sighed. "I''ll leverage what Guild resources I can to look at this problem, but... you four are pretty much one of our stronger assets at this point, and you seem to be at the center of this one way or another." She grimaced slightly. "There''s no way those fights didn''t get you guys some levels, right?"
Misa frowned, hesitating. "It actually didn''t," she said. "We checked. It''s not that we didn''t level at all, but the levels we got out of it are pretty much just enough for a couple of stat points."
"Except for me!" Vex piped up, eliciting an amused smile from Misa. Once upon a time she might''ve been jealous, but that was a time that felt far away, now. "It pushed me over the edge into Silver. I got a new skill for it, too. [Ssh of Mana]. I haven''t experimented with it much, but it''s some kind of skill that allows me to manipte the texture and behaviour of mana." The lizardkin''s eyes gleamed with excitement, and Derivan couldn''t help chuckling lightly.
"He is looking forward to experimenting with it," the armor said fondly.
"And no one can stop me!" Vex proimed.
"We wouldn''t dare try," Misa said with a faint grin. The Guildmaster only watched, though a slight smile slipped into her expression; it vanished just as quickly when she focused her attention back on the subject at hand.
"I want you to train on the way to Elyra," the Guildmaster said. "Like I said, one way or another, you four are at the center of this and the matter appears to be somewhat urgent, but not so much that you can''t afford some time to train."
"We''re running on some timers," MIsa said with a slight frown. She exined the degrading anchor quickly, though she added that she wasn''t quite sure if anything had changed with the way the anchor had merged with her skill.
When she was done, the Guildmaster looked... sympathetic, but her face was still hard.
"Be that as it may," she said, and then she sighed. "I''ve seen this with adventurers before. They get caught up in something big happening, and it always seems like there''s something urgent right around the corner, and they just don''t have the time to stop and rx, or to train and prepare. You cannot function if you don''t do both of those things.
"If you don''t take some time for yourselves, you''re liable to make a mistake and get yourselves killed, and whatever benefit your gods are trying to pull to get out of this situation will end there. If you don''t take the time to train, you may not be strong enough to face whatever challengese next worse, you may not understand your skills and resources well enough to leverage them in theing fights. This has been your greatest strength as a team so far. I underestimated you when I said you''re the kind of team that can fight a tier above your rank. Level almost doesn''t matter for you four.
"But that''s only if you polish the advantage you have. It''s important to focus on your goals, don''t get me wrong, but it''s just as important to strike a bnce between all these things, and not allow yourselves to be consumed one way or another." The Guildmaster''s eyes were serious. She spoke almost like she was looking through them, like this was something she''d seen again and again
...it probably was something she''d seen before, wasn''t it.
Slowly, Misa nodded, though her hand instinctively went to the pocket where she kept the reality anchor. She couldn''t help but worry, for all that her family had said they''d also work on the problem, for all that her skill imed there was now some permanent connection between her and her home.
Her pocket was empty.
Misa froze for a moment in panic. "The anchor," she said out loud, and all four of the others looked at her sharply.
"Did you lose it?" the Guildmaster asked, her voice urgent.
"I it shouldn''t have been stolen," Misa said. She tried her best to keep the defensiveness out of her voice. "I haven''t been close enough to anyone for it to be pickpocketed."
"Let''s think through this," Sev said. "I doubt something like that would get stolen so easily. When was thest time you checked it?"
"Right before I epted the bonus room rewards," Misa said with a frown, and paused. The box had said there was a synergy between her skill and the item. She hadn''t heard of item-skill synergies before, but...
Sure enough, Vex spoke up, a slight frown on his snout. "Item-skill synergies don''t usually consume the item," he said. "It''s been reported maybe once or twice that I''ve seen, and in those cases it''s usually possible to check the item box by concentrating on the skill box."
Misa frowned. "You could''ve told me that before," she grumbled.
"I forgot," Vex said, embarrassed. "I don''t remember everything all the time, you know."
"I know, I know," Misa said. "I didn''t mean it. Just stressed. Okay, let me see..."
Chapter 53: Splitting the Party for Fun and Profit
Chapter 53: Splitting the Party for Fun and Profit
The half-orc pulled up the box for [An Anchor of Heart and Home], and exerted an effort of will. The system didn''t exactlye with instructions, though it was rather intuitively built and would respond intelligently to most thoughts directed at it. The problem was that one needed to know that amand existed to be able to perform it.
Sure enough, it took only a slight twist of perspective for the skill to suddenly flicker, changing form.
[X-51 R###### A####R] [Grade: Unknown]
Item description missing.
Integrity at 89.7%. Degradation rate is currently: MEDIUM. Time before a##### falls below critical stability threshold: 5 months and 12 days.
#####r boundaries are currently in flux. Stable point identified using skill: [An Anchor of Heart and Home].
She flicked copies of that box over to the other four without saying a word.
"...So the anchor''s merged with you in some way?" the Guildmaster frowned at the box for a moment, then nced at Vex. "Do you know if it''s possible to separate the item and the skill after something like this happens?"
"You haven''t seen something like this before?" Vex asked, surprised.
"Believe it or not," the Guildmaster said dryly. "I don''t actually have ess to the endless resources and records that Elyra does, and things like this are actually rare. How frequently do you think adventurers get rare items and rare skills?"
"...Semi-frequently?" Vex ventured. The Guildmaster stared at him tly, and he deted.
"You four are a terrible example of what''smon," she said, though her tone implied she was vaguely amused. "Can they be separated or not?"
"I don''t know," Vex answered. "Not that I know of."
"Isn''t this a good thing?" Misa asked, sounding a little protective. "The skill''s... it might help me protect my home, even when I''m away from it."
"Depending on what it does, it might also make you a target, and if it''s that important I was going to ask you to give it to us for safekeeping," the Guildmaster said with a sigh. "But this might be the second best thing, as long as you don''t go around telling people you have it."
"This is going to make training even more important, isn''t it," Sev said with a slight grimace. The Guildmaster shrugged, and favored him with a faint smile.
"It''s always going to look like a bad time to take a break," she said. "There''s always the next milestone to look at. The next hill to climb. If something''s sufficiently urgent, then yes, by all means, run for that goal as fast as you can and don''t stop until you''ve done what you need to do.
"Right now, you have time. Not a lot of it not an infinite amount of it but you have it, so make use of it as much as you can so that when you do need to run, you have everything you need to do it.
"There are a couple of quests that need to bepleted that are between this branch town and Elyra. I''m sending you there anyway, so do me a favor and try toplete them. I''m sure you''re not opposed to helping a couple of viges on the way?"
"I mean," Sev hedged, but she''d gotten him with the allure of helping people. "Um. Yeah, I guess we can do that. Anyone opposed?"
"If we haven''t found a way to stop or slow the anchor degrading in three months," Misa said. "I''d like us to focus on that. But we''ll be in Elyra by then. I don''t think the trip will take more than a week. Maybe three, if we''repleting quests on the way."
"We will keep an eye out on the way," Derivan said. "There is no guarantee that Elyra will contain the solution we need. Perhaps we will find a solution sooner than we expect."
"That''s a good point," Misa said. "...Yeah. I feel a little better about that now."
"I need to go have a meeting about all of this," the Guildmaster said with a sigh. "Before I go. What happened to Kestel?"
"Oh." Misa grimaced a bit. They''d forgotten, in the midst of everything else. She quickly exined what had happened, going over how Kestel had apparently tried to protect the delve team from being reported.
The Guildmaster rubbed her temples like she was getting a headache."Those skeletons you mentioned will be joining the Guild, right?"
"We were hoping they could. They''re strong. They''d be an asset," Sev said.
"And they need Guild protection so Elyra doesn''t just steal them away," the Guildmaster muttered. "I''ll get something made for them. Disguise enchantments, maybe. Oh! Speaking of."
The Guildmaster reached into her pocket and tossed an amulet at Derivan, who caught it. "The amulet I promised," she said. "It''ll stop people from being able to notice that you''re not quite what they expect."
"Thank you," Derivan said, bowing his head. "I will use it wisely."
The Guildmaster snorted. "You''re too polite," she said as she headed out the door. "Use it however you like. Knowing you four, I expect yet another fundamental rule broken by next week."
"I can''t tell if she''s overestimating us or underestimating us," Misamented once the Guildmaster left.
"I give it two days tops," Sev said with a grin.
"I''m not sure we should make this apetition..." Vex ventured.
"Perhaps one day, if you will help me test my Magic stat," Derivan said.
Vex immediately nodded in agreement. "Okay!"
Misa snorted, and Sev justughed. Then they settled down to discuss their ns for the next few days.
It''d be another day or two before the Guildmaster could arrange for a caravan to take them to Elyra which, they decided, gave the four of them just enough time to split up and focus on themselves for a bit. Sev''s status was still stuck behind the ''processing'' notification, the process of anchoring Aurum to him apparently a costly one; he told the others he''d update them as soon as anything changed regarding his status, and that he''d try to stay rtively close to someone that could help.
Vex and Derivan, as before, decided they''d stick together to experiment and explore what they could do with their skills. Derivan''s Magic stat was vague enough that they figured there might be more to it, and keeping them together would help Derivan train up the Slime stat, too, though the benefit of that particr stat versus the cost was growing untenable.
Misa wanted to visit the vige as they went to rebuild. It wouldn''t be the same as J''rokksur, but it would have all the same people, and that was what mattered. She made the other three promise that they''d join her tonight for dinner before they all split up; she''d be cooking them something from her home, she said. None of them questioned where she would find the ingredients.
"Alright, let''s get some sleep," Misa said, ncing outside the window and grimacing. The sun was close to setting she didn''t think the vige would be arriving by tonight. By the morning, maybe, if they got some rest. "I want to greet Mom and Dad properly when they get back. It''s been... it''s been too long."
"We''re looking forward to being properly introduced to them," Sev said with a smile.
Misaughed. "Yeah, you say that now. Wait till Dad gets a chance to interrogate you three. Remember,e find us at eight for dinner. Sev, do not show up at eight in the morning."
Sev held up his hands. "I wasn''t nning to!"
Misa narrowed her eyes at him. "Suuure."
At exactly eight o''clock the next morning, Sev found himself standing outside Jerome''s room.
He wasn''t actually going to intrude on Misa''s reunion with her family. He''d heard the noise as they arrived early in the morning, around six; he''d heard Misa wake up around that same time, too, rushing down the stairs to go see her parents. He''d thought about what he wanted to do, and two things popped out at him.
One, he wanted to visit Jerome, and make sure the guy was doing okay. He wasn''t exactly sure how much the pdin knew about what happened with Aurum, or what the state of his divine connection was. If nothing else, he felt the pdin might want to know what was happening with his chosen god.
Two, he wanted to visit Velykos. The stone elemental had been pleasantpany, and while he wasn''t sure what he wanted to do, with the infolock apparently not working... he wanted to see if he could give something back to him. He''d make sure there were priests around, of course. Just in case.
So he''d found the recement clerk and asked where to find Jerome, and he''d been led to this door. Jerome''s party members the two elves were apparently out at the moment, the clerk had told him.
"Do you know what''s happening with Max?" Sev asked, vaguely worried.
"I''m not informed on that kind of thing, no," the clerk said with a shake of his head.
"And your nametag says that your name is... also Max?"
''Max'' let out a long-suffering sigh. "Yes, I''ve been asked this question before."
"Just so we''re clear," he said. "You''re not actually the same Max."
"No, sir," the clerk sighed. "We just happen to have the same name. I dislike subbing in for her for exactly this reason, you know."
"Aha! You called me sir." Sev pointed triumphantly at... well, not at the clerk. That would have been rude. He pointed instead at the wall next to Max, his hand jerking to the left at thest minute, leaving this other Max to stare at him rather unimpressed. "The real Max would never call me sir. You''re definitely not her."
"Sir," the clerk said, sounding vaguely exasperated. "You can only dy entering the room for so long. Jerome is expecting you."
"Just as insightful as Max, though," Sev muttered with a sigh, and eyed the door critically for a moment before giving it a knock.
He didn''t know why he was so nervous. It shouldn''t have mattered. He was visiting someone that was under heavy supervision; there was a reason this clerk was here in the first ce, though he wouldn''t be listening in. He''d just be on the lookout for skill activations.
The door opened, startling Sev. Jerome stared out at him, looking surprisingly... normal.
The man wasn''t wearing any extravagant armor or anything of the like. He was dressed in casual clothes neshifter casual clothes. A cotton t-shirt and loose fitting pants. Sev was almost jealous, looking at him; they seemedfortable.
"Uh, hi," Sev said awkwardly. "I''m here to visit. Give you some news about Aurum."
"Oh!" Jerome''s face brightened somewhat. "Man, I''ve been kinda worried about the guy. Haven''t heard anything at all over the connection. You know if he''s okay?"
"I think he is," Sev said with a slight grimace. "The system''s being a bit weird about it. It says he''s attaching to me, so... I''ll let you know if he''s okay once that''s done. Whatever that is, it''s taking a long time."
"The fuck does that mean?" Jerome frowned at him. Then he winced slightly, and caught himself. "Uh. I mean... Do you know what that means?"
"You know about as much as I do," Sev said with a shrug. "Therapy''s doing a number on you, huh?"
"Listen, man," Jerome groaned. "They keep giving me lectures. I didn''te to another world for this shit! And they won''t stop until I actually understand them! It''s not fair!"
"Are you sure that''s the therapy?" Sev raised an eyebrow. "That doesn''t sound like therapy. That sounds like the introductory sses the Guild conducts for new adventurers."
Jerome''s face was nk. "What''s the difference?"
Sev sighed, changing the subject. "Nevermind," he said. "Look, I''m d you''re doing well. I gotta get going. I''ll keep you updated on Aurum?"
"Obviously," Jerome said, and then paused. "Uh, I mean... please."
Sev stared at him for a moment, thenughed. "You know what, I''ll give you credit for trying."
Chapter 54: Sculpting Stone
Chapter 54: Sculpting Stone
Sev found Velykos in the gardens behind the temple again, rather than inside the temple proper. It was quite the sight, really. As old as Velykos was, he was still , and he towered over the majority of the trees and flowers and herbs that filled the temple garden.
The garden itself was beautiful. Part of it was set out to harvest potion ingredients, that much was clear there were rows and rows of identical nts, each in various stages of growth and carefully marked ordingly. But the rest of it? The rest of it was beautifullyid out, more haphazard art than anything orderly; clusters of bright, star-petaled flowers grew in broken zigzags around twisting vines, and a variety of trees brightened the atmosphere with various colors.
Really, Sev was never going to get over the fact that this world had trees that came in bright blue.
"Hey, Velykos," Sev called, and the stone elemental turned to him in surprise. He seemed pleased to see Sev, though, and gestured for the cleric to join him, though he also put a stone finger to his not-quite-lips.
"There is a bird here," Velykos said, his voice surprisingly quiet. It sounded like the gentle drift of sand down a dune, instead of the usual gravel and rock. "It injured itself. I have been taking care of it."
"It doesn''t have health, huh?" Sev said, peering at the bird that Velykos was talking about. It was sleeping, the little thing, a tiny chest rising and falling with every breath.
...He had no idea what kind of bird it was, though. It had an incredibly long beak, and its feathers were almost prismatic, shimmering in a number of different colors every time the light nced off it from a different angle.
"It is too insignificant," Velykos answered. "Though perhaps significance is not the marker by which the system identifies an object... It is good to see you again. Your name was Sev, yes?"
"Yeah," Sev said. "I wanted to check in. Make sure everything was going okay after what happened. I''m sorry about that I didn''t know what would happen."
"It is fine," Velykos said with a hum. "Nillea forgives all. Though... do youe here to speak of your god again? The one whose name cannot be spoken?"
"Recent events have led me to believe that I can talk about it now," Sev said. "But it''s not something I''m sure about. I made sure to tell some of the priests before I came here, so they''re keeping an eye on us, but..."
"Why do you wish to tell me of your god?" Velykos asked calmly. Very, very gently, he ced the bird he was holding back into its nest, the stone he was made of disying an astonishing flexibility. "Not to preach, I assume."
"Definitely not," Sev said, letting out a slightly ufortableugh. He knew what that felt like. But how was he supposed to exin that he thought that Velykos had lost a piece of himself? That he''d been forced to choose a different god, and to forget about the old one?
Though, in all fairness, there was a lot about the rtionship mortals and gods had that made Sev ufortable.
"Can you tell me a little more about your mentor?" Sev asked, deciding to switch tacts. "The daemon you said became a friend?"
Velykos nodded. Slowly, he rose to his feet, Sev feeling once again a little overwhelmed by the way the stone elemental just towered over everything around him; it was a wonder that he didn''t trample the grass beneath his feet every time he took a step. "Walk with me," the stone elemental said. "I want to tend to the garden."
"Of course," Sev said, surprised.
"His name was Ramos," Velykos exined after a short pause. He was inspecting some strange-looking flowers that grew out of the trunk of a tree rather than out of the ground; each petal shimmered strangely, like they were barely real. "Though he did not tell me his name until I had known him for many years. Their names are important to them, you see."
"Magically?" Sev asked.
"Culturally," Velykos said, ncing at Sev. The human blinked once, feeling a little bit embarrassed. "Their names hold no power over them, no matter what the neshifted rumors say. But their true names are an intimate thing, given only to people that they trust beyond measure; people they consider family."
"Is it... okay that you''re telling me his name, then?"
"He is long gone," Velykos said mildly. "And it is equally important to them that their true name is used, when they are dead. They believe an element of themselves lives in their name; if it is used when they are alive, then their selves are diluted. But if they are gone, it is the only way they live on."
"Ramos, then," Sev said, and Velykos nodded approvingly at the way he said it; quiet and respectful, like a prayer for the lost.
"He was a kind man," the stone elemental said. "Dedicated to the god he chose to worship. Daemons do not ordinarily have a good rtionship with gods; they live a life of rejection. By the system, by the gods, and by the world itself."
"But Nillea chose to ept him," Sev said. He was stepping in territory he thought might have be within the realm of the original infolock. If he was right about who Ramos and Velykos had worshipped if it had been Onyx instead of Nillea...
"Yes," Velykos said, though he took a moment to pause as he more carefully inspected yet another flower. Sev saw a brief sh of divine mana before a gentle mist of water settled over the nt. "It is strange, if I reflect on it. Though Nillea is a goddess of the earth, she is not known for her kindness towards daemons. I suppose she saw in him someone that was trying to do better, and wanted to give him the opportunity..."
Velykos stopped, and this time not to examine any nt or flower. He stopped like he''d been struck by a thought, and he turned a grave look towards Sev. "This is why youe to speak to me, is it not?" the stone elemental said. "I hear the stories. I know a little of what you and yours have been involved with. Gods and angels."
"How much did you hear?" Sev asked with a small frown. As far as he understood, most of that information wouldn''t have been able to propagate even the Guildmaster had said Max hadn''t been able to exin much of what happened with Jerome and what Aurum had been doing. "And how?"
"I hear through Nillea," Velykos said. "Through dreams, asionally, though sleep for a stone elemental is sporadic. Sometimes through skills. [The Walls Have Ears]."
"That..." Sev paused. Creepy name for a skill. "I''m not sure how to feel about that."
"It is a bypass," Velykos said. "I should have tried it earlier. The skill is less literal and weaker than it sounds; I do not truly understand what I hear. I gain a half-formed instinct about what may have transpired, instead."
"Somehow I don''t feel better about it," Sev said a little dryly, and Velykos tipped his head in acknowledgement.
"I do not use it often," the stone elemental said. "Only when I suspect that my perception is being messed with. Which is more often than I had expected, when I first moved here."
"Ah, right. Because of the Guildmaster." Sev gathered his thoughts. "That''s how you found out how the skill works?"
"It is, yes," Velykos acknowledged. "I have informed her of the skill and what it does, out of courtesy. She does not contest my use of it."
"That was kind of you," Sev said, surprised. "Kind of her, too, I guess. I''m surprised she let you use it."
"She said it keeps her honest," Velykos said, shrugging his massive shoulders with a rumble. "I am given to understand that her colleagues do something simr, so that she does not simply run unchecked with her abilities."
"I didn''t realize that was something she was worried about at all," Sev said. "Huh. Good for her, I guess."
"We were discussing the gods," Velykos reminded him. "You came to me to speak to me of your god, I believe."
"Yeah," Sev said. He hesitated, still, an unnatural trepidation rising up in him. He remembered thest time he''d done this, when he''d woken up on the floor and he''d been told he almost died. He remembered what he''d done for Kestel, and the memories he''d taken on in return the very sensations he''d been lucky enough to skip the first time around. The thought of his heart seizing and stopping, his blood flow suddenly not enough to keep the rest of his body running
"You are panicking," Velykos said gently, over the ringing in his ears, and the stone elemental gently raised a stone chair through the earth. He nudged him backwards to get Sev to sit, and conjured a droplet of water for him to sip from an actual droplet of water, a tiny sphere of magically animated liquid that stayed solid in his hands.
Sev stared at the droplet for a moment, mesmerized, and then took a small sip from it.
"...Sorry about that," Sev said after a moment. He took a deep breath. "I wanted to tell you about what I think really happened," he added softly. "I don''t know if I''m right. But you told me that Ramos liked to sculpt things out of stone..."
"He wanted to leave behind a mark on the world," Velykos agreed. "He acknowledged that even stone would wear down, eventually. But he wanted to leave the world more beautiful than when he found it."
"Does that sound like a follower of Nillea, to you?" Sev asked. His tone wasn''t usatory it was genuinely curious. He didn''t know much about Nillea beyond that she was a goddess of the earth. "What does Nillea represent?"
Velykos took a moment to consider the question. "She represents a respect for the earth and the bounties thate from it," the stone elemental eventually answered. There was a slight frown in his voice. "An appreciation for the natural beauty of thend."
Ah. There was the contradiction he''d failed to spot the first time. Not in the events of the story itself, necessarily, but in the domain of the gods.
...Maybe he needed to pay a little more attention when it came to the gods, Sev thought to himself with a grimace. He was the cleric of the party, and the one that would be expected to know more about the gods...
Sev nced up at Velykos to see how he was doing. The stone elemental was frowning to himself, little pebbles rolling around in agitation along his form. Subconscious elemental maniption, maybe?
"It is strange that he was a follower of Nillea, now that my attention has been called to that fact," Velykos said atst. "You believe this has something to do with your own god?"
Sev nodded. "Onyx was a god of change," he said quietly. "Well. A minor god of change, anyway. He was a god of sculpting, of leaving a mark on thend that''s all your own.
"It just... it seems to fit a little too well, you know?"
Chapter 55: Memories
Chapter 55: Memories
Velykos was silent for a moment, processing Sev''s words. He seemed to use gardening as a distraction as he thought, bending down to pluck weeds from the dirt with a delicate precision that Sev admittedly would not have expected from him. Every weed he plucked disintegrated as he clenched his fists, which...
...admittedly, Sev was a little worried about that part. He was rtively certain Velykos hadn''t been disintegrating nts before. Arger part of him, though, was more relieved that there had been no apparent adverse reaction no visible twitch from Velykos as he failed to process what Sev said, and certainly no unnatural drop in his own health.
"It does fit well," Velykos eventually said, his voice soft. It wasn''t angry, exactly, which made Sev exhale a sigh of relief. "I am unsure how to feel about it. I have followed Nillea for such a long time, and you tell me now that I may have chosen to follow the wrong god..."
"Nillea may have done good for you regardless," Sev said. "I mean, I don''t know her, obviously. But you''re not powerless, you''ve got a skill that helps you remember things around infolocks... maybe she wanted you to know."
"If that is true..." Velykos'' words trailed off as he thought on the matter, and then he nodded to himself, as if satisfied with whatever conclusion he''d reached. "Then I am grateful, I think. But I do not understand. You said he was those things; is he not any longer? And are you not a cleric yourself? If he is your bonded divinity, and you maintain your ability to use and cast skills..."
"I don''t know all the answers," Sev said with a slight grimace, looking down. "I still have all my skills and I don''t know why, yeah, you''re right about that. I know Onyx isn''t gone, and maybe that''s why. Or maybe it''s because the circumstances with my ss are kind of fucked up to begin with."
"But there is more you wish to share," Velykos said, and Sev nodded with a sigh.
He''d pointed out to the Guildmaster that the idea informing the entire temple about what was happening would have been a bad idea but informing Velykos? He didn''t know the stone elemental very well, it was true, but he almost felt like he owed it to him. Velykos'' god, if he was right, had already been erased; the connection he had now was a fake, a remnant forged from the connection he''d once had.
"He was a god, yes," Sev said quietly. "Whether he is now... I don''t know. I don''t fully understand what happened to him. But this is something you need to know, and something you need to tell only people you trust, because I don''t know what kind of panic this might cause if it gets out."
"You have my word," Velykos said solemnly.
"The gods are dying," Sev said bluntly. "Maybe not directly, and maybe not in a way we understand. But every so often the system picks a god and begins to scrub it from existence. It erases that god''s understanding of themselves, and it erases everything that god''s followers remember of them. All pdins, clerics, anyone who follows that god and relies on them for power they''re prompted to choose a different god. And when they do, they forget everything about the one they followed before."
There was a long silence after Sev spoke. Velykos continued silently in the garden, his footsteps barely so much as blending even a de of grass but the rocks on his body were agitated, now, the pebbles trembling against him in barely-suppressed fury.
"This would exin a lot," Velykos said. "Though you understand that this is difficult to believe without proof."
"And proof is hard to provide for something like this," Sev said with a sigh. "Look, I understand if you don''t believe me"
"The strange thing is that I do," Velykos interrupted. "I know that I should be skeptical, and yet... a part of me insists that I ept your words no matter how little sense they make. [The Walls Have Ears] kicking in, no doubt. And so I must believe that you are in fact telling me the truth. That the god that Ramos originally worshipped was not Nillea, but this Onyx that you speak of. That the god that I followed in turn was originally Onyx, until that was taken away from me, and reced with a different god..."
Velykos'' voice trailed off, and then became more firm. "Yes. The more I speak of it, the more certain I am. I have lost something crucial to me in the exchange, I think."
"What makes you say that?" Sev asked tentatively.
"Because I remember a moment in which I changed," Velykos said bluntly. "My memories still say that I follow Nillea, and that I have always followed Nillea. But there is a marked change in my behavior a marked change in the carvings on my body, if you follow them."
Sev paid attention for the first time. Stone elementals aged by carving and eroding away at their own bodies, the designs slowly bing more intricate with time he''d already seen that the first time, but until Velykos had pointed it out, he hadn''t noticed the way the engravings changed.
Initially, they were artistic sworls and patterns,ndscapes painted in impressionistic, abstract ways. Sometimes they were clearer and cleaner, but Velykos'' markings there were filled in almost like it was at the whim of an artist; it changed with his mood and with the day.
And then after a certain point new carvings were all in the same style. It was never the exact same image twice, but there was no variation, no change of mood; a lined capture of different naturalndscapes, from cliffs and canyons to sunsets and forests.
"I recall being more adventurous in my youth," Velykos mused out loud. "At a certain point, I wanted to be an adventurer, rather than work in this temple. There was no real appeal to me when it came to nts and gardening... That all came after a certain point."
"After you lost Onyx, you think?" Sev asked quietly.
"That is what I suspect now, yes," Velykos said. "What would you say Onyx was like?"
Sev squirmed a little. "He was just... a guy," he said. "He tried to encourage his followers into doing whatever they wanted to do, within reason. Told them they could sculpt the shape of their own lives. He was a big proponent of that sort of thing."
"Nillea is a goddess of slow change and eventual growth," Velykos supplied. "They are perhaps not too different in that regard, and yet... I remember a time when I wanted with far more passion than I have now. There was a time I wanted to explore the world, as Ramos had done; to find my own inspirations and make my own sculptures..."
"Do you still make them?" Sev asked.
"I do not," Velykos said with a regretful shake of his head. "Most of my efforts are focused now on potion making, so that the adventurers whoe to the temple have something that will keep them alive. And I have found that many of the other priests do not have the... delicate touch that is asionally required for potion making, shall we say. They require my assistance."
"You sort of fell into this life, huh?" Sev nced around at the garden contemtively. "Are you the one that takes care of this garden?"
"I am," Velykos confirmed. "It is the source of many of our ingredients, though not all of them. Some nts cannot be sustained here, and must be grown in the wild; for those, we set quests out for adventurers to harvest them."
"I wonder if this isn''t a small part of yourself trying to express itself," Sev muttered to himself. The garden did strike him as that, in a way one half strict,belled, orderly rows, and the other wild and unkempt and beautiful. But that seemed like a bit of a stretch.
Velykos smiled at him anyway, like he knew what he was thinking. "The garden is something I am very proud of," the stone elemental said. "But perhaps it is time that I consider taking up the adventurer''s mantle again. If I am to seek answers about the god that Ramos worshipped, and the god that I may have worshipped once upon a time."
"You could just ask me, you know," Sev said, though he felt a little embarrassed saying the words. Velykos chuckled.
"I am aware," the stone elemental said. "And as I mentioned, I believe that you are correct in that I once worshipped a different god. I do not know if that god is Onyx, and if it is, I would like to search for a way to recover those memories."
"I guess," Sev said, though he frowned slightly. All this time, and he hadn''t considered looking into a way to help people recover their memories of their lost god...
Well, that wasn''t true. He had. But the fact was that he had very little to go on, and at the time he had been practically falling apart from the side effects of trying to heal Onyx as he was being forgotten.
"I will have to make sure that the nts are well taken care of," Velykos said, this time speaking more to himself than to Sev. "I believe there are a number of priests that show potential in that regard... I do not suppose you would be willing to care for these nts in my stead?"
"What?" Sev blinked. "I have to leave, too. My team''s headed over to Elyra in a day or two..."
Sev''s voice trailed off slightly as he took in Velykos'' expression. The stone elemental was, in his best approximation of the word, grinning at him though it was difficult to define what he was doing as grinning. More like an amused roll of his shoulders, a slight quirk in the rocks that represented his facial expression.
"Oh. You were joking," Sev saidmely.
"I was indeed," Velykos rumbled, amused. "Though it seems my sense of humor is something I need to work on. I appreciate your candor in informing me of all this, however. There is something to be said for knowing the truth behind the matter... and I feel a drive that I have not felt in years. I will let you know of anything I find, and perhaps I can find a way to cure the affliction that has struck so many, while you search for a way to stop more gods from being consumed by this process."
"Of course," Sev said. He''d been intending to do that anyway. But his voice came out a little weak; he was distracted by a shing notice that had appeared in front of him.
Attachment of coalesced entityplete. Finalizing...
Chapter 56: Manifestation
Chapter 56: Manifestation
A lot of things happened all at once.
First was the sudden influx of an absolutely monumental amount of divine mana the kind that would escape the notice of most people''s [Mana Sight], but not the notice of the [Divine Sense] that many clerics had. Several priests over in the nearby temple jerked their heads over, their eyes growing wide; Velykos, in contrast, narrowed his eye-equivalents and stepped back somewhat cautiously. A spell began to form in his hands, though there was too much of a storm of divine mana for Sev to be able to tell what kind of spell it was.
But the caution was warranted, in Sev''s opinion. The magic was terrifying. It acted like no form of divine magic he''d ever seen before. Layers of divine mana twisted themselves over him, then attached to his body to his soul, if he was understanding what he was seeing correctly like golden, divine strings. Those strings led a short distance away, and then abruptly vanished.
Just as quickly as it began, it was over. The notification box vanished, and the storm of divine mana abruptly calmed, although it didn''t disappear; instead, it started to slowly dissipate, spreading out from where it had coalesced.
For a moment, Sev was confused. Hadn''t the box said that it was manifesting? What, exactly, had manifested, except the strings that now seemed attached to the stuff of his soul?
"What was that?" Velykos asked him, and Sev realized with a start that the stone elemental had been gathering healing magic into his hands. Now that the immediate danger seemed to be over, he let the magic flow away, joining the rest of the ambient divine mana in dispersing.
"It was..." Sev hesitated, then sighed; there wasn''t much use in keeping it hidden, he thought. Velykos knew most of the story, anyway. "I told you that the system is erasing gods. My team was able to rescue one that we think was in the process of being erased. We don''t fully understand the mechanics of what happened there, but apparently the god needs something to anchor to, and I was the only avable option."
"Anchor..." Velykos repeated the word with a slight frown. He shook his head after a moment, not getting whatever he needed to get out of the word. "It reminds me of the connection that we share with our gods, perhaps," the stone elemental said. "Though I am certain it is not the same thing."
"The notification text implied that all gods need to be attached to an anchor," Sev said. "On top of all the people that worship them. I''m not sure exactly what rtionship that implies, but... we''ll find out, I guess."
The strings were still there, attached to him. There were no notifications that he could see about new skills, or new abilities though his status was still fuzzy and grayed out, like something about it was still updating. Experimentally, he tugged on the strings of divine mana he could now feel.
This time, there was a response.
H-hello?
That was Aurum''s voice, echoing back down through the connection; Sev metaphorically jerked back from his grip on the thread, startled. He didn''t quite know how to process that. Aurum''s voice was gone almost as soon as he released his grip on it, so he reached out again, feeling for the connection and this time connecting as gently as he could.
Aurum? he asked, trying to send his thoughts along the connection the same way he''d done with Onyx, before his god had been forgotten. The sensation wasn''t exactly the same; the nature of the connection was different. Can you hear me?
Yes! Aurum''s mental voice was suddenly enthusiastic. I''m back now! The angels were all so worried about me... Histre is here, too. They didn''t think I woulde back, but I did! Did you guys do that?
I think so, Sev answered. The system says you''re connected to me, now. Do you know what''s up with that?
I dunno, Aurum said. Um... Lemme ask!
A short pause.
All of us have to be connected, the angels say, Aurum reported back after a moment, sounding more confused than anything else. They don''t really know why. But they say it''s a price we have to pay. Um... They say that it''s also the source of our powers? It''s how I can send down angels and stuff! If I pull from the connection.
Please do not do that, Sev said with a slight wince. You''re connected to me, now, not to an anchor. If you try to pull anything like what you did before, with the angels, uh... I don''t really know what will happen to me.
I don''t think I can even if I wanted to, Aurum said. Your connection feels... um... weaker? I dunno. There''s not much I can pull from it even if I want to. If anything it feels like it''s almost the opposite.
The opposite? Sev frowned. You mean I can pull from you instead? Why would the connection be inverted like that?
I dunno! Aurum said again. Sev sighed, and changed tacks.
Do you remember anything about what happened? he asked, keeping his mental voice gentle. He wanted to know where Aurum had been, before the god had been anchored to him. After we freed you?
Um... Aurum seemed to give this some serious thought, but then Sev felt the mental sensation of the god shaking his head. Kinda. But I can''t remember clearly yet. The angels say ice cream will help.
Excuse me? Sev blinked.
You gotta eat some ice cream, Aurum told him. I can taste it through the connection. And then I can remember things! Maybe.
Sev paused for a moment, then let out a sigh. You just want ice cream, don''t you?
The angels tell me to tell you that I won''t speak without mywyer, Aurum supplied helpfully. Sev groaned.
Where did you even hear that, the cleric muttered, and then looked up at Velykos, who was blinking at him curiously. He hadn''t stopped tending to the flowers even then.
"Do you happen to know a ce I can get ice cream?" Sev said out loud, a little awkwardly. He didn''t have much hope for that; he''d never seen it in town. But if Aurum was giving him an excuse to try to find a treat for himself...
"There is none nearby," Velykos said, his tone impying that he''d been thrown off by the question, but was going along with the flow anyway. "But I know how to make some, if you wish."
"You do?" Sev blinked up at him, surprised.
"I did not always live here," Velykos said. "And I have encountered the children of the neshifted, before. Ice cream is amon demand."
"Is it?" Sev sounded bewildered. "Are you telling me I could have had ice cream this whole time and all I needed to do wase to the temple and ask?"
"Well, that was not my intention," Velykos said, his tone an amused rumble. "But I would have made you some had you asked, yes. In all fairness, I doubt you could have reasonably expected to find ice cream within a temple."
"I mean I definitely didn''t, but I kind of regret not talking to you guys more," Sev muttered. Then he thought about what he''d said, and amended his statement. "I regret not talking to you more. Maybe Ixome, since all he needed was a little bit of a wakeup call. Jury''s still out on the rest of the priests."
"Do you have something against us?" Velykos asked, sounding amused. He was leading the way back to the temple, though he stopped as he passed by some nts very carefully, Velykos reached out to the bean pods on those nts. He didn''t pluck them off, instead using a tiny knife he manifested on the tip of a finger to split open a pod. He scraped out the insides with a de of divine magic, and held it there carefully as he closed the pod shut again.
Healing magic gently suffused the nt, and the pod seemed to healpletely. Sev blinked.
"Does that nt have health?" he asked, slightly thrown off. "Wait, no. To answer your question, I don''t have anything against priests, it''s just that a lot of them preach at me a lot, and... I care about my friendship with Onyx, you know?"
"You have a closer and more casual rtionship with your god than most," Velykos acknowledged with a nod. "Many in the temple would call it sphemous. And no, that nt does not have health; healing magic is more effective on it because it is able to absorb that mana independent of the system, and heal itself."
Sev blinked, ncing back at the nt. "Huh," he said thoughtfully. That was a line of research to follow, if he could get Vex to research it. If he could heal people that were disconnected from the system... it''d be easier to heal people like Kestel. Healing magic was too ineffective otherwise without health to help it along.
"Will you be telling anyone what happened?" Velykos asked him curiously, and Sev blinked up at him. "It was rather obvious, and many of the priests seem eager to ask."
"Oh." Sev had almost forgotten. "Uh... no, I don''t think so. That''s something that I want to keep private. I''ll say I got a divine message from my god, or something, and it''s not meant for them."
"Did you?"
"I mean, technically, that happened," Sev said. "It''s just that the god just wants to taste ice cream."
"Ah! Thus the current quest." Velykos seemed inordinately amused by the prospect. He continued leading the way into the temple several priests immediately began to approach them, but Velykos waved at them, and they backed off, seeming to get the message.
"Wow," Sev said. "Maybe I should get you as an escort more whenever I need to visit the temple."
"Remember," Velykos said with a chuckle. "I am nning to return to adventuring, to uncover what may have happened to Ramos. You may not find it quite that easy to find me."
"Well, I''ll be in Elyra, anyway," Sev said with a shrug. "Are you nning on heading in that direction?"
Velykos nodded. "It has been a long time, and all traces of him may be gone," the stone elemental said. "But that is where Ist saw Ramos, and I believe I will try to track down where he went, and what happened to him. There were dungeons near that area that I will have to check."
"Can you do it alone?" Sev asked.
"I hear there are teams of adventurers that are recruiting, now," Velykos said with a shrug. "A pdin of gold? His party is down to three members, and they may be in need of a mage."
Sev winced slightly. "Uh... good luck with him," he said. He couldn''t imagine what Jerome''s team would look like with Velykos there, actually. "If you do join his team."
"It is just a thought," Velykos said with a chuckle.
They arrived at a small room at the back of the temple all of the priests had their own little bedrooms, each separated by a thin cloth barrier, although Velykos'' wasrger than most due to the simple nature of his size. In the corner of his section was a small chest; the telltale mist of frost magic spilled out when he opened the chest.
Velykos retrieved a small bottle of milk, some sugar from the nearby drawers, and the various other ingredients he needed, including the small pods from the nt that he''d retrieved. Sev simply sat back and watched. It was nice, in a way, that so many neshifted recipes had spread as they had.
Soon enough, he had a small bowl of ice cream, and a very pleased god humming along to the taste in his head.
Sev couldn''t deny that he was enjoying it, too.
I''m gonna try to remember, Aurum told him, while enjoying the taste of the vani-vored ice cream alongside him. The angels think I should, too. But gimme a few hours.
Sev just nodded. Aurum had only just returned. He''d figured it might take a while. He could wait.
Hopefully Aurum didn''t barge in with a world-changing revtion during dinner with Misa''s family, though. That would just be awkward.
Chapter 57: Understanding New Skills
Chapter 57: Understanding New Skills
Derivan had suggested they go back to the forest to test any new ideas they had about magic, and so they had. They''d informed the Guildmaster beforehand, just in case anything went wrong with the skills they wanted to test and the magic they wanted to cast she''d assured them she would ensure that there were people that would keep an eye on them while giving them privacy, through an assortment of [Danger Sense]-adjacent skills so they were free to practice as much as they wanted within the forest.
For now, though, Vex was just charging up Derivan with more mana, trying to push Slime into the next stage. The amount of mana he absorbed passively had slowly increased as the stat went up; it was at a whole 25, now, giving the armor 2500 mana to y with.
"I''m almost jealous," Vex admitted with a shy smile, not looking remotely jealous. If anything, he seemed admiring. "I had to go through... a lot more, to get as much mana as I have now. And you''ve already almost caught up."
"It will get much harder now, I think," Derivan said. He watched the forest with [Mana Sight] turned on, enjoying the yful dance of mana over the trees it hadn''t noticed them yet, and wouldn''t until they began to cast. He''d try to disturb it as little as possible, but something about the dance sparked something in him, and he wanted to test that.
"It''s still incredible," Vex said. "If my family knew this..."
He fell silent, then, and Derivan nced at him with concern. The lizardkin didn''t seem like he was willing to borate too heavily on the topic yet, and so Derivan changed the topic.
"You still know far more about magic than I could hope to, I believe," Derivan said with a small smile. "Do you want to try your new skill first? [Ssh of Mana], yes?"
"Oh! Yes," Vex said, brightening considerably. "The skill doesn''t actually tell me a lot about what it''ll do, so I''m thinking I can use [Delineate] to limit the effects first. And once we''ve got a better idea of what it does, we can figure out what to do with it."
"Indeed," Derivan said, though he was paying attention more to the lizard''s smile than the words. Misa was rather more practiced at exploiting skills than he was, though he''d had his moments.
Vex stood back for a moment, preparing the skills he wanted to cast first, [Delineate], which didn''t cost any mana at all and didn''t seem to be a spell. The air seemed to twist and turn in the region he had marked, and now there was a barely-visible boundary sitting in the air, an almost-sphere.
"Huh," Vex said. Then he reached out and cast [Ssh of Mana]. It was an ambiguous cast, formed with no real intent behind the spell, and so the mana that emerged wasn''t typed in any particr way; instead, raw mana spilled out of him, bright and colorful to Derivan''s eyes.
It sshed into the area marked by [Delineate], like it had struck a barrier, and then settled into a pool at the bottom of the sphere. It hovered there, invisible to the naked eye but a gentle glowing green to his [Mana Sight].
"It acts like a liquid," Vex said after a moment, carefully looking over the spell. The mana didn''t seem to be dissipating like it normally did whether that was due to [Delineate] specifically or due to the effects of [Ssh of Mana], he wasn''t sure. "That''ll let me create spells that cling to people, I think, if it works that way? If I make the liquid more viscous..."
"Can you do that?" Derivan asked curiously, and Vex nodded.
"I didn''t show you the skill box, did I?" the lizardkin said. He gestured, and the box popped up in front of Derivan; he nced at it.
[Ssh of Mana] [Active Skill] [Grade: 1]
Cost: Variable mana
Your mana takes on a form akin to paint, allowing you to color surfaces with it. This skill has secrets, and will grow as your understanding of mana grows.
"That''s... an unusual description," Derivanmented after reading it through twice. He nced at Vex with a metaphorical eyebrow raised, one glowing eye lifted over the other. "Are skills usually this direct about their growth?"
"They''re not," Vex said, shaking his head. "I''ve never seen one be this direct, actually. Most skills do have secrets to them, and understanding them enough always unlocks some sort of skill growth Misa''s [To Fall Yet Hold the Line] is one of them, even if she hasn''t chosen to evolve the skill yet. So there''s no reason for this skill to outright state it the way it does."
"And yet," Derivan mused.
"And yet," Vex agreed. He nced at the bit of liquid mana still hovering in [Delineate]d space and made a gesture; the [Delineate] skill cut out, and the liquid mana within sshed down onto the grass.
There were two immediate effects that Derivan could observe one was that the ambient mana nearby shied away, though not nearly as dramatically as it presumably did when a full spell was cast. The second was that the mana began to dissipate noticeably.
"It''s still not dissipating as quickly as when a normal spell is cast," Vex murmured to himself, ncing over the puddle of mana and making a note in one of his journals. "So the liquid state is definitely a factor when ites to mana dissipation rate. It''s like evaporation, then?"
"If it is like paint," Derivan said. "Would it not dry, rather than dissipate?"
Vex paused and frowned. "That''s a good point," the lizardkin admitted. "I''m not actually sure. There''s a few different forms of paint I was thinking of when I used the skill, so if it doesn''t anchor to any one of them the mana might just evaporate. Or maybe it''ll require me to dismiss the skill?"
They stared at the patch of mana for a moment. It was still dissipating, but the process was slow; Vex was right, in that it wasn''t nearly as fast as when a normal spell was cast.
"We''re not actually going to watch paint dry, are we?" Vex asked after a moment of staring.
"It seems to me that we may be watching grass grow," Derivan said dryly. Vex giggled. neshifted humor. They weren''t exactly familiar with all of the cultural norms, but they''d heard enough of Sev''s sayings over the months. Sev didn''t even realize they were neshifted sayings, usually, when he said them; a consequence of his memory.
"Well, while we''re waiting for this, do you want to try anything?" Vex asked. Derivan nodded.
"I would like to try out that skill, I think," Derivan said, then paused to consider his words. "Later. First, I wish to test my ideas of magic. You mentioned the mana would shy away once I cast a spell, did you not?"
"Yeah," Vex said. "It doesn''t like it for some reason. I''m not sure why."
"Perhaps because of the way we cast spells," Derivan mused. He cast a [Barrier] spell once, watching as the ambient mana immediately shot away from the manifestation of... what he would call ''dead mana'', he thought. The word wasn''t exactly urate the mana wasn''t dead by any means but it was... docile. It didn''t seem to have the same joy that the ambient mana here did.
So what if he changed the way he cast the spell?
He was leaning more on the Magic stat now, he realized. He tried to remember the way the spell had cast when he''d been relying on the system he didn''t have a hope of understanding theplicated runic constructs that had instantaneously formed and dissipated, guiding the mana into forming a barrier. But he could remember the way the mana flowed and changed, switching from an ethereal presence into something solid...
Instead of using his own mana to fuel the spell, he used [Mana Maniption]. Instead of forcing the mana into his own shape, he asked it to move as he wanted, to change as he wanted. If his ideas were correct, if the mana was alive...
The mana responded.
It was slow and hesitant far different from anything he was used to when he cast spells. Those formed instantly. Now, though, the mana had to understand what he was asking for, and he could almost sense that it didn''t trust him. There was the way that it hesitated, the way it shied away from the grip of [Mana Maniption]...
But he kept at it. Vex was watching him carefully, his eyes slightly wide, but he didn''t say a word. The mana gathered into his hands, and then slowly shifted not through any particr twist of his skills, but simply because he''d asked.
Just above his hand was a small but gleaming... no. It wasn''t a [Barrier]. It was a barrier.
The mana that was swirling further away from them came back closer. Vex was staring at it in a curious sort of wonder. "May I?" he asked.
"Of course," Derivan said.
The lizardkin came close and poked at the barrier once, his eyes gleaming with his particr version of [Mana Sight]. "It doesn''t look different to me," Vex said softly. "But it feels different. Stronger. You didn''t get a notification about a new version of the [Barrier] spell, did you?"
"I did not," Derivan said, shaking his head.
"May I try a spell on it?" Vex asked.
"I would like to test its efficacy," Derivan agreed, nodding. "It is more difficult to cast than the standard [Barrier]."
Vex paused for a moment, as if considering what spell he wanted to use and then he reached out with a hand. Electricity yed across his scales. "[Shocking Grasp]," he exined when Derivan looked over at him. His fingers brushed against the barrier
"Ow," Vex winced, pulling his hand back sharply. Derivan had been watching as the lizardkin reached out, and he saw the spell pop and fizzle strangely against the barrier. At the same time, he felt the mana within the barrier twist, like it no longer wanted to stay in that position, and so he let go of whatever tenuous grasp he held on it; the barrier unravelled in his hands, and Vex looked at it, surprised. "Did I break it?"
"I dismissed it," Derivan said.
"Ah." Vex winced a little as he looked down at his hand. "I''ve never felt anything like that before. It was almost like the mana rejected me."
"A path worth exploring, then?" Derivan asked, and Vex nodded vigorously.
"Yes. I mean, teach me how to do that. I want to learn."
"Of course," Derivan said, feeling strangely pleased that he could do something in return for the lizardkin. He had no doubt that Vex would pick up on anything he could teach remarkably quickly, but the lizardkin seemed excited in a way that he rarely was unless they discovered something new.
"It might be something you can only do with the Magic stat, but I want to try anyway," Vex said. "And if it works together with [Ssh of Mana], I have some ideas. But let''s try and see what uh, I don''t know how to say the skill name out loud. The skill you have with an error in the name. You wanted to test it out, right?"
"I did," Derivan said. "You are sure? I do not mind guiding you through what I just did, first."
"Nah," Vex said. "Let''s see what that skill does. We can y with magic after. I want to spend as much time on that as possible." He grinned at Derivan, and Derivan felt an urge to smile back, though all he could do was the usual faint eye-curve. Hepensated by patting Vex on the head, making the lizard yelp.
Not in protest, though, so he figured he''d won there.
That done, Derivan reached into where he felt the skill, and activated [###### Night].
Chapter 58: Night
Chapter 58: Night
A dark, glittering fog coalesced in the middle of the clearing.
Derivan heard Vex breathe in, a sharp intake of air the lizardkin''s eyes were wide with wonder, and Derivan couldn''t me him. The fog was a deep, dark shade of blue, verging on being the same shade as the night sky itself; it might very well have been, if not for the fact that it was fog, and so didn''t do quite that good a job filtering out all that ambient light.
Perhaps rather conveniently, though, a cloud passed in front of the sun and with that bit of extra shade, the spell suddenly turned stronger. The fog thickened, spilling into the outeryers of the clearing and slowly beginning to spread; struck by the thought that the skill might have arger range than he''d intended, Derivan quickly turned to Vex.
"Can you [Delineate] a space for it?" he said. His words were oddly quiet, like part of him was worried that speaking loudly would break the transient beauty that was forming in front of them. Vex seemed to feel the same way, because he didn''t respond verbally; instead he nodded and gestured, and a shimmering barrier seemed to form around the edges of the clearing.
Just replicating what seemed to be the very essence of the night would be one thing something about this was deeply reminiscent of the Serpent of the Night Sky, and for good reason but within the spell were what seemed like full fireball spells. Balls of me the size of Vex''s head swirled in abstract spirals, the light they emitted shining briefly before being once more subsumed by the fog. Each one grew and shrank with every passing moment, the movement unpredictable.
"It''s beautiful," Vex said softly after a moment. The lizardkin still hadn''t looked away from it, but he seemed to be trying to pull himself together. "Um is it a damaging spell, do you think? Do you have much control over it?"
"I have some," Derivan said, his own reply quiet. He could feel them now, like knobs that he''d been given control over. The problem was that the knobs were ubelled, and he didn''t know what each of them did.
So he turned them carefully, and slowly.
As he turned one of them, the color of the fireballs seemed to shift from a gleaming yellow to a deeper orange, and then to the dark red of firewood. In the other direction, it shifted from yellows to the green of Vex''s scales, then to the blue of the sky, then all the way down into the purples and pinks that he''d rarely ever seen outside of portraits and paintings. And his own armor, as far as purples went.
Vex breathed out slowly, and stepped in closer towards the boundary of the spell Derivan reached out to pull him back, just in case. Vex didn''t resist, at least, so presumably it wasn''t a hypnotic sort of spell, not that he was sure something like that existed. Vex just leaned into him, instead, staring at the shifting lights.
Derivan reached for the next knob.
This one seemed to change the size of the fireballs they grewrger as he turned this one, though at the same time, he could feel another mental knob moving on its own. The more he turned this one, the more the fireball in the center grew and the more the other one twisted backwards; he saw, at the same time, that the fireballs were growing fewer in number. At itsrgest setting, there almost seemed to be a zing sun sitting in the middle of the night sky, though ''sun'' didn''t quite fit as a word to describe what it was.
It didn''t hurt to stare at, for one thing. It wasn''t quite a single ball of me, for the other. The odd nature of the light was far clearer when it was sorge; it moved slowly, like strips of paint crawling over a painter''s canvas.
He reached for the one that had moved on its own next and sure enough, this one seemed to multiply the number of fireballs, though their individual sizes shrank. The fourth knob made them zip around inside the fog like fireflies, leaving glittering trails wherever they went.
"That is all I can change, I think," Derivan said, and Vex nodded. He hesitated slightly, as if reluctant to call on Derivan to end the spell.
"...We should test if this spell damages things," Vex eventually said. "Maybe drop the spell for now?"
Derivan nced at Vex and chuckled. "If you wish to watch it for a while," he said. "We can do that instead."
Vex didn''t reply for a moment but then he nodded, maybe a little shyly. "I see mana act on its own a lot," he confided after a moment. "But I never see it act like this. Spells are always function over form, so you rarely see spells focusing on the aesthetic of it all... there are a few magi that try to focus on it. But the system isn''t very good at art."
"It appears to leave that in the hands of its users," Derivan offered. "I have seen your sketches. You are quite good at that yourself."
Vex colored. "I had to learn how to draw diagrams," he said by way of exnation.
"You learned it well, then," Derivan chuckled. "I only wish you would share your sketches more, and with the rest of the team."
"I... maybe." Vex looked down for a moment, then back to the spell. He took a few minutes to take it in, like he was trying to memorize it forter Derivan adjusted the colors back to the original shades of yellow for him, and watched as the shifting shades of yellow and blue bounced off his scales.
They spent a moment more watching the spell, and then Vex nodded to himself. "Let''s test it," he said. "See if the skill does any damage. Can you cancel it?"
"Yes," Derivan said. In his mind, it felt more like a switch he had to press and as soon as he did, the fog copsed, dissipating into nothing along with the fireballs it contained. Vex dismissed the [Delineate] boundary a moment after the spell vanished, then watched the clearing with slightly narrowed eyes.
"There''s frost and burns on the grass," he said softly. "I think it''s safe to say that spell does damage. Fire and ice elemental damage, it looks like?"
"We do not know how much, though," Derivan pointed out.
"It''s hard to get exact damage numbers anyway, unless we''re sparring," Vex said with a slight wince. "Or if we find some monsters with known health values... there aren''t really any monsters here, and it''s dangerous to spar directly without Sev around."
"I was not going to suggest sparring, regardless," Derivan said with a chuckle. "Perhaps we can focus on your spells now?"
"Your skill gave me some ideas," Vex said thoughtfully. "Fire and ice together, too... That''s not a normal presentation of a spell. It''s rare for opposing elements to work together like that. Did it draw any mana from you, or is it more of a system skill?"
Derivan blinked, the lights in his helmet flickering, and checked his status. "...It drew some mana from me," he said, surprised. "A few hundred. I did not notice."
"You didn''t feel the mana moving?" Vex asked, surprised. "I mean, that doesn''t mean it''s definitively a spell and not a skill, but all spells use mana..."
"I did not feel my mana move, no." Derivan paused for a moment, contemting his status screen. "A side effect of the skill description being errored out, perhaps?"
"I''d still expect you to be able to sense it using your version of [Mana Maniption]," Vex said with a frown. "But I think this is fine. You''ll just need to keep an eye on your mana if you''re casting that spell."
Derivan nodded. "I will also make a deliberate attempt to feel how my mana is moving, I think," he said. "I did not think to do so before."
Vex grinned at him. "S''why I''m here," he said cheerfully. "To help with magic! But also I wanna try to do some magic now, so..."
He paused with consideration, and began using abination of [Ssh of Mana] and [Delineate]. He was careful with how he did it, too, and with his color choices each use of [Delineate] marked out a region in the frostburned grass, and each shade of color he used for [Ssh of Mana] came out identical to one of the shades they''d seen just before, when Derivan had used [###### Night].
The end result was... less than perfect. [Delineate] was a poor substitute for using an actual paintbrush, and it showed; perhaps with more practice, Vex would be able to imitate the product more closely. Derivan was still impressed, however, and Vex still seemed happy with the end result.
"Is that fire magic?" Derivan asked curiously, gesturing to an impression of the ball of fire.
"It isn''t," Vex said, shaking his head. "I want to see if mana aspect matters, and [Ssh of Mana] lets me tune the color of mana, which... it really shouldn''t be able to do. That''s not how mana works. But the system breaks the rules all the time, anyway." He pondered his painting for a moment, fidgeting with the dagger in his hand. "I''m not sure if anything is supposed to happen... I''m going to give it a moment. Maybe when it dries?"
"Or the different mana aspects are required," Derivan supplied. Nothing happened, still, even as the paint began to dry, and Derivan saw Vex begin to sag; the lizardkin had been hoping something would happen.
An idea struck him.
"Perhaps if we do what I did with [Barrier], earlier," Derivan said softly. "I used [Mana Maniption] to ask the ambient mana to fuel the skill, rather than fueling it with my own mana. But I did not force the mana into doing as I wished merely guided it."
Vex frowned slightly, but he seemed willing to try anything. He reached out with his own version of [Mana Maniption] and began to try to guide the ambient mana but his version was too strong, and Derivan could almost feel the ambient mana shying away from his grip. Without thinking about it, he knelt by Vex, a hand on the lizardkin''s shoulder, and reached out with his own version of the skill.
"Like this," he said. Vex''s eyes widened, though he didn''t say anything. Derivan guided him slowly not grabbing the mana and moving it, but guiding it, pushing it towards the painting on the grass.
Derivan''s skill with [Mana Sight] wasn''t quite at the level of Vex''s, but even he saw the way the mana acted it was far different than any spell either of them had seen before. The ambient mana that surrounded them had shied away once he''d started casting his new spell drew closer as the painting waspleted, and when it was done...
The mana dove into the painting, and brought it to life.
Neutral mana turned into fire and ice, this time with far more vibrancy and life than even [###### Night] had offered. Balls of fire flickered in the air like floating bonfires, emanating a heat that hadn''t been felt earlier through Derivan''s use of the skill; the fog that drew around them was cold, grass freezing into shards of ice at its touch. Vex''s use of [Delineate] didn''t seem to protect them from the effect, either.
Still for all that the effect was powerful, and threatened to burn and freeze them all at once it never got close enough to them to actually harm them. Unlike Derivan''s skill, it stayed in ce, hovering just above where the painting had been. In a few short minutes, it began to dissipate, aspected mana turning back into a lifeless neutral, and that neutral mana copsed back onto the ground like liquid.
Vex swallowed once, and slowly dismissed the skill.
"That was... something," he said softly. Derivan nced at him.
"It was," he agreed.
Chapter 59: A Proper Reunion
Chapter 59: A Proper Reunion
For all that she''d been looking forward to this moment for all that she''d had trouble even sleeping in her anticipation, checking both her system messages and the view outside the window in case she could spot the vigers arriving Misa found that she was still undeniably nervous.
It hadn''t taken her particrly long to find the vigers when she''d woken up. Her inability to sleep had cost her; she''d fallen asleepte in the night, or in the early hours of the morning, depending on how one looked at it. By the time she''d woken up, blinking the sunlight out of her eyes, it was a solid hour past noon.
Meaning she''d missed not only her vige arriving, but also the time they spent setting up a temporary camp. The Guildmaster had been kind enough to leave her a message; apparently, her parents and the other vigers were having trouble with the system, and couldn''t send her any messages personally. But they wanted her to know that they loved her, and that they were looking forward to seeing her when she had the time.
Misa could read between the lines there, of course. She could practically hear her mother saying ''get down here as soon as possible, young woman'', and she couldn''t help the stupid little grin that overcame her.
But now, standing outside the tent that her parents were in... she found herself strangely nervous. Anxious. She found herself pacing in front of the tent, her mind inundated with inane questions she hadn''t cared about before. When she''d met them in the dungeon, there was this idea in her mind that it would be herst time seeing them that the dungeon had given her a gift and a curse all at once, by offering her thatst opportunity.
Now... well, she had her parents back. She''d dreamed about that, once upon a time. She had her whole vige back, and even at the worst of the denial stages of her grief she hadn''t dared to hope that that might happen.
And Misa found she didn''t really know what to do with that.
The threat of the system should have been the first thing on her mind; the idea of the anchor degrading, and taking her vige with it. But the threat seemed so far away at the moment, and her parents were right in front of her well, behind the p of the tent...
Charise poked her head out of the door and scowled at her. There was no heat in the scowl at all. "Get in here already. I can feel you pacing from in here."
And just like that, the tension broke.
Misa grinned back at her mother. "Mother''s intuition, or [Mother''s Intuition]?"
"That joke would work better if I actually had that skill," her mother said, smiling at her. She stepped fully through the folds of the tent and embraced her daughter in a hug.
For a moment, Misa felt like a child again. It was a little strange her mother was shorter than she was, now, and she couldn''t bury her face in the folds of her mother''s clothes like she had once upon a time. But Charise was somehow just as strong as she remembered, and the hug was...
...well, the hug was everything she''d wished for, when she''d first lost her. It felt like a lifetime ago, now.
"Hi, mom," she said softly, and though she couldn''t see Charise smile, she could somehow feel it.
"It''s good to see you again, Misa," her mother said warmly, and then took her by a hand, gently leading her into the tent. "Let''s go see your father, shall we? He''s waiting for you, too. He''s just too stubborn toe outside, the old fool."
Misa choked back augh, following her mother into the tent. "Sounds like him," she agreed.
She fell silent as the folds of the tent parted, and she saw what had been constructed inside.
The tent was nothing like their old home, of course. It was far too small, asrge as they''d tried to make it for Orkas and Charise, and the walls were made of fabric instead of brick. And yet for all that it was different, there was an aching sense of familiarity within it.
Orkas and Charise had made all the furniture in their house by hand. It was an orcish tradition that a marriage would be consummated by the new couple building their new home together, to symbolize their entrance into a new life. System skills from the vige builders had helped construct the walls and floors, but every piece of furniture had been lovingly crafted without the help of skills.
Here, there obviously hadn''t been the time for that. And yet...
The table was just like their old table, down to all the little imperfections from inexperienced hands. Even the grain of the wood was the same; beautiful swirls coalescing in the center of the table. One of the chairs had a slightly crooked back, just like she remembered. In every chair there was a little carving of two birds, the symbol that her parents had chosen to symbolize their marriage.
"How?" Misa asked softly, her voice thick with emotion.
It was Orkas that answered. "Your Guildmaster, believe it or not," the orc said. He smiled at her, a kind smile that she barely remembered anymore, and stepped forward to pull her into a hug; she felt herself melt into the embrace just as much as she''d melted into her mother''s.
"She did all this?" Misa asked, her voice muffled.
"No," Orkas said with a deep bellyugh. "She''d be a terrifying woman if she could do all this on top of what she can already do. No, she pulled some strings and asked one of her adventurers to do it. A bard, I believe."
"A bard did all this?" Misa couldn''t keep the astonishment out of her voice, and Orkas grinned at her, pulling back from the hug.
"Knew that would catch your attention. It''s amon skill, too, can you believe it?" he said.
"There''s no way this is amon skill," Misa protested.
"Well, he wasn''t the only one that helped," Orkas said with a grin he was clearly enjoying himself, and by the way her mother was smirking slightly, she was enjoying it, too. "I''ll be honest, I didn''t pay attention to what other skills he used. He had a friend with him, too."
"Dad," Misa groaned. Her father had done this to her all too many times before, knowing her old fixation with figuring out the limits of every skill.
"The skill he used was [Song of Memory]," Orkas said. He busied himself by going over to a sort of makeshift kitchen and starting to prepare tea. "Makes an illusion of a chosen memory, as long as the recipient is willing to share it. yed some very pretty music, too."
It was almost strange, to interact with her father like this again. When he was in charge of the vige when he didn''t have his memories of her, and she''d been a stranger... he''d been so much more rough. She wasn''t sure how much of that was simply because she''d been a stranger, and how much of that was because he''d lived a different life.
"I''m d you''re back," she said more quietly.
Orkas paused. When he spoke again, his voice was a little rougher. "d I got to see you grow up, kid," he said. "Not that you weren''t grown up already."
"Sit down," her mother suggested, patting the seat beside her at the table. Misa sat herself down, feeling oddly self-conscious. She had so many questions she wanted to ask but she also had so many things she wanted to share, so many pieces of her life she could show them that she never thought she''d be able to...
"You have plenty of time," her mother told her, smiling at her like she knew exactly what she''d been thinking and she probably did.
So she took her time. She thought about where she wanted to start. She''d already spoken to one version of her mother about many of the things she''d wanted to share, but she hadn''t yet told Orkas about them; not about how she''d met her current team, about the trust they''d built together.
And that was where she started.
There was a lot to tell from the time before that, too the time she''d lost herself in her grief, and her anger was the only thing that drove her. But that was something she could save for another time. It didn''t feel right, somehow, to talk about this now. This was supposed to be a celebration.
Eventually, while she was reminiscing, talking about all the times she and her friends had saved one another, about how one of them had been rather terrible at hiding who he was and another struggled not to sass everything in sight her mother had interrupted her there, questioning if it wasn''t her that sassed everything in sight her father joined them both at the table. He gave them both sses of hot tea, and they spoke in warm tones, Misa''s parentsmenting on all her adventures and misadventures...
Before she knew it, an hour had passed, and then two. The conversation trickled to a slow, morefortable rhythm, and then Misa remembered to bring up her new skill before she forgot.
"[An Anchor of Heart and Home], huh?" Charise said, frowning slightly. "[Intuition of Truth] isn''t telling me much about it. I get the impression that you''re right, and that''s what saved you when we were first..."
Charise grimaced slightly at the memory, and Orkas put a hand on her shoulder, though he, too, looked grim. "It is something that bears testing," he said seriously. "But give us some time to make sure that the vige is prepared, and to speak with your Guildmaster for any insight she may have on a way to safely test the passive part of the skill."
"Tomorrow, then?" Misa asked.
"What? No. We will test it as soon as possible," Orkas said with a snort. "Who''s to know what may happen if we wait. I will contact the Guildmaster to send someone suitable for supervising a spar, and a healer perhaps your own, if he is avable. And in the meantime, perhaps we can test the active portion of your skill."
"I have a skill evolution avable, too, for [To Fall Yet Hold the Line]," Misa said with a frown. "I haven''t epted that yet. The skill itself is so useful that I''m worried the evolution will take something away from it."
"It won''t," Charise spoke with confidence, and Misa blinked at her mother.
"Are you... sure?"
"Completely, yes," Charise said.
Slowly, Misa nodded. Intuition was a weird skill.
"Don''t ept it yet, still," Orkas said. "In case there''s yet another system glitch, or it modifies the behavior of [An Anchor of Heart and Home]. One thing at a time. Can you try to activate the active side of the skill?"
"Sure," Misa said, and almost immediately frowned.
The skill wouldn''t budge when she tried to use it the way she used all her other skills. There was a sense she was getting from it, like she was in the wrong... ce?
"I don''t think I can use it while I''m in the vige?" she said with some uncertainty.
"Then let''s go outside," Orkas said. He checked his system messages, and made a grunt of satisfaction. "The Guildmaster is sending an agent, so we can test the passive part right afterwards."
"That was quick," Misa blinked.
"She''s efficient," Charise said cheerfully. "C''mon. Let''s see what this skill of yours does."
Chapter 60: Taking From a Distant Future
Chapter 60: Taking From a Distant Future
[An Anchor of Heart and Home] had a cost to it, presumably. The system said it cost ten units of something, but whatever it was, the system hadn''t been able to parse it. This was worrying for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the system was evidently capable of parsing some very esoteric costs Misa remembered Max''s skill costing ''an opportunity'', whatever that meant.
Ten units, in this case, was vague and worrying. But not knowing what the skill did was potentially even worse, and so once Misa was properly outside the vige (or the assortment of tents that currently passed as ''the vige''), she hesitated only one final time. A small nod from her mother was all the reassurance she needed.
She activated the skill.
There was a noticeable twist in her stomach.
Misa couldn''t exin the sensation of exactly what was wrenched out of her as she activated the skill it felt like potential. Like possibility. But that potential wasn''t drawn out of her and lost to the ether; no, it was instead offered to her, like y for her to mold. It took her a moment to get over the nausea the skill induced, and another moment to understand exactly what the skill was offering to her.
It would take from her a fragment of raw possibility a potential future. Someone she could be, given enough time. Ten units meant it would be ten steps harder to achieve, though it was unclear whether that would be ten times harder or if the growth was linear.
But in return? It gave her the ability to take that raw potential and shape it into someone else. Someone that she considered part of her ''home'', to be specific, and right now it meant anyone from her vige. What she created would be closer to a reality fragment than a full person, connected to the real version of that individual back in her vige.
It was all very convoluted. Misa wasn''t surprised that the system had given up and simply said ''error''. Simply put, the active version of the skill was something like a summoning skill that she could use to summon... copies of the members of her vige, forck of a better term. They would be able to control those copies at a distance, giving them the ability to act on her behalf, if they so chose.
Right now, the skill hovered at half-spent, still pulling that fragment of potential out of her and as she considered the possibilities, Misa frowned, and slowly canceled the skill.
She felt the potential rubberband back into her, the feeling of relief nearly overwhelming. Misa grinned.
It was a good skill. But it was good to know that it was something she could cancel; that she didn''t have to spend something that felt like it had such a high cost, if she began to cast it and it became unnecessary.
And she needed to ask before she started summoning clones of people, obviously.
"Misa?" Charise ventured when nothing seemed to happen, and Misa looked up, startled. Her mother stared at her with an eyebrow raised. "I don''t know if you realize this, but from the outside it looked like you just started grinning for no reason."
"To be fair," Orkas added, sounding amused. "You did this a lot when you were young, too."
"Oh, fuck off," Misa grumbled good-naturedly, and her father only grinned wider at her. "The good news is that I didn''t need toplete using the skill to figure out how it works, and I don''t want to pay the cost right now. I know what it''ll do, though. Roughly. I wanted to talk to you guys first, make sure that you know to be ready."
"It involves us, huh?" Charise said with a raise of her brow, and Misa nodded. She exined the active effect of her skill, as best as she understood it through whatever instinctual understanding had been granted to her, and her mother''s brow furrowed. "You should try it now. At least once. So that we know what it''s like, and if dismissing the summon restores the cost."
"Yeah, that was the n," Misa agreed. "Uh... which one of you do I... copy?"
Which was easily one of the strangest questions Misa had ever had to ask. Maybe third strangest.
"Make a copy of me," Charise suggested. There was a sh of the smallest hint of a smirk... Misa narrowed her eyes at her mother suspiciously.
"Okaaay," she said, drawing out the word slightly. But she activated the skill nevertheless, and now that she was slightly more braced for the gut-wrenching sensation of having her own future torn out of her, it took her much less time to recover. It took her a moment to figure out how to shape it, but the system seemed to take over as soon as she thought of her mother. It told her how that future potential needed to be molded, nudged it into a perfect recreation
there was a sh of light, mana gathering into a sensation that made her skin prickle and her hair stand on end. There was a corresponding gasp from her mother, though no impression of pain. Surprise, maybe? The skill seemed to halt for a moment, as if waiting for something, and then all of a sudden she felt the skill resolve; it finished pulling from her, and then in front of her formed an exact copy of her mother.
Misa wasn''t sure what she''d expected.
Charise, on the other hand, seemed delighted. She looked down at herself in her new body, patting it down quickly as if to make sure everything was still in ce. For a moment, both versions of her mother were oddly mirrored everything one version of her did, the other copied in perfect sync.
But then one version of her mother the original strode forward with a confident grin.
Directly towards Orkas, who suddenly looked a lot less sure of what was going on.
"Uh," he said. "Hi?"
"You know, honey," Charise began with a grin, in a very specific tone of voice.
Misa made a face and stared at her mom. "Mom. Really?"
"Hey, it''s my extra body, isn''t it?"
"You''re not" Misa sighed. "You know what? I''m not going to question it."
"You should see if you can dismiss the skill," Charise suggested. "Don''t dismiss it if you can''t get back whatever you spent on it, though."
Misa frowned. There was an option for her to disable the skill she could feel it in the so-called mental interface of the system, allowing her to choose to pull the skill back. It''d dissolve her mother''s extra body, forck of a better term, though Misa also immediately resolved to find a better term.
But for now, she reached out to the skill, pulling on the metaphorical lever to disable the effect.
What was interesting was the fact that her mother was right Misa hadn''t expected to be able to gain back whatever she lost to the ''cost'' of the skill, but either [An Anchor of Heart and Home] was an exception, or there was more to the cost that she hadn''t thought about. A brief thought about it affecting the integrity of the anchor had her heart suddenly racing, but a quick check showed no apparent decrease in integrity.
And as the skill began to unravel, potential flooded back into her. But there was something interesting about it.
It wasn''t the same as what had left.
The potential future that had been taken from her was still gone Misa had no specific idea of what it had been, but she had general impressions. That was a version of her that would focus hard on using [The de Arcane], bing more of a warrior than a tank; she didn''t see herself going down that path, and so had no problem sacrificing it. What returned now was a nk, undifferentiated potential; the future in which all her focus was poured into mastering the sword was still gone, but now she could... what, use it for something else?
"This skill''s fucking weird," Misa muttered, and her mother gave her a look. "What? It is!"
"Why exactly is it... weird, as you call it?" Orkas finally asked, walking over to Charise''s copy. She winked at him, and Misa groaned. She hadn''t canceled the skill yet, but she pulled on that string now, unraveling the copy right in front of Orkas'' eyes
She realized, perhaps a hair toote, that she didn''t know exactly how the effect would manifest. Orkas'' face went slightly pale as the copy faded in the worst way possible, skin vanishing before everything else; even Charise winced. Her father''s eyes shot to the real version of her mother as though for reassurance...
"Sorry about that," Misa said quietly, and her father didn''t respond immediately. He just walked over to Charise, and slowly pulled her into a hug. He said nothing else, but Charise seemed to immediately realize what he needed.
They were silent for a moment, the three of them and then Orkas let out a sigh.
"Better we find out now, I suppose," he muttered.
"That felt strange," Charise said, trying to change the subject.
"It did," Misa agreed, though it had been strange in a different way for her. There was a lump of undifferentiated potential now that she could still feel in her near future, almost like a lump in her throat. It was distinctly ufortable. It would shape itself as she acted, she instinctively realized, but for now it was a raw nothing that could be fed back into the skill if she wanted.
And then she realized she hadn''t answered her mother''s question. It was hard to exin, though... Misa tried to draw on her thoughts of how Vex would have exined it. "Uh. But to answer your question, I dunno, it''s some weird shit."
She paused. Not how Vex would have exined it. "It feels like it takes... a path I could have tread a future that could have been and it turns it into something real."
"Is that safe?" Charise immediately asked. Misa shrugged.
"I give up something. But I don''t think it makes it impossible for me to be that person. It just makes it harder. Moves the goal further away by ten steps, so to speak."
Orkas grunted. "I don''t like it," he said, wearing a heavy frown.
"It might be useful," Misa said, but she didn''t disagree. It felt... risky. Strange. "What did it feel like, mom?"
"Weird, like you said," Charise admitted. "It was like I had two bodies at once. It was hard to adapt to I could only focus on one of them at a time. I could still use my skills through them, though, so..."
Misa whistled. "That could be very useful, then."
"If you can use it on more than one of us," Orkas said. "Can you?"
"I... think so." Misa hesitated. "I think I''d have to practice with the skill a bit, but for obvious reasons it''s going to be a hard skill to practice. The skill says its grade is maxed, but it feels... I don''t know. It feelsplicated to use."
"Some skills are like that," Orkas acknowledged. "My brother" he winced slightly as he mentioned the words. " mentioned, back when he got his Unique skill, that it felt like it had a thousand different things he could do with it. But he never felt like he understood more than a tiny portion."
"What was the skill?" Misa asked. Her father almost never willingly talked about his brother.
"[A Thousand Hands]," Orkas answered, and then managed augh at Misa''s t look, though there was a touch of bitterness in theugh. "Look, I don''t know how he got the skill either. He was an [Alchemist]. It let him transmute things."
"Huh," Misa said. She opened her mouth to say something else
And then Max was suddenly in front of her. She blinked once, and Max blinked as well, as though surprised she was there. And then she grinned.
"Hello!" the [Adventuring Clerk] said. "I hear you need an adventurer''s help?"
"We sent in for some assistance with sparring," Orkas said, seeming grateful for the change in subject. "The Guildmaster said she would send someone. Are you that someone?"
"Probably!" Max said cheerfully. "Sometimes I go missing because of my skills, and a great way to get me to appear again is to schedule something for me. So if you say the Guildmaster wanted me here, she probably wanted me here."
Orkas blinked at her. "I am sorry?"
"Just go with it," Charise whispered.
"I need you to hit me," Misa said.
"Say no more," Max said. She wound up for a punch, and Misa''s eyes widened
"Wait wait wait," Misa managed. Max grinned at her, and Misa groaned. "Dammit, Max," she said. "You''re supposed to ask questions!"
"That''s exactly why I don''t ask questions," Max said knowingly. "It''s a lot more fun that way."
Misa sighed.
Chapter 61: Two Parts of a Whole
Chapter 61: Two Parts of a Whole
"You''re sure everything''s fine?" Misa asked again, and Max scowled at her.
"Yes," Max emphasized. "You''re putting this off. I''ll tell you about what happened ."
She was, technically. Misa stood in the field across from Max, far enough away that it would take a good few seconds of running for either of them to strike the other, though Max likely had significantly more speed. It wasn''t that she was nervous about sparring she enjoyed it.
The problem was more that Misa didn''t know what her new skill would do about it, and she wasn''t sure she wanted to find out.
She''d been reassured as much as possible, though. [Right ce, Right Time] wouldn''t have brought Max here at all if the ensuing spar had a disastrous oue. Her own mother''s [Intuition of Truth] spoke nothing of anything bad happening.
"We were worried about you," Misa grumbled, still stalling slightly, and Maxughed.
"Are you ready yet?" she said in lieu of a response. Max bounced on her feet, and Misa sighed, lowering herself into a [Guard Stance].
She didn''t need to guard. But she was morefortable with it; this was how she fought. Standing still and letting Max punch her in the face felt odd.
"Fine," Misa said, and no sooner had she said it than Max shed forward, as if unwilling to let her change her mind again. Her fist drew back, a strange purple gathering around it, likely the application of some kind of skill
Misa realized with a start that she could react to the attack, if she wanted.
She hadn''t gained that many levels from the fight against the whether that had something to do with the reality anchor, or if the fight simply hadn''t counted for whatever reason, she wasn''t sure. But whatever few levels she''d gained and the points she''d put into dexterity still seemed to matter. She wouldn''t have imagined being able to match up against a tinum ranker at any stage, and yet...
This was an attack she could dodge.
Technically, the point of this exercise was to see what would happen when Misa took damage to make sure that the skill wouldn''t simply distribute the damage to her entire vige, or if it did, then to see how that could be best mitigated. But Misa couldn''t help herself. She saw a punch she could dodge. She liked sparring.
She dodged.
Not by a lot. Her perception being faster didn''t mean her body could move to match, and the two things didn''t seem to scale evenly. But moving even a little was enough for the punch to ghost past her nose, the flickers of purple me brushing past her instead of zing into her. She saw Max''s eyes narrow slightly with surprise, and then a delighted grin crossed the [Adventuring Clerk]''s expression; she twisted on the spot, instantaneously converting all her forward momentum into a twisting momentum as she brought the back of her heel up and towards Misa''s head
This time Misa didn''t dodge at all. She brought her arm up in a block, feeling the magic of [Guard Stance] guiding her movements. It wouldn''t deny the damage entirely, but it would mitigate the damage. The purple me, whatever it was, still charred her forearms ck and the force of the blow knocked her back several feet; as soon as it appeared, the charring was gone, restored by the effect of health.
Misa paused and nced at her parents. "Anything?" she called out.
"Hold on!" Charise shouted back, and Max grinned at her, still bouncing in ce.
"Nice moves," the clerk said.
Misa snorted. "I dodged one and blocked the other," she said. "Could''ve done a better job with the block. Didn''t need to let myself get pushed back."
"Well, sure, but they were still nice moves." Max grinned at her, and Misa smirked back.
"If you say so."
"How much damage were you expecting to do with that attack?" Orkas frowned as he approached, ncing through the air; looking through the messages and reports he was receiving from within the makeshift vige, presumably.
"Enough to take out about half of Misa''s health," Max answered. She nced back towards the camp, though it was impossible to really make out if anything had happened to it. They hadn''t gone far, exactly, but the camp wasrge and chaotic. "Did something happen?"
"One of the tents in the vige caught fire," Orkas reported. He was still frowning slightly. "But it may be a coincidence. The damage was not bad, and no one was hurt. The fire was put out before it could damage anything."
"How much health damage did you take?" Max asked, and Misa frowned at her health bar.
"About half my health," she said, a little disgruntled. "That doesn''t seem right. Was the fire just a coincidence?"
"it was not a magical fire," Orkas said. "Someone knocked over a candle, and the me spread. But the timing seemed too perfect for it to be a coincidence."
"Let''s try again," Misa suggested. She had a health potion on hand, since she''d expected that Sev wouldn''t be avable for the test it took her only a moment to down it, and only a moment more for Max to flick yet more fire into her face. Misa didn''t bother dodging this time, though it felt strange to let someone hit her.
Just as before, the strike did about half her health in damage and just as before, a tent seemed to catch fire.
"Same tent," Orkas reported. "Same candle, too."
"That''s odd," Misa said. "Did they just light the candle again?"
"They did not," Orkas said, shaking his head. "So this is almost certainly caused by your skill. But it is a strange one. I cannot see any direct benefit. If anything, you will have to be even more careful."
"Which is hard, considering I''m the tank. I''m supposed to take hits," Misa said with a slight frown. If taking hits caused problems in the vige, no matter how small those problems were, then the skill seemed to be more of a liability than a benefit especially since there was no clear reduction in the damage she was taking.
"You can''t control the passive skill at all?" Max suggested. "Sometimes you can influence how skills like those turn out."
"For passive skills?" Misa asked, surprised. She supposed she shouldn''t have been, though; with all the adventurers Max worked with, she would know something like that. But nothing had stood out to her as something she could actively control, the same way she could when she used an active skill under the system...
Now that she was looking for it, though, she realized there was something there. She couldn''t manipte it quite the same way she could manipte an active skill, but there was a sort of dial she could adjust, and that dial was turned almost all the way to its lowest setting.
She turned that dial up, of course.
"I think you''re right," Misa said, and then indicated to Max that she should try again.
Max did.
This time, there was shout from the vige as Max''s fist contacted with Misa''s face though Orkas quickly reported that no one was hurt. He''d looked anxious for the first few seconds, checking through his messages frantically, but the vigers had learned quickly to avoid that particr tent.
Which, well, fair enough. Misa figured she couldn''t me them for that.
More importantly, she had taken significantly less damage from the hit only about a quarter of her health. "Shit," she whistled. "That worked pretty well. Uh, sorry, dad. I probably won''t actually use this skill very often. Keep the dial turned down and all."
"You should use it if you need to," Orkas said, frowning severely at her. "Do not limit yourself because of us. Though I ask you try not to inconvenience us for your own sake, either."
"It seems like a good opportunity to make sure the new vige is as strong as possible, though!" Charise spoke cheerfully, cing one hand on Orkas'' arm. "I imagine that would give you a little more durability in turn."
"I think so," Misa agreed with a nod. Charise beamed.
"We can''t test anything else, I think," Max said thoughtfully. "Probably not a good idea to see what happens if you lose all your health... what about if something happens to the vige?"
Orkas grimaced. "I can order someone to set a tent on fire," he said, sounding very much reluctant to do so. But he did it anyway, as was evidenced by the column of smoke that rose up from the makeshift camp a secondter.
Misa winced. "Ow," she said. The sensation manifested as a persistent heat across her right corbone, like a burn that wouldn''t go away which was ufortable. System health usually took away pain almost as soon as it appeared, but this pain lingered,
And then she noticed something on her status that made her pause. "it doesn''t damage me," she said in wonder. "It lowers my max health."
Charise blinked. "So if we build up the vige..."
"It''s not a guarantee," Misa said. "But I bet it''d give me more health."
"I bet it''d give you more health, too," Max said with a grin. "How much are we putting in the betting pool?"
Misa shot Max a look. "It''s a turn of phrase," she said.
"Five gold," Max responded immediately.
Misa pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed.
"Onest thing," she said. "I need to ept the skill evolution for [To Fall Yet Hold the Line]. Any of you see anything going wrong with that?" Misa nced between Max and her mother, but both of them shook their heads, and she nodded, satisfied.
She pulled up the skill prompt, and as the message about a skill evolution being avable shed in front of her eyes she epted it.
The box shed orange.
Sufficient understanding has been achieved to unlock evolution of [To Fall Yet Hold the Line]. Evolving skill...
New skill granted.
[Misa''s Endless Echoes] [Active Skill] [Grade: 1]
No longer a mere guard, you have be a true guardian you, and all your other selves.
If you would fail to block an attack, you do not. In addition, you may call upon an echo to understand more about the world around you.
Misa paused and stared at the skill.
It... made sense, in a way. Her echoes, or reflections, or whatever those were were different versions of who she was. It stood to reason that they were more than just tools to wield power. They would have their own experiences she could draw from.
In theory. In practice, she wasn''t so sure. There were still too many questions about her echoes if they were variations on her that had made different decisions, did they all live in the same world? Or were those worlds slightly different, filled with other people that had made different decisions?
"Didja get something good?" Max asked, raising an eyebrow at her. Misa blinked.
"I think so," Misa said, then grinned. "It''ll need some testing, and I''m always down for testing. But we don''t need to fight to test this one. Hey, mom? Want some help getting dinner ready?"
"I''m never going to say no to some help," Charise said. "Especially from my favorite daughter."
"I''m your only daughter."
"Touch."
Chapter 62: Skills, Dinner, and Introductions
Chapter 62: Skills, Dinner, and Introductions
Over the course of cooking an entire three-course-meal with her mother, Misa managed to learn a few crucial things about [Endless Echoes]. She refused to call it [Misa''s Endless Echoes], for all that that was the ''proper name'' given by the system. Something about that struck her as too... egotistical.
Though she was rtively certain the others would tease her about it a bit. Vex, perhaps, might be more interested in how she''d had a skill named after her at all she''d only seen that sort of thing happen with spells, though she didn''t know the exact mechanics behind how the system named skills. Something to ask him aboutter.
Back to what she''d learned, though.
[Endless Echoes], as she understood it, was a skill that allowed her to... not summon a copy of herself, exactly. It allowed her tomunicate across herselves in a limited fashion, by giving her control over the variations of herself she wanted to manifest.
In the context of cooking, for example, she''d identally added bloodberries into the hauvre instead of the more traditional five-point fruit; a quick use of [Endless Echoes] as she tasted the result told her that the bloodberry variant was much, much tastier. The five-point fruit was just a little too sour, having gotten overly ripe since Charise had picked it on the way here.
Her mother had insisted that that shouldn''t have been possible, despite her intuition skill telling her otherwise, and had continued insisting it all the way until she''d tasted the five-point fruit and spat it out, making a face.
Misaughed at her, of course, and her mother grinned back at her. She didn''t miss the way her mother''s eyes twinkled, or the way her father guffawed in his corner of the tent, where he was chopping up the meats; she didn''t miss the way the tension in her father''s shoulders flowed out, either.
Misa was learning that her mother was much better at using that intuition skill than she''d ever let on.
Bloodberries, on the other hand, tasted like chocte with just a hint of sweetness. It was the perfectplement to the rest of the hauvre, which was a cheesy, savory dessert.
Further testing had shown Misa that she could pick out variants of herself that made decisions at different times, too. There was a limit to how far she could stretch the skill out when she did this; she couldn''t, for example, try to reach a version of herself that had finished cooking everything a day before, and learn from all the mistakes that version of herself had made.
She could pick a version of herself that had started on everything an hour earlier, which was how she knew not to mix the bloodberry juice with cymmanom. That surprised her mother, who stared at her keenly; apparently, she''d been expecting her to do exactly that.
So it was good to know that her skill seemed to have some precedence over other information-gathering skills. Cymmanom and bloodberry juice resulted in a violent but ultimately harmless reaction, something to do with the mana aspects naturally present in both ingredients. That she knew because her mother had exined it to that other version of her, and Charise''s face when she repeated that information to her had been priceless.
Cooking, it turned out, had been a great way to practice using the skill on the fly.
Max was a guest in their home or tent, Misa supposed and so hadn''t been required to cook, as much as she insisted on helping. Misa had eventually sent her running around for various ingredients that they''d forgotten, sometimes before even Charise realized that they''d forgotten them at all.
"Whatever your new skill is, it''s cheating," Charise informed her at one point, and Misa hadughed in return, seeing the proud twinkle in her mother''s eyes.
"It was already cheating," Misa replied with a smirk. "It''s just more cheating, now."
With all the help, it hadn''t been long before dinner was finished. There would be a celebrationter in the night, Charise told her, in part to celebrate the vige''s return and in part simply because the vigers needed it after the stress of everything that had happened. She''d seen more than a couple of people shaking slightly when they thought no one was looking. An attack like that the memories of being killed that they still had that wasn''t something that would fade easily.
So... a celebration. Something to distract them while they tried toe to terms with their new lives.
The dinner was to introduce her parents to all her friends first, of course. Max had been invited, too, but she''d politely excused herself she was only there to help Misa with sparring, and she''d spent her break helping them cook. Misa felt a little guilty for that, and offered her a small portion of food that Max had happily taken with her.
They''d timed it well it was almost eight by the time they were done cooking, and the rest of her team began arriving. Derivan, for instance, poked his head into the tent as Misa put the finishing touches on a dish of cooked wyrm-meat.
"You''re early!" Misa waved him over. "Mom, dad, this is Derivan."
Derivan pushed his way into the tent as he was prompted, revealing that he was carrying Vex, who had his face buried in his hands.
"Misa," Vex said. "Help. He won''t put me down."
"You said you were tired," Derivan said sternly.
"I didn''t mean I wanted you to carry me into the tent," Vex moaned, his voice still muffled by his hands. "We''re meeting her parents! I mean, we''ve seen them before, but we''re doing it properly! You were supposed to put me down!"
"We''re right here, by the way," Charise said, sounding amused, and Vex let out what sounded very much like a squeak.
"And that''s Vex, our wizard," Misa said with a grin, very pointedly not telling Derivan to put Vex down. It took a moment before the armor did it anyway, seeming rather satisfied with himself, and Vex did his best to gather himself into a more presentable state.
"Wizard?" Charise asked curiously, and Vex took the opportunity to sweep himself forward in a bow.
"I dress as a rogue to throw people off, but I am a wizard," he said proudly.
"Has that evere in useful?" Orkas spoke, amused, and Vex paused awkwardly.
"...Mostly when I was solo," he admitted. "People don''t mess with rogues as much as they do wizards. They know wizards need cast time and all. It''s harder to surprise a rogue. And I did train myself in some basic knife skills, so I can defend myself in closebat."
"Good," Orkas said approvingly.
Their introductions sorted, Vex and Derivan quickly found themselves seats, though Vex needed to [Erge] Derivan''s. The stools they had in the tent didn''t quite fit the armor, and even standing up, his head threatened to brush against the ceiling. He was tall.
Sev was thest to arrive he brushed open the ps of the tent with his staff and then paused awkwardly, like he was trying to figure out how to knock on fabric. A muffled voice came through a momentter. "Um. Hello? Can Ie in? I didn''t want to be rude."
"Come in, you doofus," Misa called out with augh, and Sev sheepishly walked in through the tent.
"You''re the priest that healed me," Orkas observed.
"Cleric," Sev corrected. He offered a smile. "It''s good to see you doing well."
"Do you not like being called a priest?" Orkas raised an eyebrow at him.
"It''s a bit too religious for me?" Sev phrased his answer like a question, his brows furrowing. "I have a strange rtionship with my god. Don''t worry about it."
Orkas blinked once at him, and then looked at Misa, who immediately gestured that no, it was not what he was thinking. Orkas nodded back at her, in a way that was far too suggestive to make her think he understood what she meant, and she immediately red at him.
Sev just stared at the both of them in bemusement.
"Just... get a seat, Sev," Misa grumbled with a sigh, giving up at convincing her father of anything. He''d either made up his mind or was just teasing her, and from the way her mother was smirking, she was suspecting it was thetter.
It wasn''t long before all six of them were seated around the table. It was cramped, of course; a tent was not, by nature, intended for arge dinner party by any means. It was awkward, because half the people in the tent didn''t quite know how to react to the other half, and one of them couldn''t eat any food to begin with. It was quiet, because none of them knew what to talk about, or even what was appropriate.
And yet, as cramped and awkward and quiet as it was, it was perfect.
Misa felt an odd lump in her throat, looking at them all.
It wasn''t a stretch to say that Sev, Derivan, and Vex had be something like family to her. They never reced what she''d lost, of course they couldn''t. But they''d brought color back into her life in the way that friends often did, and she''d never imagined that they''d get the chance to meet her parents.
Sometimes she dreamed about it. She dreamed about telling her parents all about how she''d be a real adventurer, just like she wanted. She dreamed about telling her mother about how Vex liked presenting himself as a roguish rogue, but was in actuality a schr that could ramble for hours on the smallest of minutiae. She dreamed about telling her mother about Sev''s strange approach to clerics and priesthood, about his uncanny ability to heal nearly anything and the scathing wit he sometimes wielded. She dreamed about...
Well, when it came to Derivan, she mostly dreamed about telling her mother how cool he was. That was before she''d known he was a literal set of animated armor, of course, which only increased the coolness level, in her estimation.
But that was just in her dreams. Derivan was kind, and determined, and protective of his friends, and perhaps most strikingly he was endlessly curious in a way that wasn''t dissimr to Vex. He''d been afraid to show it before, but now he was expressing it a little more, asking questions, learning about the world that had been built.
The point was that seeing all of them together, in a way that she''d thought was impossible...
It felt like home.
So Misa smiled, and broke the silence. "Let''s eat already. I''m fucking starving."
And, almost as one, everyone began to talk like that was all that was really needed. Even Derivan, who wasn''t eating at all and instead watched the rest of them in fascination. Her mother drew him into conversation several times, asking him about this and that, about what drew his curiosity the most; he spoke of magic, and of a developing interest in culture, in seeing how the different kingdoms handled their people. Orkas drew Sev into a conversation about his god, apparently trying to pry out details about Onyx, and when that failed he turned his attention to Vex and tried to ask the lizardkin about whether he had any romantic interests (at which point Vex sputtered and began aggressively stuffing dessert into his mouth, much to Misa''s amusement).
It was an almost perfect night. The only reason it wasn''t perfect was because it hadn''t ended yet.
There was still the celebration, after all.
End of Book 1. Chapter 63: Revelation in the Night
End of Book 1. Chapter 63: Revtion in the Night
It was a small celebration, really. Sev heard Orkas say that he would have preferred it to be bigger, but there hadn''t been time to gather everything they needed part of why they had taken so long to reach the Guild to begin with was because they''d sent out several of their hunters and gatherers to try to collect food, both to lessen the burden they would ce on the Guild and to gather enough for a small feast.
But it really was a small feast, and Sev felt a little guilty that he was part of the celebration at all. Misa wanted him there, he knew, and yet the food was so scarce; what was ced out on the tables barely seemed enough to feed all the vigers, let alone two extra mouths...
Then again, Misa had scoffed and told him to ignore it, when he''d brought up the problem.
It turned out that every viger had already had dinner the feast that wasid out here wasn''t meant to be a recement for a meal. It was meant to be a small celebration of the vige, with all the popr dishes that were often shared by the best cooks they had.
Or the worst, in a few cases. It was a celebration of the little bit of culture they''d developed together as a vige. That didn''t mean that all of it was good.
"You should try the bloodberry pie!" Charise beamed at him. "Adremel made it. He''s our resident cksmith. Very quiet, keeps to himself, basically just bakes this every time we have a vige gathering."
Behind her mother, Misa rapidly shook her head. Sev blinked at her once, then at the slice of pie that Charise was offering him. It steamed and... bubbled?
Why was the pie bubbling?
He couldn''t exactly... refuse? Because he could see Adremel, staring at him with a look that he absolutely could not read. The lizardkin stood in the corner of the gathering with his arms crossed, rebuffing most attempts to speak to him with a short re except for Vex, who was rambling animatedly about enchanting onto metal. Adremel didn''t seem to mind him.
Sev swallowed, looking at the pie Charise was offering him, and with far more drama than was probably necessary he took the ce, carefully sliced into the pie with his fork, and took a bite.
It was delicious. ky pastry, some sort of chocte-strawberry taste that sparked over his tongue. Sev paused, taking a moment to savor the vor.
Then he red at Misa. "You made me think this was bad!"
"It''s tradition," Misa said with a grin. "We make everyone think Addy''s pies are bad when they first try them. All the kids think he can''t cook because he''s a cksmith."
"Turns out cksmiths are really good at controlling fire," Charise said cheerfully, and Addremel grunted in the background, as if in agreement.
"Bloodberries require a lot of fine temperature control," the cksmith exined after a moment, when the conversation between him and Vex paused. "Too hot and they taste burnt. Too cold and you can''t really bring out the vor, and they taste like overprocessed chocte."
"The fire mana does something to the vor, I think," Vex added.
"Now it''s your turn!" Charise swung yet another slice of the pie, this time towards Derivan, who took the te and stared at it awkwardly.
"I am... unable to taste?" he said.
"Don''t worry about it," Charise said with a grin. "I got our skeleton friend to taste some stew, I can help you too. We just need our resident [Taste Tester]. Michael!"
A short, brown-haired kid popped up. "Wha?"
"We need your [Remote Tasting] skills again," Charise said cheerfully. Michael brightened.
"I get to have more pie?"
"Not too much," Charise warned, but he was already reaching greedily for the te; Sev grinned a little as the kid nearly gobbled down the pie. A faint glow was the only hint that he''d used [Remote Tasting] at all.
Poor Derivan seemed mostly overwhelmed.
"This is what taste is like?" he asked. He moved his head experimentally around, as if trying to work at the phantom taste he was experiencing, though Sev had no idea what it felt like to him. "I am... unsure what to think."
"I was hoping he''d be more wowed," Vex stage-whispered to him. He was watching the disy with wide eyes, though, clearly interested in Derivan''s experience of a new sensation.
"Eh, cut him a break. It''s his first time experiencing any kind of taste. For all he knows it''s fucked," Misa said dryly, then nced at Addremel. "Uh, no offense."
"None taken," the cksmith said, his voice a low rumble.
As Michael calmed down a little in his wolfing down of the pie, though, he began to take slower bites actually savoring the food he was eating, rather than just swallowing it. And that seemed to give Derivan the time he needed to actually process what he was feeling, too. Vex leaned forward in interest, his eyes glowing in the usual telltale sign of him focusing on his mana sight, and Sev watched them both with interest.
"It is... pleasant," Derivan said after a moment. "Strange, to be tasting without doing anything in particr. But I appreciate the new experience."
"You''re wee!" Charise said cheerfully.
"I can kind of see what the skill is doing," Vex murmured. "Not exactly. That''s not a spell, and the way it''s influencing the mana around Derivan is weird... but I can see how it''s adjusting the enchantments, kind of. I wonder..."
"Going to figure out how to let Deri join us in meals?" Misa grinned, popping up behind Vex so suddenly the lizardkin let out a startled yelp. He almost fell forward, and it was only Misa reaching out and grabbing his shoulder that stopped him.
"I mean, y kind of!" Vex defended himself. Sev wasn''t sure why. He didn''t really need to. "He should get to join us. And I want to know how to help him experience more things."
"He sure seems to be enjoying himself now," Misa said, amused, and Vex looked over to see that Derivan was indeed doing exactly that he''d found a stump of a tree to sit on and was leaning forward with his eyes closed, as though to savor the bloodberry pie.
As with all good things, though, the pie had toe to an end. Derivan made a sound that was vaguely disappointed as Michael polished off thest few crumbs, gave them a thumbs up, and vanished back into the crowd.
"Please tell him thank you for me," Derivan said to Charise, and then nodded an additional thanks to Addremel, who nodded back at him. He walked forward to join the other three around the campfire they''d chosen, even as Charise left to find Orkas and pull him into a dance; there was music that was ying, too, fast and rhythmic and delightful. But the adventurers were tired, and just wanted to talk over a fire.
Well, mostly. Vex vaguely seemed like he wanted to dance, in Sev''s estimation, but he also seemed too embarrassed to ask. Before he could prompt the lizardkin, though, Misa interrupted his thoughts.
"Oh yeah," the half-orc said, ncing at Sev. "How''s the thing with Aurum going? Is he attached yet? What about your rewards?"
"Oh shit I forgot," Sev swore. "Uh, yeah. The attachmentpleted earlier today, and it... I don''t really know the details, but I can talk to Aurum the way I could talk to Onyx, before. There''s some kind of connection linking the two of us. Aurum said he was going to try to remember what happened while he was gone..."
Sev paused, listening for the connection between him and Aurum but it was still silent. Whatever the god was doing, it didn''t echo back down the connection. The most he could feel from it was a silent sort of pulse, like Aurum was alive and focusing on something; every so often he could feel a faint reverberation, like a realization or a memory was beginning to touch on the god, but then it faded again.
"Whatever it is, he''s not done yet," Sev said with a shrug. "Maybe he will be soon. Although now would maybe be... not the best time?" He nced around at the still-ongoing celebration.
Part of him had been worried that all of this would be happening too soon for the vigers to be able to rx, but it seemed like Orkas and Charise knew what they were doing. They were practically dragging even the most reluctant vigers into the party, except for those that really seemed like they needed time to themselves, and while it wasn''t a perfect solution
for the most part, people were smiling. That was a far cry from the worried nces
he''d seen when they were traveling back towards the Guild.
"What about your rewards?" Misa asked eagerly, and Sev blinked.
"Oh, right," he said. "Give me a second."
He''d dismissed the notification a while ago, and now he brought it back, blinking at the message.
Congrattions onpleting The Vige''s Last Defense>! Here are your rewards:
Item: [Bottle of Something Old]
Skill: [Look Up]
"What?" Sev muttered, staring at his rewards. He reached out to ept them, feeling vaguely pensive the red lettering stood out to him. He only remembered seeing red before in once instance, when the dungeon had been supposed to spit out the name of his bonus room and had given him instead what seemed to be a message...
He didn''t know who that message was from, still, now that he thought about it. It might have been Onyx, but he''d never confirmed. Maybe there was someone else he needed to look for.
Was this a message, too?
A potion bottle manifested in his hands as the notification pinged; a bright, shimmering light shone within it, spinning and turning and singing, though the sound was muffled by the ss.
The skill box appeared in front of him a secondter.
[Look Up] [Active Skill] [Grade: Maxed]
Look up and remember. Onyx
Sev nced upwards. It was a message, then, in the form of a skill? There was nothing unusual, as far as he could tell. The sky was dark, since it was in the middle of the night, and the moon shone down on them all.
Through his connection with Aurum, Sev felt a shock of recognition. The shock reverberated, and the connection between them suddenly expanded, divine mana pouring in waves into that connection he felt pressure pushing against him, asking him for permission, and he felt an instinctive urge to deny
not his own, he realized. An instinct. He was anchoring Aurum, and anchors had to reject requests like these
Fuck that.
He epted.
Divine mana burst out of him, coalescing into robes, into an orb of gold, into Aurum an avatar of him, anyway,posed purely out of golden mana. The god was far smaller than he had been in the Serpent, the approximate size of a human child, which was likely for the best; this event would have gotten people''s attention as it was...
...except it hadn''t. Everyone else was frozen in time, save for him and his team. Aurum bent over and retched, and his chest heaved in panicked, frightened breaths.
"They''re gone," he said, his voice trembling. "I remember now It''s hard to remember. But you have to remember. Please. I can''t say it. It doesn''t let me."
"What the fuck," Misa said, her eyes wide; an instantter, they narrowed. "I tried [Endless Echoes]. There''s something censored from us. I can''t pull information from half the echoes."
"My status is flickering," Derivan reported. "The new stats are all going red and white."
"Mana is going wild, especially around that bottle of yours," Vex said. "I can... it''s trying to tell me something, too. I''ve never seen mana behave like this."
Sev tried to use [Look Up], but the skill seemed to do nothing. Vex''s gaze flickered over to him again when he did.
"Do that again," Vex said, and when he did, Vex frowned. "Your mana''s reaching out to Misa... I can''t see where it goes."
"I can Shift that mana to be visible," Derivan offered, and when Vex nodded at him, he reached out. There was no apparent visible change for Sev but Vex evidently could see something. The lizardkin reached out.
"It''s trying to touch the anchor, but the anchor is rejecting it," Vex said softly. "If I can just..."
He reached out with his mana maniption, like he was forcing a key into a lock.
Something clicked.
Sev remembered, now. He remembered looking at the sky above the anchor, at the pinpricks of light; remembered staring at the Serpent of the Night Sky and its endless sea of gleaming points.
Vex and Derivan remembered the skill he''d used, the dark fog that looked just like the dark sky above them, and the fireballs that hung in the air.
Misa remembered the five-point fruit, too, the one she''d used in an echo.
There was one word that could have been used to describe all those things one word that had been eroded into conceptual nothingness.
"It''s the stars," Sev said, though they all seemed to realize it at the same time. It was important, anyway, and so he said it out loud, and ignored the way the word seemed to catch on the wind and get whisked away. He tried again, pushing on the skill, and Vex and Misa and Derivan all helped, shattering whatever remnants of the infolock remained, if it had ever been an infolock at all.
Sev looked up at the nk expanse of the night sky, and felt a cold dread creep into him.
"The stars are gone."
BOOK ONE END
64 - Book 2: Chapter 1: Road to Elyra
64 - Book 2: Chapter 1: Road to Elyra
[Alright. You know what to do. Don''t screw this up.]
Xothok flicked his gaze onest time over the traveling caravan, slitted eyes narrowing slightly. There were indications that this was a diplomatic envoy the Guild emblem imprinted on the side was a telltale giveaway but this was a diplomatic envoy from the Adventurer''s Guild, and so while it wasn''t anything to be taken lightly, he had no reason to believe he and his troupe would fail to take them down. There were twenty of them, and there couldn''t have been more than six people in the caravan. He was low Silver, and most of his men were at least mid-Bronze, if not higher.
His stomach growled, and he hissed low in displeasure.
They had food. Good food, too; maybe a diplomatic gift to Elyra, considering the trouble they''d had with foodtely. But Elyra wasn''t the only one having troubles with food, and Xothok wasn''t inclined to care about the troubles of that bunch of stuck-up, pretentious assholes. It wasn''t like the food would ever reach the mouths of the needy.
[Are you sure we can take them, boss?] one of his men questioned, messaging through the system, and he held back a sigh.
[I''m sure. Guild or not, they''re not likely to have more than one rare ss. They''re about to make camp, so wait for them to split up and then target them one by one, like I said. Don''t let them call for help. We have Silencing scrolls for a reason.] His tone would have been short and clipped, if he had been actually speaking instead of sending through the system these were all things his men should already have known but it seemed to satisfy them nheless.
He kept a close eye on the adventurers as they began to set up camp. There were four major threats that he could see; likely, the one in full armor was the one they needed to worry about the most. Clerics had next to no capability inbat. The rogue had a dagger, and so probably wasn''t specialized against long-ranged attacks.
The entire party didn''t really seem to be geared towards handling long-ranged attacks. Xothok smiled in a grim sort of satisfaction. Part of him felt sorry for them. A mage was the strongest counter to their troupe, and even then they had the scrolls needed to disable wizardry; they were expensive, though, and he preferred not to use them if he didn''t have to. This was perfect for them.
[Bet that armor''s gonna sell for shitloads of gold,] one of his men sent. [I call dibs.]
[I don''t know what a dib is, but absolutely not,] Xothok replied bluntly, and he heard the man mumble something rude. He gave him the finger. [And don''t fucking say anything out loud when we''re preparing an ambush, idiot.]
Not that Xothok med him, really.
Banditry was, contrary to what some people expected, a good deal of... waiting. He trusted his men, but he knew full well that they didn''t have the training to survive a fight with four battle-hardened adventurers; if they could, they would''ve be adventurers themselves. It paid better than this nonsense. That was part of the point of the Adventurer''s Guild, he''d heard.
They''d tried to join, even, over in the Elyran branch of the Guild, but they''d been turned away. So here they were, and these adventurers were the unlucky sods that would suffer.
[They''re splitting up, boss,] someone reported, and Xothok nced up. The armored fellow was staying by the camp they''d set up, and the other three were heading off. In different directions, no less. The half-orc seemed to be heading towards the river, and the cleric and rogue looked to be gathering firewood.
[Follow them,] he ordered. An odd feeling of difort pooled in him, though. This felt too convenient. [But be careful.]
Xothok stayed at the camp. At low Silver, he was stronger than the majority of upstart adventurers out there. He wasn''t stupid enough to think he could take what was obviously a rich adventurer decked out in enchanted armor on his own, but the group that fought him would need him to help.
And then he waited.
[Sneak], at least, was amon skill. He''d made every one of his men max out its grade for situations exactly like these ones where they needed to follow and wait until the group they were targeting was far enough apart that they couldn''t just regroup. The way the skill worked, at max level, their odds of getting spotted were less than one percent per hour; with those odds, he wasn''t worried about getting spotted.
Time passed.
The sun began to set, casting shade down on the forest. Purple-ck wood began to stand out amongst the more vibrant reds that the leaves began to shift towards; the Sunlit Forest was precisely known for this particr phenomenon. Luminescent gold began to light up the central veins of each leaf, and the armored man below them looked up, as if admiring the slow change in color and then he nced out at the rest of the woods, as if wondering where his friends were.
It was time. Xothok gave the signal.
[Go.]
Byrrhon smirked. He was hoping he''d get one of the easier marks and the way he saw it, the lizardkin mark was the easiest of them all. Five-on-one, the little fucker didn''t stand a chance. Few rogues were equipped to handle crossbow bolts, let alone five of them, and all this one had was a little dagger. It was pathetic, really.
He was almost tempted to attack before Xothok''s signal. If it weren''t for the fact that the lizardman would probably kill him...
He licked his lips, ran his finger along his crossbow, then eyed the lizard below. He wanted the dagger, he thought. It looked like it had some fancy inscriptions on it. He''d keep it for himself, hide it when Xothok asked for the loot say the rogue had thrown it and it had gotten lost, or something. It wouldn''t be too hard to lie, and none of the men in his team would dare contradict him.
The signal came. He and his men fired their arrows all at once, aimed directly at the rogue''s back; he wouldn''t even have the time to see iting
the air rippled, and the bolts pinged off an invisible barrier in the air.
Byrrhon froze.
The rogue turned around, and Byrrhon found himself almost insulted. The lizardkin looked nervous. Nervous, but determined; he drew on his dagger, and began to cut a rune into the air.
Not a rogue, he realized. And it was worse than that the wizard had known they wereing. How had he known? They''d all been under [Stealth] the entire time; the odds of them being spotted were
He didn''t have time to finish the thought. A wave of heat rolled over him, the sheer density of magic distorting the air. It wasn''t a fireball, but the heat soaked into him, eating up his energy; he felt his consciousness practically being dragged away from him, and he fought it as best he could.
Thest thing he saw was the ground rapidly approaching.
Two he didn''t really have a name beyond ''two'', being that he was Xothok''s second-inmand and had been for as long as he could remember, which wasn''t really very long crouched up in his tree and waited. He was patient. Xothok had taught him to be patient.
Below, the priest-cleric or whatever he was hummed to himself, gathering firewood and tucking them beneath an arm. Mostly, he was picking up loose branches and dry leaves; kindling to build into a bigger me. Two remembered that from Xothok''s teachings, too.
The people he had with him were used to his more reticent nature, and none of them grumbled about waiting, which he appreciated.
The signal came. Three of them fired crossbow bolts at the priest''s back; two dropped silently to the ground, wielding their daggers. Closer to rusted knives, really. The priest seemed to jerk backwards at the sound of the crossbow, and Two allowed himself to feel a brief flicker of satisfaction. If he was reacting like that, then he wouldn''t be prepared
but the crossbow bolts passed through him, and he seemed fine.
Two frowned.
He threw himself at the priest, together with the other man he had with him the long-ranged fighters would have trouble hitting him with them in the way, he knew, but crossbow bolts didn''t seem to affect the man anyway? He would fight, then.
And then he realized what the problem was.
It wasn''t that the bolts didn''t do damage to him. They did. His knife was cutting into the man, too. But he either had far more health than anyone should have, or he was healing back from every hit dealt to him.
The worst part of it was his eyes.
The priest wasn''t worried. He wasn''t scared. He just seemed sad, and Two didn''t particrly care for the look of pity he was giving him.
He was so distracted by the look in the priest''s eyes that he didn''t see the prepared spell in his hands. The sh of light was so bright it blinded him.
But even blinded, he couldn''t stop himself from seeing those eyes.
Morkar''s legs ached.
He hated waiting. He hated all of this, really, the fact that they''d been reduced to preying on random adventurers just to make sure they got the food they needed to keep going. He''d made an argument that they could just try to steal the food from the caravan and leave before anyone noticed, but Xothok had shot that down; trying that would get them noticed and hunted down.
If they took out the adventurers, they''d have time to leave before the Guild realized anything was wrong. And Xothok was right, at least as far as Morkar could tell he wasn''t particrly strategically minded but he still hated it. And waiting to ambush someone didn''t sit right with him.
Also, his legs were cramping, because he was crouching in a fucking tree. So that made him grumpy.
The orc or half-orc, Morkar really couldn''t tell the difference was in the river washing some of her equipment, it seemed. Thankfully, the men he had with him refrained from making any disgustingments. Gods forbid Byrrhon''s people were here.
The signal came. Morkar dropped out of the tree with a grunt, his tail helping to counterbnce his weight as he fell. Three bolts shot out of the trees towards the half-orc
who vanished.
Morkar blinked once.
"Um," someone said. One of his men. Except there was someone else with him, too. The orc''s hand was gripped firmly around the crossbow''s firing mechanism, preventing the bolt from firing. Pressed against his throat was a faintly glowing sword.
No one moved. The orc grinned at them. "Sup," she said. "Wanna try fighting fair instead? Ambushes are for suckers."
Morkar paused.
And then despite himself, he grinned. He hefted his axe.
"If that''s what ya want," he said.
Xothok didn''t waste any time himself. His [Enhanced Hearing] caught the twang of crossbows as his men attacked all four adventurers at the same time, split as they were but even as the bolts shot towards the armored man, he leapt out of the tree he was perched in, using a [Charge] to give him some forward momentum. Xothok felt the skill take hold, carrying him forward at incredible speeds just behind the rain of bolts; if the adventurer survived the first wave, his sword would strike directly towards the gap between the helmet and his torso, straight into his neck for a critical strike
and it did.
The bolts struck the armor and scattered, deflecting off the dark metal like it was nothing; Xothok wasn''t too surprised. Enchanted armor was often reinforced against basic attacks like that, but it didn''t mean the attacks wouldn''t carve off chunks of his health. He held a grim determination on his face as he kept his sword in the adventurer''s neck, counting the seconds. The longer he held it there before the man moved away, the more health it would drain, and the more the pain would put him off-bnce...
...except the man wasn''t moving back.
"What are you doing?" the armored man asked him curiously. He talked like it was normal to be able to speak with a sword inside his throat. Xothok jerked his sword back like it was on fire and stared, trying to suppress the fear bubbling up in him. This man was a threat. He''d gravely underestimated his chosen marks. It was fight or flight now, and every bone in his body was screaming at him to run
A searing wave of heat shed over his scales,ing from the direction the rogue had been wandering in.
A bright sh of light seared into his eyes from where the cleric had gone.
In the fighter''s direction came a loud shout. It didn''t sound like any of his men. It didn''t sound like a shout of pain, either. It sounded like a shout of triumph.
Xothok stared at the armored man in front of him, staring at him with just mild curiosity instead of anything approaching anger, and swallowed.
"...I surrender?"
65 - Book 2: Chapter 2: No Free Lunch
65 - Book 2: Chapter 2: No Free Lunch
There were several things that the Guildmaster had warned Sev and the others about before allowing them to leave for Elyra. The first was, of course, the possibility of bandits the routes they normally took didn''t often have bandits on them given they were rarely traveled to begin with, but the path to a Kingdom was almost always ripe for the picking. They knew how to pick their targets, of course; they wouldn''t pick anyone that seemed too powerful, or anyone with toorge of a delegation, or anyone who seemed like they didn''t have anything worth stealing.
The other warnings were for dealing with Elyran politics in general. Vex had some idea of what they were like, and he nodded vigorously to every one of the Guildmaster''s points. Don''t make jokes at the expense of any noble. Don''t call them out in public. Don''t interfere with their businesses.
She had sighed and cut herself off midway through the exnation, because absolutely none of them (except for Vex, and even he was starting to look a touch rebellious, after a quick nce at Derivan) looked like they were nning on taking her up on her advice at all.
"If you do run afoul of Elyra''s politics," she had said, and then she''d hesitated, eyeing all of them carefully as if to figure out how much trouble they were going to get the Guild in. Then she just sighed. "We''ll back you up. The Guild''s been trying to make some changes in Elyra for a while, but it''s hard to participate in a system without being influenced by it in some way. We rotate the people that work in the Elyran branch every so often, and that''s only mostly sessful. Some things still slip through the cracks.
"And on that note. If any of the problems you see are with the Guild... Report them to me. But you''re also authorized to deal with them. You''re a Silver ranked team, now, and I''m giving you Gold authority. Make use of it."
So that had been nice.
Back to the problem of the bandits, though.
They''d decided almost immediately after the meeting that they would make themselves targets intentionally. They''d make their caravan look weaker and less well-staffed than it was. They''d leave a symbol of the Guild on the side of the caravan, to show that it might have something worth stealing.
If there were bandits en route to Elyra, then they wanted to do their part in making sure the route was safer.
To that end, they''d spoken to Max about their n.
"It might work," she had said thoughtfully. "As long as you don''t get in over your heads. If you keep an eye out and make sure you spot them before they spot you... then sure. They''ll expect a diplomatic envoy to be guarded, but the standard guard team is one Silver rank and three Bronze ranks. Just make sure they don''t hit the food, and remember that they might decide not to attack you anyway."
Which was fine. They weren''t looking to intentionally pick a fight, and they didn''t have the time nor the skills to chase down bandits that they didn''t know for sure were there but if they were targeted, they would be prepared, and they would have a n to lead the bandits into their own trap.
Even with all of that preparation, though, Sev hadn''t expected it to all work out quite so... well.
Vex had been the one to notice the bandits first the lizardkin wizard spent most of his time observing the movement of mana anyway, when he wasn''t working on one of his sketches or on a runic form. It hadn''t taken him long to notice that the ambient mana was avoiding a patch of trees further into the Sunlit Forest, and although he couldn''t see any actual people, the mana had been a rather obvious tell.
From there, they''d quickly worked out a n. [Endless Echoes] could work out, roughly, what sorts of skills the bandits had, to make sure they wouldn''t be caughtpletely by surprise all Misa had to do was find a few versions of herself that had hopped out of the caravan to challenge the bandits to a fight. There had been... a surprisinglyrge number of them.
And they''d learned from there that those bandits weren''t really a threat to them at all.
So they decided to wait it out. They''d get attacked by the bandits sooner orter, but the bandits were clearly waiting for an opportunity, for them to drop their guard; they''d nned out a number of possible scenarios in the safety of the caravan, messaging each other over the system.
If they were attacked before they made camp, they could deal with the bandits in short order Misa had more or less confirmed that.
If they were attacked while they were making camp, they would try to lure the bandits out. [Endless Echoes] came in useful here, too; they tested making camp a number of times in simted alternate timelines, and while Misa''s information-sharing capabilities were somewhat limited, the fact that the fights rarelysted more than five minutes... helped.
As a result, all four of them knew pretty much exactly when they would be attacked, how they would be attacked, and how long the fight would take. Misa cautioned them not to be careless, though; this was exactly the sort of thing that might lure them into being overconfident, and they''d quickly assured Misa that they would take the ambush seriously, when it happened.
It was just...
"I can''t believe that just took us two minutes," Sev said inly, looking at the others, then at the carefully restrained bandits. Max had provided them with a set of particrly durable, enchanted ropes for exactly this purpose. "What are we going to do with you," Sev muttered with a sigh, and then raised a hand when the lizardkin bandit opened his mouth. "No, I wasn''t asking you, don''t you start talking."
Xothok snapped his mouth shut again, looking disgruntled. Further in the back, an infuriated bandit Byrrhon, Sev vaguely remembered tried to yell at him, and mostly failed through the [Silenced] effect Vex had ced on him.
Just him. He was the only one that would not stop talking, and kept insisting that his being defeated was a fluke. He''d basically turned purple when Vex [Silenced] him, and was in the process of doing so again now.
"I was not aware humans could turn that color," Derivan said mildly, watching him.
"We usually don''t," Sev said.
"Max said she''d pick up any bandits we caught if we found them, right?" Misa asked, staring with interest at Byrrhon.
"She didn''t really tell us when she''d be picking them up, though," Sev grumbled. "For all we know we have to drag them all the way to Elyra."
"We could just send her a message," Vex pointed out.
"Right, right, I''ll ask," Sev said, sending out a quick message
"And do we get any say in this?" Xothok growled out now that there was a lull in the conversation. Sev was honestly surprised that he''d bothered to wait to speak at all, but...
Perhaps he shouldn''t have been. More than anything, the lizardkin man seemed tired. A lot of the rest of the bandits were quiet and sullen, save for Byrrhon; Sev didn''t miss the way a lot of them were looking to Xothok like they were expecting him to get him out of this somehow.
"You''re bandits," Misa said. "And we''re probably not your first targets. So no, not really."
"And what''s this Max going to do with us?" Xothok asked. There was a thick sort of bitterness in his voice, and he spat his words out like they were curses. "ughter us? Sell us into very?"
"What the fuck?" Sev stared at him. "No. Obviously not. I can''t say I know the exact procedures, but I''m sure Max will. You''ll probably be hired into the Guild andpensated fairly."
"What?" Xothok stared at Sev. "Are you an idiot? We''re bandits"
"Uh, boss," one of his men said. "I think that''s a good thing. Dunno if we should argue the point."
Xothok just red. "We tried to join your damn Guild," he said. His voice was thick with anger and the smallest hint of something else; Derivan stepped forward, seeming concerned, but he didn''t say anything yet. "They kicked us out. Wouldn''t listen to a damn thing I tried to tell them."
Sev frowned. There had been some mention of problems with the Elyran branch, but from what the Guildmaster had told them, it shouldn''t have reached the point where the Guild would turn away people that wanted to work for them.
"Doesn''t excuse your banditry," Misa said, her eyes hard. "You didn''t react when I mentioned other targets earlier. You have hit others. I''m guessing they didn''t survive."
"None of us have restraining skills, believe it or not," Xothok snarled. "What do you want us to do? We have barely any food to eat. There''s almost nothing to hunt here. The monster corpses all disappear if we kill them. It''s us or them"
"Tell you what," Sev said. He nced at Derivan, who gave him a nod, and then he looked over his system messages. "Max says it''ll be a couple hours before she can make it here. Why don''t we talk over dinner?"
"Are you fucking trying to mock us?" Xothok red. "I just said we have barely any food to eat. I''m not going to sit here and watch while you gorge yourselves in front of us."
Sev sighed, and decided the time for words was over.
Actions were better, when it came to convincing people that you were acting in good faith.
Cooking for something like 25 people would have been more of a chore if the caravan''s food supply hadn''t included an absolutely absurd amount of bread something about bread was, apparently, far more amenable to spatialpression magic than most other foodstuffs.
So dinner was bread, and a massive pot of stew, the pot itself being conjured out of the earth and sterilized with fire. That part was easy. The moreplicated part was figuring out how to feed 20 people that were being restrained with ropes.
But Misa checked with [Endless Echoes], and it seemed that none of the bandits were particrly inclined to run away from the offered food, or even take off running with the food. Not when they could smell a massive pot of it nearby and were told they could ask for seconds. Nor were they particrly inclined to fight, after the rather onesided way they had been taken down to begin with. The only real problem was Byrrhon, who refused to eat, or indeed admit that they''d lost the fight.
"Leave him be," Xothok had said when approached with the topic. "Just... put some bread near him or something. He''ll eat it when no one''s looking."
"Has he always been like that?" Sev asked curiously.
"No," Xothok said, but he fell silent, and didn''t seem to want to borate further.
There was a long silence. Xothok had been angry and snappy with them, right up until the part where they''d actually started feeding his men he hadn''t believed a word they said until then. Then they''d untied his men well, mostly and given them food, and his face had gone carefully nk.
Then they''d untied his arms, and Sev had quietly handed him his own bowl of stew, along with a hearty helping of bread.
Xothok sighed.
"What the fuck is all this?" he asked bluntly. He didn''t sound angry anymore, at least; maybe just a certain kind of tired. Sev looked up from his own stew, from where he was seated in the grass, to stare at Xothok. The lizardkin was just staring at his stew, not eating.
"Food," Sev said, trying for a joke, and when Xothok red at him he backpedaled quickly. "I''m not making fun of you. But you''re hungry and we have food. I don''t think it needs to be moreplicated than that."
Xothok looked down at his te for a moment. He grabbed his bread, dipped it into the stew, and took a bite; all in lieu of responding, and when he finally did, he did it without looking at anyone.
"Fine," he said, his voice a little softer. "But don''t think this changes anything."
Chapter 3: Pick Up Lines
Chapter 3: Pick Up Lines
There was a ritual of sorts that Sev, Derivan, Vex, and Misa had started, now. They''d started it ever since they''d learned that the emptiness of the night sky wasn''t the way it was supposed to look ever since they''d learned that it used to be full of stars. They''d tried to tell others, of course; Max, the Guildmaster, the vigers. But no one else had been able to retain any information they tried to share, no matter whatbination of skills they tried; whatever kind of infolock this was, it seemed different in some way than the ones they''d dealt with before.
Even now, after removing the lock if that was indeed what they had done they could feel that slipping out of their minds again. It was so easy to look at the night sky and think that everything was normal; that the expanse of darkness above them was all there ever had been.
But it wasn''t.
And so, every night, Derivan would cast the skill that was clearly meant to be [Starry Night], though the name of the skill hadn''t fixed itself in the system. They would watch. They would grieve. They would try to remember, though the world clearly wanted them to forget.
This was just the first time they would be doing it with an audience.
The bandits had all been restrained again most of them hadn''t put up much of a struggle, surprisingly, though a number of them had certainly tried to run when they went to restrain them. They didn''t make it very far before Misa appeared in their path, wielding her mace threateningly, and it didn''t take much more than that for them to be cowed. It was one of the little tricks they''d figured out before heading out on this trip. Vex could fire an invisible [Mana Bolt], and Misa could block that attack, looking for all the world like she could teleport freely. Anotheryer of misdirection that was proving itself to be useful.
It helped that the bandit leader, Xothok, seemed resigned to whatever would happen. He didn''t trust them, explicitly, but he wasn''t fighting them, either. He was just... watching them, something unreadable in his eyes.
"Any idea what he''s feeling?" Sev asked Derivan quietly. "He''s just staring."
"He is... worried," Derivan said, ncing at the lizardkin. There was a brief flicker in his eyes. "He cares about his men. He regrets some of the things he has done, even if he feels he had no other choice. He feels hope, but he is angry that he feels that hope, because he has been burned on hope before. And... a small part of him feels fear, I think. He worries that if we are correct, then the crimes he hasmitted will have been for nothing."
"Physical Empathy is doing well for you," Misa noted, a hint of surprise in her voice.
"I am notpletely certain, of course," Derivan admitted. "There are many small details. I can feel the way his heart beats. His posture is guarded. The stat helps me interpret these things, but my own views are still imposed on them."
"It seems about right to me," Sev said with a sigh. "We''re going to need to look into what he said about the Elyran branch of the Guild. They shouldn''t have turned them away like that, not if they were looking for a job. Or there''s some information we''re missing on what these guys did..."
"Sometimes Elyra overprioritises its nobles," Vex said, looking down. "They have to look like the best and the brightest. Nobility in Elyra is earned it''s not exclusively a right of birth. But the side effect is that the nobles hate it when someone that isn''t a noble ranks higher than them."
"That sounds kind of fucked," Misa said with a frown, and Vex just shrugged, withdrawing into himself slightly. Derivan watched him with concern, moving over to take a seat next to the lizardkin.
"Perhaps we should move on," the armor offered after a moment. "We will have to go to Elyra and see what is happening in the Elyran branch for ourselves; further spection now will always be iplete."
"I''d like to move on," Vex said quietly. Sev nced at Misa, and the both of them nodded.
Derivan cast [Starry Night].
Once again, that deep-blue fog began rolling in from the edges of the clearing, past the slightly rmed cries of the bandits; more than one of them pulled their limbs back from the tendrils of fog, though Derivan made sure not to let the fog conceal any of them. Instead, he focused the spell upward, allowing the fog to blend almost seamlessly into the night sky.
A rather unique point for the Sunlit Forest, however, was that the bioluminescent gold of the leaves shone right through the fog like it wasn''t even there. They glittered in the breeze, looking for all the world like someone had painstakingly painted the veins of every individual leaf on a canvas.
Small, flickering fireballs began to appear within the fog. Derivan kept the dial on the size small, as he always did; instead, he began to make more and more of the stars appear, until the fog was littered with countless, tiny specks.
A breeze blew through the clearing, and the leaves rustled, swaying in the fog. The stars stirred, swirling within the confines of the spell.
Just for a moment, the painting came to life.
Even the bandits had gonergely silent, where they''d previously been talking with one another, worried about what might happen to them. Now they were all just staring at the canvas in the sky that Derivan had created. Xothok, in particr, seemed taken aback by the sight.
Vex was the first to let out a breath.
"I never get tired of seeing this," he said quietly.
The others nodded silently. They watched it for a moment more, with only Misa sparing an asional nce at the bandits to make sure none of them used the moment to try to escape, but none of them did they all seemed equally enamored by the sight.
Except for Xothok, who was staring at it with one fist clenched, gritting his teeth together.
"Why the fuck does this seem familiar," he growled out. Sev and the others nced at each other, and Derivan cut the spell.
They''d tried showing this skill to the Guildmaster, too, exactly like this. Her reaction had been remarkably simr to Xothok''s bewilderment, and a certain frustrated anger. There was wonder there too, but there was a deeper sense of pain. Some part of her seemed to recognize that she''d lost something precious to her. It was the closest they''d been able to get to exining to her what they''d discovered.
She didn''t understand, per se. But she understood that something important had transpired, and promised to leverage all the Guild resources she could into uncovering what had happened. Velykos, the stone elemental priest they''d made sure he was using [The Walls Have Ears] too, when they spoke to the Guildmaster about it. It was the best they could do.
With Xothok, on the other hand...
"What do you mean, it seems familiar?" Sev asked.
"Exactly what I said." Xothok red at him. "Did you do something to me? Was that a mental spell?"
"It was not," Derivan said, though he seemed concerned that that was the first conclusion Xothok had jumped to. "It was a visual effect. A reminder of sorts."
"What the fuck kind of a reminder was that," Xothok seethed, but he didn''t really seem angry. Derivan watched him for a moment more.
"You are angry because it made you sad," he observed after a moment. "And that made you feel vulnerable."
"Like hell it did," Xothok spat.
"Derivan," Vex said awkwardly. "That''s one of the things we don''t say out loud."
"Oh." Derivan paused and looked at Xothok. "My apologies."
Xothok didn''t answer him, preferring to stare off into the distance instead, and Sev sighed. He was hoping he''d gotten through to the man a bit with the offer of food, but for all that he seemed calmer than before, he didn''t seem any more inclined to talk or share with them. He nced through his system messages Max had messaged him to let him know there would be a dy, and that she would meet up with theme the morning.
"I don''t think we can get anything more here," Sev said tiredly. "It''s been a long day. Let''s get some rest and set up a night watch. Derivan, you okay with taking the night shift again?"
"Of course," the armor said. "I do not need to sleep."
"Yeah, but that doesn''t mean you should always take the full duty," Sev muttered.
"I''ll stay up with him for a shift," Vex volunteered. "Um. It''s only fair. And I''m used to staying upte, anyway. And lizardkin don''t need that much sleep."
"You only needed that first sentence," Sev said, amused.
"I appreciate it," Derivan said, chuckling.
And with that, they retired for the night.
Max arrived in the early hours of the morning, just as the glow began to fade from the leaves of the Sunlit Forest. She grinned and waved when she caught sight of Derivan standing guard over the bandits Vex was next to him, having curled up onto the rock at some point, with a nket pulled over his body.
"Did he fall asleep out here?" she asked, ncing with amusement at the lizardkin.
"He was very sleepy, despite his insistence on not being sleepy," Derivan said with a chuckle. "It is not the first time he has done this. Did you know he cast a [Sleep] spell on himself once by ident?"
"I did not know that," Max said brightly. "But that''s kind of great. Are these the bandits I need to pick up?"
"Yes," Derivan said. "Twenty-one of them in total. We have some concerns we wanted to share, however..."
Derivan quickly briefed Max on the situation. She''d heard a little bit about what happened from Sev, apparently, but hadn''t gotten all the details over the system; she frowned when she heard about the Elyran guild apparently rejecting these bandits, and about the particrly stubborn one that was Byrrhon.
"Really?" she asked. "That''s... it''s weird that we haven''t heard anything about that. All the reports from the Elyran branch have seemed normal."
"We will be investigating," Derivan said with a nod. "It seemed strange to us, too."
"Well, let the Guildmaster know what you find," Max said. "Or let me know. Either or. We''re trusting you to handle things in Elyra."
"What will you be doing with the bandits? Can you handle them all by yourself?" Derivan asked curiously. Max grinned.
"Trust me," she said. "I have my ways."
Max did not, in fact, have her ways.
It wasn''t that she couldn''t handle the bandits by herself she was pretty sure she could do it with her eyes closed, if she had to, though she didn''t particrly want to test that theory.
It was just that this was an escort quest, functionally, and she hated escort quests. She got bored! It was so much travel, and not enough teleportation. She knew, logically, that [Right Time, Right ce] cost her more the more she used it; she knew that she should be using it less, despite how convenient the skill was.
But still, she''d gotten used to teleporting around, and now mundane travel made her bones ache. And she wasn''t even 30 yet!
Bah. Whatever. There were other ways to entertain herself on the trip.
Max sidled up to Xothok, who stared back stoically at her, looking only the faintest bit disgruntled. "So," Max said cheerfully. "Tell me about yourself!"
"Do you think we should feel bad for the bandits?" Sev asked conversationally.
"What?" Misa stared at Sev. "Why? Max is awesome."
"She is," Sev acknowledged. "But she gets bored easily. It''ll take like two seconds for her to get bored here."
"What does she do when she''s bored?" Misa asked curiously. Sev grinned.
"Really aggressive friendship. Trust me. She''ll have their barriers down in no time."
66 - Book 2: Chapter 3: Pick Up Lines
66 - Book 2: Chapter 3: Pick Up Lines
There was a ritual of sorts that Sev, Derivan, Vex, and Misa had started, now. They''d started it ever since they''d learned that the emptiness of the night sky wasn''t the way it was supposed to look ever since they''d learned that it used to be full of stars. They''d tried to tell others, of course; Max, the Guildmaster, the vigers. But no one else had been able to retain any information they tried to share, no matter whatbination of skills they tried; whatever kind of infolock this was, it seemed different in some way than the ones they''d dealt with before.
Even now, after removing the lock if that was indeed what they had done they could feel that slipping out of their minds again. It was so easy to look at the night sky and think that everything was normal; that the expanse of darkness above them was all there ever had been.
But it wasn''t.
And so, every night, Derivan would cast the skill that was clearly meant to be [Starry Night], though the name of the skill hadn''t fixed itself in the system. They would watch. They would grieve. They would try to remember, though the world clearly wanted them to forget.
This was just the first time they would be doing it with an audience.
The bandits had all been restrained again most of them hadn''t put up much of a struggle, surprisingly, though a number of them had certainly tried to run when they went to restrain them. They didn''t make it very far before Misa appeared in their path, wielding her mace threateningly, and it didn''t take much more than that for them to be cowed. It was one of the little tricks they''d figured out before heading out on this trip. Vex could fire an invisible [Mana Bolt], and Misa could block that attack, looking for all the world like she could teleport freely. Anotheryer of misdirection that was proving itself to be useful.
It helped that the bandit leader, Xothok, seemed resigned to whatever would happen. He didn''t trust them, explicitly, but he wasn''t fighting them, either. He was just... watching them, something unreadable in his eyes.
"Any idea what he''s feeling?" Sev asked Derivan quietly. "He''s just staring."
"He is... worried," Derivan said, ncing at the lizardkin. There was a brief flicker in his eyes. "He cares about his men. He regrets some of the things he has done, even if he feels he had no other choice. He feels hope, but he is angry that he feels that hope, because he has been burned on hope before. And... a small part of him feels fear, I think. He worries that if we are correct, then the crimes he hasmitted will have been for nothing."
"Physical Empathy is doing well for you," Misa noted, a hint of surprise in her voice.
"I am notpletely certain, of course," Derivan admitted. "There are many small details. I can feel the way his heart beats. His posture is guarded. The stat helps me interpret these things, but my own views are still imposed on them."
"It seems about right to me," Sev said with a sigh. "We''re going to need to look into what he said about the Elyran branch of the Guild. They shouldn''t have turned them away like that, not if they were looking for a job. Or there''s some information we''re missing on what these guys did..."
"Sometimes Elyra overprioritises its nobles," Vex said, looking down. "They have to look like the best and the brightest. Nobility in Elyra is earned it''s not exclusively a right of birth. But the side effect is that the nobles hate it when someone that isn''t a noble ranks higher than them."
"That sounds kind of fucked," Misa said with a frown, and Vex just shrugged, withdrawing into himself slightly. Derivan watched him with concern, moving over to take a seat next to the lizardkin.
"Perhaps we should move on," the armor offered after a moment. "We will have to go to Elyra and see what is happening in the Elyran branch for ourselves; further spection now will always be iplete."
"I''d like to move on," Vex said quietly. Sev nced at Misa, and the both of them nodded.
Derivan cast [Starry Night].
Once again, that deep-blue fog began rolling in from the edges of the clearing, past the slightly rmed cries of the bandits; more than one of them pulled their limbs back from the tendrils of fog, though Derivan made sure not to let the fog conceal any of them. Instead, he focused the spell upward, allowing the fog to blend almost seamlessly into the night sky.
A rather unique point for the Sunlit Forest, however, was that the bioluminescent gold of the leaves shone right through the fog like it wasn''t even there. They glittered in the breeze, looking for all the world like someone had painstakingly painted the veins of every individual leaf on a canvas.
Small, flickering fireballs began to appear within the fog. Derivan kept the dial on the size small, as he always did; instead, he began to make more and more of the stars appear, until the fog was littered with countless, tiny specks.
A breeze blew through the clearing, and the leaves rustled, swaying in the fog. The stars stirred, swirling within the confines of the spell.
Just for a moment, the painting came to life.
Even the bandits had gonergely silent, where they''d previously been talking with one another, worried about what might happen to them. Now they were all just staring at the canvas in the sky that Derivan had created. Xothok, in particr, seemed taken aback by the sight.
Vex was the first to let out a breath.
"I never get tired of seeing this," he said quietly.
The others nodded silently. They watched it for a moment more, with only Misa sparing an asional nce at the bandits to make sure none of them used the moment to try to escape, but none of them did they all seemed equally enamored by the sight.
Except for Xothok, who was staring at it with one fist clenched, gritting his teeth together.
"Why the fuck does this seem familiar," he growled out. Sev and the others nced at each other, and Derivan cut the spell.
They''d tried showing this skill to the Guildmaster, too, exactly like this. Her reaction had been remarkably simr to Xothok''s bewilderment, and a certain frustrated anger. There was wonder there too, but there was a deeper sense of pain. Some part of her seemed to recognize that she''d lost something precious to her. It was the closest they''d been able to get to exining to her what they''d discovered.
She didn''t understand, per se. But she understood that something important had transpired, and promised to leverage all the Guild resources she could into uncovering what had happened. Velykos, the stone elemental priest they''d made sure he was using [The Walls Have Ears] too, when they spoke to the Guildmaster about it. It was the best they could do.
With Xothok, on the other hand...
"What do you mean, it seems familiar?" Sev asked.
"Exactly what I said." Xothok red at him. "Did you do something to me? Was that a mental spell?"
"It was not," Derivan said, though he seemed concerned that that was the first conclusion Xothok had jumped to. "It was a visual effect. A reminder of sorts."
"What the fuck kind of a reminder was that," Xothok seethed, but he didn''t really seem angry. Derivan watched him for a moment more.
"You are angry because it made you sad," he observed after a moment. "And that made you feel vulnerable."
"Like hell it did," Xothok spat.
"Derivan," Vex said awkwardly. "That''s one of the things we don''t say out loud."
"Oh." Derivan paused and looked at Xothok. "My apologies."
Xothok didn''t answer him, preferring to stare off into the distance instead, and Sev sighed. He was hoping he''d gotten through to the man a bit with the offer of food, but for all that he seemed calmer than before, he didn''t seem any more inclined to talk or share with them. He nced through his system messages Max had messaged him to let him know there would be a dy, and that she would meet up with theme the morning.
"I don''t think we can get anything more here," Sev said tiredly. "It''s been a long day. Let''s get some rest and set up a night watch. Derivan, you okay with taking the night shift again?"
"Of course," the armor said. "I do not need to sleep."
"Yeah, but that doesn''t mean you should always take the full duty," Sev muttered.
"I''ll stay up with him for a shift," Vex volunteered. "Um. It''s only fair. And I''m used to staying upte, anyway. And lizardkin don''t need that much sleep."
"You only needed that first sentence," Sev said, amused.
"I appreciate it," Derivan said, chuckling.
And with that, they retired for the night.
Max arrived in the early hours of the morning, just as the glow began to fade from the leaves of the Sunlit Forest. She grinned and waved when she caught sight of Derivan standing guard over the bandits Vex was next to him, having curled up onto the rock at some point, with a nket pulled over his body.
"Did he fall asleep out here?" she asked, ncing with amusement at the lizardkin.
"He was very sleepy, despite his insistence on not being sleepy," Derivan said with a chuckle. "It is not the first time he has done this. Did you know he cast a [Sleep] spell on himself once by ident?"
"I did not know that," Max said brightly. "But that''s kind of great. Are these the bandits I need to pick up?"
"Yes," Derivan said. "Twenty-one of them in total. We have some concerns we wanted to share, however..."
Derivan quickly briefed Max on the situation. She''d heard a little bit about what happened from Sev, apparently, but hadn''t gotten all the details over the system; she frowned when she heard about the Elyran guild apparently rejecting these bandits, and about the particrly stubborn one that was Byrrhon.
"Really?" she asked. "That''s... it''s weird that we haven''t heard anything about that. All the reports from the Elyran branch have seemed normal."
"We will be investigating," Derivan said with a nod. "It seemed strange to us, too."
"Well, let the Guildmaster know what you find," Max said. "Or let me know. Either or. We''re trusting you to handle things in Elyra."
"What will you be doing with the bandits? Can you handle them all by yourself?" Derivan asked curiously. Max grinned.
"Trust me," she said. "I have my ways."
Max did not, in fact, have her ways.
It wasn''t that she couldn''t handle the bandits by herself she was pretty sure she could do it with her eyes closed, if she had to, though she didn''t particrly want to test that theory.
It was just that this was an escort quest, functionally, and she hated escort quests. She got bored! It was so much travel, and not enough teleportation. She knew, logically, that [Right Time, Right ce] cost her more the more she used it; she knew that she should be using it less, despite how convenient the skill was.
But still, she''d gotten used to teleporting around, and now mundane travel made her bones ache. And she wasn''t even 30 yet!
Bah. Whatever. There were other ways to entertain herself on the trip.
Max sidled up to Xothok, who stared back stoically at her, looking only the faintest bit disgruntled. "So," Max said cheerfully. "Tell me about yourself!"
"Do you think we should feel bad for the bandits?" Sev asked conversationally.
"What?" Misa stared at Sev. "Why? Max is awesome."
"She is," Sev acknowledged. "But she gets bored easily. It''ll take like two seconds for her to get bored here."
"What does she do when she''s bored?" Misa asked curiously. Sev grinned.
"Really aggressive friendship. Trust me. She''ll have their barriers down in no time."
67 - Book 2: Chapter 4: Interlude - Velykos
67 - Book 2: Chapter 4: Interlude - Velykos
The earth was quiet today.
Often, Velykos would be able to hear echoes of emotion from the earth, through his connection with Nillea. Sometimes it was fear, like there was something biging, and little could be done to change its course; sometimes it was anger, like there was something truly wrong, and the earth was shaking in its desire to fix it. More often it was smaller gentle, happy trembles, or sad little quakes.
It had been most active when those strange adventurers were here the odd priest, the little lizard, the protector and the fighter. The earth never seemed silent at all when they were around, not even when they left for that dungeon of theirs. It was only when they left truly left, on their diplomatic mission to Elyra that the earth settled. And that was... strange.
It left Velykos wondering what their significance was. Or was it them that was significant? Perhaps it was something else that was following them. Whether that something was a light or a shadow... only time would tell.
As for him, it was time for him to leave on his own journey. He had been enlightened, in a manner of speaking; something truly important to him had been changed, and Velykos would not allow it to stand.
First, though. The Guildmaster wished to speak with him. And he suspected he knew what she wished to talk about.
"I am here," Velykos said into the air. It was where the Guildmaster had said to meet her, and he had no doubt she was there, only hidden.
A woman was indeed standing near him. He didn''t jump he simply turned and bowed his head respectfully. "Guildmaster."
"Velykos," she said, returning the greeting.
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Velykos turned his gaze towards the sky. It was night, of course, which meant only the night of the moon shone down on them, and [The Walls Have Ears] told him there was something deeply wrong with that fact. The Guildmaster, too, was troubled he could see it in her posture.
"There''s something wrong with the sky, isn''t there?" the Guildmaster said. She sighed. "I could glean that much. They tried to tell me more, but I couldn''t retain anything. I''m not used to being on the other end of that kind of magic."
"There is," Velykos rumbled. Stone and pebble rained down his chin when he spoke; he wished it wouldn''t, sometimes. It gave his voice a gravelly quality that many found intimidating. "Something is... missing."
"Missing," the Guildmaster echoed, and she stared into the sky. Velykos felt her heartbeat, slow but steady. He felt the beat of her emotions, too; there was a weight pressing down on her, a certain sadness. A small part of her recognized what was missing, just like he did.
"I trust those four to keep figuring things out on their end," the Guildmaster said eventually. "But I''m getting a lot more reports of errors cropping up in the system, for old and new adventurers alike. They''re not significant errors by any means, and it''s possible I''m just getting more errors because I''m asking for them to be reported, now. But there''s a definite trend."
"And if what they said about the gods are true," Velykos said. "Then we may be running out of time."
"We have decades," the Guildmaster said. "We''re lucky that the four of them have figured out this much on their own, and they''re on their way to get more answers. But that doesn''t mean we''re going to do nothing with what they''ve given us."
"No," Velykos agreed, though he was at a loss on how they would explore more on their own. "But what will we do?"
"Research, mostly," the Guildmaster said with a sigh. "The Guild is going to leverage its contacts to find out what the Kingdoms have managed to uncover about the history of this world. They know more than they''re saying, but I don''t think they know the stakes."
"And we cannot tell them what the stakes are," Velykos said. "Not because we do not want to, but because they have even greater difficulty than we do remembering that something is wrong."
"That''s the gist of it," the Guildmaster said.
"It is strange that those four can remember, and we cannot," Velykos mused.
"If we knew why, we''d be a lot closer to understanding the crux of this problem, I think." The Guildmaster frowned slightly. "I''ve spoken to the J''rokksur leaders about this. Misa''s parents Charise and Orkas. They think it has something to do with the reality anchor thing."
"And what do you think?" Velykos asked curiously.
"I don''t know," the Guildmaster admitted. "It''s an easy answer, but it doesn''t exin everything. We know how they got their reality anchor, so we could try sending in a team to get one, but..."
"It is dangerous," Velykos said, and the Guildmaster nodded.
"The conditions they were able to get their anchor in are rather specific," she said. "And I don''t have a good feeling about sending people into a random dungeon break. Max already tried teleporting into one, and the fact that she didn''t manage it is a bad sign. It might not be survivable outside that specific circumstance."
For a moment, they were silent. And then the Guildmaster looked at him. "What about you? What are you nning to do?"
"I must understand in more detail what is happening to the gods," Velykos said. "I have some idea now, of what might have happened. Of who I might have met, and what might have been changed in my past. But I cannot know for sure. I think, perhaps, if I travel back to the quarry that I originally came into being in..."
"Would that work?" the Guildmaster asked him, and this time it was his turn to go silent for a while.
"There are traces left in the earth, always," Velykos said eventually. "They are difficult to track, even for elementals such as I. But it is not impossible. Not with divine assistance, and assistance from the system."
"I''m not sure I would be so quick to rely on the system."
"I do not think the system is evil." Velykos chose his words carefully, seeing the doubt in the Guildmaster''s eyes. "But I do believe it is... unchecked. It appears to be a solution to a problem we cannot see."
"It''s not a very good solution," the Guildmaster said, still doubtfully. Velykos nodded.
"That, I agree with," he said. "It is iplete. Perhaps it was rushed. Or perhaps the problem at hand cannot be solved. We cannot say until we know more."
"And we won''t know more until our efforts pay fruit," the Guildmaster sighed, and then she looked up at Velykos again. "I know I''ve asked before. Are you sure you don''t want me to send an escort with you?"
"An escort would be difficult for me," Velykos exined, though not unkindly. "My needs are not the same as that of most mortals. I do not need to pause to rest or eat, and while I could amodate them, I feel it would only slow me down."
He could take care of himself. Stone elementals were hard to hurt to begin with, due to some passive status effects the race had. And more importantly, this was something of a personal journey for him; he understood and appreciated the Guildmaster''s desire to make sure he was safe, but this was something he felt he needed to do alone.
"Actually," the Guildmaster said. "I have a new team that might be perfect for you, there."
"Oh?" Velykos tilted his head curiously.
"They''re a veteran team made of ," the Guildmaster said. "They don''t need to eat or sleep, just like you. But they''re all still... adjusting. The change from mortal to immortal has been hard on them."
Velykos had a lot of questions about that, but he focused on what was the important detail to him. "Do they need help adjusting?"
"Yes. And I think you''d be a good guide for them."
Velykos hesitated. "...This journey I wish to take is personal," he admitted. "But not so much that I cannot bearpany, I think."
There was a parallel of sorts here that he thought might help, even.
"Thank you," Velykos added, though the words weren''t strictly necessary, and the Guildmaster gave him a nod.
They stared at the sky for a moment more, in a moment of strange solidarity. Different as they were, Velykos thought that the Guildmaster was perhaps one of the few here that might understand how he felt; both of them understood that something had been stripped away from them, and their best efforts had yet to yield any real results. There was too much they still didn''t know, and they couldn''t rely on Sev''s team to find out everything.
But even for someone immortal, there was only so much time that could be spent on quiet moments.
"I will let you know anything I find," Velykos said, turning to leave.
"I''ll do the same," the Guildmaster agreed. "I''ll have the new team meet up with you shortly. Give them about an hour."
Velykos nodded.
It took precisely forty-eight minutes for the team to arrive. The five of them came dressed in heavy clothing, obscuring all but the most prominent of their features; simply put, they looked vaguely humanoid, and nothing else. Velykos couldn''t help but wonder if this wouldn''t be suspicious to other mortals.
"Eh, it ain''t more suspicious than showing our faces," the team leader had told him when he''d asked. Herald, his name was? Or perhaps it was Harold? He''d never gotten a handle on human names. "Just gotta be careful around people is all. Will we be goin'' through a lot of cities and the like?"
That was a good question. Velykos hadn''t actually kept up to date on the development of viges and cities. "I do not think so," he said. "I am merely headed for the quarry I was born in, to find traces of an old friend. There is a town nearby, but it is on the other side of that quarry, I think."
"Good," the captain said. "Lessplications that way. You ready to get goin''? I gotta say, it''ll be nice to have a healer on our team for once."
Velykos took a moment to watch the five of them, curious. They were quite different from what he''d expected, when the Guildmaster had first mentioned new immortals that needed to adjust to their new life but he supposed he had no frame of reference for how a mortal would act after the transition. Perhaps there wouldn''t be a difference at all, until years and years had passed, and they had umted the same sort of experience a typical immortal had.
The captain was the most at ease in his new form, if Velykos was reading his bodynguage correctly. He could never really be sure, and he was missing a lot of the cues he normally had; no heartbeat, no temperature, no strange distributions of blood for him to make inferences with. But he seemed rxed and at ease, with just the slightest bit of tension when he spoke.
Two lizardkin-shaped individuals seemed the next-most well adjusted. They stood close together. Siblings, perhaps? They nced at one another asionally, and Velykos could feel the way they would tap their feet nervously against the ground every so often, or the way their tails would touch the ground and then jerk back, like they didn''t want to be reminded of the new, strange weight.
There was an orc Velykos was pretty sure thergest figure there was an orc, though he could have been wrong who seemed not to care too much about his new status as a skeleton. His difort seemed to be with something else; he moved like he expected everything to be heavier, and it bothered him that it wasn''t.
And thest one... That poor man would need Velykos'' guidance the most, he thought. The Guildmaster had spoken to him before about this one. The human wasn''t coping well. His body felt like it didn''t belong to him, the way Velykos understood it, and it was causing him no small amount of mental distress. In a way, he could sympathize stone elementals were very much the same way, in that they were always sculpting themselves into a body that better suited them but he understood that the young man''s situation was fundamentally different.
Not too long ago, he would have asked Nillea for guidance. But now...
Now he wondered. Sev had given him ideas. Perhaps he could try something different.
68 - Book 2: Chapter 5: Time for a Quest
68 - Book 2: Chapter 5: Time for a Quest
The bandits were, in all honesty, the most exciting thing to happen on their trip to Elyra so far. It would still take a number of days for them to get there, and they had other stops they wanted to make along the way the Guildmaster had marked out two quests in particr that were rtively urgent and that the Guild didn''t have the spare manpower for. Each quest was located in a small vige that was just barely off the road, making it convenient for them to make a stop on the way to Elyra proper, and the first quest...
"I am still unsure why this request is urgent," Derivan admitted, looking over the quest form for the third time. It seemed rtively simple it was an extermination quest of sorts. At least, he assumed that was what the ''handle an infestation problem'' part meant.
"Guildmaster priority," Sev said with a shrug. "Something weird happened with the receptionist that took down that quest, and the Guildmaster wants us to make sure that everything''s on the level."
"Doesn''t she have other people she can send to help with perception bullshit?" Misa asked. "I dunno about you, but I feel like we''ve dealt with more than our fair share of perception-rted problems."
"I think that''s exactly why she wants us to handle it," Sev said. "Nothing beats experience, and we''ve handled more infolocks and broken system boxes in thest week than most people do in their entire lifetimes."
"It makes sense for us to handle it," Vex said quietly.
Derivan nced over at him. The lizardkin had stayed mostly silent throughout their trip he had been most animated when they were dealing with the bandits, and Derivan had hoped that whatever mise had ovee his friend had been resolved. But the moment they got back on the road, it had returned, and he spent most of his time just silently staring out of the caravan''s window.
Not for the first time, he tried to approach the topic gently. "Are you alright, Vex?"
"I''m... fine," Vex said, managing a small smile at Derivan. He held that smile for a moment before it crumpled, and he let out a sigh. "Or not, I guess. I don''t know. I know it''s some time before we actually reach Elyra, but I''m not... looking forward to going back there, I guess. I didn''t n on doing that for another year or so."
"You said before you wanted to wait until you were ready to talk about it," Sev said. "I don''t think any of us want to push you, but if you think it''ll affect you..."
Vex looked down, seemingly conflicted. "It won''t," he said. "I handled the bandits fine, didn''t I? And I''ll tell you before we reach Elyra. I promise. It''s just, we''ve got these two other quests to handle, and I feel like if I tell you all now it''ll just be a distraction. Let''s handle these other quests first."
"If you say so," Sev said. Derivan simply ced a hand on Vex''s back, and the lizardkin looked back at him, grateful.
"Let''s go over the quest again," Misa said. "See if there''s anything we''re missing."
They''d all looked at the form multiple times, of course, but they took Misa''s change of subject for what it was a way to let Vex gracefully escape the conversation they''d found themselves in. Sev pulled out the sheet of paper that the request had been written on.
To say that the request was strangely worded was... an understatement.
To the Adventurer''s Guild:
The town of Fendal would like to put in a request for a Silver team to handle an infestation. Further details will be given on arrival. Pleasee to the town hall and ask to speak to Gensen.
As a general rule of thumb, the Guildmaster had exined, the Guild didn''t tend to ept vague requests like these they''d learned that lesson a long time ago. The Guild had standards as to the kind of requests they would take, both as a politically neutral party amongst the Kingdoms and because they were positioning themselves as a constructive power rather than a destructive one. People had tried to get around it with vague requests like these, and the Guild had responded by banning these types of requests.
In certain, limited circumstances, however, vague requests could still make it through typically requests that were too embarrassing to be publicly listed. In those cases the one making the request would still have to disclose to the receptionist the details, but the listing itself was allowed to be vague.
The problem, in this case, was that the receptionist that had taken the listing didn''t remember what the exnation he''d been given was.
So all the information they had was that there was ''an infestation''. And it was an infestation that presumably required at least a Silver ranked team to handle, to boot; the receptionist on duty at the time must have agreed, or he would have adjusted the details down, which left the question what kind of infestation?
"Nothing more there than thest dozen times we looked," Sev said dryly. "Unless one of you can magic something out of there."
Misa groaned. "We''re just going to have to wait until we get there, aren''t we," she grumbled. "I hate waiting. Also this stupid caravan."
"I think the caravan is kind of nice," Vex offered.
"It''s nice but it smells weird and it makes me nauseous," Misa sighed. "Don''t get me wrong, though. The Guildmaster''s an amazing woman for getting all this together for us. Just wish there was a faster way to get there."
"Can''t say I don''t feel the same," Sev said, ncing out the window. "The caravan reminds me of neshifter technology. It''s just... weirdly familiar, in a way I can''t really remember anymore. And that''s ufortable, let me tell you. At least the scenery''s nice."
And it was. They were still passing through the edges of the Sunlit Forest even now, as the sun began to set again and the colors of the forest began to change; this time, they were able to enjoy the change of scenery in rtive peace, watching in quiet wonder as gold light began to bloom across the leaves.
There was only one more incident that night. Right as they passed out the border of the forest, all four of them felt a strange chill but though they discussed it, there was nothing they could glean from it.
And so the night passed, with Derivan keeping watch through the night as usual.
The next morning saw them arriving just on the borders of Fendal. The town was certainly set up differently from Misa''s home vige of J''rokksur; for one thing, Fendal was directly supported by Elyra, and so had a lot more infrastructure set up. Despite that, they had no gates barring the way into the town a couple of guards sent curious looks at their caravan as it rode in, but no one even questioned their appearance.
Derivan found this strange. It wasn''t that he expected Fendal to celebrate their arrival but the nature of the request had apparently been urgent, and some of the information they''d received on Fendal had indicated that the guards were the suspicious sort; they should have been questioned on arrival, at which point they could present their Adventurer''s badges and quest and been allowed further in.
It didn''t help that the town was oddly quiet. There was none of the bustle he''d gotten used to seeing in the makeshift vige that J''rokksur''s residents had built to rece the one they''d lost; they were loud and friendly with one another, and there was alwaysughter that could be heard somewhere. Here, people spoke instead in quiet murmurs, the volume just low enough that the sound didn''t carry...
It was almost like the townspeople were afraid. Physical Empathy didn''t tell him any more than that, as much as he tried to push the stat.
And there was another thing that was strange the town waspletely spotless, with not a hint of litter or dirt on any avable surface. The pavement of the stone looked polished. It could have just been very well-maintained, of course, but when he asked Vex if that was the case in Elyra, the lizardkin just shook his head.
"Elyra is... clean, in the right ces," Vex said, hesitating slightly as he answered. His tail waved nervously behind him he was uneasy, too, even if he didn''t want to show it. "But not even the noble districts are this well-maintained. I guess if they just ran a cleaning spell, that would exin it?"
"I dunno," Misa said with a slight frown. "This ce feels off, honestly. Can''t pin it down, but it''s... ufortable."
"I''m getting that too," Sev said. He nced out, then patted the side of the caravan. "Let''s just stop here and get to the town hall on foot. We can ask around for directions and see if anything jumps out to us as strange."
So they did. They set up the usual barriers around the caravan before they left, much to the chagrin of some of the guards, who didn''t seem to like seeing magic being practiced openly in front of them Sev snapped the scroll shut as soon as he was done. Derivan couldn''t me him; he''d have felt ufortable with the vaguely hostile gazes of the guards, too.
Though he was surprised when Sev outright strode up to those guards to speak with them.
"Hi, we''re new here," he said. "We''re looking for the town hall. Any idea where we can find it?"
"...It''s that way," a guard said after a short pause, pointing. "You here for the quest?"
"Yes...?" Sev blinked. Derivan paused at that, too, watching the guard carefully; he wasn''t betraying any particr emotion besides a general distrust of strangers, which they''d expecteding into Fendal to begin with. But then was this questmon knowledge?
"Good," the guard said with a nod, and then he continued patrolling; Derivan stared after him, slightly bewildered by his behavior. Misa stared, too.
"Okay," Misa said. "I''m calling it now. There''s some sort of mind control involved."
"I don''t know if it''s anything so direct," Vex said with a small frown. He was squinting at the air, as if only just noticing something strange; Derivan followed his gaze, amplifying his own [Mana Sight] to see what the lizardkin was seeing. "The mana here is behaving weirdly, too."
"It looks like it normally does," Derivan said cautiously. He watched the semi-yful ambient mana dancing around, as active as ever. "Are you seeing something different?"
"No," Vex said. "It''s the fact that there''s ambient mana here at all. It usually avoids towns. It prefers gathering in natural ces."
Sev frowned. "Keep an eye on it," he said. "But let''s get to the town hall and see what Gensen wants, first."
Derivan nodded, agreeing, and watched as the others did the same. The town hall wasn''t actually that far away the only problem was that it was a rtively nondescript building that blended in with all the rest, and if the guard hadn''t explicitly pointed out, they might have walked past it without noticing. As it was, they only realized they were at the right building because of the tiny letters emzoned on the handle of the door to the town hall, of all things.
Even the inside of the building wasn''t particrly ostentatious. It was clean, like everything else in Fendal, but it was sparse and barely decorated; there was a red carpet lined with gold, a couple of pirs holding up the upper floor of the hall, and then a desk at the far end of the room. Just in front of that desk stood a tired-looking elderly gentleman, who seemed startled when Sev pulled open the door.
"Er... we''re looking for Gensen?" Sev tried.
"Then you''re just in time," the old man said with a small, weary-looking smile. "I am him. Why don''t you have a seat, and we can have a chat?"
69 - Book 2: Chapter 6: Plans and Learning
69 - Book 2: Chapter 6: ns and Learning
Vex couldn''t help but feel anxious. Something about this town about Fendal felt off to him. Where the presence of mana was usually afort, this time something about it felt... dangerous. Like it was a warning. He wriggled in his seat, slightly annoyed by the fact that the chair was tall enough that his feet didn''t even touch the ground.
Derivan wasn''t having any problems with his seat. The armor sat ramrod straight in his chair, paying polite attention to the old man that was apparently in charge of this ce. Gensen, apparently. Vex watched Derivan for a moment, distracted, and then jumped when Sev spoke.
"You said in your request that there was an infestation," Sev said. "What kind of infestation?"
"Let''s not speak of such things to start with," the old man said, though not unkindly. The exhaustion seemed to vanish off of him as he spoke. "You must be tired from your journey, surely. Perhaps I can get you a spot in one of our inns?"
Sev blinked. "That would be... nice? But I''d really rather you tell us what''s going on first."
"If you insist," Gensen said.
Vex wasn''t paying attention to what the old man said. He watched the mana instead it was drifting through even in this building, and wasn''t that strange? It didn''t move the way it usually did, though; there was nothing freespirited about it.
It moved with intent.
The lizardkin wondered if there was someone controlling it with [Mana Maniption], or a variant thereof. He''d never seen mana moving with such purpose before. It almost made him want to try to reach out with his own [Advanced Mana Maniption], to see if he could touch on it maybe do what Derivan had done before, and just ask the mana
"Vex?" Sev said, and Vex blinked.
"What?" he said, and when he saw everyone was looking at him, he flushed. "Um, sorry. I wasn''t paying attention."
"Apparently there''s a goblin camp nearby," Sev said. "They raid Fendal every so often and take the mana crystal stores sent by Elyra, among other things. Gensen wants us to help... clear the camp. You''re the resident tracking expert, so I wanted an estimate of how long you think that might take."
Vex absolutely wasn''t the tracking expert, but he was the ''rogue'', and he frowned in thought. The story didn''t add up. It didn''t exin half the things they''d noticed felt off. And the others felt the same way, too, given the looks on their faces; Misa had her brows drawn together skeptically, and Sev seemed like he was doing his best to be diplomatic. Derivan''s helmet allowed him to keep the best straight face out of the four of them, but Vex could practically sense his armored friend''s concern radiating from him.
"Um," Vex said, mostly to stall for time. He wasn''t exactly sure what Sev wanted from him. The cleric shook his head just slightly dy, he interpreted the gesture as and saw two of his fingers twitch just slightly. "We''ll need some time to investigate, of course. Find out where their camp is, what kind of numbers we''re looking at. I''d say we''ll have a n of attack in two days or so."
"Of course," Gensen said with a nod and a kind smile. "Shall I settle your lodgings, then?"
"Please," Sev said with a nod, and the old man hobbled off to talk to... someone. The entire town hall seemed empty, actually, which was another oddity; Gensen slipped into another room, but as far as Vex could tell, there weren''t any other people in that room.
That didn''t stop him froming out with a set of keys. "There''s a room waiting for you at the Sleeping Bird inn, a little ways south of here," Gensen said kindly. "It''s the fifth door to the right on the second floor. It''s quite a spacious room. I hope you enjoy your amodations."
Vex opened his mouth to ask why in the world Gensen had keys to a room in an inn here, in the town hall. There were ways that could be done, of course, but teleportation spells weren''t cheap at the best of times... maybe the town hall had replicas of all the inn keys?
...That made Vex feel kind of ufortable, somehow.
He stopped short just before actually asking the question when Sev gave him a warning nce, and diverted the movement into a yawn instead. He trickled some power into [Advanced Mana Sight] as he did so, eyeing the room Gensen had just emerged from but besides the presence of ambient mana, it all seemed normal. No traces of magic, at any rate.
Vex followed Sev and the others somewhat mindlessly as they were escorted back out of the town hall, his gaze flicking over the details of the town. Besides the extraordinary cleanliness and the presence of mana, nothing struck him as particrly out of ce. The townsfolk were going about their days, picking up whatever bread and produce they needed from the open stalls set up in the center of town; some of the more expensive-looking shops had their own dedicated buildings, and Vex counted at least one alchemy shop and one fancy-looking bakery among them.
It was all very... normal.
The mana did seem to gather more in some ces than others there was a florist selling a variety of beautiful, purple-blue flowers that the mana seemed to love. It twirled around that shopkeeper and his flowers, seemingly excited every time someone purchased something, or even just looked at the flowers. The sightforted him, even; it was the most ''normal'' behavior he''d seen from the ambient mana in Fendal.
And now that he was paying attention... the mana did seem to act differently around different people. Overall, the mood was gloomy. The way it moved was slow and sickly, especially near the guards. Near the children, however, it was especially lively; with everyone else it was difficult to establish a pattern
Vex felt Derivan grab him by the shoulders and physically ce him a foot to the side, right before he would have walked into a woodenntern pole. He blinked several times, startled, then flushed. "Sorry."
"I imagine you were paying attention to something important," Derivan said with a chuckle. "We are here. Perhaps you can share your thoughts when we are inside?"
The inn that Gensen had mentioned the Sleeping Bird was arge, three-floor building, if rather in on the outside, with pale-blue walls and round windows decorated with smaller versions of those purple-blue flowers. Its only unique feature otherwise was a sign that featured a rather crudely drawn bird sleeping in its nest. Sev pushed the door open, and Vex followed just behind Derivan, expecting to find a lively inn full of people.
The building was empty.
Sev blinked. "Uh... maybe that''s why Gensen gave us the key instead of telling us to get it from the owner?" he said.
"Maybe the owner''s out," Misa suggested, but she looked ufortable.
"You don''t see anything strange in the mana, do you?" Sev asked Vex, and the lizardkin shook his head.
"I''ve been keeping an eye out," Vex said. "The ambient mana in this whole town acts a little weird, but this ce isn''t trapped or anything. Not that I can tell, anyway."
"This building''s too big to not be staffed, though," Sev mused.
"Let''s just get to our room," Misa said, looking a little bit disgruntled. "The empty inn lobby is kinda creeping me out."
"We could just stay in the caravan," Vex suggested.
"We''d have to exin that to Gensen," Sev said, making a bit of a face. He began to climb the stairs up to the second floor, and the others followed him. "And I think we have better odds of figuring out what''s going on if we''re staying here. It''s pretty obvious the problem isn''t a goblin camp, but I don''t know why he''d hide it from us."
"Maybe he''spromised," Misa said.
"Perhaps," Derivan said. "I am not sure that he believed what he was saying, and what is particrly strange is that he did not seem frustrated by the raids he mentioned, only mildly concerned."
"Yeah, he didn''t really act like there was any kind of emergency," Sev said with a frown. He approached and opened the door to their room the fifth door to the right was at the end of the hallway, and led to a room that must have upied half of the entire floor, and was almost certainly spatially expanded in some way. The amodations were better than even what was provided by the Adventurer''s Guild, considering it came with a small kitchen and sectioned-off rooms.
"I changed my mind. I don''t want to stay in the caravan," Vex announced, and Misa snickered at him.
"This ce is pretty nice," Sev admitted. "Must cost a pretty penny."
"S''long as we don''t have to pay, I don''t care." Misa threw herself back onto one of the couches, ignoring the way the whole thing rocked back with the force of her weight. She groaned with pleasure. "Fuck, I''m grateful to the Guildmaster and all, but it''s really nice to have an actual seat."
"No kidding," Sev agreed, though he was much more polite about taking a seat in one of the unupied armchairs. Vex and Derivan upied thest couch opposite to Misa, though Vex grumbled a little at the way he had to curl his tail around. Most seats just weren''t really built to amodate lizardkin.
It was a small gripe, though. Misa took barely a second to switch gears again, changing the subject and leaning forward, her expression serious. "But let''s talk about this. Do we think Gensen''s being controlled?"
"I don''t think so," Vex said, then hesitated. "It''s definitely a possibility, but it''s too early to jump to that conclusion. At best we keep in mind that he might bepromised and keep investigating."
"I''m inclined to agree," Sev said. "I''m not sure I believe the story about the goblins at all, though. The people here don''t act like they''ve been raided recently."
"If he is notpromised, he could be lying," Derivan suggested.
"Why would he lie, though?" Misa frowned. "Someone put in a request with the Guild and told us to get in contact with him. There has to be a reason for that."
"He''s either pointing us in the right direction, or else he''s a lead himself," Sev concluded. "Either way, I think it''s prudent for us to investigate things besides the goblin raids."
"I can look into the raids," Misa said with a grunt. "Some of the guards are pretty good at tracking. I can summon ''em, ask them for advice. That kind of thing."
"Then I''ll talk to the people and see if I can get them to talk about the raids that have supposedly been happening," Sev said.
"I want to look into what''s going on with the mana here," Vex said. "I''ve never seen ambient mana be so active inside a town. Too many skills and spells being cast pretty much all the time mana doesn''t typically like that. Derivan, I''m thinking maybe if you try that new method of casting you''ve got here, we might see different results."
"New method of casting?" Misa asked curiously, and Vex nodded vigorously.
"I still haven''t figured out how to do it yet! But he found a way to cast spells without relying on the system or on runic constructs," Vex said, his tail moving to wag almost without him being consciously aware of it. "I''ve been trying to learn how, but it''s slow going on my part. You wanna show ''em, Deri?"
"I will try," Derivan said, though not without a faint hint of fond amusement in his tone. He reached out again, and Vex watched him with bright eyes, following the movement of the mana. The abundance of ambient mana made it easy to cast here, at least Derivan''s particr brand of spellcasting, he suspected, wouldn''t work as well in normal cities, where whatever ambient mana there was was mostly dead and lifeless.
Just like before, Vex watched as the mana responded to Derivan, starting to form into the familiar shape of the basic barrier spell
and then the barrier flexed, and shattered.
There was a small silence.
"That has never happened before," Derivan said, sounding concerned. Vex couldn''t help but echo that concern, too, because he was watching the mana move in the aftermath, and it was agitated.
Worried.
Angry.
70 - Book 2: Chapter 7: Kitchen Lizard
70 - Book 2: Chapter 7: Kitchen Lizard
The first thing Vex did was, of course, exin his concerns about what he''d seen. "Do we know what that means?" was Misa''s immediate question, and Vex just shook his head mutely.
"I''ve never seen mana behaving like this," he said, his tail swishing about nervously. He looked up at Derivan forfort, almost automatically, and without seeming to think about it the armor reached out to take his hand and squeeze it Vex froze at that little action, feeling his heart beating faster.
He didn''t say anything, afraid it would spoil the moment; he was still nervous, even then, but it was... a slightly better kind of nervousness? He found it hard to gather his thoughts.
"Perhaps I can investigate the problems with the mana, together with Vex," Derivan said; he didn''t seem to notice the small existential crisis Vex was in the middle of having. "I believe I may be able to coax more out of the mana. And even if I cannot, there is a pattern in the behavior of the mana we may be able to trace... There are people and ces that it seems to prefer. If nothing else, that is something we can investigate perhaps it is trying to tell us something."
There was a small silence. Misa looked at the remnants of the barrier that Derivan had cast; fragments of mana still remained, quite unlike the normal usage of a spell provided by the system. She shook her head after a moment.
"I don''t really know much about this mana stuff," Misa admitted. "I gotta take your word for it. But I''m pretty sure this isn''t about fucking goblin raids, so that''s our biggest lead right now."
"I''m not sure we''ll get much more done tonight, though," Sev said, ncing out of the window. Vex followed his gaze, trying his best to focus on the conversation, and not on Derivan''s hand still ced casually over his own. The sun was already setting, and the town of Fendal was cast in the dim, orange hues of the sunset; many of the townsfolk were heading back to their homes, and the stalls they''d seen earlier were beginning to close up.
Even the mana seemed less active and more sleepy.
"We should get some rest," Sev continued. He wore a slight frown, though, and his leg bounced as though in agitation. "I don''t want to stay here longer than necessary, but it looks like whatever''s going on here isn''t all that simple, so we''re going to have to take the time to figure it out... I''ll keep the Guildmaster updated."
"Something up?" Misa asked, raising a brow slightly. "I mean, I know we''re in a hurry, but you''re a little anxious."
"It''s mostly Aurum," Sev said with a sigh. "He doesn''t say much these days, but he''s always very worried. His angels are scouting the celestial nes to try to find out if a new god is being targeted, but we don''t have any news so far. I think theck of news is getting to him."
"I''m pretty fucking worried about that," Misa muttered, then shook her head. "Let''s just get dinner ready and then get some rest. We''ve got a lot to do tomorrow. Whose turn is it to make dinner?"
"Vex''s, I think," Sev said, ncing at the lizardkin.
"What?" Vex said, blinking. He''d lost track of the conversation. Misa snickered.
"You two are going to need to sort that out eventually," she said.
"What do you mean?" Derivan asked curiously, and Misa just shook her head.
"They''re hopeless," she said conversationally to Sev, and the cleric just grinned. "I said it''s your turn to prepare dinner, Vex. But I can do it if you''d rather stare at Derivan for a bit longer."
"I''m that wasn''t what I was doing!" Vex protested, flushing.
"I do not mind," Derivan said, with what Vex thought might have been a touch of protectiveness.
"Don''t encourage her," Vex groaned. He got up and out of the couch, stumbling a little when he realized his tail had wedged itself between the cushions. Derivan reached out to steady him, and he made sure he didn''t pull away abruptly, even though that was his first instinct; instead, he gave Derivan a grateful, embarrassed smile, and made his way to the kitchen while trying desperately to pretend that the other three weren''t staring at him.
Dinner was an enjoyable affair, at least.
The kitchen in their room was surprisingly well-stocked Vex had expected to have to pick up some ingredients from their caravan, but that wasn''t the case at all. Small preservation runes lined the cupboards, and exotic meats that Vex didn''t even recognize were stocked in about half of them.
"There''s no way this is a room they give to ordinary adventurers," he muttered, staring at the breadth of ingredients.
"No kidding," Sev said, making Vex jump; the cleric was watching over the kitchen counter, having apparently decided his time was better spent watching Vex cook. The lizardkin stuck his tongue out at his friend, getting only an amused grin in response, and began pulling out ingredients... mostly at random, really.
A lot of his favorite spices were avable. There were leaves from an herb he didn''t really remember the name of, but he knew was grown exclusively in specially cultivated gardens in Elyra; peppers that were spicy, in the sense that they actually converted part of your personal mana into fire-aspected mana; fresh five-point star fruits. Berries, rabbit meat...
Vex paused.
"Isn''t Elyra dealing with a food shortage?" he said quietly, looking from the contents of the pantry and then back to Sev. "Why do they have so much food just... avable here?"
"Why indeed," Sev said with a slight frown. "...Maybe they just left it here and forgot about it?"
"Maybe," Vex said, but something about that answer didn''t sit right with him. "But this is a lot of food."
"I''ll ask around about the food situation when I''m out tomorrow," Sev suggested. "We''re only going to be here for a day or two, hopefully, so if people need food... I mean, this is all technically ours, right? They don''t know how much we eat."
Vex blinked, then grinned slightly. "You''re not wrong."
And with that, Vex got to cooking.
It wasn''t all that long ago that he hadn''t known how to cook at all. Noble life was pampered, in that sense he''d never had to prepare his own meals, not when their family had a personal chef that would prepare all their food for them. He''d been a little curious about it once, but all it had taken was one instance of being chased out of the kitchen for him to lose any interest he had; why learn to cook, when there was magic to learn?
Of course, then he left his home, and he''d had to survive on his own. He regretted not knowing how to cook, then all he had to eat most of the time was stale bread, or oversalted stew, which tended to happen every time he tried to cook.
Part of the problem was that he wasn''t brave enough to try cooking anything besides stews. At least with a stew, he could just throw everything into a pot.
He''d only actually learned how to cook when he''d joined Sev and the others. The rotating cooking schedule meant that he had to be the one to cook for the party every so often, and none of them were willing to let him get away with cooking stew every single time.
Which meant he''d had to actually learn how to cook.
And he''d learned to enjoy it, too. There was something calming about it the process was easier once he knew what to do, and [Dagger Proficiency] actually helped him when it came to cutting meats and vegetables. Who would''ve thought!
Well, Misa had. But that wasn''t the point.
He nced up and over at Misa and Derivan just to see what they were doing while he was grilling rabbit meat, and saw that they''d found some sort of board game in one of the cupboards and that Misa was spiritedly arguing with him about the rules of that game. Sev was watching them, too, faint amusement painted on his face.
"It''s nice to actually have a room to ourselves again," Vexmented as he ted up the rabbit.
"You have no idea how much I''ve been holding back myints about sleeping in the caravan," Sev said, grinning back at him. "Trust me, I''m very d we have a room. Even if there''s some weird shit going on. Heck, I don''t care if this room is haunted."
"...is this room haunted?" Vex asked, suddenly worried.
"I''m pretty sure it isn''t. But you never know!"
"Sev," Vex said with a sigh, but he wore a faint smile. "Alright. Let''s have dinner, at least."
The dishes were ted up and served, with everyone except Derivan eating but he participated in conversation right alongside the rest of them. Vex resolved to figure out that one skill that allowed Derivan to share in another person''s taste. He wanted the armor to be able to try his food, dammit.
It was a good night for the four of them.
The next morning was... considerably more chaotic. Vex woke up in the early hours of the morning, as he usually did, and while he was going through the notes he''d made, he realized that something had changed since he''d woken up. There were sounds now, sounds of people talking andughing amongst themselves, like there was a full tavern of people below.
That shouldn''t have been strange, of course. But Vex was rtively sure that he hadn''t heard anything when he''d woken up, and he hadn''t heard any doors opening, either. The lobby had beenpletely empty when they arrived...
He frowned, and went to Derivan. The armor never slept, after all.
"I had not noticed it before you mentioned it," Derivan said, a hint of concern seeping into his voice. "But I believe you are right. I heard no sounds of people entering. Perhaps we should investigate."
It was early enough in the morning that Sev and Misa were still fast asleep; Vex sent a quick message to them through the system, to keep them apprised of what they were doing, and he and Derivan went down the stairs together. They stopped at the foot of the stairs, briefly stunned.
The inn was full. The lobby functioned as a tavern, and it was full of people of all kinds, from other lizardkin to orcs and even an elemental or two; every one of them wereughing and talking with one another like it wasn''t four in the morning, and Vex couldn''t help but wonder briefly if he was dreaming.
At least, until he saw the mana. He froze. The mana was thicker and denser here than he''d ever seen in Fendal and it was dancing and twirling here, like it was partying right alongside all the people in the inn.
"Are you seeing this too?" Vex asked, just to make sure. Derivan nodded, and Vex stared.
Strange.
71 - Book 2: Chapter 8: Breakfast (1)
71 - Book 2: Chapter 8: Breakfast (1)
Vex didn''t have all that much time to contemte the behavior of the mana before he was osted by what he assumed to be the owner of the tavern; arge, portly woman smiled brightly at him as she noticed himing down the stairs, and immediately walked over to greet them, a smile on her face.
"You must be the new guests!" she said cheerfully. "I''m Anyati, owner of the Sleeping Bird. I heard about you from Gensen. I didn''t think you''d be up so early, though! I hope we didn''t wake you up? I might have to rece the sound enchantments, if that''s the case..."
"Uh," Vex said, a little taken aback and wishing very desperately that he''d let Derivan take the lead. "I''m Vex. We didn''t get woken up, don''t worry. I just wake up early." And Derivan doesn''t need to sleep, he thought but didn''t say.
"You must be starving, then!" Anyati said, and she took Vex by the arm immediately, leading him over to a conveniently empty table that the lizardkin could almost swear wasn''t there before though he was frazzled enough that he couldn''t really tell. "Sit, sit, I''ll get you two some warm porridge."
"We don''t need..." Vex started, but the woman was like a whirlwind; she''d no sooner sat them at the table than disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Vex staring awkwardly after her. He blinked once, then turned to Derivan, who was sitting politely in his seat and looking vaguely bemused. "Was this table always here?"
"I believe so," Derivan said, amusement briefly flickering into his voice. "Though this Anyati could tell me that it wasn''t, and I imagine I would believe her. She does not leave much space to doubt."
"You got that right!" someone over at the next table yelled, and the whole tableughed along with her. Vex exchanged nces with Derivan, a little surprised that they''d been heard over the noise in the tavern at all. "That''s our Anyati!"
Vex was honestly starting to feel a little overwhelmed.
Derivan seemed to recognize this, however, and took over for him. "If I may ask," the armor said curiously. "Where did you alle from? The inn was empty when we came earlier."
"What kind of a question is that?" the woman he''d asked responded, grinning at him. "You''re the ones from out of town! Where are you from?"
Derivan seemed thrown off by the question. He blinked once, eye-lights flickering within his armor as he considered the question. "We are from the Guild," he settled on saying after an awkward pause. "Though we have spent most of our time housed at the outer Elyran branch town, between Elyra and Anderstahl."
"Y''all need to name your towns," the woman snorted, but she grinned at him, reaching out to shake his hand, then Vex''s. "Good to meet you, though. I''m Henna. My friends here are Visyen and Noram."
She gestured to the two people seated at her table one of them an orcish woman who greeted them with a half-wave-half-salute, and the other a young lizardkin that was not unlike Vex, though he had blue scales instead of green. He was taller, too, and seemed to be trying to sink into the wall.
"Noram''s shy," Henna added with a conspiratorial whisper, winking at them both. Her lizardkinpanion managed to muster up a half-hearted re.
"I am not," he said. "I just... don''t handle taverns well. You know that."
Indeed, Noram seemed more nervous than either of his twopanions. His tail was stiff and coiled around the leg of his chair, and he''d pushed his chair back as far as possible so that his back was against the wall. Vex could sympathize, but...
"Are you alright?" he asked, just in case, and Noram''s gaze darted to him before he rxed by a fraction. He sighed and nodded.
"I''m fine. It''s just... taverns are loud," Noram said, shaking his head slightly and looking into the air. He let out a frustrated sigh. "And you won''t understand this, but the mana here is behaving strangely."
"He''s been going on about that for weeks," Henna said with augh and a shake of her head. "Poor guy. He''s the only mage around that thinks the mana''s acting weird. We think he caught something on ourst outing. We''re adventurers too, you know, or we''re going to be. Just need to sign up."
Visyen finished her drink with a burp, and grinned at them. The orc seemed to be some sort of mage ss, too, though Vex was well aware that appearances could be deceiving. "There''s no mana here," she said. "Dunno what''s up with Noram. We think he got hit by some blueweed gas on ourst dungeon expedition."
"I did not," Noram insisted, looking upset.
"Um," Vex said. He looked around at the rest of the people in the tavern they were talking amongst themselves, and not really paying attention to the group in the corner, though they did get curious looks every now and then. He paused awkwardly, trying to figure out how to exin that he, too, could see how the mana was behaving.
And so could Derivan, for that matter.
"I do not think he is hallucinating," Derivan offered, seeing that Vex was getting a bit stuck on his words, and the lizardkin shot his friend a grateful look. "We see the mana here acting up, too."
"What?" Visyen frowned, then double checked; her eyes glowed blue for a moment as she channeled more power into her own version of [Mana Sight], and then she shook her head. "I don''t see anything. Same skill variant, right? [Mana Sight]?"
"[Advanced Mana Sight]," Vex said.
"Intermediate," Derivan added, foregoing the full name. Visyen frowned, and nced at Henna, who shrugged; Noram, meanwhile, looked absolutely vindicated.
"I told you I didn''t just forget my cloth!" he said.
"Yeah, yeah," Visyen said, in a dismissive sort of way that made Vex frown just slightly. "But that doesn''t exin the discrepancy here. I don''t see a drop of mana in the air. And I''ve got the intermediate variant as well, so it can''t be the skill. Are you sure you two didn''t inhale some blueweed?"
"I do not" Derivan began, and Vex realizing what his friend was about to say quickly interrupted.
"Neither of us have been near any kind of blueweed," he said. "And some of our skills that rely on ambient mana are acting up, so it''s definitely real."
"Huh," Visyen said. Then she shrugged, calling for another mug of beer. "Whatever. Itt''s none of my business."
"It''s probably not that much of a problem, right?" Henna said, looking apologetic. Noram, meanwhile, was quite understandably looking increasingly upset.
"Something''s wrong, I''m telling you," he insisted, and then he looked pleadingly at Vex and Derivan both. "They don''t usually just dismiss me like this. You gotta reason with them. We need to look into it, or something."
"Noram," Henna said, a note of warning in her tone.
"He''s right," Vex said suddenly, surprising both himself and the others at the table, judging by the startled looks they all cast him. Derivan seemed to smile at him, though, if the slight tilt of his head and the flickering in his eyes was any indication. Feeling emboldened, Vex continued, "I don''t think we should be ignoring mana fluctuations like this. This is the kind of thing you only see when..."
Vex paused mid-sentence, suddenly struck, and Derivan nced at him in askance. Vex narrowed his eyes, thinking.
"This is the kind of thing you only see during things like dungeon formations," he said, finishing the thought.
Derivan paused and stared at him. Noram''s eyes went wide. Henna and Visyen both didn''t react, save to look slightly confused.
It didn''t make sense. There couldn''t have been a dungeon formation going on the system sent notifications when a dungeon was forming, and they only formed from mana nuclei to begin with. For a formation event to happen here would necessitate that the town be sitting on top of a nucleus without anyone being aware of it, and that was an absurd thought.
Maybe something simr, then? A simr process, though Vex couldn''t think of anything else that led to this sort of behavior in the mana from all the literature he had read; there were some esoteric monsters that could cause simr fluctuations in ambient mana, but none on this scale. As far as he could tell, the strange behavior was present all throughout the town.
"We can''t be in the middle of a dungeon formation," Noram argued, but he seemed like he was arguing to convince himself, and not because he believed what he was saying. "We''re not on a Nucleus. That''s not how dungeon formations work."
"I know that," Vex said. "But it doesn''t have to be a dungeon formation. Just something simr."
"You guys are being ridiculous," Visyen snorted, rolling her eyes. Henna looked a little more apologetic.
"I think maybe my team should get some sleep," she said. "We had a pretty long night, you know."
"No, I want to talk about this. I need to talk about this," Noram said, and then he focused intense eyes on Vex. "You two can go sleep if you want. I need to figure this out."
Henna frowned at him, then sighed. "Can''t force you to do anything, I guess," she said. "Youing, Vis?"
"Course," Visyen said, finishing her drink and mming it down on the table. She grunted, looking over at Vex and Derivan. "I think figuring this out is gonna be a waste of your time," she said bluntly, then hesitated. "But it was nice to meet you. You guys seem pretty cool. Let us know if you find out something important, yeah?"
Noram''s brows had furrowed a bit while she spoke, but he seemed to rx a bit when she said it was nice to meet them; he''d been expecting a fight, or something along those lines.
"She''s... not usually so aggressive," Noram said apologetically, looking after his friend as she stormed up the stairs. Vex supposed, if he had to be fair, she wasn''t really storming; maybe that was just the way she walked. Noram walked over to sit at their table, though he kept his distance from the two of them, still seeming a bit shy.
"She seems nice," Vex said, and he meant it. She didn''t need to add on thatst part; she''d done it only because she realized she wasing off too overbearing. Beside him, Derivan nodded, and Noram let out a relieved chuckle.
"She can be angry," Noram said. "But she usually means well. It''s just, I''ve tried to talk to other people about this, and no one else wants to."
Vex exchanged nces with Derivan. "Think it''s an infolock?"
"I do not know," Derivan said, then hesitated. "But... perhaps. The signs are simr."
"What''s an infolock?" Noram asked, watching the both of them, and Vex quickly exined; when he was done, Noram''s face was considerably paler.
"That''s an existential crisis waiting to happen," he muttered. He frowned. "But then why am I excluded from it?"
"I don''t know," Vex said.
"The rules are still unclear to us," Derivan added. "But it seems that you are excluded from the lock if you are involved in some way in its creation."
"I but I didn''t do anything!" Noram said. His eyes flicked left and right once, though, and Derivan seemed to catch on to the movement quickly; the armor leaned forward slightly, but when Noram flinched he moved back, evidently not wanting to intimidate the young lizardkin too much.
"You may not have realized it," Derivan said, his voice gentle. "Your friends mentioned yourst dungeon expedition? When was that?"
"It was weeks ago," Noram said, but he looked stricken. "And this started happening after we came back... I didn''t think anything I did was rted, I swear."
"Did something happen in the dungeon?" Vex asked, worried. The timing a few weeks ago that was around the time they''d ''broken'' the dungeon they were exploring. There were messages sent out too, about how fragments of that dungeon had been scattered into existing ones.
"No," Noram said quickly, and then sagged a little bit. "Yes. Maybe? I don''t know. It was weird. I got separated from the others at one point, so if what you''re saying about infolocks are true, it has to have happened then. But nothing weird happened. I just opened a door, and then I was back with the others."
"No system notifications?" Vex asked.
"None," Noram said, shaking his head.
72 - Book 2: Chapter 9: Breakfast (2)
72 - Book 2: Chapter 9: Breakfast (2)
Noram was looking around anxiously, in a way that felt rather painfully familiar to Vex. It reminded him of himself, but also... "Do you think all this is my fault? Some people are acting weird. I don''t know if the mana changes caused it, but..."
"You opened a door," Vex said, shaking his head, and trying not to think about his little brother. He offered Noram an encouraging smile. "We don''t even know what that did yet, if it did anything. But maybe you can"
"Porridge!" Anyati announced, the innkeeper bustling over and startling both Vex and Noram; Derivan was as stoic as ever. Two heavy bowls of porridge were mmed onto the table in front of them; it smelled heavenly, and Vex''s mouth began watering just from the sight of it. It came with crunchy pieces of fried dough on top and thick slices of meat, sprinkled with just the right portion of greenery
Noram was staring, too, and he looked like he was starving. Vex hesitated, but before he could say anything, Derivan seemed to notice, and spoke up.
"My armor negates the need for food," the armor said. "Would you like my meal instead?"
"I I couldn''t do that," Noram said, but he looked like he desperately wanted to. "I mean, are you sure? It''s not like I haven''t eaten, it''s just I''m still hungry, and I don''t really know why..."
"I am sure," Derivan said, and nudged the bowl over to Noram. Vex couldn''t help but smile slightly at the sight.
It didn''t take long for Noram to begin devouring the bowl like he was starving. He took the first bite like he was being cautious of his food, but the next ones came more and more rapidly, until he was practically shoveling porridge into his mouth; Vex took more polite sips of his own meal inparison.
It was delicious. But he wondered if it meant anything that the food Noram had eaten apparently hadn''t been filling.
"Maybe you can show us where the dungeon is," Vex said, continuing his earlier thought as they ate. "It''s not very far, is it?"
"It''s not," Noram said, pausing for a bit so he could wipe off some of the porridge that had gotten on his nose. "Uh. It''s pretty close. It''s a small, low-level dungeon. Doesn''t usually give much in terms of rewards; we just use it to try to level. Not much sess so far, either."
"What level are you?" Vex asked curiously, then nched a little as he realized the faux pas he''d made. "Um, you don''t have to answer that. I was just wondering."
"We''re around level twelve," Noram said with a slight shrug. He didn''t seem embarrassed about it, or bothered by the question. "We figured we wanted to at least get past ten before applying to the Guild, you know?"
"The Guild doesn''t really have a level requirement," Vex said. "You don''t have to do that."
"I know," Noram said. He looked down slightly. "We just wanted to prove to ourselves that we could do it, too, you know? The other jobs around here are all farming and taking care of the town, and those are important, but we wanted..."
He trailed off a little bit, looking embarrassed, and dove back into his porridge. Vex exchanged nces with Derivan.
"You do not want glory," Derivan said, cocking his head slightly. "But you want... something more than this town?"
"Yeah, exactly," Noram said. He sighed he''d finished about half of his food, at this point, and was finally starting to slow down. He looked around, as if to check if anyone was listening to them, and then lowered his voice and spoke again. "And Fendal is low on mana crystals, too. They won''t admit it, but the supplies from Elyra are dropping. We''re going to need more, and we want to try to help farm more."
"Why not just farm at a Nucleus?" Derivan asked.
"It''s normally less dangerous than a dungeon," Vex added.
Noram grimaced a little at the question. "There aren''t any nearby. We''d have to travel further out, and there''ve been attackstely. Monsters and bandits. A low-level dungeon is actually safer."
"The bandits shouldn''t be a problem anymore, at least," Vex said, but he frowned a little at the mention of monsters. "When you say monster attacks, do you mean the goblins that have been raiding Fendal?"
"Among others," Noram said with a nod. "The goblins are just the closest ones. There are some slime-insect colonies further out that are almost Silver ranked. Elyra said they would send out one of their elites to take out the colonies, but we haven''t heard anything about that since."
"That is... concerning." Derivan nced at Vex, who sighed.
"It''s not unusual for Elyra, I don''t think," the lizardkin said, ufortable. "I don''t like it, but if one of the noble houses called in to use the elites, they''d get priority."
"It doesn''t matter," Noram said, and Vex opened his mouth to argue it very much did matter but the younger lizardkin looked... tired. He shut his mouth again. "Let me help you guys out. I know I must be pretty low levelpared to whatever you guys are at, but... I want to help. Please. Especially if I caused this."
There was a small pause, there, while Vex considered the danger, and the pleading look on the young lizardkin''s face. He''d even stopped eating his porridge.
"If the dungeon is low level," he said slowly. "And we make sure we don''t get separated."
"I promise it is. All the enemies are less than level ten. I can handle them," he said. "And... I want to know more about how professional adventurers do things. I think it''s important."
"What about your friends?" Derivan asked. "Would they being as well?"
"I... can talk to them," Noram said. "But I don''t know if they will. They think chasing this is a waste of time. And experience gain is really bad if you''re with high levels, so..."
Noram sighed and went back to finish off his porridge Vex was still only about halfway done, and surreptitiously channeled a bit of fire magic back into his bowl to warm it up a bit.
After a moment, though, Noram spoke up. His tail was still wrapped nervously around the leg of his chair, and he was tapping his foot; it was like what he did when he was nervous, Vex recognized. Heck, he was nervous right now, and his tail had already subconsciously begun to curl around the leg of the table
Derivan seemed to recognize this and reached out again, calmly cing a hand on Vex''s once more, and the lizardkin felt his face grow warm. The armor''s hand felt warm against his own, though he was just made of metal; he wasn''t sure if that was his imagination... His tail, though, rxed and spooled down onto the floor instead.
"Can we... change the subject?" Noram asked, oblivious to what was going on between the other two. He''d finished off thest of his food, and now was tapping the spoon on the edge of his bowl. "I want to know more about adventuring. Um. If you don''t mind. What kind of adventures have you had? Did you fight any crazy monsters?"
Vex blinked.
He hadn''t expected that. But Noram''s eyes were bright and interested, if a bit nervous; he''d wanted to ask this question from the beginning, but he''d only mustered up the courage after being treated like an equal.
He smiled a bit. "We''ve had some pretty crazy adventures," he said. "So crazy I think I should start with one of the tamer ones."
"What!" Noram seemed to forget his nervousness for a moment; he leaned forward and made the most pleading eyes Vex had ever seen a lizardkin manage
except for his little brother. Vex swallowed back the sudden swell of emotion, and managed to smile at the younger lizardkin. His brother was fine, he was sure. He had time to get him out.
"please," Noram was saying, and Vex blinked and refocused.
"Fine, fine," he said, injecting just a touch of yfulness into his voice, and he could swear that the other lizardkin wiggled in his seat.
...He did the same thing, sometimes, so he supposed he couldn''t really judge.
"There was this one time I convinced my team to go explore some old ruins," he said, his voice low and soft he leaned in like he was trying to keep a secret, and Noram leaned in too, almost instinctively. "You know how there are all those ruins about, right? The ones that are said to have ancient magic secrets?"
"Yes," Noram said, nodding rapidly; he looked like he was holding his breath. Vex couldn''t help but chuckle slightly.
"The one we went to was trapped," he said. "We didn''t know what we were dealing with at the time. But have you ever heard of runic circlesing to life?"
"They can do that?" Noram asked, his eyes wide. He was a mage himself, so he no doubt was imagining what that meant his hand tightened around his wand, almost like he was getting ready to defend himself.
"They''re not supposed to be able to," Vex said with a chuckle. "But they could there. We still don''t really know why. The ruins were littered with runic circles, and some of them were designs for new spells but some of them, if you tried to draw them and channel mana into them? You''d be attacked by a living manifestation of mana."
"Whoa," Noram said. Vex blinked, holding back augh. When had the lizardkin gotten out a notebook? "How did you beat them?"
"I figured out how they worked," Vex said with a grin. He was genuinely proud of this particr story neither Misa nor Derivan had been able to fend off the circles, since they werergely ephemeral things, creatures of mana that followed them around and sted spells at them. "They were slightly modified versions of the spells they could cast. There was a sort of runic program attached to it; the circle as a whole resists mana maniption, but you can still tear apart that attachment point."
"But you said it doesn''t work outside the ruins?" Noram asked, still scribbling notes.
"Believe me, I tried," Vex said with a chuckle. "Derivan will remember it."
"He would not stopining about it not working," Derivan agreed, but his tone was fond and affectionate. "It was cute."
"It was not!" Vexined.
"We all agreed," Derivan said whispering conspiratorially to Noram, who nodded seriously and began taking notes
"You''re not actually taking notes on that, are you?" Vex asked, groaning.
"Course not," Noram said,ughing. He seemed morefortable with them, at least he grinned, and flipped the notebook around to show them. It was just a list of notes about the ruins, and a small diagram for what he thought the runic circle might look like.
It was astonishingly urate, actually.
"I''ve got notes on what the circles looked like," Vex said, trying to gather himself. "I can share them with you, if you like."
"I would love that!" Noram said. He said it maybe a little too excitedly some of the other tables turned around to look at him, and he blushed and sat back down in his chair. "I mean, I would love that. Thank you."
"He is giving you quite the honor," Derivan said gravely. "To this day, Vex will not show me his notebooks."
Vex squeaked. "I have a good reason for that!" he argued, though he really didn''t. He just couldn''t let Derivan see his notes.
...Or Misa. Or Sev.
He couldn''t let Noram see his notes, now that he thought about it; he''d ask questions about the sketches.
...He could copy the circles out. That would work.
"I am sure," Derivan said, sounding amused, and Vex groaned.
73 - Book 2: Chapter 10: Interminable Interviews
73 - Book 2: Chapter 10: Interminable Interviews
"Huh," Sev said, ncing through his messages. He nced at Misa they were having breakfast together in the room, having decided that the suddenly crowded tavern downstairs was not for them.
Well. More urately, Sev had decided that the crowded tavern wasn''t for him, and Misa had opted to eat with him so he didn''t have breakfast alone. Which was a gesture he appreciated, really.
"Looks like we''ll be splitting the party?" Misa asked, ncing through her own messages, and Sev nodded.
Vex had sent him an update through the system, informing him both about what had happened downstairs and who they''d talked to, as well as the various suspicious circumstances they''de across. The fact that only one mage could see the mana behaving oddly in town was strange enough.
Then there were the other things. The mention of a dungeon, albeit a low-level one. Vex shared his concerns about the behavior of mana and whether or not it was potentially rted to dungeons, or to a dungeon formation.
He added on that no one had technically actually answered the question of where they''de from overnight even Noram, when asked, seemed to frown a little bit and then said he couldn''t remember. Everyone else deflected from the topic. Then there was the matter of food, and how Noram had said he hadn''t actually felt full from eating until he''d had porridge with them.
That part in particr, Vex had noted, was strange but it was a minor sort of strangeness, and he didn''t know what it could point to. He mentioned it anyway for the sake ofpleteness. Sev wasn''t quite sure what to make of it; he certainly hadn''t noticed anything odd with their food, though he made sure to cast a quick [Purify Food and Water], just in case.
"Any ideas what''s going on?" Sev asked, raising a brow at Misa, and she shrugged and shook her head.
"Not a fuckin'' clue," she said. "But I''m thinking my mom might. I sent out a couple messages so she can get a few people ready to help me scout out these goblin raiders."
"Meanwhile I have to get ready for a day of socializing," Sev grumbled, and Misa grinned at him.
"Consider it training," she teased.
"I''m already the leader of the party!" Sevined. "I don''t need diplomacy training!"
"Funny, you''re whining like you do."
"Misa," Sev huffed, and Misaughed.
"You''ll be fine," she said, giving him a more genuine smile. "You always get worried about talking to people. We picked you as the party lead for a reason. I get too aggressive, Vex is too nervous, and Derivan doesn''t like using a lot of words and doesn''t really folllow most customs."
"So you admit you''re too aggressive," Sev said. Misa narrowed her eyes yfully at him.
"Don''t push it."
Breakfast was a simple affair Sev had cooked up some pancakes with the ingredients in the pantry, and after their meal the two of them went about their days. Vex and Derivan, they were sure, would be fine; the two were headed out to a low-level dungeon withpany. Sev told them to call on him if there was any trouble and healing was needed, though, and he made ns to head over once he''d finished questioning people about the goblin raids. That wouldn''t take too long, he figured.
How very, very wrong he was.
The problem with a task like "go and ask people questions" was that "people" turned out to be a prettyrge variable. The first person he''d decided to ask about the raids had been Anyati and he still hadn''t managed to extract himself from the conversation.
"And they broke all my good pans!" the womanined. "Can you believe that? Came into the inn and smashed them right up. Didn''t even take anything. What''s the point of that!"
She was bustling about the kitchen while she was talking, cooking meals for the surprisingly many hungry customers outside not all of them even looked like they were from Fendal. There was a table of water elementals sitting in the corner, their thin, wavering forms sshing harmlessly against the wood. It didn''t seem to actually soak into the wood, either. Elementals were a rarer sort, so Sev was surprised to see a number of them apparently traveling.
And the rest of the tavern''s visitors... well, there were plenty of the moremon species he''de to expect lizardkin, orcs, humans. But there were some of the rarer species, too. Some of them he''d never seen or heard of before, even.
There was a table where a lone crystal floated above a seat, very asionally making a ting, which appeared to trante into a request for a drink Sev wasn''t sure how they were drinking, exactly, except that alcohol seemed to vanish within a certain vicinity of them.
There was a table where a man that appeared to be made entirely out of nts and vines was sitting. He was devouring, perhaps a little frighteningly, a te that was stacked high with steak the vines and petals on his head opened up to reveal razor-sharp teeth and an interior maw that seemed like it led straight into a void, and the steak disappeared into it, with the nt-man barely chewing. Not for the first time, Sev wondered about the food shortage, and how bad it really was.
There was yet another table where three kobolds were chatting animatedly between one another, which wasn''t particrly unusual except for the fact that kobolds were generally considered a ''monster'' by the system. No one was giving them a second nce, though, and Sev mostly wanted to meet them, because good god, they were small and cute. He was d he''d never faced off a kobold he was pretty sure he''d refuse to fight them on principle.
"And!" Anyati said, and Sev blinked; he''d forgotten she was still talking. "One time they raided the town just to scream really loudly in the center of the town! They were ranting about... eh, I don''t know. But it was very disruptive," she said, huffing.
"That doesn''t seem... bad, though," Sev said, phrasing his words carefully.
"It''s terrible!" Anyatiined. "How am I supposed to get business done with goblins yelling outside my inn!"
Sev decided that he wasn''t going to get anything that was actually useful out of her, and moved on. She hadn''t seemed explicitly angry about the goblins, at least; frustrated with the raids, certainly, but she''d never mentioned any great harm that they''d done and didn''t really seem to care about them beyond wishing that they''d be less disruptive when they raided.
But that didn''t really match up with what they''d been told. Gensen had mentioned the goblins stealing from the mana crystal stores; Anyati had mentioned nothing of the sort, only that they''d been loud and disruptive.
And that trend was consistent, he woulde to find. Or rather, it was consistently inconsistent.
He asked a man at a flower shop what he thought of the goblin raids, and the man had immediatelyunched into a full-on rant, just like Anyati. He was another one of the nt-people that Sev had never seen before, and hisint was that the goblins would always raid in the middle of the night; they were the stealthiest creatures he''d ever seen in his life. He''d wake up in the morning to find his flowers half-chewed on.
"I can just grow them back," the man, whose name was apparently Seed-nter Sev didn''tment on the name said. "But it''s a waste of mana! And I shouldn''t have to do it in the first ce."
"We''re going to try to figure it out," Sev said, trying to project reassurance into his voice. "Have you heard anything about them stealing from the mana crystal stores? Or being loud and disruptive?"
"What?" Seed-nter frowned at him. "No, I didn''t hear anything about that. I didn''t even know we had mana crystal stores."
"So they just... sneak around at night? And chew on your flowers?" Sev asked a little helplessly. Surely that wasn''t the only thing Seed-nter knew they did.
"Yes," the nt-man said, apparently still very convinced that that was, in fact, the primary goal of the goblins.
"We''ll figure out what''s going on," Sev said with a sigh. "You take care, alright?"
"Are you sure you don''t want to buy some flowers?" Seed-nter said, leaning forward. He brandished a single flower that looked a little bit like a rose, though the center of it twisted off into several smaller roses. They were a pale blue, matching the color of his robes remarkably well. "These ones would look great on you. They match your eyes."
"My eyes are ck," Sev pointed out, amused.
"They''re a very dark brown," Seed-nter said, acting affronted, but he seemed to grin in his own strange way the petals and vines on his head spread open wide, revealing the same razor-sharp teeth that he''d seen back in the tavern. "And I happen to think pale blue matches very well with dark brown."
"Or it happens to match my robes and you''re just trying to sell me flowers," Sevmented with augh. "But I''ll take it."
And he did. Seed-nter was kind enough to pin the flower on his robe for him, too, a small burst of magic causing two thin thorns to grow out of the flower and stick to the fabric of his robe; it wouldn''t actually damage the fabric, he was assured, although Sev was a little doubtful of that im. It didn''t really matter, though; Sev wasn''t particrly attached to the integrity of his robes.
The florist-merchant waved him goodbye after extracting a promise from him that he''d return, and Sev began to search for the next person to question.
The pattern remained the same. Everyone knew about goblin raids; none of them seemed to agree on what the goblins did. They all agreed on the time, but never on what the goblins did or where they were. On top of that, they all seemed to have very specific, personal grievances when it came to the goblins; it was never that it disrupted the town, it was that it disrupted some aspect of their personal lives, or their personal business, or else just something they cared about.
Which was... certainly a pattern. Sev wasn''t sure what to make of it. He was almost concerned it was all just some sort of very borate prank, but he couldn''t imagine the sort of skills that would be needed to fool nearly everyone in a town.
The next step, then, was to speak to someone with a skill that could pierce illusions. Intuition-type skills, like Misa''s mother, or various forms of observation and mildly precognitive skills often given to people with
Sev went to look for the town''s guard captain. Hopefully, whoever they were, they''d be all business, and he could get the interview over with quickly so he could join Vex and Derivan and whoever it was they''d brought with them to the dungeon
"Oh, I''ll tell you about the goblin raids, alright," the guard captain told him when he finally found the man. He was an older man covered in heavy te armor, in sharp contrast with the lighter leathers that his men wore. Sev couldn''t even see his face. "Let me tell you, back in my day"
Sev sighed.
74 - Book 2: Chapter 11: A Path Through Stone
74 - Book 2: Chapter 11: A Path Through Stone
Misa was,pared to Sev, having a far more interesting day.
The first thing she''d done was use her Anchor skill to call a copy of her mother and two of the guards over, ones that specialized more in tracking and hunting than necessarily in guarding the town. She gave them a chance to limate themselves to the strangeness of having two bodies while she spoke with her mother, who was having no such problems.
They were still in the privacy of the inn, anyway, so the two guards could bump into the walls all they wanted.
Though it was pretty funny.
"This ce is strange," Charise said, her brows furrowing slightly. She ran her fingers over the wood of the walls. She frowned, nced at Misa, and took a step away from her then tapped on the wood again, her expression contemtive. "It doesn''t feel entirely here, but it''s more solid in some ces than others."
"The fuck does that mean?" Misa asked, earning a scowl from her mother, and she raised her hands in surrender. "I''m just worried!"
"I am too," Charise admitted. "But I don''t think it''s bad. It just feels... different. It''s hard to say until we know a little more about what''s going on."
No answers yet, then. Misa was forced to ept that with a nod, though it was a little tense. For all that there wasn''t much they could do with that information, a part of her still worried...
But no. She was going to trust that the others could take care of themselves, and focus on her own task.
Which was tracking down the goblin raiders.
"Are you guys set up?" she asked, ncing at Vro and Juni the two guards her mother had brought with her. Juni was a half-orc woman like herself, and was grinning at her as she bounced up and down on her feet; Vro, on the other hand, was a surly-looking older man who mostly seemed eager to get this over with.
"This is so cool," Juni said. "Can we do this more often?"
"Any idea where we should start?" Vro asked politely, pointedly ignoring Juni''s question.
"I don''t actually know," Misa said. Sev hadn''t been able to find out, either, though she''d been periodically messaging him so far his interviews hadn''t yielded much information. No one had actually seen the goblin raidersing and going from any particr direction.
"Then we''ll have to circle the town instead," Vro said, letting out what sounded suspiciously like a long-suffering sigh. "If we''re lucky, we''ll find something the goblins left behind. We have some skills that will help, but they might not be enough, depending on how long ago this was."
Misa raised an eyebrow, interested. "What kind of skills?"
Vro gave her a look. "I know your reputation. Not today, Misa."
Her mother smirked at her, and Misa did her best to scowl in response though she couldn''t help the slight grin that edged on the side of her face.
Surprisingly, it didn''t take them too long to find something, once they got out of the inn. They''d barely walked out of town when Vro stopped, frowning.
"Something''s pinging my skills," he said, hesitant.
"Already?" Charise nced sharply at him.
"It''s not usually this good." Vro frowned slightly, ncing into the air like he was staring at his status screen. "[Tracking Instinct] is supposed to just elerate the process of me spotting things I would normally spot. This is the first time I''m getting a direction."
"I mean, that doesn''t sound like a bad thing," Juni said brightly.
"It''s different." Vro folded his arms. "And different can be dangerous."
"Bah," Juni scoffed. "Point me in the right direction, old man. I''ll find the thing!"
"I''m not" Vro sighed.
While they walked, with Vro leading the way, Misa gave her mother an amused raise of the brow. "Are they always like that?"
Charise smiled. "Vro''s practically adopted Juni," she said. "He just won''t admit it. And Juni''s going to keep calling him ''old man'' until he does."
It was still early in the morning, and so they had plenty of time to find what they needed. Misa wouldn''t have minded if they''d taken much longer; the ins that surrounded Fendal weren''t exactly interesting, but it had been a long time since she''d been able to just go on a walk with her mother.
And yet, right as she was about to strike up a conversation...
"I found something!" Juni pointed excitedly at a clump of bushes that looked identical to all the other bushes nearby even Vro looked confused, although Misa noted that he seemed quite certain that Juni knew what she was talking about. He just wasn''t seeing whatever she was seeing. "There''s an underground passage here. Very well hidden."
Juni pushed the foliage to the side, revealing... ordinary dirt, as far as Misa could tell.
And then Juni poked her foot at it, and the dirt copsed into a passageway.
"What the fuck," Misa said tly, and then she stared at Juni. "Was that a skill? Or was that just hidden by magic?"
Juni grinned. "You sure you want to know?"
"Yes," Misa said bluntly, and Juniughed, sticking her tongue out at her.
"Yeah, I figured. It''s just hidden by a [Minor Earth Illusion]. I''m surprised they have that kind of magic at all. Minor elemental spells have some level of physical presence; most monsters just have the standard [Minor Illusion] variant, and those are pretty easy to spot."
Misa blinked. "That''s very specific."
"I learned it at tracking school."
"We didn''t have a tracking school."
"She learned it from me," Vro said tiredly. "Can we please just go? The goblins are clearly hiding in there. We can go in, clear them out, and be done with this."
Misa frowned. "Probably not how we''re going to do things," she said with some authority. For one thing, she wasn''t practiced with fighting with Vro and Juni, and certainly not with her own mother; it was always Orkas that had trained her, even if Charise was formidable in her own right.
For the other, it didn''t feel right to do this without her own team. And besides! The information they had was still iplete.
But not for much longer.
The inside of the tunnel was dank and musty and the worst part was that the tunnel was poorly lit at best. There were torches, certainly, of the everburning variety; Misa recognized the rune from the various times Vex had tried to show off the spell but those torches were few and far between, and set so far into the wall that the light they cast into the tunnel was barely a speck of light in what felt like a very long trail of darkness.
And the worst part was that the passageway was small, clearly built for goblins. They all managed to fit, but it was a tight squeeze at best; Misa had to bend over slightly for her head not to be scraping against the ceiling.
It was ufortable, to say the least. And she was the tallest of their group, so she was the only one that struggled with the ceiling of the tunnel quite like that.
The four of them walked alone the tunnel in a single file, expecting the path to begin to branch out but there were no branches or forks. It was just a straight tunnel. Juni frowned.
"There''s some kind of magic here," she said.
Misa froze, narrowing her eyes slightly. "Hostile?"
"No," Juni said, but she hesitated for a second, sniffing the air. "I don''t think so. It feels like spatial magic. It''s... spatialpression? I''m pretty sure it''s some variant of spatialpression."
"Hang on," Misa said. "Are you smelling the magic?"
Juni grinned. "It''s a skill. [A Nose For Magic]. Managed to learn it using some tips from Vro. Pretty cool, right?"
"I didn''t even know that was a thing you could do." Misa paused. "I don''t even know if Vex knows that that''s a thing you can do."
"It''s amon skill in that it''s technically easy to get it, but not a lot of people actually get it," Juni said. "Skill rarities are weird! But it''s pretty useful if you''re a tracker and you don''t have [Mana Sight], like me."
"You''ll have to teach me sometime," Misa said, and she meant it. Having a new skill could only help expand her repertoire, and the fact that it was a different way of detecting magic might mean she could cover for things that Vex didn''t spot
"You might not want to learn it," Juni said, and this time she looked embarrassed. "If there''s any strong magic around it''s usually impossible to stop sneezing."
Oh.
That made things a lot more awkward, didn''t it?
"Anyway, let''s keep going," Juni said, quickly getting over her own embarrassment. "We''re not too far now, I don''t think. The magic smells stronger ahead."
Misa, of course, couldn''t smell any such magic but both Vro and Charise seemed to agree, even though nothing about the passage had visibly changed. Misa put herself on guard, literally; [Guard Stance] flickered into activity as they ventured carefully into the depths of the tunnel.
And then they hit a dead end.
Except it wasn''t a dead end, of course. Juni reached out to tap it, and it crumbled away just like exit did; this time, when it crumbled away, Juni hissed and pulled back, because the light from the tunnel was spilling into a massive underground cavern in a way that was really quite obvious
But no one seemed to notice them. Obvious as it was, the tunnel they were in was just one light amongst many and there were many other entrances that all spilled into this enormous cavern dug deep into the middle of the earth. Below them, small enough to look almost like the specks of stars, glittered the lights of a bustling city.
Almost a kingdom.
"What the hell is this?" Misa said quietly. Her voice echoed, though thankfully it didn''t travel too far before it was just lost in the general noise.
There were buildings down there. Buildings of stone, lit with the light of everbright torches and some more sophisticated looking manamps. Small figures ran around below them, and a thin precipice of a path just outside the tunnel led down into the city proper; Misa didn''t need to look closer to be able to tell that goblins were far from the only species in this sprawling underground city.
"Perhaps we won''t be clearing them out," Vro said, and Misa gave him a deadpan look.
They were here to scout. Only scout. She wanted to figure out more about what was happening here, but she wanted Sev and Vex and Derivan with her, too; this was too big for them to explore on their own, and her vigers didn''t have the levels to back her up. Because there was something else that Misa was noticing about the citizens down below
All of them were monsters. Every single species she saw, she knew the system categorized as a monster.
And yet... not a single one of them had a systembel. No level. No species indicator.
Nothing.
[Guys,] Misa sent through the system. [You need to see this.]
75 - Book 2: Chapter 12: Doors
75 - Book 2: Chapter 12: Doors
Vex stared at the dungeon that Noram had led them to. "Are you sure this is it?" he couldn''t help but ask.
It was just... a hole in the ground. It sloped downwards, opening up into a cave of some sort, but it didn''t change the fact that it was one of the least impressive dungeon entrances Vex had ever seen and that was amongst even the low level dungeons he had visited before.
Those usually at least had a door.
"Yup," Noram said, sounding a little embarrassed. He even kicked a bit at the ground. Vex wasn''t sure why he was so embarrassed it wasn''t like he''d been the one to design the dungeon. "I know it doesn''t look like much, but it''s pretty big on the inside."
"Does this dungeon have a theme?" Derivan asked, which was probably a more practical question.
"Doors," Noram said. "The main room is just a hallway of doors. Every door inside leads somewhere different, though, and sometimes just touching a door will teleport you inside the room. That''s why I didn''t think too hard about opening one back when I got separated from the others. We got pushed into different doors by a trap."
"I can''t believe it''s door themed and it doesn''t even have a door for the entrance," Vexined, and Derivan chuckled, ruffling the frills on the back of Vex''s head. The lizardkin maintained his huff for as long as he could, which was a grand total of about two seconds, before he whined. "Derivann."
"Yes?" the armor asked him, his voice teasing.
"I can''t when you do that!"
"I believeining about things is Sev''s job," Derivan said, still sounding amused. "Perhaps it would help you to know that there are mana signaturesing from the doors within?"
Vex perked up, his dismay about the entrance to the dungeon immediately forgotten. Noram snorted out augh.
"You''re really into magic, huh?" the other lizardkin asked.
"Aren''t you?" Vex asked, blinking a few times. "You''re a mage."
"Yes, but actually getting your hands on spell scrolls is pretty hard if you''re not apprenticed or part of one of the noble families in Elyra," Noram said with a shrug, and Vex winced a little bit. Noram didn''t seem to notice. "It''s hard to really get excited about magic when all the good stuff is locked away from me. I''m hoping I can learn more when I join the Guild... Maybe I''ll find some cool stuff in some ruins, like you did."
Admittedly, Vex was one to get excited about ruins, as well, so he understood Noram''s excitement there but this was the same sort of thing! Dungeons had secrets, too; secrets that could be harvested for more magic. He was being a little too dismissive about magic, in Vex''s opinion.
"You can learn a lot from dungeons, too, not just ruins," he said. "And there are mentorship programs."
"From dungeons?" Noram looked a bit skeptical. "I don''t know about that. Aren''t they all about, I dunno, challenges and traps and stuff?"
"Sure," Vex said with a shrug. "But that doesn''t mean there isn''t anything you can learn from it. A lot of the time... Actually. Let''s go in. It''ll be easier to show you."
With that cue, they made their way into the dungeon. Derivan insisted on leading the way, of course, just in case.
True to Noram''s word, the dungeon seemed like it was just one long hallway, with an array of different doors alternating with each other on each side. Every door was unique, though, both in mana signature and in appearance. There were the standard doors made of wood, along with heavier-looking doors made of metal. There were doors that were barely doors at all, made of straw or clumped-together grass that was barely holding itself into the shape of a door, for all that it held the appearance of one.
And some of them were distinctly traps. It was obvious from the runic imprint on the doors, but that wasn''t something Noram would be able to see without the advanced version of [Mana Sight]; he would have to look at the flow of mana around it instead...
Which made this a good opportunity for teaching Derivan, too, actually. Vex flipped his own mana sight to the basic version, allowing the runic inscriptions to fade from his sight, and guided both Noram and Derivan to the first trap he spotted.
"This door''s a trap," Vex said. "Do you see the way the mana''s flowing around it?"
"It doesn''t look that different from the other doors," Noram said, frowning.
"I am unsure," Derivan said. "There is a confluence of mana at the center of the door, like with all the other doors, but this one has... there are more streams of mana leading into it than out of it,pared to the other doors."
"Exactly!" Vex beamed, even as Noram frowned and peered more closely at the door. "Even if you can''t see the runic inscription directly, you can still read how the mana flows to get an idea of what the door is doing. This one is storing more mana than it''s releasing it''s basically an explosive trap. If the rune gets triggered, it blows up like a shockwave."
The non-trapped doors, by contrast, usually had the same number of ''input'' and ''output'' streams of mana. The visual noise was enough that it had never been outright obvious to Noram, but he seemed grateful for being told how to read them; less chance of any of them triggering a trap in the future.
But with that quick lesson done...
"Can you show us to the door you mentioned?" Vex asked.
"The doors rearrange every time wee in here," Noram said, hesitating. "I can recognize it, it''s pretty distinct, but... This ce is a maze. It was a few corridors in, though."
Noram reached out, and after a quick nce at the flow of mana pulled open one of the glowing, white doors; it led down into another hallway. The doors, Noram quickly exined, worked like this: the white doors were doors into new corridors, and the other doors were either traps or would lead to challenge rooms of some sort. They''d never encountered a monster in the hallways themselves.
And so, for the next while, they just wandered the hallways. Vex kept track of which doors they went through, though Noram said that going backwards would alwaysnd them back at the entrance; it was more a safety measure than anything else.
He kept in contact with Sev and Misa, too. Sev told him about who he was talking to, and the strangeness that was species that he''d never seen before, the concentration of magical beings; Misa talked about the tunnel they''d found, and her mother''s suspicions about Fendal being not all there.
And then they found the door.
A small part of Vex had been worried that they wouldn''t find the door that opening it had triggered some condition that would erase it from the dungeon''s memory, or something like that. He''d heard of simr things happening in other dungeons. But no, this was definitely the door, and Vex knew it without a shadow of a doubt before Noram even pointed it out.
Because the door had the symbol of the Ashion house on it. The symbol of his family.
It was empty of any mana signature that he could detect, though, even flipping his Mana Sight back to the advanced version; it was, as far as he could tell, magically dead.
"The door looked like this the first time I saw it, too," Noram said. "No mana to speak of. It was one of the other reasons I was so sure it was safe. And nothing seemed to happen when I opened it..."
"But something did happen," Vex said softly. "You recognize that symbol, don''t you?"
"It''s one of the noble houses in Elyra, I think?" Noram said with a slight frown. "I don''t pay much attention to the nobles, sorry. Too stuck-up for me."
"Right," Vex said, opting not to tell Noram who he was, exactly. At least not yet. Maybe if it turned out they had to keep working with him, but that was a can of worms he didn''t quite want to open.
Derivan noticed his difort, though, and stepped closer to him almost protectively. One hand slipped into his own, and Vex felt his face warming again; he didn''t know what hade over the armor, considering how frequently he was now doing this, but it was... nice. Being near Derivan was alwaysforting.
He leaned in, almost subconsciously, into Derivan''s presence, and Derivan didn''t seem to mind at all.
"I think..." Vex paused, trying to gather his thoughts.
The door seemed like it was rted directly to him. There was a small possibility that it wasn''t, but there were other signs that it might be. The way the mana had acted when Derivan had tried to cast. The people Sev had spoken to...
Vex reached out for the door, and sure enough, a box appeared.
Activation of bonus room has failed. Insufficient data at this dungeon. Insufficient units of .
Safeguards failed. Rollback failed. Partial activation of bonus room A World Without A System> currently in ce within the limits of region H-72.
"Noram," Vex said, and the other lizardkin perked up a bit at hearing his name. "Is there a trend to these doors? What kind of challenge rooms do they usually open up into?"
"There isn''t really a pattern," Noram said cautiously. He could sense something was wrong, clearly; Vex had no doubt that his face was a little pale, and Derivan seemed to being to his own conclusions, from the way he was looking at the doors. "They''re all... rooms, I guess? Like most of the time they''re all ces that doors would lead to. Except the weird ones."
There was a door a little further back that he''d noticed seemed familiar the memory came rushing back to him now. He sprinted backwards, to both Derivan and Noram''s startled surprise, and they shouted as they ran to keep up with him. Vex was mostly hoping that he was wrong, because he wasn''t sure what he would do if he was right.
There was a door back there that looked a little bit like the door to their room at the Sleeping Bird inn. It wasn''t a trapped door, either. Vex pulled the door open
and stared at a nearly perfect replica of their room.
"The theme of this dungeon is doors," Vex said. "These doors lead to any ce that a door might lead to. But when you opened that door..."
"What is it?" Noram asked, looking worried.
"It was a door to another dungeon''s bonus room," Vex said. The words felt heavy; maybe heavier than they should have been, because he was now considering that all of this might be his fault instead; that bonus room had been based off of him, after all. "I think this dungeon copies doors, and the ces they lead to. But it couldn''t copy that bonus roompletely. It just tried."
"It could not create a world of its own," Derivan said out loud. He nced sharply back towards the door. "You are saying that the dungeon is creating an effect that is removing the influence of the system from this town."
"Pretty much," Vex said heavily.
"But everyone will get system sickness," Noram said, his face pale.
"They might not," Vex said. "Not if the room makes it so that the system never existed in the first ce. Not if it makes it so that the system doesn''t need to exist. It exins all the magical creatures, and the reason the magic is so upset with us; we''re not from this town. Our link to the system is stronger."
"But I have ess to the system, too," Noram protested, and Vex looked at him.
"Do you?" he asked.
Noram frowned. And then he frowned harder, like he was trying to call up his status screen but failing. His face went pale.
A message came in through the system, though Vex wondered if it was his imagination, or if the box seemed paler than usual.
[Guys,] Misa had sent. [You need to see this.]
76 - Book 2: Chapter 13: A City of Magic
76 - Book 2: Chapter 13: A City of Magic
Vex followed along behind Derivan, ncing cautiously at the walls of the tunnel around them. The system messages from the dungeon had been their cue to leave and meet up with Misa; they exchanged a few messages to make sure they were all on the same page, and Sev had been thrilled to finally have an excuse to extricate himself from all those interviews.
Noram wasn''t here, and neither were any of Misa''s people. Without the ovey of the system, there was no easy way for them to gauge how powerful the monsters down in the cavern were, and while they weren''t necessarily expecting hostility given the nature of the raids...
They were still more equipped to deal with danger. Vex had to promise Noram to keep in contact, though.
It hadn''t been long before they found themselves in the tunnels Misa had mentioned, but Vex had to admit that he was feeling uncharacteristically nervous.
They''d been suspicious, at first, about the way it had reacted when Derivan tried to cast and the armor was barely connected with the system to begin with. Their prevailing guess was that whatever the Magic stat did, it didn''t y well with the new systemless region they found themselves in. But if the reaction had been angry when Derivan had cast, then it had been outright hostile when Vex made his attempt.
It was a good thing they hadn''t encountered any monsters down in the door dungeon, really, because Vex''s spell had outright exploded in his face.
They were prepared for the possibility, so the spell he cast to test had been a weak one, and even then Derivan had to catch the lizardkin as he stumbled from the resulting explosion. Vex''s expression had been ashen. He''d always been close to magic. To have it actively fight against him...
''Distressed'' was a mild way to put it. But Derivan assured him that they would find a way to work around the problem, and he felt his unease fall back to the wayside, reced by a warmth in his chest.
There was definitely some animosity between mana and the system, though. That little experiment almost seemed to confirm it.
His distress was, at least,rgely forgotten as he approached the end of the tunnel, where Misa and Sev were already waiting. The sight of the massive cavern with a whole underground city was awe-inspiring, to say the least; Vex couldn''t stop himself from gawking at the sight for a whole minute before he eventually gathered himself, and that little bit of nervousness leaked back in.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" Misa asked. She looked worried part of her knew how badly Vex wanted to explore this new city, but she also knew Vex didn''t have his magic.
"Yes," Vex said with admittedly a little bit of trepidation. "I know I can''t cast magic right now, but I won''t be a burden."
"I''m not worried about you being a burden," Misa said with a sigh. "You pull your weight in more ways than just magic, you know? You don''t have to prove yourself or anything."
Vex hesitated. "I know," he said softly. "But anti-magic exists. This is a danger I''m going to have to deal with at some point. If it gets too dangerous down there, then we can bail, but I can still protect myself a little."
He gripped his dagger. Derivan looked at him, something like concern and protectiveness flickering in the light-purple light of his eyes, and Vex tried to ignore the way his heart fluttered. Misa was probably right in that it was past time he talked to the armor about his feelings...
...Not now. Not yet.
"Let''s go," he said instead, though Derivan looked at him curiously, like he''d noticed something. Misa sighed, but nodded, no doubt resolving to use her blocking skills to make sure Vex stayed safe. She lead the way into the cavern, and Vex couldn''t help but gape as he followed.
There must have been a secondary illusion over the entrance that he hadn''t noticed, because the moment he stepped through, the whole cavern burst into multicolored light.
Misa hadn''t mentioned the amount of mana here.
Which made sense, since she couldn''t see mana normally, and she hadn''t stepped through whatever illusionary filter was there at the entrance but if what Vex had seen back in the town was unusual, what he was seeing here was outright unheard of. The magic in the air went beyond simple, dancing streams; they turned into thick rivers in the air, weaving and twisting around with so much density that Vex was sure they were visible to even those without mana sight
"Whoa," Sev said, confirming his thoughts. "Is that mana?"
"Yes," Vex said, and winced a little bit as he toned down his own [Mana Sight]; the skill was making things a little too bright for him, on top of the natural brightness of the mana. "I''ve only ever seen mana this concentrated when dungeons are forming."
"Perhaps this is the natural state of mana," Derivan suggested. "If the system did not exist."
"I''m thinking more and more that all of this is," Vex said with a sigh. "Which makes me wonder what the point of it all is. The system''s clearly manipting mana, dungeons are at the center of this maniption in some way, and it''s outright harvesting gods..."
He nced at Sev, who shrugged. "Aurum is quiet today, and we''re not going to find anything out from standing around," he said. He hesitated for a moment. "...I''m a little worried about the guy. It might just be that I can''t talk to him while we''re... here."
"Let''s get going, then," Misa said, waving them forward impatiently.
The sheer concentration of mana diminished somewhat as they headed down the path set into the stone; it circled around the cavern, leading them on a curved path down towards the center. There were dozens of other paths that were the same, too, cut into the rock like a set of spirals going down into the city. Vex wondered if those paths led to other towns surely not. They would''ve gotten a lot more than just a report from Fendal had that been the case.
Then again, the whole town was clearly under some kind of natural infolock, so...
"There aren''t that many towns around here, are there?" Vex asked, worried. Sev nced at Vex, then followed his gaze to the paths circling around the walls of the cavern.
"No," he said cautiously. "But the path here had spatial magic in it, right? So this is pretty far away from Fendal."
"We''re going to have to do so much walking to check that out," Misa groused.
"We could also just ask," Derivan said calmly. They were approaching the floor of the cavern, now, which meant that they were also at the outskirts of the makeshift city at its center. Vex barely had the time to wonder at the arrangement of magical lights, many of which looked nothing like the runic inscriptions Elyra used to fuel its own lights there was some kind of rune painted on the floor, but thenguage was entirely different; nothing like the detailed circuitry Vex was used to before Derivan approached one of the many so-called monsters that were going about their days.
"Excuse me," he said politely, and the cockroach-like man he''d spoken to turned back to him, startled.
"You talkin'' to me?" he said. His voice was low, bordering on gruff; he hefted the groceries he was carrying onto a ridge on his hip.
"Yes," Derivan said. "I was wondering if you could tell us where the other paths lead. We are new here, you see." Derivan indicated the other spirals cut into the wall, and the other man peered at him, antennae dipping low over his eyes in a curious impression of a squint.
"They don''t go nowhere," he said gruffly. "Roads are sealed. No one knows why."
"We''re here," Misa pointed out.
"Roads are mostly sealed," he corrected himself with a sigh. "Go to the city hall if you want to talk about it. I ain''t the schrly type. Got some mages there trying to figure out the Roads. And take a shower. You guys stink."
With that, he started to walk off. "Thank you," Derivan called after him, trying to be polite, but he looked baffled. He turned to the others. "Do we... stink? I do not believe I am capable..."
"I can''t believe he just called us smelly," Misa said, looking offended.
"Let''s just go to the city hall," Sev sighed. "Again."
Vex frowned, looking around. The lights in the city were reminding him of something he remembered the version of himself that Misa had summoned, casting off meteors with a brush.
The symbols on the ground weren''t runes. Not as he knew them. They were more like miniature paintings in themselves...
He was walking forward before he even realized it.
"Uh, Vex?" Sev asked.
"Just give me a second," Vex said. "I wanna look at some of the lights. Did you see them? The runes they use down here are totally different. If there''s a whole new system I can use... maybe it''ll work better than system-assisted spells."
Sev raised an eyebrow, but he didn''t protest as the lizardkin scurried over to one of the so-calledmps they were effectively poles of solid light that extended out from a painted rune on the ground. Vex examined it closely, though there wasn''t all that much to look at, and he felt Derivan approaching him as well to stare curiously at the painted image.
"The material looks simr to the mana your [Ssh of Mana] skill generates," Derivan noted. "Do you think you can still use that skill?"
"Probably," Vex hedged. He wasn''t actually sure. "System skills are still working properly... Skills and spells are differentiated by mana usage colloquially, but they''re more nuanced than that academically. The ones that generate runes are the ones that are actually considered spells; everything else is a system skill that happens to cost mana. [Ssh of Mana] doesn''t generate a runic inscription, but I''m still kind of worried..."
He trailed off a little. Derivan was right, though, in that the rune he was looking at looked like it was painted out of mana, the exact same way things had looked when he was creating material to work with using the [Ssh of Mana] skill.
He grabbed a notebook out of his tailbag, making a quick sketch of the rune. It was nothing like the painting he''d made with Derivan, so many nights ago, modelled after his [Starry Night]. But there was still a certain beauty to it. It was made of long, swooping lines that looked almost like wings; the mana flowed into it from the sides and up through the center, filling out the rest of the image in a prismatic sheen before forming a glowing light pole.
A part of him was half afraid that his pencil sketch would be enough to trigger whatever magic there was here, but the mana stayed thankfully dormant he didn''t want to identally burn a hole through his notebook or anything.
"That exins some of the things I was confused about," Derivan admitted. "Do you think you can use these to cast, with the system disabled?"
"I need a brush," Vex said. "I think I should limit my use of system skills as much as possible, just based on what we''ve seen so far. Even if I can get away with using Ssh to generate the mana-paint, using [Delineate] to paint it might be a bit much."
"There are supply shops nearby," Derivan noted. "Perhaps we can look in those?"
Misa sighed, and nced at Sev. "We''re gonna get sidetracked by a shopping trip, aren''t we."
Sev shrugged and smiled a bit. "But look at Vex. He seems pretty happy."
Vex stuck his tongue out at Sev.
And yet... he couldn''t deny it. This was new. This was exciting. This was why he''de out to adventure in the first ce, or at least a part of the reason he''d done so.
The lizardkin took Derivan''s hand and outright dragged him towards one of the shops. It was the closest one, too; Vex hadn''t bothered looking through the shops particrly closely. All the nearby ones looked mostly the same, anyway, and were slightly dpidated for being near the city outskirts; the stone they were made of was worn and chipped, and the paint had peeled, but dammit, they were magic shops.
Actually, Vex paused right before he stepped into the shop. Was tbat why some of the lightmps were weaker than others? They weren''t all the same; some were dimmer than others. Maybe, like the paint on a shop wall could chip and peel, the runes could...
He needed a better name than runes. The system waspletely different. Glyphs?
"I''m gonna call the new runes glyphs," he decided, and then scribbled down a note about it in his notebook so he wouldn''t forget.
"Glyphs?" Derivan asked, and Vex beamed at the question.
"Look," he said, throwing himself practically entirely off course to drag the armor to a nearby failingmp instead of the shop he''d been about to walk into. Sure enough, he was right the glyph was damaged, the paint partially peeled. "The glyph is damaged, but the light''s still working, it''s just a bit weaker. Regr runic inscriptions don''t work like that a slight bit of damage either breaks the spell or alters its function in a very predictable way."
"But glyphs remain functional," Derivan said, and Vex nodded excitedly.
"It could change the face of enchanting," Vex said, and then he frowned slightly. "Although I''m not sure... hmm. Glyphs look like they function off of ambient mana, and outside of dungeons runic inscriptions usually have to be powered by personal mana or a mana crystal. Normally I''d say that saves on mana, but most cities don''t have that much in the way of ambient mana..."
He frowned, starting to mutter to himself. Derivan chuckled.
"Perhaps we can worry about thatter?" he offered. "There was a shop you wanted to go to."
"Right!" Vex brightened again, and grabbed Derivan''s hand to pull him into the shop. Misa nced at Sev.
"Think Vex is gonna tell him first?" she asked in a stage whisper, her tone amused.
"Nah. Derivan''s got Physical Empathy. I''m sure he''ll figure it out," Sev said, chuckling.
77 - Book 2: Chapter 14: That One Magic Shop
77 - Book 2: Chapter 14: That One Magic Shop
There was a small part of Vex that knew there was something bigger here to worry about. They had some of the answers, but they didn''t have all of them. The idea that a dungeon had tried to copy his bonus room, of all things, and that that had somehow leaked into the local area that exined some of what was going on.
But it didn''t exin everything. It exined the mana acting strange, and the appearance of magical creatures that acted as though they were simply part of the town. There was still the question of the strange behavior in the townspeople, the sudden appearance and disappearance of people in the inn...
And none of that told them how they could fix the situation. Maybe the only way to fix it would be to go on ahead to Elyra andplete the dungeon there, where the real bonus room would be.
Maybe.
But there was new magic here. Magic he''d never seen before magic he''d never even heard of. The glyphs he''d seen were nothing like the runic inscriptions he''d been taught, and they were nothing like any mage used to cast spells, as far as he knew. He was reminded of the glyphs he''d painted into the sky, back when Misa had summoned a copy of him. He wondered what path he would''ve needed to take to learn about them so much earlier in his life.
New magic was important. If he could understand this form of magic, he might be able to change everything. His family would have to listen to him, then, and he''d be able to pluck his little brother away from them; all of his siblings, even, if he could convince them to listen
"How may I help you?" A light, polite voice sounded, and Vex blinked as he nced up at the shopkeeper.
Quite literally up, actually. The shopkeeper was almost as tall as Derivan was, and even taller if you counted the feathery antennae. They were lithe and slender, but their true build was hidden in an enormous amount of fluff, and Vex resisted the desire to ask to pet it.
"I''m, uh, looking for some painting supplies," Vex answered. He nced around the shop, his eyes widening a little in wonder; for all that they were still on the city outskirts and the shop seemed old and unremarkable on the outside, it was warm and cozy within.
Part of it was the mana. The magic here was warmer, somehow, in a way that wasforting; it weaved in between every item in the shop. And the shop seemed to have almost everything Vex had chosen this one for being the closest one that seemed rted to magic with brushes visible through the window, but inside, there were all kinds of artifacts. There were small,plicated-looking mechanisms and a variety of gems; even small pieces of weapons and armor, lined somewhat haphazardly on the shelves.
The shopkeeper was watching him patiently. "What sort of painting supplies?" they asked, and Vex realized he''d gotten distracted. He flushed a bit.
"For something like the... light glyphs? Sorry. I''m new here."
"Ah! Are you a visitor from the Roads, perhaps?" The shopkeeper gave Vex a friendly smile. "I suppose I should have guessed. Things must seem quite different here. Your magic does not work the same way, if I understand correctly?"
"Yeah!" Vex perked up slightly, though a part of him wondered how the shopkeep could possibly have known. "We use runes, but they look different from yours."
"We call them Signs," the shopkeeper said with a chuckle. "But a glyph is a good name as well, I think. I would teach you a small lesson in magic, but s, I have been told I must charge for that, and that it is ''bad business'' to simply teach."
"I could pay," Vex said hopefully.
"If you are from the surface, you cannot," the shopkeeper said, though they spoke kindly. "We trade in mana slivers here fragments of mana that are deposited when any great act of magic is performed. We give to the mana, and it gives to us in return."
They paused, then chuckled. "Though perhaps that was not its intent, when it first began awarding them."
Vex had so many questions. "What kind of great acts of magic?" he asked, almost tiptoeing so he could lean in closer. Derivan watched him, though he was only peripherally aware of the fact, and let out a small, fond chuckle.
"Now that would be telling." The shopkeeper managed to smile with a sort of flourish at the end, sweeping their head forward so their antennae dipped down in a makeshift bow. They nced to the sides, as if checking to see if anyone was watching, and then leaned in to whisper. "New paintings, usually, or great new works of art. Sometimes it''s the discovery of new Signs, or simply two existing Signs beingbined in a new way..."
"You canbine them?" Vex said, his eyes wide. He flipped open his notebook again and began scribbling notes. "How?"
"Everyone has their own methods," the shopkeeper said with a light, airy sort of chuckle. "And the results are always slightly different. Some practitioners believe there exists an innate talent within people, but I think that is rather foolish. Whatever magic you create is yours; the biggest problem, I believe, is that people try to copy others.
"Magices in two parts. One part in the mana in the air, yes, the source of all things magical but the other partes from you. Your own interpretation of what magic is. What mana is. There are always rules, but the rules are yours, and yours alone."
There was a small silence after the shopkeeper spoke, where their words hung in the air like the stars in the sky; the way they spoke had a certain enchanting quality, though it didn''t seem magical in nature so much as just something that they truly believed. It resonated with the mana in the air, almost, like it was about to begin coalescing into a spell.
"That''s a beautiful thought," Vex said softly, but he was watching the mana in the air. "Do you cast with your voice, then?"
"Do I?" The shopkeeperughed. "Ah. Perhaps I have revealed too much."
"I''lle back and pay you some slivers when I get some," Vex said, determined, and the shopkeeper seemed to grin at him.
"Confident," they said cheerfully. "But I like that kind of confidence. Perhaps a free gift, to get you started on your journey? Or perhaps we could call it an investment, if you can truly gather slivers with your magic."
The shopkeeper walked purposefully through the shelves, their steps surprisingly light; despite their size, they didn''t make a sound on the admittedly creaky wood of the floor. They scanned the shelf of brushes carefully, before selecting one and presenting it to Vex with a flourish.
"I''ll skip the spiel about how it''s ethically sourced," they said cheerfully. Vex blinked.
"Do I need to worry about... ethically sourced paintbrushes?" Vex asked, sounding vaguely worried. He hadn''t known that was a thing he needed to worry about.
"Not when the Roads are down," the shopkeeper said with a wink, to Vex''s relief. "Take your time and experiment. It may take you weeks to understand what Signs are like, and even longer to get your first slivers. But if you truly love magic, you''ll find your path, just like I did."
"I don''t know how long we''ll be staying..." Sev had walked into the shop with Misa shortly after Vex and Derivan had, although neither of them said anything until now. He had been staring at the store''s products with some fascination, and only spoke up now, his brows furrowing slightly in concern.
"If you are from the Roads, then I should let you know that time does not work the same way once you cross the boundary," the shopkeeper said helpfully. "You will have plenty of time to do whatever you came here to do... Well. I suppose with most of the Roads not operational and one barely functional, that time discement is less of a guarantee... But that particr function remains, to the best of my knowledge."
"What do you mean, barely functional?" Misa asked, looking up from the small statuette of a cat she''d been peering at.
"The remaining Road only works some of the time," the shopkeeper said with a small shrug of their shoulders. "It is inconsistent, and sometimes deposits visitors far away from their intended destination. Sometimes it leaves those walking it as... mana-ghosts, shall we say; some creatures of magic cannot be properly tranted into thends beyond the Roads, and can only exist as manaforms until they return."
"What?" Misa asked. "Is that going to happen to us?"
"You are not creatures of magic," the shopkeeper said with a light chuckle. "So no, it will not. I would not worry overmuch; those that are mistranted often make their way back, soon enough."
"I guess that exins the raids?" Sev said, uncertain. The shopkeeper cocked their head in curiosity.
"What are these... raids... you mention?"
"We came here from a town called Fendal," Sev exined, exchanging nces with the rest of the party briefly. Vex shook his head; he didn''t have a problem with exining to the shopkeeper what they were doing here. "They hadints about their stores being raided... amongst other things. We were investigating the problem when we ended up here."
"Hm," the shopkeeper said. "I believe we have had simr issues. Perhaps it''s best you find our mages; they will be able to tell you more. The city hall is near the center of the city, if you are in need of directions."
"Thank you," Sev said with a slight bow of his head, and he nced at Vex. "You ready to get going?"
"Yeah," Vex said, then nced at the shopkeeper. "Thank you for the paintbrush," he said, as sincerely as he could manage. "And for all the advice about magic."
"Practice your glyphs diligently," the shopkeeper said with a wink.
"I will," Vex said with a small smile.
Sev led the way out of the store, with Vex thest to emerge; he kept looking back longingly into the store, spotting a few magical artifacts he wished he could afford to purchase forter study. Once he had earned a few slivers, he told himself though he was quickly distracted by Sev talking.
"The time discement thing," Sev said. "It feels a little... convenient, doesn''t it?"
"I''m notining," Misa said with a shrug.
"There was a time discement in as well," Derivan said. "Perhaps it is simply another symptom of the bonus room leaking out?"
"The shopkeeper mentioned they''re having simr problems here, too," Sev said thoughtfully. "But the way he exined it didn''t really feel the same..."
"Oh!" Vex realized, and when everyone looked at him, he blinked, scratching his frills in embarrassment. "Um. I just realized I forgot to ask for the shopkeeper''s name. I''m gonna go ask real quick."
Vex ran back over to the door and poked his head into the store; the chimes over his head rang again as he pushed over the door, and the shopkeeper raised a single fluffy brow at him. "Back again already?"
"I forgot to ask for your name," Vex said, embarrassed. "You helped me. I want to at least know your name. I''m Vex."
"Ah, of course," the shopkeeper said with a chuckle. "You may call me Anyati."
78 - Book 2: Chapter 15: Friendship
78 - Book 2: Chapter 15: Friendship
"You said their name is... the same as the innkeeper''s?" Sev frowned.
"It might not mean anything," Vex offered hopefully, though he didn''t really feel like that was true. "Maybe it''s just a coincidence."
"I think we have the experience now to say that it''s probably dungeon fuckery." Misa scowled. "Or system fuckery. Or both.""
"Probably," Sev said with a sigh. "It''s pretty convenient that the first shop you wandered into happened to be a shop with a shopkeeper that gave you the tools you needed to learn magic... But I don''t know. Sometimes people are just nice, you know?" Sev nced to Derivan. "Any thoughts there?"
"I do not know," Derivan said with a light shrug of his shoulders. Vex rxed a little bit, looking at him; if Derivan didn''t seem too concerned, then maybe he didn''t have to worry too much, either. "It is best we speak to the mages that the shopkeeper spoke of, however. Perhaps they have made progress in understanding the problem."
"I just worry that it''s my fault," Vex said softly; he felt Derivan reach for him, and felt an armored hand pet the back of his head again, in a soothing, gentle movement. He couldn''t help leaning into the touch.
"It is not," Derivan told him firmly. He knelt down, even, so he could speak eye-to-eye with the smaller lizard. "You spoke to Noram, and told him that it was not his fault for opening the door. The same applies to you. It is perhaps not even the system''s fault, for the system has been failing around us ever since that dungeon first appeared. Do not spend your time worrying about who to me. There is new magic here to be discovered, and a solution to be found; is this not the exact sort of opportunity you wished to have, when you first began your journey?"
Vex blinked. "That... was the most you''ve said in a while, I think," Vex said with a slight chuckle, trying to ignore the way the intensity of Derivan''s eyes, the certainty in them, made him feel. "...It is, yes. Thank you."
"You should do speeches more often," Misa whistled.
"That was barely a speech," Derivan said, shaking his head as he stood back up, and Misa just grinned at him.
Vex did feel better about it all, though.
Notpletely. But better.
The party made their way through the city, leaving the more worn-down outskirts behind; the city grew more sophisticated and strange as they made their way further in, with the architecture getting progressively more fantastical in a way that hadn''t been visible as they''d made their way down the path into the crater.
Here, they could see, the river of mana above split off into tiny, smaller streams; it filtered down through the sky and fell onto the homes and shops like slow-falling rain. Some buildings seemed to have special, purpose-built filters to capture this rain, little funnel-like structures built of magic that drew mana in like some sort of sinkhole; others were built to allow the magic to flow off of them in patterns, the almost-liquid energy etching glyphs deeper wherever it went.
Vex was fascinated. Here was a city built like the city of his dreams; Elyra had mana crystals everywhere, albeit enchanted and protected, built to empower all the various devices they had created to support daily life. But this was a city that was built to live in synergy with the mana there was no taking, here. They took what the mana had to offer, and no more. He wondered briefly if something simr would be possible for Elyra, in time, but...
...the system seemed to make that impossible. Mana never gathered in this abundance, not even in the wildest or emptiest ces he''d been to on the surface.
"Excuse me," Sev was saying, and Vex blinked himself back to paying attention. "Could you tell us where the city hall is? We''ve been told that''s where the mages are."
"Of course," the woman he spoke to replied unlike many of the other creatures down here, she seemed to be almost entirely human, save for some unearthly etherealness about her. She inclined her head closer towards the center of the crater. "Just look for the tallest building there. You can''t miss it, really. The city hall functions as a Mage Tower."
Well, that exined the massive building stretching up high enough to reach the mana river.
The odd thing was that the building simply hadn''t been visible until they''d known about it being a tower and now that they did, it was impossibly obvious. Some more obfuscation magic, perhaps? Vex was beginning to think he needed to put more of a focus towards learning magic like that; the privacy it would give him was unparalleled.
"Thank you," Sev said, and the woman gave him a gracious nod before walking away.
"''City hall'' seems like a weird name for something that''s a big fuckoff tower," Misa remarked, staring up at the tower. Sev and Vex both snorted out augh, and Derivan chuckled in amusement.
"Maybe it''s a trantion thing?" Sev offered. "It is weird that they speak the samenguage we do."
"It''s not that umon in dungeons, though," Vex pointed out. "There''s almost never anguage barrier in a bonus room, unless that barrier is part of a challenge the dungeon intends, or something."
"I still think it should just be called a big fuckoff tower," Misa said.
"That is not a particrly friendly name," Derivan pointed out, his tone amused. "Perhaps they wish to be more weing to visitors. They have mentioned that there are usually many more Roads open than this one; I am sure they are used to more visitors. It would make sense, then, to name the tower something its visitors would know to look for."
"And yet it doesn''t even show up until you know it''s a tower," Misa said with a dramatic sigh. "ssic wizards."
"Hey," Vex said, pretending to frown at her, and she smirked at him.
"You booby-trapped your sketchbooks. You totally fall into the same trap of doing unnecessarilyplicated shit."
"I do not," Vex said with a huff, and with absolutely no heat to it.
"Don''t worry," Sev said with a grin. "We''ll build you a tower one day and let you cast whatever spells you want on it. Maybe some decorative lightning? That would be pretty cool."
"I will help," Derivan said, with far too much seriousness for the topic, and Vex buried his snout in his hands.
"...I want a wizard''s tower so badly now."
"But you want to adventure with us more, right?" Misa grinned at him, and Vex pretended to frown at her for a moment more before he broke into a smile of his own.
"Maybe I''ll just have to put legs on the tower. I''ll even give you all your own rooms."
"Now you''re talking," Sev snickered.
"I''m not sure Derivan needs his own room," Misa said, teasing. "Maybe he can share with you?"
Vex felt his face warming up with a blush beneath his scales, but he kept up an appearance of haughty dignity, though he could practically feel Derivan''s curious gaze piercing into him.
"I would not mind," Derivan offered, perfectly seriously. And then, a hint of a joke: "Though I am a bit concerned for my safety. Thest time I touched one of his notebooks..."
Both Misa and Sev burst intoughter, and Vex tried very hard to make sounds that were more coherent than vague grumbles but for all that he protested, he felt a small warmth growing in him. That small ember of his remaining worries didn''t go away, exactly, but it was shielded from him by a reminder.
No matter what the room was doing, or what was happening with the system, it wasn''t a problem he had to solve alone and as they joked and bantered all the way to the doorstep of the tower, he found himself smiling.
Sometimes he let himself forget that things weren''t the same as they had been with his family in Elyra. Sometimes he felt that he had to tackle his problems alone, to prove himself and hold himself to some invisible standard he could never quite reach.
But not here. Not now. Not anymore.
Vex stepped into the tower after Sev and Misa, with Derivan right at his back.
The city hall and it felt strange calling it a city hall, when Misa was right, and it was indeed just a ''big fuckoff tower'' was about exactly what they expected on the inside, which meant that it looked nothing like a city hall at all. There was what seemed to be a makeshift desk that was mostly made out of stone, stacked with official-looking paperwork, and that was the only thing that made it city hall-like at all.
The rest was...
Well, there was what Vex was pretty sure was an otter sleeping on the desk, for one thing. For another, magic swirled all around in gleaming patterns that were visible to the naked eye; the walls were painted with more of those glyphs, these ones far moreplex, almostplete paintings in and of themselves.
And right at the side of the tower were stairs. A long, frankly unsafe-looking series of wooden nks leading up to the upper levels of the tower.
"...I guess we climb?" Vex said, trying to keep the uncertainty out of his voice. Sev blinked, looking around the tower for anything else.
"Might as well," he said. "I don''t see a bell we can ring or anything."
He was the first up the stairs, but he''d barely taken a few steps before a low, gruff voice stopped them. "Hey!" it said. "Where do you think you''re going?"
Vex nced back. "Um," he said. He didn''t see anyone there. Some sort of [Invisibility] spell? But he should have seen the traces in the mana, if someone was invisible. "We''re going to find the mages. We were told that there are problems here, and we wanted to see if we could help."
He had no idea why he was speaking for the group. This was Sev''s thing! But the cleric seemed more than content to allow him to speak, and he''d already started talking, so he''d sort of trapped himself in this position.
"Want to see if you can help, huh?" the voice scoffed, and Vex peered closer, trying to figure out who was speaking
...It was the otter, wasn''t it.
The otter stood up, folded little arms at him, and red a little re. "The upper floors are off limits. If you want to petition for an audience, you need to do it here, with me."
"We didn''t know that," Vex said, a little helplessly. He nced to Sev for help, and the human seemed to finally take pity on him.
"We apologize if we were rude," Sev said. "We''re pretty new here, and we''re still getting used to everything. We came here from the Roads the town we''re helping is being raided, and ording to them, they''re being raided by goblins... but the story is very inconsistent. We were told you might have more information."
The otter narrowed his eyes in a way that looked remarkably human. "We might know something," he said. "But you should tell us what you know first, and then we''ll tell you what we know."
Sev stared at him. "You don''t know anything, do you."
"Of course we do!" The otter puffed out his chest, which was a bit of an absurd look, for an otter. It mostly ended up looking cute. Vex had no idea how to process any of this.
"We''re wasting our time here, guys," Sev said, sighing dramatically. "Let''s go. We''ll find an inn or something and investigate this by ourselves. I''m sure having one of the best wizards in Elyra on our team will help."
"Sev!" Vexined, but he was fairly sure he was blushing again.
"He is correct," Derivan said with a nod. "I am sure this will only take us a day or two"
"A day or two!" the otter exploded. "It took us weeks just to narrow down the possibilities, and we still have almost nothing to show for it! You''re not going to do it in a day or two!"
Sev grinned.
The otter facepalmed.
"Fuck," he said.
79 - Book 2: Chapter 16: An Otterly Fascinating History Lesson
79 - Book 2: Chapter 16: An Otterly Fascinating History Lesson
"This is everything we know," the otter-mage said.
His name was Noram, because of course it was. Vex had exchanged worried nces with the rest of his friends when the mage finally introduced himself, but none of them had said anything. They needed a better picture of what was happening, first.
Otter-Noram led them up to the second floor of the tower, where two other mages were seated around a glyph painted on the floor. Mana swirled around both of them, coalescing into an orb at the center that glowed and shifted; a dozen dark branches spiralled off that orb, each one fading into nothing. Among them was a single dark-blue branch a remarkably familiar shade of blue, actually. That branch, and only that branch, was connected to a smaller, tighter spiral of white.
"It''s a visualization of the Roads," the otter exined. He looked at them, his gaze flicking somewhat furtively over the darkened branches, like he was worried. "Those are the dead Roads. Nothing we''ve tried has brought them back. The one remaining Road, the one you came from it looks like it''s dying. The white node over there is your town, and everything surrounding it. Fendal."
For a moment, the five of them stared in silence at the map of the Roads. The other two mages didn''t say a word. They each seemed deep in concentration, though their figures werergely hidden by their robes.
"I''m still not sure I understand what exactly the Roads are," Misa said with a frown. "They don''t just teleport people, right? We noticed spatialpression magic in the Roads, so I thought maybe this whole ce was just really far underground. But we''ve been told something about the Roads also... ''tranting'' people? Whatever that means."
Otter-Noram grimaced slightly. "Yes. Well. The Roads don''t just reach through space," he said. "I suppose it''s a bit of an open secret. That spatialpression is a suponent of a deeper magic at work. But exining all of that is... a deeper lesson on the history of our world than I want to get into."
"We have time." Misa crossed her arms. "We were also told time runs differently here."
The otter sighed.
"I''ll give you a quick summary," he said. He gestured to the map of the Roads again. "Or as quick as I can make it. Mana is, quite literally, the life force of this world; it empowers nearly everything we do. It might not be the same where you''re from but a couple hundred years ago, it started acting erratically. Almost dangerously.
"Some ces in the world gotpletely blocked off from us. It was slow, at first so slow we barely even realized what was happening. Maybe there was some small corner of the kitchen you wouldn''t be able to teleport into, or your cab might be smaller than it was supposed to be. Nothing big. Nothing insidious. Not enough for people to talk about, to realize it was a pattern; most of us thought it was just a problem with our magic, or some small mistake we made.
"Then the spells we used to travel far and wide stopped working properly. Those broken spaces gotrger. The mana began to physically herd us into groups, away from our old cities and capitals; every time we tried to teleport, or use any movement-based spell, it moved us somewhere else instead. Anyone who didn''t use those spells it forced out, through some application of forced teleportation or flight, and then it sealed those ces offpletely so we couldn''t go back.
"We didn''t know what to do. But we noticed that anyone living underground didn''t seem as affected, so we eventually decided to dig; we built underground cities and moved there as best we could. The mana didn''t stop us if anything, it seemed stronger there, and it seemed to want us there."
Otter-Noram frowned, as if trying to find the right words. "We told stories of what the surface was like; what the sun looked like, what the seasons looked like. We had spells to keep those memories perfectly preserved. We told stories of the seasons and the weather...
"And then we just... forgot." The otter shook his head and clenched his tiny fists. "After a hundred years. Don''t know why it happened. Don''t know how. Half the spells we had banked to remember were just fucking gone, just like that. So we tried to leave again, and see if we could get back what we lost, and we found that we could ess the surface again, but nothing was the same.
"We''re not sure. Because of how much we lost. But the ces we could go back to didn''t feel right. Some of them were outright hostile. The rules didn''t make sense anymore. You needed magic just to stay attached to the ground in some ces. In others the wind scoured your fur, or whatever your equivalent is.
"And then the mana gifted us the Roads." Here Otter-Noram hesitated. "They''re a deep magic. A magic we don''t fully understand. There are small parts of them that do not work as magic should, and that function of ''trantion'' is one of them; with it, when we go through the Roads, we don''t need extra magic just to keep ourselves alive. If possible, we''re adapted to fit. Or we just... be mana-ghosts. Able to survive and return, though it''s hard to interact with the world unless we''re very experienced.
"The destination of the Roads always change. Sometimes they bring us to new ces, and sometimes they bring us to other cities like our own; underground cities or kingdoms built in the aftermath of whatever the mana did to the surface. And then, a few weeks ago, our Roads all simultaneously just... died. And the mana is acting strangely, even here."
Otter-Noram sighed. He seemed exhausted from telling that story, and promptly seated himself down on a small chair that had been hiding in a corner of the room he slumped backwards on it, and stared at the four adventurers.
"I did my part of the bargain," he said. "That''s almost everything I know. We''ve had some disappearances in our local supplies mana slivers keep going missing, and we keep a store of that for emergency ritual magics we need to perform. We don''t have any leads on that. We keep an eye on those, and they just disappear. Right in front of our eyes. So if you have any idea what''s going on, I''d really love to know, because so far none of our magic hase up with anything."
Vex had so many things he wanted to say. So many questions, even. But he bit his tongue now wasn''t the right time for those questions, and he wasn''t sure if there was a right time for those questions. This version of Noram seemed to have lived for a very, very long time, and Vex had so many questions about that point alone, yet...
He seemed so tired.
Sev and Misa looked like they were trying to figure out what to say, too, slowly soaking in what Noram had exined to them. Derivan was watching Otter-Noram carefully, seemingly on the verge of saying something, and trying to decide whether or not he should.
He chose to speak. "If I may ask," the armor said slowly. "When you told us your story, your gaze was more frequently directed at Vex and me. Why is that?"
"What?" the otter mage frowned, evidently not expecting that question. "...I don''t know. You two felt more familiar, I guess."
A small piece of the puzzle. Vex''s heart beat hard; this ce was connected to Fendal in more ways than just through the Roads, if that hadn''t been obvious already. This was just the only evidence they had that the connection was active. That it was continuing, even now.
"I think," Sev said slowly. He''d evidentlye to the same conclusion. "That we''re going to need some time to discuss everything we''ve just learned."
The otter scoffed. "That was a lot, was it?" he said, his words holding a small bite of bitter sarcasm.
"I wasn''t saying I wouldn''t share," Sev said with a sigh. "It''s just that what you told us is it''s a lot? And I don''t want to give you the wrong information based on just guesses. We need to talk and figure out what we know, and what''s just a guess.
"But I will tell you what we know," Sev added when Otter-Noram opened his mouth to protest, and the otter mped his mouth shut again. He watched Sev in a mixture of suspicion and anticipation. "We know that Fendal''s been experiencing what they call goblin raids, and that those words do not urately reflect what is happening in Fendal. We know that they''ve had raids on their mana crystal stores, which parallels what''s been happening to your mana slivers. We know that a dungeon is involved."
"What''s a dungeon?" Otter-Noram frowned. "I know at least two kinds of dungeons, and I''m pretty sure you''re not talking about either of them."
Sev coughed. "No," he said. "It''s plicated."
And that, of course, led to a long conversation about the nature of the system, of dungeons, and how they affected the world or the slice of reality that the Road connected to. By the end of it, Otter-Noram was looking about as confused and lost as Vex was sure he had looked at the end of the little history lesson the otter had given.
"It doesn''t sound like our Road is just connected to a small slice anymore," Otter-Noram said, looking troubled. "Maybe that''s why all the other Roads are dead...?"
I don''t think so, Vex wanted to say, but he kept his mouth shut and nced at the others instead Sev caught his look and shook his head just slightly. It was one of the things he wanted to discuss.
"I''m assuming you four need a room here?" the otter suddenly asked them, and Vex blinked at him. "There''s an inn nearby. The Rising."
"The... Rising?" Sev asked, sounding confused. The otter shrugged his little shoulders, and hopped off his chair.
"I didn''t name it," he said. "I''ll get you some slivers so you can pay for a room there. I don''t know how long you''ll be saying, but if you want to stay any longer than a night, I suggest you find some odd jobs. The local alchemists are always needing test subjects. And there are sometimes monsters on the outskirts, ifbat is more your thing."
"Oh, good," Sev said faintly. "For a moment I thought you were going to give us a key to a room at the inn."
"Why would I have keys to the inn here?" Otter-Noram stared at Sev. "Do things work that differently in Fendal?"
"Believe me," Sev muttered. "I wish I knew."
This time, the inn wasn''tpletely empty when they arrived though it wasn''t bustling and full, either. They spoke very briefly to the innkeeper, who was a being of ethereal me that sounded like a tired old man; his name, apparently, was Nesnub. So at the very least, not everyone they were meeting was someone they had already met in Fendal.
A quick exchange and five sliversted them a room; one that was much smaller than the one they had in Fendal, admittedly, but going back and forth through the Road seemed like too much of a hassle and seemed risky besides.
"I mean," Sev said, looking around the room. "It''s kinda fancier than I was expecting."
Vex looked around as well. For all that it was a small room, it was rather exceptionally cozy; small glyphs decorated the walls, radiating both light and a sort offorting warmth. Even the room seemed to be arranged like two wings spreading out; two beds in the corners, and one in a little alcove in the middle.
"I want that one," Vex said, pointing to the alcove. "Please?"
"Sure," Sev said with a chuckle.
"I don''t mind." Misa shrugged.
"I do not need a bed," Derivan said. Vex grinned happily at that, but was quickly distracted by Sev pping his hands together.
"But first," Sev said. "Let''s talk about what''s going on."
80 - Book 2: Chapter 17: Theorycrafting
80 - Book 2: Chapter 17: Theorycrafting
"There was a lot there to digest," Vex said with a slight frown. He''d been thinking about what the other version of Noram had told them throughout the journey here, and he was churning with ideas. He just hadn''t put them all together yet.
"The names are one thing, but I think what stood out to me is when he said all of that started. He didn''t give us an exact timeframe... but a few hundred years is about as long as we know the System existed." Vex narrowed his eyes. "That''s about as far as Elyra''s historical knowledge extends, too. Anything further back is... vague."
"Infolocked," Sev supplied, and Vex nodded.
"Probably," he agreed. "But it all lines up too well. Which means there''s gotta be something we can figure out about what''s happening based on what''s different about our two histories."
"If we assume that there''s a rtionship at all between their world and ours," Misa said. "We don''t know that for sure. The coincidence might be a dungeonfuck; maybe it can only create history as far back as the system exists."
"A... what?" Vex stared at her. Misa shrugged.
"I figured we need a term for when dungeons do the thing," she said. "neshifters have mindfuck, right? Dungeonfuck. Same thing."
"I do not feel like that is the same thing," Derivanmented.
"Well, I''m using it." Misa grinned, seemingly satisfied with herself. Sev chuckled a bit.
"The bonus rooms all seem to hide clues, though," the cleric said after a moment. "The way Onyx talked about it, and the [Look Up] skill... We don''t even know what red means, in the context of the system. But it looks like Onyx and maybe some other gods manipted that dungeon into forming, somehow."
"If they did, then some warning would''ve been nice," Misa said, crossing her arms and leaning back in her chair. "But that might exin the red. System can''t figure out what it is because it''s not within the scope of the system."
"Or it''s been purged from the system," Sev said. "Though if that was it then the anchor would be red, too, so... yeah, maybe it''s that. Red is outside the system."
"We do not know much about the Administrators yet," Derivanmented. "Nor of the foe that struck at the orb and almost killed the delve team, back in the dungeon. But perhaps red is an artifact of administrator ess, or what happens when someone that is not an Administrator attempts to modify the system."
"Multiple groups trying to modify the system would exin all the errors," Sev grumbled.
"I''m worried about where that arrow-fucker went," Misa said with a scowl. "But we''ve had no news on that so far. Nothing from Elyra or Anderstahl."
"We''re going to have to wait for news on him anyway. He didn''t leave a trace," Vex said, shaking his head slightly. He tried not to let his nervousness show something about that man unnerved him, for all that he hadn''t met him directly. "Let''s assume the two ces are rted. T. he people in Fendal were behaving strangely, and that''s probably rted to the bonus room, but we''re missing a connection somewhere."
"The people I met while interviewing felt... one-note?" Sev frowned a little bit. "They kept me held up in their conversations, but they didn''t share any... personal history, exactly. I don''t know."
"It was convenient for Gensen to have the key ready for us," Derivanmented. "And the mana was behaving strangely there, too."
"There''s a connection between the mana and how people are behaving," Vex muttered to himself. "We know that the Roads ''trante'' people when they go through it, so we know it''s a possibility that some people went through the Roads and ended up being... what, ghosts in the mana?"
"That was how it was described," Derivan said. "Though it seems vague."
"It doesn''t mean much because we don''t know what mana-ghosts can do," Vex said, shaking his head.
"Let''s put that aside for now," Sev said. "What do we know?"
"We know that the histories of the two worlds diverged around the time the system came into the picture," Misa said. "Or, well, we don''t know that for sure, but that''s what we''re assuming for now. If we take that at face value, then the mana is acting to solve some problem, the same way the system is presumably here to solve some problem for us."
"Which is a good start," Sev nodded. "We can assume that the mana and the system are both acting to solve whatever problem resulted in the stars going missing."
"Right," Vex said. "Which is... a little terrifying. But okay, both worlds has survived for a few hundred years, everything probably isn''t going to copse in the next few months."
"But we do know that the system is decaying," Derivan pointed out. "The system is more unstable today than it was before. And Misa''s reality anchor is decaying, too; that means that the other reality anchors are probably decaying, even if the dungeons they are in are stabilizing them in some way."
Misa sat up straight. "Do you think that''s what dungeons are doing?" she asked. "Stabilizing the anchors?"
"I assumed the anchors were the ones stabilizing and influencing the dungeon," Sev said with a frown. "But if you''re right, and the dungeons are the ones stabilizing the anchors..."
"I only just considered it," Derivan said. "But it appears to fit with what we know. Dungeon breaks ur if the dungeons are not delved frequently enough; reality anchors decay over time."
"That flips things around," Vex said with a slight frown. "If the dungeons are supporting the anchors, and not the other way around, then the anchors must have another function. It... I wanna say it feels like magic did something simr here? But it''s almost the inverse... there''s a connection I''m missing." The wizard began muttering to himself, his brows furrowing in concentration.
"If dungeons require people to delve them to maintain whatever they are doing," Derivan said. "What does the mana require here, to open up new Roads?"
"Slivers," Vex said, snapping his fingers. "I mean, this is all just spection. But these mana slivers seem to upy the same space as mana crystals do in the system. We have crystals being stolen from Fendal, and slivers disappearing here..."
He picked up a sliver, examining it critically. "It doesn''t really look like a mana crystal, though."
"Different methods to solve the same problem, I guess?" Sev said.
"Except it doesn''t quite solve the problem," Vex said. "And neither does the system."
"And we still don''t know exactly what the problem is," Misamented. She thought about this for a moment, folding her arms onto the table. Then she shook her head. "Fuck. I need a drink if we''re going to have this conversation. I feel like I''m getting hungover already, and if I''m going to have a headache I might as well feel good about it."
"You could probably get one downstairs," Sev said.
"Anyone else want one?" Misa asked, raising a brow at the rest of the group. Most of them didn''t really drink. Vex shook his head, and Sev shrugged before he indicated that he''d take one ss of whatever they had avable; Misa shrugged and popped down the stairs.
"You do not want a drink?" Derivan asked, ncing at Vex. Vex made a face.
"No. Alcohol tastes like shit," he said, sticking his tongue out somewhat petntly. Derivan''s gaze focused briefly on his tongue, and Vex drew it back into his mouth, embarrassed.
"You licked me, you know," Derivan said. "Thest time you were drunk."
"I did what?" Vex practically squeaked out the words Sev, sitting opposite the both of them, snorted out augh. Derivan nodded seriously.
"You licked me," the armor said. "And then you used me of being the one to do it, because my armor happened to be where your tongue was."
"Oh by the gods." Vex buried his face in his hands.
"Are you saying you want Vex to get drunk again?" Sev asked, barely holding back the mirth in his voice.
"I am never getting drunk again," Vex said, his voice muffled by his hands. "I swear off alcohol. Forever."
"I would not want him to get drunk if he did not want to," Derivan said seriously. "But it was a good memory, to see you rxed. I cherish it."
Sev chuckled, and grinned at his friend. "You hear that, Vex?"
"What I''m hearing is that I need to develop a [Sink Into Floor] spell," Vex grumbled.
The three of thempsed into afortable silence for a little while, though Vex felt the many unspoken words still floating about the room. He remembered the little promise he''d made to himself to talk to Derivan...
Sev was watching the both of them, too, a small smile on his face. Vex wondered if the cleric would mind if he went to him for advice. Probably not? Maybe he would do that first; talk to Sev and see what he thought, and then go to Derivan and just... tell him.
That might work.
Really, he just needed a way to deal with all his nerves.
Misa swung the door open a secondter, carrying of all things a fucking barrel on a shoulder, and two empty tankards. "I got the good stuff!" she said, and then she blinked at Sev. "Why are you smiling like that?"
"It''s just those two again," Sev said, gesturing at Vex and Derivan. Derivan tilted his head curiously, and Misa groaned.
"I just went down to get some beer," she said. "You''re telling me I fuckin'' missed it?"
"You didn''t miss anything," Sev said, to Vex''s relief though that relief was immediately cut short when he continued, "Derivan was just telling us about how Vex licked him when he was drunk."
"You what?" Misa rounded on Vex, looking delighted. "You didn''t tell us about this."
"I didn''t remember," Vexined. "And Derivan only told me about it just now."
"I cherish the memory," Derivan repeated, looking rather pleased with himself, and Misa snorted augh before slumping back into her seat.
"I leave for five minutes," she said with a grin and a shake of her head.
Vex, from his position with his face buried in his hands and his snout pressing against the table, let out a muffled "Let''s please change the topic back to what we were talking about before."
Sev and Misa exchanged nces.
"We only know an overview of their history here," Misa said, getting right to business, though she filled her tankard from the barrel as she spoke. Sev did the same, but he only filled it halfway, and made a bit of a face as he drank. "I don''t think that''s enough to make any assumptions about what the mana did or is doing for them. I think we can make a reasonably educated guess that the mana and the system are both working to solve A Problem. We just don''t know what that problem is."
"We know a little bit about it," Vex said. "We know whatever it is is probably linked to the stars disappearing and getting conceptually erased on top of that."
"It is worrying," Derivan said. "If there are other things being erased..."
"There are," Sev said. "The gods, for example."
"We need to know how much time we have," Misa said with a sigh.
"Let''s start with what''s happening here," Sev said. "How do we think the bonus room is affecting Fendal? The obvious conclusion is that there are some pranksters that were mistranted by the Roads that are using the opportunity to steal mana crystals."
"Doesn''t fit," Sev said, shaking his head. "It doesn''t exin the slivers going missing here. Or the way Gensen and the vigers were acting."
"The way the vigers act remind me of the stories I heard of other adventurers going into ''bonus rooms'' that were essentially historical reenactments," Vex said thoughtfully. He nced at Misa. "It''s the reason what you did with your family hasn''t been done before. I think I mentioned it then. When ''people'' are generated by a bonus room, they don''t act...plete? They feel like they''re following scripts."
"Noram did not feel like he was following a script," Derivan said.
"He didn''t," Vex agreed. "That''s not aplete theory either. And everyone here has felt pretty real, from Anyati-the-shopkeeper to Noram-the-otter..."
"Which is worrying," Misa said. "Because if we take that at face value, then everyone here is real, and the bonus room is Fendal."
Vex froze. Sev stopped drinking mid-sip, and put his tankard down slowly. Derivan stared.
"Oh," Misa said, realizing what she''d just said, and then she narrowed her eyes slightly. "But that''s not... oh shit."
81 - Book 2: Chapter 18: Worries, and a Plan of Action
81 - Book 2: Chapter 18: Worries, and a n of Action
"It still doesn''t makeplete sense." Misa frowned. "Everyone here''s had apletely different history. They don''t even know what dungeons are. They don''t know what the system is."
"It''s not a perfect theory," Vex agreed. "It''s definitely iplete. But I think it''s somewhere close. It exins why people in both ces have the same names, kind of. It just doesn''t exin who''s stealing the mana crystals, or what exactly the link between the two ces are."
"But if this ce is real..." Misa muttered, then she shook her head.
"What if it is not the ce that is real, but the people?" Derivan asked. "Or what if realness, as it were, is a property that can be transferred?"
"That''s fucking terrifying to think about," Misa said.
"But it might be true," Vex said softly. "There''s even hints about it. Food didn''t seem to fill Noram until we were around. The problem is just... we don''t have a real way to test any of this. We''vee up with a few theories that exin what''s happening, but that doesn''t give us a solution."
"Okay," Sev said. "We need a way to test our theories, then."
"My mom''s still back in Fendal with the two guards I summoned," Misa said. "We could ask them to keep track of things there while we investigate what''s going on here. Noram''s there, too, so he can confirm if he knows anything about this... other version of Noram."
"About the food," Derivan said. "Why did food only fill him when we were around? We do not possess some quality that makes things more real."
"Misa does," Sev said. Everyone else looked at him and blinked.
"That''s... true," Misa said slowly. "You think the reality anchor is affecting things right now?"
"You can check," Sev said. "How''s the integrity on it?"
Misa frowned and seemed to gaze into the air for a moment. Then she froze slightly, mouthing some words to herself; she shook her head.
"...Five months, three days left." Misa wasn''t angry, exactly, or she didn''t seem that way to Vex but part of her seemed to dete. "The degradation rate still says medium, but it''s definitely lost a couple days more than it should have, and there''s another warning about additional stress being put on the anchor. Fuck. I should''ve checked this earlier."
"Is it possible it''s just because your mom''s still summoned?" Vex asked. "When did youst check it?"
"I''ve checked the anchor notification before during a summon and there wasn''t any notice about an extra drain," Misa said, shaking her head. She scowled a bit. "And I looked at it before we got into Fendal. Wish the damn thing would give me more notifications."
"We know now, at least," Derivan said, angling his tone towardsfort. "Though we do not know if this began in Fendal, or... here."
"It''s a start," Sev said, and then he frowned. "We never asked what this ce is called, huh? We''ll have to ask next time we head out."
"No need," Misa said dryly. "I asked while I was downstairs. This whole ce is just called Teque; it''s a dedication to the guy who led them down here, or something."
Vex grabbed a notebook and scribbled a note; when Derivan peered over at him, he promptly hid the notebook from his friend, sticking his tongue out at him in the process.
Sev, meanwhile, just blinked and said, "Huh."
"It''s not that surprising that I asked questions about this ce." Misa scowled, folding her arms across her chest.
"I didn''t say anything," Sev protested. Misa held the scowl for a moment more before grinning at him, and the cleric rxed with a sigh; even Vex could tell, though, that her heart wasn''t quite in the banter. Her gaze kept flicking off a little to the right, like she was still looking at the reality anchor''s item screen.
There was a small silence for a while.
"Anyway," Misa said, clearly noticing that everyone was trying to find the words to talk to her. She forced herself to smile a bit. "Don''t worry. I''m not... I mean, okay, fuck, I am ming myself a little bit. But there''s no point dwelling on it."
"Better that we learn this can happen now," Vex offered, a little meekly. "With minimal damage to the anchor. You know to keep an eye on it now."
"That''s... a good way of looking at it." Misa hesitated, looking for a moment like she wanted to say something more, and then she shook her head and gave Vex a smaller, more genuine smile. "Thanks."
"We still need a n of action," Derivan said. His tone was soft, like he was trying to acknowledge the conversation that just happened while guiding it gently back to its original purpose. "We have some ideas about what is happening, but no ideas for a solution."
"The problem is that bonus rooms typically have an objective." Vex sighed. "We don''t know what the objective here is. The dungeon in Fendal, such as it is, tried to copy the bonus room in Elyra''s primary dungeon and failed; that failure still leaked out, because something went wrong, but we don''t know how to patch a hole in the system like this."
"And we do not know what will happen if we do," Derivan said. The others all grimaced slightly when he spoke, and for a while, the table went silent again.
Vex sighed.
"I think we just have to investigate the slivers and mana crystals going missing," he said after a moment. "That''s the only obvious corory between Fendal and..."
Vex paused, then checked his notebook.
"Teque," he said. "Between Fendal and Teque. So if we figure out why the slivers are going missing here, and the crystals in Fendal, we might have a better idea of how to stop the ''raids'', at least, although at this point I''m not sure who we''re stopping the raids for."
"So you''re saying we do a stakeout," Sev said.
"I feel like they''ve probably tried doing a stakeout," Misa mused.
"We have something they don''t," Vex said. His gaze slid to Derivan, and he felt his heart betray him, beating a little faster as the armor watched him in return. "You have Shift, right? If there''s something here that''s stealing things that mages can''t detect, Shift might be able to find it."
"I had not considered that," Derivan said, his voice thoughtful. "Yes. Perhaps we can investigate..."
"What about Noram?" Sev asked. "Do we tell him... everything? The bonus room stuff is going to sound unbelievable at best."
"I doubt he''s going to let us near the slivers if we don''t at least exin that," Vex said with a sigh. "So let''s go find him again and talk to him, convince him to let us keep an eye on the slivers, and... hopefully that''ll fill in the rest of the gaps in our knowledge."
That was the hope, anyway. The n still felt like a shaky one, and Vex saw that uncertainty reflected not only in himself, but in the others around him; Derivan was the only one who didn''t appear particrly troubled. The armor seemed contemtive, instead.
Focusing on the future, perhaps.
The four of them discussed a few more potential ns, but they had nothing else solid their ideas they had were difficult to investigate. They felt they had the broad strokes right, and they could use any further information they found to refine those ideas, at least; that was the closest they would get, for now.
Before they retired for the night, Misa managed to get an update from her mother, as slow as it was. ording to her, in all the time they''d been down in Teque, only a few minutes had passed in Fendal. That was another datapoint to add if crystals were being stolen every few in Fendal, then much, much more time passed in Teque between each robbery.
That was... a data point. It didn''t tell them much. Hopefully, they wouldn''t have to wait too long before the next set of slivers went missing; it had, after all, already been a few days since thest raid.
"Hey, Sev?" Vex asked.
They''d pretty much all gotten ready for the night Derivan was off by himself near the center of the room, apparently experimenting with small-scale attempts at magic without going through the system, or something like that. Misa was far away at the opposite side of the room, and Vex had approached Sev while he was sitting at the side of his bed, apparently engaged in his nightlymune.
From what he''d heard, Sev treated it more like a divine pen pal sort of situation, for all that he no longer got replies from Onyx.
"What''s up?" Sev smiled at him. "Need something?"
"Kind of," Vex admitted. He took a breath he felt nervous, and he didn''t even know why. It wasn''t like he was actually talking to Derivan about this. But he felt like he needed to talk to someone before he just went up to Derivan. "I just wanted to talk. Um. Ask for some advice, as it were."
"I''m all ears," Sev said, putting his focus to the side and looking attentively at Vex. The lizardkin wizard flushed, not quite sure how to begin; he sat himself down next to Sev when the cleric patted his bed in invitation, and tried to gather his thoughts.
"I really like Derivan," the lizardkin blurted in a whisper after a moment, and then he nced quickly to the side to see if the armor in question had heard him; Derivan was still seated in the center of the room, mana carefully dancing between his fingertips.
"I know that," Sev said, vaguely amused. "And you know I know that. Misa knows that, too."
"I that''s besides the point." Vex buried his face in his hands. "It''s just what do I do about it?"
"Talk to him about it?" Sev suggested mildly.
"I was going to," Vex said, because not all that long ago he was, and now he found himself doubting himself again. The lizardkin sighed and drew his legs up to himself. "But I dunno. I''m worried about messing things up. We''re a good team."
"We''re not going to be less of a good team if you two get together," Sev said, and then considered his statement a bit. "Maybe if you fight. The Guild doesn''t really encourage this for that reason. But fighting together, facing dangers together... It''s pretty inevitable that it happens from time to time."
"Has it happened to you?" Vex asked. Sevughed.
"No," he said. "Honestly, I''m probably not the best person to give you advice here. I''ve never really liked anyone that way."
"Really?"
"Nope," Sev shrugged. "But I''m pretty happy. I have you guys, and... that''s enough for me, I think. I just want to help people, figure out what''s going on with the system, and not deal with weird evolutionary branches like mimics that pretend to be trees and walk around every so often."
Vex snickered. He was feeling a little better about talking to Derivan, at least. "Are you still thinking about that?"
"It''s a weird fucking tree," Sevined. "It''d be weirder if I wasn''t. But don''t change the subject. Are you going to tell Deri, or am I?"
"...You wouldn''t."
"I would not," Sev said, and grinned, poking Vex in the snout. "But you should''ve seen your face."
Vex sighed, but he found he was smiling, just a bit. "I will," he said. "I want to wait for the right time, but... yeah, I will."
"Don''t want too long. Or do, and then I get to win the bet that Derivan confesses first."
"Your bet" Vex started, and then sighed, as though entirely unsurprised. "Before we reach Elyra," he promised instead.
82 - Book 2: Chapter 19: Opposing Elements
82 - Book 2: Chapter 19: Opposing Elements
Derivan hummed in consideration.
There was an oddity of magic here.
He''d spoken with Vex on their suspicion that the magic performed by the system was artificial, after a fashion there was something in the way he''d cast that one Barrier spell without the assistance of the system. Vex had tried, on a few asions, to copy what he''d done to guide the magic into the spell, instead of forcing it and had never quite seeded; the closest he''d gotten was that their time together that first night, when Vex had painted an imitation of his Starry Night spell and they''d guided the mana into it together.
He had a suspicion, now, as to why his first attempt at the Barrier spell had failed. With the rules of in ce, the mana had likely never encountered [Mana Maniption] or any of its variants before. It had still followed what he''d asked it to do, but it had done so almost grudgingly; when there had turned out to be no substance behind his request, it had shattered almost indignantly.
Proper magic, then, needed a base. An anchor.
He''d seen that before, even, in Vex''s version of Starry Night when the spell had something to anchor on, it had been far stronger than his system-assisted version of the spell.
So... Mana maniption was a bridge. It helped, in a world where the mana didn''t trust anything rted to the system; maybe it was willing to help him as long as it wasn''t forced the way the system did it, or maybe he was missing a particr connection in his own ability with magic, as exined by Anyati-the-shopkeeper.
Or it was the Magic stat. He felt his connection with that stat even more keenly than before, now, and he felt he was close to some kind of revtion on it; every time he turned it over in his mind, though, his thoughts simply went to Vex and the lizardkin''s love for magic.
Regardless, in this ce, where the mana presumably didn''t know what the system was, it wasn''t as useful. It wasn''t that mana maniption didn''t work; the mana still did as he asked, dancing around his fingertips with a certain exhration he''d never seen before the moment he prodded it into doing so but if he gripped any more strongly with the skill, he suspected, he''d face the same bacsh Vex had suffered when he tried to cast a spell.
Mana here was more powerful than the system was. And Derivan wasn''t quite sure how that thought made him feel.
"You are a curiosity," he murmured, watching as the light-green disy of magic yed across his senses. The mana wriggled between his fingers, as if in response to his words, though he knew it couldn''t possibly have heard him. "What makes you different from the mana in our world?"
It didn''t answer him, of course. Very gently, Derivan fed his [Intermediate Mana Maniption] skill with a thread of willpower, and guided the mana into forming the basic Barrier spell once again; he''d done it enough times now that it was instinct, even though the spell that formed was neverrge or fast enough that it would be useful inbat.
A perfect, polished barrier formed in front of him, tinted a faint green, and Derivan felt the mana reacting the same way it had before that same moment of realization, followed by the barrier beginning to flex and break in response. This time, he didn''t fight it, and when the spell broke the mana spun free; it scattered in the air like it was confused, but Derivan was more concerned with the odd twinge he''d felt from within the moment the spell broke.
That odd feeling, as he understood it, was the influence of his Magic stat.
He remembered the first moment he''d gained that stat. It had happened in connection with Vex, when the lizardkin had begun feeding mana into him in order to test the growth of his Slime stat. He hadn''t felt anything particrly special about it then, but as the stat grew he''d be more and more in tune with a nebulous something that he''d never quite been able to quantify.
Anyati-the-shopkeeper had mentioned that magic was always a little personalized to the caster; the broad strokes were the same, but the details would change. Derivan wasn''t sure that he could do the same thing the casters in Teque did, nor did he think he could approach the same heights of magic that he was sure Vex would someday reach.
But he did have something that was uniquely his.
Derivan hummed once again, and this time he guided the mana into his gauntlet.
He was operating on an instinct that wasn''t quite his own and he recognized that now, because he''d gotten more in tune with the feeling that working with the stat gave him.
It was the same warmth he felt whenever he looked at Vex, though he didn''t quite understand the feeling. It was the way he found his gaze always drifting to the lizardkin no matter what he was doing, ever-interested in whatever puzzle the lizardkin had decided to solve that day.
It was the part of him that enjoyed listening to whatever the lizardkin had to say, even if he didn''t quite understand what it was Vex was saying all the time.
He did the same thing now with the mana, watching in quiet wonder as the mana soaked into the metal of his body and began to trace out the faint, almost invisible engravings. They didn''t mean anything, as far as he knew. He hadn''t exactly been created with a purpose in mind the decorative elements of his armor were just that but it still made him shine, and when the magic was sufficiently suffused into his armor, he reached out and allowed the stat to guide him.
A faint trail of magic followed his fingers when he moved. Without thinking, he began to draw, a vague mimickry of the style of the light glyphs he''d seen before but while he drew in flowing lines and swoops, his mind settled back on his connection with the Magic stat. It hummed through him, feeling like it was stronger than before, somehow, and when he was done...
Derivan nced at the glyph he''d drawn. It looked like a shield, almost, except it was really more of the suggestion of a shield; the lines intersected with one another in a way that looked more like a dance, and the colors were all various shades of green. He wondered if there was significance to that, and he felt his gaze slide to where Vex was in some deep conversation with Sev
The spell formed, and Derivan''s attention snapped once more to the spell he was casting.
It was... like a barrier, but he could feel that this one was different from the one before. It didn''t threaten to snap and break, like the barrier he''d cast without a proper foundation. This one held steady, a translucent barricade against anything that might cause him harm.
It was also shaped like a book, oddly enough. He wondered if that had something to do with how he''d been thinking about Vex when the spell formed.
He liked it, though. It was like a small reminder of his connection with Vex, and the bond he had with the lizardkin.
The spell itself was... not unlike Misa''s ability to block. Derivan felt almost instinctively that this spell, whatever it was, was stronger than any [Barrier] he would be able to conjure up with the system. He''d have to test it to be sure, of course, but even now there was a link he had with this book-shield that he simply didn''t have with barriers; he could move it at will, open and close it, and there was almost certainly more he would be able to do with it in time, so long as he iterated on that opening glyph.
Part of Derivan was excited about this development, yet...
For whatever reason, Derivan found that he was looking forward to sharing this new discovery with Vex more.
And the rest of his team members, of course.
"You figured out a spell?" Vex was looking at him with wide eyes, and Derivan nodded.
"I believe I understand the Magic statistic a little better as well," he said. "It has increased to 21."
"Does anything feel... different?" Vex asked, curious, and Derivan shook his head.
"Only in my understanding," Derivan said. "I believe, more than anything else, it is a guide though I am uncertain where that guidancees from. It feels very much like you, Vex."
"Does it?" Vex seemed to stiffen a little bit, a darker color flushing across his scales. "Um. I hope that''s a good thing."
"I enjoy listening to you," Derivan said. Physical Empathy told him Vex was embarrassed, but what he had to be embarrassed about, Derivan really wasn''t sure.
"You''ll have to show me the spellter," Vex said. "I was gonna experiment a bit with glyphs, but I was a little tiredst night. And I had other things on my mind."
"dly," Derivan said.
The four of them were hiding just outside where otter-Noram said the city kept its main store of mana slivers. Vex had tried to ask after a little more information on the slivers in fact, he''d tried to ask for rification on a whole host of things, and had in fact prepared a list of questions but Noram had waved him off tiredly, and the poor otter seemed like he was on the verge of outright falling asleep. There was the question of what had kept him so busy, but the poor otter didn''t seem awake enough to answer even that question properly.
Something about the Roads, he''d said. Something about odd screens showing up, and haywire magic. That had been enough for Sev and Misa to exchange worried nces, and for Derivan and Vex to start to ask questions but the otter was already gone, apparently getting himself ready to keep fighting off the crisis.
They''d discussed cancelling their stakeout ns to go pursue this new problem instead, but eventually they talked themselves down from it. They understood the system the most, certainly, and could provide guidance but from what it sounded like, the system notifications that popped up were random and sporadic, never tied to any specific person. More importantly, no one here had ess to mana crystals to bind themselves to the system with.
They''d need to get a copy of what one of those notifications looked like as soon as they were done with this. But since the disappearances of the slivers seemed like it was likely to be linked to the mana crystal raids in Fendal, this seemed like their best lead.
The warehouse was nothing like they expected. It was a in building that didn''t look any different from the others - security through obscurity, or something like that. Inside of it was a in expanse of gray rock, and a few crates of slivers. Not a lot of them, either; if this was their main supply, then they either didn''t have a lot to begin with, or they''d lost quite a number of the slivers over the course of the raids.
And for better or for worse, it wasn''t long before Derivan noticed something off. Shift was indeed picking up on something happening that wasn''t visible on the usual wavelengths of light or mana.
"Something''s here," he said, and promptly pulled on that thread of reality, Shifting the intruders into visible space.
83 - Book 2: Chapter 20: System Shift
83 - Book 2: Chapter 20: System Shift
In hindsight, Derivan reflected, the result of what he''d done was perhaps something he could have anticipated.
He''d spent a little more time trying to understand his stats, in the week they had spent waiting and then traveling towards Elyra. He''d been trying to understand how it was that he acquired new stats, and why he hadn''t gained any since gathering Shift; there was the chance that he''d simply hit his limit, but that didn''t seem likely.
Yet was so little inmon with how he''d gained each of them. The only thing he could really say was amon factor was that he was involved, which wasn''t helpful. In four out of five cases, someone else had been involved in the acquisition of a stat; the problem there was that Physical Empathy was an outlier. He''d gained that one seemingly at random, when he''d been trying to interpret the feelings of his friends.
He''d always had trouble understanding the breadth of the emotional reactions the others had, and he''d simply wanted to try to understand, and then... new stat.
But the actual mechanism almost certainly wasn''t that simple. He''d made attempts at gaining other stats since then, but he''d gained nothing beyond the five he already had so far.
Slime. Magic. Physical Empathy. Golden Geas. Shift.
An odd array of stats, to be sure, and a difficult one to create... a ''build'' around. Slime was still growing, and he suspected there was no upper limit to the stat; moreover, he had discovered that there was an ability to absorb ambient mana attached to it, just as Vex had described. That ability got better as the stat grew, but the amount of mana he needed to draw in to overcharge his mana pool increased, too.
He''d talked the math out with Vex, who had plotted out a graph, and they had both eventually concluded that it was probably not a good use of his time to sit for centuries in a field absorbing ambient mana just to grow his Slime stat. (Vex had certainly seemed inspired, though, and started talking about how slimes had ''cores'' that grew over time, and how having a core to study as it grew might revolutionize slime farming, at which point Derivan had to remind the wizard that they were not, in fact, out to farm slimes.)
The lecture had been amusing and enthralling to listen to, though, even if Derivan hadn''t understood most of it. He had understood he would probably gain and grow this ''slime core'' himself, if he kept growing the stat, but had no interest in doing so to that extent. If it happened over time, so be it.
Magic... was a stat he was still learning about, and here and now it seemed especially relevant. It gave him an insight into the whims of mana, perhaps? It guided him, allowing him to work with mana in a way that didn''t belong to the system which was odd, given the stat was provided by the system to begin with. But it was his best guess, and the stat was hardly part of the system''s normal function.
Physical Empathy was his stat, and the one he used the most. It bridged the gap that made it difficult for him to understand others. It had been invaluable, and had only continued to grow as he used it; the number sat at afortable 51, now.
He''d more or less resolved not to use Golden Geas as much as possible, not liking the autonomy it took away from others.
Shift... had something to do with... disparate wavelengths of reality, as best as he understood it. He suspected that what it did was it brought him more in tune with those disparate wavelengths, and grew the more he interacted with reality outside its baseline. It was growing now, he could feel, albeit only by decimal points; this entire ce was Shifted, very slightly, as a result of the bonus room''s contents spilling into the world.
And that that right there that was something he should have paid attention to. Not that the ce was Shifted, no, but all the times he had encountered Shifted reality. He''d never really thought about it.
But now that he did? Except for the neshifted, every instance of Shifted reality they had encountered had been imposed by the system.
Dungeon boundaries existed because the dungeons themselves existed in a Shifted space, one or two wavelengths above the baseline; that was the reason he had needed Shift to break in, and how he had aided Misa in blocking the attack on the delvers within the dungeon, albeit inadvertently. The bonus room that Misa''s vige had once been in had been several wavelengths above that. The Serpent of the Night, the Overseer in which Aurum had been trapped that had been many wavelengths away, but the boundaries had weakened when they had injured it, and he had been able to rip his way through the rest of thoseyers of reality until they found themselves within.
Even the gods weren''t above the system, as they had learned not so long ago, and so the fact that they had their own nes... there was something there. Perhaps it wasn''t that the gods had their own nes of power, like many religious schrs assumed. Perhaps they were simply trapped in their own nes. Histre had implied as such, even, when the angel had mentioned a ''cost'' that Aurum had had to pay to send them down.
The reality anchor they owned, the one hidden within Misa''s skills that was Shifted away, too, which was the reason he''d needed to shift the mana input into visibility for them to see it.
These ''wavelengths of reality'', oryers, or whatever they truly were they seemed to be a tool mainly used by the system. Something it used to keep some things apart, and other things together; Derivan was concerned, just slightly, about the extent to which that was true. He would learn more as the stat grew, he suspected.
But that meant, first of all, that the stat was far more important than he assumed, and that he needed to find a way to train it that wasn''t simply spending more time in shifted reality.
Second of all and perhaps more importantly in hindsight, he really should have known what those intruders likely were before he Shifted them into visibility. He''d simply never put it all together until now.
The words floated in the air; the only boxes they saw here besides their own. They flickered, like they weren''t supposed to exist; the text warped and changed every half-second, broken letters barely spelling out a name.
"What the fuck," Sev said. His hand was gripped tight on his staff, and he was tense. Vex''s tail was stiff, and he had retreated slightly, automatically keeping enough distance to throw a fireball, even if he couldn''t use one here. Misa stepped in front of him, and her aura flickered ck with [Guard Stance].
Derivan could only grip his sword and gently pull Vex to his side. He''d learned new spells, but no new skills had been offered to him by the system, and magic here was unreliable unless he used the new methods he had found and that took him time.
Time they didn''t have, here. Time that needed to be bought. Time he wasn''t sure could be bought, because every one of them felt it.
That feeling of wrongness nketing the air.
Something is wrong.
It wasn''t a thought of his own. It wasn''t an instinct imposed upon him by the system, a feeling he remembered from what felt like a lifetime ago. It wasn''t a guess.
It was a feeling from the mana. Fear, anxiety, anger. A hint of resonance with a memory from a world that never existed, as far as it was concerned.
Derivan could see that Vex had felt the same thing, too; the lizardkin stiffened and his eyes narrowed even more than they already had, and now the worry in his face became something more real.
Yet... there was a fierce protectiveness in his expression that hadn''t been there before.
Derivan felt a surge of some foreign emotion he didn''t understand; admiration, perhaps, for Vex''s love for magic.
And then the System Patchers spotted them.
The names were easy enough to read, despite the garbled and changing text. What was less easy to handle was what they looked like. Perhaps that was one of the reasons they were Shifted away at all, instead of being allowed to work in the open; the very sight of them would, Derivan imagined, scare off anyone that saw them.
They were vaguely insectoid, in the sense that they had a carapace. But that carapace was the strange system-blue of the boxes they so often had, and that was where any simrity to any living creature quickly ended. Every one of the Patchers were an amalgam of limbs. And every one of them was different, too some had five thin, sticklike arms, waving out in an array that mocked the general concept of anatomy, and others had three bulky ones that would not have seemed out of ce flexing for attention in a tavern.
Others had more. Five, nine, eleven; always odd and asymmetrical. There were five of these System Patchers in total, and Derivan had pulled all five of them out of reality like a fool; part of him wondered if he could shove them back, but already he could feel resistance pooling in that part of his soul.
Shift was a stat, which made it a part of him. But it was like what Derivan imagined a muscle was like, for organic species; he had pulled it too hard, and now it would take time to recover before he could push that hard once again.
"I cannot send them back yet," Derivan informed, his voice tense. "I apologize."
"We need to see what we''re dealing with anyway," Sev said grimly. "Pulling them all is better than getting ambushed."
"I''ve just been waiting for a fuckin'' challenge," Misa grinned, baring her teeth.
"I... can''t help," Vex said, and there was a slight tremble in his voice that made a part of Derivan tighten in turn. He shifted so that he, too, was slightly in front of Vex, positioned to guard him.
Vex held out his dagger anyway, because of course he did. His skills with a dagger were reasonable, and Vex didn''t like being useless.
And then they waited. The air was tense, and charged with electricity; no one else was around, because the mana slivers were kept in a derelict-looking warehouse guarded by dozens of security spells right at the edge of the city.
The System Patchers regarded them curiously, at first. Derivan could only read that emotional context because of Physical Empathy; the stat helped him skip all the steps he would have needed to learn how to read a new people, a new species. They weren''t necessarily hostile.
And yet all his instincts screamed at him to be careful, that there was danger. And the others clearly felt the same way.
Which was a good thing, too, because the Patchers rushed at them all at once though strangely, even then, they didn''t seem hostile. They simply...
"They think we are a problem to fix," Derivan said. His words echoed strangely in all the extra empty space in the warehouse, and the Patchers kept moving.
They weren''t fast. They moved with a strange, loping gait, bodies twisting and contorting so the hands and limbs could make contact with the ground.
And then, when they were closer, they screamed.
All at the same time, a keening, chittering sound emerged from them, one ripple bouncing into the next and joining together until it turned into a solid wave that resonated not only with the air, but with the baseline wavelengths of reality.
That air around them shifted, impossibly. Stone and dirt changed at random where the wave connected, turning to grass, then fire, then sea, and then something dark and wrong
Misa flinched first, seeing what the skill did. And then her face set, and she blocked.
It took all her branched timelines to do it, too. It was visible, just as much as the strain on her was; she looked like she wasid over on top of herself, differing versions all straining against the same attack, each offering a different guard, a different counter. She struggled, and Derivan was forced to reach out with a smaller use of Shift,pressing that attack down onto a single wavelength, and the block resolved with Misa looking only a little worse for wear.
The attack snapped back onto the Patchers, that outward ripple copsing inwards into five separate impacts that knocked them back. Misa didn''t seem to care.
"These aren''t fucking level 37," she growled instead. Her face was paler than usual.
"They''re attacking using the system''s mechanisms," Vex said, the flesh beneath his scales pale. His eyes shed with his traditional color of his [Mana Sight], though Derivan had no idea what his friend was doing. This didn''t seem to be a matter of mana. "We can''t we can''t fight with system skills. Bad idea."
"That block was taking something out of me," Misa agreed. There was a certain anxiety set into her shoulders, now. "I think Derivan stopped it. But that was"
She shook her head and cut herself off.
Derivan stepped forward, because now seemed like the time, and Misa had bought him the time; whatever had happened with the block and Shift, the Patchers seemed disoriented, rolling on the floor in a disjointed jumble of limbs.
Mana flowed into his gauntlet just like it had before, and he drew the same glyph he had before.
If the system wasn''t an option...
Maybe magic could be.
84 - Book 2: Chapter 21: Patching Pains
84 - Book 2: Chapter 21: Patching Pains
The problem with his n, of course, was that Derivan only knew a single glyph of his own design, and that glyph was a shield not something that could be used to attack. Not as far as he knew, anyway. But it was one of the only tools he had to work with. There was always the chance that he could hurt the Patchers through whatever protection of Health they had, but that method relied on physical damage meaning something.
The System Patchers were an amalgam of limbs patched together with the colors of the system. He wasn''t sure that they operated on physical damage at all.
Defense first, in any case.
The glyphpleted.
Just like before, mana rushed into the glyph,pleting it in a way that was not unlike how runic inscriptions were charged with mana and yet there was something more. The glyph came to life, the outer edges of the shield copsing down into the vague form of a book, outlined in shimmering green.
It happened just in time, too. The five Patchers skittered upright, twisting and rotating unnaturally before letting out yet another rippling screech; the air rippled again, struck the barrier of Derivan''s spell
something strange happened.
The effect was connected to him, first of all; anchored to him much like a real shield would be. When the ripple struck the barrier, Derivan could feel himself being pushed back, and he had to dig his feet into the ground to avoid being forced back by the sheer metaphysical weight behind the attack. There might be something he could do to detach the spell, prevent it from anchoring to him in such a way, but if there was then he didn''t know how.
Second was a strange feeling in the mana that he sensed almost as soon as the ripple hit the barrier. Vex sensed it, too, judging by the way the lizardkin perked up and narrowed his eyes; Derivan couldn''t quite spare the attention to check on him, though, because the Patchers were beginning to push forward against the barrier. Two of them scattered to the side, trying to go around it while the others pushed dumbly against the magic, and Derivan tried to react
Vex reached out and touched his shoulder, the lizardkin''s eyes determined. Derivan felt Vex''s mana trickle into him the way it did when they were testing his stats, but this time it did something different. Instead of entering and merging with his mana pool, it somehow tangled with the part of his soul that was currently interacting with the spell.
The barrier Derivan was holding on to flexed, somehow, and expanded into a semicircle around them. The two Patchers that had shifted beat their too-long limbs uselessly against the barrier, also too dumb to try to go around it.
"Sev," Vex said, his voice a little tense. "Please get some help."
"Me?" the cleric asked. He opened his mouth, as if to protest Derivan saw the way he gripped his staff and nced nervously at them, as though worried they would be hurt and die without him but then he snapped his mouth shut into a grim, determined line, spun on his heel, and ran.
"You have a n?" Misa asked. Her voice was terse, and she was watching the Patchers with wariness; Derivan sensed the same thing she did. The barrier wouldn''tst forever. Every strike against it drained some of his mana.
"We need magic to fight them," Vex said. There was an oddness in the way his eyes shimmered, and he blinked and shook his head, like he was trying to get rid of something in his eyes. Derivan was starting to get the feeling that Vex had somehow understood a lot more than he had from that strangeness in the mana. "I dunno how to exin. The mana here doesn''t... it doesn''t know the system. Not really. But it understands reality. It spent a really long time trying to understand reality."
"How do you know this?" Derivan asked.
"I wanna know too." Misa frowned.
"I just... do." Vex hesitated, then pointed at the barrier at the small, fluttering books that made up its expanded semicircle. They weren''t actual books, of course, just impressions in the magic but the pages flipped and turned with every strike against the barrier, and now that Derivan was paying attention, the armor saw a very faint trace of mana leading back to Vex.
How odd. He''d been the one to cast the spell. Why was Vex receiving information he wasn''t?
How was Vex helping him with the spell, for that matter?
Not that Derivan minded. But the Patchers were getting tired of beating uselessly against the shield, and Vex seemed to tense a little bit. "They''re going to try something else," he said. "We need to hold them off"
There was a flutter in reality. A slight change.
A small Shift.
But small as it was, it was one that cascaded, bouncing between the five Patchers and umting in strength. Derivan felt it, this time, as the mana tried topensate and stop them but they Shifted further and faster, and as much as he tried, Derivan found he couldn''t stop what they were doing.
An instantter, they had stepped through the barrier. And yet, something was different the system-blue of their chitin was slightly burnt and chipped. They didn''t seem to care. They screamed again, and the echoes of that rippling Shift didn''t reach quite as far as before; it was weak enough that neither Derivan nor Misa had to try to block it before it dissipated, but it left the stone behind it broken and warped.
"I''ll take three!" Misa called loudly, before either Vex or Derivan could make any sort of tactical call, and she sprinted forward it didn''t take her that many steps. Threerge bounds and she smashed her mace into one of them, the crunch of carapace and limbs loud enough to echo in the building; she spun on her feet almost immediately,unching herself past the scream of a second one to kick and snap one of its lower limbs. ck lightning crackled around her in the form of a [Paralyzing Bash]
"Misa!" Vex called out, ever so slightly paler beneath his scales. Derivan winced. Vex had said not to use system-given skills, and [Paralyzing Bash]used mana on top of that.
But there was no runic inscription. It wasn''t a spell. Instead, mana briefly enveloped Misa before abruptly beginning to Shifting to the ck lightning that was typical in all paralysis skills.
And then Derivan saw why Vex had warned them against using any system-offered skills.
Before Misa''s mace could strike the third Patcher before the Shift into ck lightning had evenpleted, with only half of the manapleting the Shift the Patcher somehow seized something in that mechanism. Derivan couldn''t sense the precise mechanics of what happened, only that something was twisted, and the skill she cast neverpleted.
Instead, ck lightning turned into fire, and Misa screamed.
To her credit, she didn''t let it stop her. The scream transformed into something halfway between a growl and a snarl, a sound caught between determination and pain. Shepleted her blow, smashing her mace into the center of the Patcher that had done this to her and throwing it a good five feet back.
The skill snapped off, and the fire vanished. Misa breathed.
She looked pissed.
And that was all Derivan had the time to see before the two remaining Patchers were among them. Almost instinctively, Derivan tried to step in front of Vex again, but the lizardkin was insistent on not letting Derivan fight alone; he had a dagger in his hand, and he danced backwards with surprising finesse when a Patcher tried to swipe at him, and a second time when it screeched.
...Perhaps Derivan was worrying a little too much about his friend. Even without his magic, Vex was quite capable and nimble, and it was apparently something he''d focused on improving with the levels he''d been recently gaining.
As much as he would''ve liked to keep watching, the armor diverted his attention to the Patcher that wasing for him. There was a hint of an idea percting in his mind, rted to his recent thoughts on his stats; the fact that save for Physical Empathy, each one of them had been gained through the action of another on or around him.
He''d seen what that Patcher had done to Misa.
Derivan dodged once, as the Patcher swiped at him; the second time he grabbed the limb that wasing for him. This was the Patcher with the thin, sticklike arms, and for a moment he tried to bend them against their joints, to snap them but it was stronger than he''d expected, and he had to retreat backwards as another screech made the air and ground ripple around it.
Well. He still had his sword.
The next attack skittered off the edge of his sword as Derivan stepped past the Patcher, and the sticklike limb dug into the stone of the floor instead. The armor took a split second to realize exactly how dangerous the limbs were the moment it stabbed into the floor, the stone around the boxes began to dissolve, fizzing and bubbling before he stepped out of the way of the next strike.
Safe enough to strike, safe enough to block. Not safe enough to get hit by. Derivan wasn''t sure his armor would hold up, and he didn''t want to test it. He needed to try his n. He needed to use a skill
"Vex!" Misa called out, derailing Derivan''s thoughts. Her voice was strained. "Don''t get hit by them! Health doesn''t shield you!"
Health didn''t
Derivan spared a nce to Misa, and his eyes narrowed in a mixture of worry and trepidation. The burn marks on her skin had stayed after the spell, and there were nasty cuts and bruises in her olive-green skin. She''d clearly used her skill to block more than once, and there were fragments of her potential selves still shifting around her, like the skill hadn''t entirely resolved; some of them were more injured than she was.
Vex hissed in pain. Derivan nced back to see a long gash down one of the lizardkin''s arms, and a second attack rearing back to hit him
Misa appeared, clearly triggering that block once more, and staggered backwards as the Patchers seemed to try to twist the skill; it struggled, though, the Patcher''s own abilities catching on something before failing, and Misa kicked it back. Vex whispered a thanks
Derivan needed to deal with his Patcher. They were being spread too thin. Part of him understood why Vex had sent Sev for help; healing was something they needed, but far more crucial was the ability to block an attack that would otherwise be deadly. Something about prevention being better than the cure, he imagined the lizardkin saying...
...It didn''t stop him from worrying.
Back to his n. There was something he could gain here, if he was right about how he gained stats. He narrowed his eyes at the Patcher, and cast a [Barrier] through the system.
Mana began to trickle through the runic inscription that the system created, but before the spell couldplete, Derivan engaged the Patcher again; he allowed the spiderlike limbs to crash against his sword, and he felt the Patcher reach into him, trying to twist his cast. Whatever mechanism the system used to create runic inscriptions was manipted, and he felt one skill transforming into another.
But in the corner of his vision, where he had called up his status to see if he was right, two things had changed.
The text for [Barrier] had glitched, shifting into a different spell called [Void Shards]; he cancelled that spell quickly before he could find out what it would do.
And second, perhaps more important, was the new stat.
Patch: 1
85 - Book 2: Chapter 22: A Song of Change
85 - Book 2: Chapter 22: A Song of Change
Derivan didn''t particrly have the time to figure out what the new spell or the new stat could do. It was easy enough to guess that the spell wouldn''t be anything good, with the way the Patchers had twisted Misa''s [Paralyzing sh]; midbat was not the time to try to understand it. As for the stat...
He had a rough idea. But this wasn''t the time to try it out he had one point in it, and was in the middle of activebat besides
A half-formed insectoid arm whiffed past his helmet, so close he could hear the whistle it made through the air; Derivan jerked his head away from the near miss, ring at the Patcher attacking him. One part of him kept a close eye on what was happening with Vex, who was still dancing away from the strikes of his own Patcher, and Misa, who was handling all three of the ones she was fighting remarkably well, but was clearly taking hits.
He needed to take one of them off of her. Sev would be back soon, no doubt, as soon as he was able to find help. They needed to survive until then, or Shift needed to recover enough for him to push all of them back away from this ne of reality, or something
Derivan blocked the next attempted strike with the edge of his sword, using a sharp, twisting motion to crack open one of the Patcher''s joints; he transitioned smoothly into a kick, heavy metal smashing into the center of the Patcher and sending it sprawling back. Before it could recover, he took three quick,rge steps
"Misa!" he called, and she seemed to understand exactly what he wanted. She shot him a grin.
"Kept me waiting," she shouted back.
Two Patchers attacked her at once; thest was still dizzy from whatever strike she had used against it, and swaying on its feet. She stepped past one of them, letting the momentum of that strike send the Patcher directly into her mace.
The crunch of false chitin shattering sounded in the air.
The second attack Misa dodged but she used her one free arm to grab the limb the Patcher used in the attack, and then moved with the Patcher, turning the attempted charge into a throw. It sailed through the air directly at Derivan, and the armor hefted his sword, cutting deep into the center, where all the limbs were joined together.
Up until now, the Patchers screamed when they attacked, sending out a wave of energy that somehow Shifted the air around them. This time, the one he''d cut into wailed, making a sound that was somehow painful and threatening all at once. This one didn''t have the apanying deadly wave, and yet...
In that sound was a song he didn''t expect. A song he expected he wouldn''t have been able to hear at all, if not for his new stat. Derivan would have frowned if he could have; as it was, his eyes darkened into concern and worry.
His understanding wasn''t perfect. But the Patcher seemed like it was trying to finish something to do whatever it hade here to do to begin with.
Vex seemed to realize the same thing. "Careful!" the lizardkin yelled, and there was a re of panic in his voice that hadn''t been there before. He sounded just a little bit out of breath, but Derivan was more concerned in that moment with getting the Patcher he was fighting to stop wailing.
He could see what it was doing. Not a shift, exactly, but small-scale attempts to change the mechanics of the system; for one thing, it was weakening their connection to it, and for another, it was trying to change the effect of their stats
but it was getting confused. Because his stats were different, and it didn''t understand.
Derivan pushed his sword the rest of the way into the center of the Patcher. There was a crack as something fundamental within it shattered, and whatever was holding those disparate insectoid limbs together abruptly fell apart; four limbs scattered to the ground, suddenly lifeless.
That left four Patchers.
Derivan took another two steps even as the one he''d been fighting before caught up to him, and stabbed his sword into the joint of one Patcher just as it tried to hit Misa. It screeched at him, clearly angry.
"I am taking two of them," Derivan informed Misa, because he saw how hurt she already was. Before she could protest, Derivan hopped several steps backwards, flicking his gaze to Vex as he did so thankfully, as far as he could tell, Vex was fine. The lizardkin was practicing avoidantbat rather than actively trying to hurt the Patcher; his dagger didn''t seem to be able to do much against it anyway.
Derivan still worried. But that worry wasn''t productive, and he pushed that feeling aside forter examination.
Fighting two Patchers at once, Derivan quickly found, was harder than Misa had made it seem they were quick, and they didn''t move like organics usually did. They moved and attacked with the same limbs, which made it easy for them to turn an attack into a sidestep and a dodge into an attack. One of them, he could handle.
Two he could also handle, but like Misa, he couldn''t do it without taking a few hits.
Derivan for the first time in quite a while hissed in displeasure as one of the Patchers finally managed to score a hit on him. He''d been trying to dodge one and block the other, but hadn''t quite been able to move fast enough; he no longer had the benefit of Agility, after all. One Patcher turned its attack into a slight shift to the side, and then followed it up with a stab towards him in a move that was so smooth he almost didn''t see it.
Derivan''s armor was tough. He''d been built as a set of armor, after all, and he was a set of armor in a high-level dungeon to boot; Vex had asked him what his armor was made of before, and Derivan had honestly not been able to answer. None of his spells had been able to identify whatever type of metal Derivan was made out of, either. All they knew was that it was very durable, and conducted magic very well.
All of which to say that single limb, with no sharp edges, encountered only a bare amount of resistance before it cut through that metal anyway.
It happened the same way it had when he''d seen a failed attack strike the ground. The rock had simply parted ways, fizzing slightly with the aftereffect of whatever it was the Patcher had done; it was the same thing here. He felt a moment of pressure as the natural protective magics in his armor held back the attacking limb, and then that pressure turned into a sharp, unfamiliar bite of pain
Derivan leapt backwards almost on instinct, then felt the wall of the storage building pressing against his back. He nced at his friends. Misa was getting tired, he could see, and so was Vex; the half-orc was in a slightly worse state than Vex, but neither of them were doing well.
He wasn''t going to count on either of them interfering.
It was odd, though, that the Patchers'' attacks could bite through the ground and even his armor, but blocking them with his sword didn''t cause it to break in the same way. Derivan ignored the aching paining from the hole in his torso-piece, and considered what he could do.
The Patchers, of course, did not grant him the courtesy of time. One of them screeched again, the air rippling with that odd Shift that made the air pause and the stone flicker; the other was the same one that had hurt him the first time, and it had clearly seen that its methods worked, because it was just trying to stab him again.
An application of Shift to force the air and ground back into stability. His sword redirected the stab, sending chitinous arms into the wall behind him instead of into his armor yet again. The wall hissed behind him, whatever enchantments built in to protect the mana slivers not giving so much as a peep of a reaction.
Derivan went on the offensive.
He kicked off against the wall, using the boost it gave them to blindside the Patchers with a boost of speed. They could be hurt, he knew that much. His sword could cut them, and Misa''s mace could crush them, and yet even as he burst out past the two Patchers, his sword aimed directly for the center of one of them
there was no shatter. No break. Whatever purchase his de had caught with the first Patcher failed to manifest here, and his sword bounced uselessly off the system-box chitin instead. He had to duck under the followup attack, only the barest glimpse of a moving limb in the edges of his awareness warning him that it wasing.
He''d have to rethink his strategy.
Already, he was channeling mana into his gauntlet again, but drawing that glyph wasplicated when two of the Patchers were fighting him he had to abort several times when theyunched themselves at him and he had to duck out of the way. A few times he mmed his sword into the Patchers, breaking off bits and pieces of system-blue chitin, but never quite finding the same weak spot he had with the first one. Maybe Misa had weakened it in some way?
Derivan didn''t quite get the chance to find out.
There was a brief flicker a jump in what he could sense with his Shift stat, followed by a sh of light from somewhere behind him. Derivan didn''t have to turn around to guess what had happened, and in fact kept his focus on the Patchers in front of him; they suddenly seemed confused, their arms waving in the direction of the neers like they wanted to head for them, instead.
Derivan did turn around, then, to see that three mages and one priest had arrived. Sev looked out of breath, and was even now panting heavily; the other three mages Derivan didn''t recognize. Otter-Noram wasn''t among them, in any case
A Patcher staggered towards Derivan, apparently intent on moving past him and towards the mages, but the mages apparently didn''t want to waste any time. Streaks of light burst out from their foci, piercing each Patcher several times over even as Derivan watched. Small pieces of the beams deflected off that protective chitin, but by andrge...
Wait. No.
Derivan had assumed they''d solved the problem by cutting through the Patchers but while the magic had clearly done a lot of damage, the Patchers were somehow still alive.
This was going to be moreplicated than he''d hoped.
86 - Book 2: Chapter 23: Fixing Problems
86 - Book 2: Chapter 23: Fixing Problems
If nothing else, Derivan reflected, the tides of the battle had definitely turned. That was... about all he could say for the situation they were in.
Unlike their own weapons, magic ''proper'' magic, as it were was apparently able to punch through the bodies of the Patchers with little to no trouble. The problem was that the Patchers simply didn''t die. Whatever allowed them to kill one of the Patchers wasn''t something they could replicate, for all that Derivan tried to strike at the same point on the other Patchers; any damage they dealt simply healed over slowly.
Not quite like health, where the damage was reversed after it was done, and became nothing but a number on a sheet. Not quite like they didn''t have health, either, or Derivan would have been able to deal with them himself; his sword still did damage, even if it did so slower than the magic did. It simply didn''t kill the Patchers.
Even when he struck at what seemed like their weak spot.
"It''s like they patched it out," Sev said, irritationcing his tone. Derivan nced at him just in time to catch the way he narrowed his eyes, then let out an exasperated sigh. "...That''s exactly what they fucking did, isn''t it."
"I am unsure what you mean," Derivan offered.
"They fixed it," Sev said. "That''s what they do, right? They''re Patchers. They fix things. I don''t know exactly what they''re here to fix, but obviously they can fix things about themselves, too, or they wouldn''t be healing back like this."
"Whatever it is they do," one of the mages said he was arge, chitinous fellow, with a slightly rounded shape that reminded Derivan of the little beetles that would sometimesnd near or on him, thinking he was another part of the scenery "You need to find a way to stop them. We cannot keep this up for that much longer."
He was telling the truth, too. Each of the mages fought by tossing out little emblems with glyphs pre-painted onto them, firing a variety of spells through nces of light, bolts of fire, and twisting, shifting shadow, among other effects and yet none of them permanently disabled the Patchers. Even the more esoteric spells didn''t seem to do much. The equivalent of Sleep had simply whiffed against them, and they''d broken out of any of the cages that the mages created in short order; in that sense, it was a miracle that Derivan''s barrier hadsted as long as it did.
Although he supposed that this was an opportunity to draw up his barrier again.
The mages fought in a way that was quite unlike any other adventurer they''d encountered, though. Derivan wondered if they would be nearly as effective without the massive stream of mana flowing above them. As far as he could tell, there was no form of [Mana Maniption] happening here; if there was a variant of that at y, then he couldn''t sense it.
Instead, small streams of visible mana fell from above, connecting to the mages like they were puppets on a string, though the imagery was far more striking. That mana flowed through them and into the glyph-painted emblems, and the emblems would re with the color of the spell.
It was a mesmerizing sight, and a disy of skill, too. Derivan saw the way they moved, the way they breathed. There was a gracefulness to it almost like the dance they were performing was another way of calling the mana. He remembered what shopkeeper version of Anyati had said about the personalization of mana, and how it could be a little different in expression for everyone...
He wondered.
But now wasn''t the time.
It was an opportunity for him to draw up his barrier again, but a barrier wasn''t what would save them here. He could wait to recover, and try to Shift the Patchers back through all theyers he''d pulled them through; whatever muscle he used for Shifting seemed almost recovered. That was an option.
Until that was an option, though...
Sev had said that they were Patchers, and that they were fixing themselves; patching their own problems, as it were. They had a weakness, and they had removed it but now he had ess to what was presumably the same mechanism they used. If he could just reach out with Patch
It was a new stat. He didn''t understand all that it could do, yet; could barely find the new muscle it had no doubt given him that he could flex. If he focused, he could sense an oddity in the air in front of him, right where the Patchers were. If he focused even more, he could sense strangeplexities from the Patchers, like interlocking gears he couldn''t quite make head or tails of.
It was a lot easier to break something than to fix it, though. If it was aplex mechanism...
He reached out without quite understanding what he was doing just yet, using the same sense he''d used to notice this phenomenon at all. The delicate touch of his stat might as well have been a hammer, or a waraxe he had not nearly the stat he needed to make a gentle change.
So those metaphorical gears, ticking away invisibly, following some invisible script they were smashed to pieces.
The Patcher shuddered, slowing down; the next barrage of spells from the mages, another set of luminous beams, tore through those insectoid arms and left gaping holes and bleeding chitin, except this time those holes did not heal.
Derivan, though, simply stared. He wasn''t sure exactly what he''d done there but he had the feeling that the Patcher had been dead before those spells had hit it. He''d torn apart something vital in a creature that fundamentally relied on the system to exist, and the stat or the part of him that was that stat didn''t like that. It was supposed to Patch. To fix
He suppressed that spiral before it could begin, but Derivan felt ufortable. That stat was strange. He''d have to learn to work with itspulsions. This was the first time he felt like he''d lost points in a stat, though it wasn''t visible in the system interface.
He hadn''t even known it was possible to lose points in a stat.
The new sense, though, hadn''t diminished with the slight reduction in Patch and now that Derivan was paying attention, he could feel how every one of the Patchers showed up on it,plicated pieces of machinery that seemed entirely driven by the System. His friends showed up on it, too, though their machinery was more opaque to him the intricacies of how the system tied in to them and their skills were obfuscated, somehow, or shifted manyyers away.
The mages were nk they had never been tied in to the system. And Derivan himself...
His system was in shambles.
It reminded him of the way the mages were tied to the great mana flow above, streams of mana trickling down to them to feed their spells. Long strings of system-stuff trailed out of that obfuscated box that he saw over each of his friends, like a dozen strings tied to him had been cut, and those strings vanished into the distance, fading entirely out of the new sense.
Derivan wasn''t sure how to feel about any of that. But he did know now that Patch could kill the Patchers, even if it came at a consequence.
"I will send them back," he said. There were three Patchers left no doubt he cold use Patch to take out at least one more, but he wasn''t sure where that would leave his stat, and the feeling of forcing it troubled him. He wanted to understand a bit more about the nature of the stat, and the consequences for pushing against it.
"Did you summon them here?" one of the mages asked incredulously, staring at him. She was a thin, wasplike figure, though most of her figures were shrouded in her cloak; he wouldn''t have even known she was staring at him if she hadn''t rather pointedly made sure he could see her eyes. "Summonings are not legal without the approval of"
"Oh,e off it, Helg," herpanion rolled her eyes; this one had the pattern of adybug. Humanoid insects in general seemed to bemon to Teque. "I''m sure they''re not hurtin'' no one."
"Except themselves," the first mage that had spoken said shortly. The next emblem he drew sprayed cloudy, sticky-looking spots of light into the air; they hung there for a moment, ethereal and impossible, and then promptly dove towards one of the three remaining Patchers.
And then they began to spin, tearing off the limbs of the Patcher one by one.
...Some of this magic was brutal.
"I did not summon them," Derivan answered, trying to focus on the question at hand, though Patch proved to be a distracting itch. "They were already here; I simply... pulled them closer, so we can interact with them. They are likely what has been stealing your mana slivers."
"And you want to send them back so they can continue?" the beetle-mage frowned.
"I want to send them back because we cannot fight them as we are now," Derivan said, and then he made the decision for them, before they could convince themselves they could fight anyway. "We will find another way. We now know the cause, and that is progress. Please stand back."
He didn''t wait for a response from the mages. Instead, he pushed forward with Shift, feeling now more than ever the way theyers of reality pulled back from him, even when he wasn''t actively using the Skill. He felt it brush against each of the three remaining Patchers, forcing them forward
felt the Patchers slide through severalyers of reality, tumbling from the raw force of the Shift
and sent them back. The Patchers vanished, fading from sight.
For a while, there was a short silence.
"...How the hell did you do that?" Helg asked after a moment. She narrowed her eyes at him. "I didn''t sense you using any mana."
"It is a long story," Derivan sighed.
87 - Book 2: Chapter 24: Glyphs and Signs
87 - Book 2: Chapter 24: Glyphs and Signs
Whatever they''d done to engage with the Patchers seemed to have thrown off their ns, if they were capable of having ns at all. As far as Derivan could tell, they didn''t return to whatever ns they''d had with the mana slivers; instead, the shifted presence he felt fled, roughly in the direction of the road back to Fendal.
Which he was concerned about, admittedly, but the time variance between Fendal and Teque gave them enough leeway to talk and figure out exactly what was going on.
"I''m waiting," Helg said, folding her arms. The wasp woman didn''t seem like she was going to just let them go. Herpanions sighed at her brusqueness, but didn''t argue with her.
"It is our job to know," the beetle-man told them, sounding somewhat apologetic.
"Why don''t we go find Noram, first?" Sev suggested smoothly, stepping between Derivan and the holes Helg seemed to be trying to re into his helmet. Derivan wasn''t sure exactly what issue she''d taken with him, but she certainly seemed offended by him in some way. Perhaps it was the fact that he''d apparently been able to do magic without using mana.
...In fact, he could sense a spark of aggression even in herpanions, though they seemed much more amiable. They seemed suspicious when they looked upon him.
"Why should we do that?" Helg asked. She lowered her hood and raised a metaphorical eyebrow at him, one antennae twitching above the other. "He''s a busy man. Otter. We don''t need to bother him."
"Because if we don''t do that we''re going to need to exin this more than once," Sev said with a sigh. He nced around at the rest of his party, and they all nodded in agreement Helg stared at them suspiciously, then finally gave an assenting nod.
"Don''t try anything," she said sharply.
"You know we''ve already met Noram, right?" Misa asked, folding her arms. "We met him while he was taking a nap. If we wanted to do anything"
"You would''ve been cut down by the spells he puts around himself when he''s asleep," Helg interrupted. Vex opened his mouth to protest, then seemed to think the better of that, snapping it shut and looking away instead; the waspishdy flicked her gaze to him anyway, sharp eyesnding on the lizardkin. "Got something to say, lizard?"
"His name is Vex," Derivan said, sounding a touch more protective than he had intended.
"I don''t care," Helg said.
"He didn''t have any defenses up," Vex said quietly. "I would''ve seen them. Just a basic rm trigger connected to the stairs."
Helg stared at him for a moment long enough that the weight of her gaze became ufortable for the lizardkin, and he took a slight step backwards. She seemed to soften just slightly at that, though there was still a distinct sort of aggression set into her body.
"Then he''s an idiot and needs to be taught a lesson again," she said shortly. "But we''ll see, won''t we?"
Without another word, Helg began marching back towards the center of the city; presumably, towards wherever Noram had decided to hole up for his nap. Herdybugpanion started hurrying after her, casting an apologetic nce back at them, and the beetle movedst of all.
"I am sorry about her," he said. "She is connected deeply to the mana. It is... ufortable, at times. It tunes her to its emotions."
"Is the mana... angry?" Vex asked quietly. The question seemed important to him.
"It is agitated," the beetle-mage replied after a slight pause. "Which is another part of what has been guing our city ofte, though you will not hear many speak of it. The mana is celebrated here, a force that supports the thriving of our peoples. Few here will admit to anything being wrong with it."
"But you will?" Misa challenged.
"I say things as I see them," the beetle-mage replied. He bowed slightly towards her. "My name is Anton. The other mage is named Unea. We have not introduced ourselves, I realize; I hope this does not cause offense."
"I mean... no?" Misa answered, ncing around awkwardly when she realized he was talking specifically to her. "I''m not the leader here or anything, y''know."
"Ah," Anton said. "I apologize. You are quite beautiful, you see."
"Oh my god," Sev said, muffling augh. Misa looked... mostly unimpressed, though she nced over Anton, as though judging how capable he would be in a fight.
"Hurry up already!" Helg called back after them, and Anton gestured for them to follow him.
"He wasn''t kidding about being direct," Sev muttered as he followed. Derivan fell into step beside Vex, even as Misa shook her head.
"Weird timing for apliment," she grumbled.
It didn''t take long for them to find Noram.
What did take much longer than it should have was waking the otter up. The first time, he''d woken up as soon as they''d begun to climb up the stairs of the tower, presumably triggering some automatic detection he''d rigged. This time, he''d done the opposite he was sleeping on a glyph that he''d painted onto the floor. In a very, very abstract way, Derivan thought the glyph looked rather like it was shaped like an otter sleeping on a bed.
Which was, to be fair, exactly what the otter was doing. A glowing bed made of blue magic rested beneath him, and he was curled up in it, asfortable as could be; a dome surrounded him, a perfect shield through which Helg was apparently attempting to break with a death stare, judging by the intensity of it.
"He''s got his personal Sign up," thedybug-mage Unea, Derivan remembered said.
"I can see that," Helg growled. She stalked over and kicked the dome. "Wake up!"
"He cannot hear you," Anton told her.
"I know that," Helg hissed.
"Um," Vex ventured, and all three of the mages looked at him. "What do you mean, personal Sign?"
Helg stared for a moment, then threw her hands up. "I''m leaving," she said. "You two can handle this. Call me when Noram wakes up."
Sev opened his mouth, like he was about to say something snarky Derivan could practically see the sass forming in his throat but he seemed to reconsider at thest moment. "Is she alright?" he asked instead. He nced at Anton. "You said something about her connection with the mana agitating her. That can''t be pleasant."
"It is not," Anton acknowledged. "But there is little that can be done. Given time, she can work her way past it, but it has been... difficult, here, for the past few months." Now Anton seemed uncertain. "It is odd how different this ce has been in that time."
"What do you mean?" Sev asked.
"I remember this ce being much more alive," Anton said. "But when the Roads deactivated, many people seemed to lose a spark. For weeks, people did not speak at all, simply following a routine; I was among them, and I did not think it strange at the time, though I do now."
"That changed when the first set of mana slivers was stolen," Vex said, and Anton nced at him. The beetle-mage''s mandibles folded together in a sort of frown.
"...That is correct." Anton looked over the lizardkin carefully. "Do you know something about this?"
"No," Vex shook his head, and then he hesitated. "Maybe. I don''t... I don''t know, exactly. That''s why I want to know what a personal Sign is."
"You forgot about his question, ya dingus," Unea finally spoke up. "Was wonderin'' when you''d notice."
"Ah," Anton said. He had the courtesy to sound contrite. "My apologies."
"Each an'' every one of us gets at least one personal Sign," Unea said. "Issa personal thing. You grow your rtionship with mana, learn somethin'' about yerself, and bam! You find a Sign. Somethin'' that represents you. You gotta learn more about it, and grow it, and it bes stronger over time."
"And Noram''s is... for sleeping?" Sev asked, ncing at the otter, still snoring peacefully in his dome.
"He''s one of them lucky motherfuckers that got more than one personal Sign," Unea snorted. "I''m thinkin'' he got that one after he became Archmage an'' all. Needed more sleep. He deserves it, the poor fe."
"I can''t believe he got one just for sleeping," Sev muttered, staring at the dome.
"Can personal Signs be used by others?" Derivan asked. Unea nched a little bit at the question, and Anton used the opportunity to respond.
"Once they are discovered, then yes, although most guard their Signs jealously," Anton said. "It is an expression of who they are. But it is in the nature of art to want to be shared and looked upon, so in truth, it is not difficult to copy such Signs. It is simply that it is considered taboo to do so."
"Can Signs bebined?" Vex asked, almost too soft to hear.
"They can, butbinin'' them is about as hard as breakin'' glitterstone," she said, apparently d to have something to talk about other than the idea of using someone else''s personal Sign. "They don''t gotta be no one''s personal Signs to do that, either."
"And breaking glitterstone is... hard?" Vex tried.
"Very," Unea said, nodding seriously. "Glitterstone is about as hard as yilrite, it is."
"I see," Vex said. Derivan had no idea what yilrite was, and he doubted Vex did either, but the lizardkin only nced at him contemtively. He looked like wanted to say something, but was second guessing himself.
After a second, though, resolve hardened in his eyes. "I think you might have... figured out my Sign for me, Deri."
"I did?" Derivan asked, surprised.
"When you cast your spell," Vex said softly. "The barrier was yours, but the book... that was mine, I think. When the Patchers were attacking it, it felt like the spell was trying to understand what they were doing. Logging them, studying them the way I would, feeding the information back to me."
"That should not be possible," Antonmented with a frown. "If your friend was able to cast such a spell, he should have received that information, not you. And there is no precedent for being able to discover someone else''s personal Sign for them."
Vex didn''t look convinced. "It''s what happened," he said.
"Maybe you were imaginin'' things, hon?" Unea tried. "It does happen sometimes"
"If he says that is what happened," Derivan interrupted. "Then I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt."
Vex shot him a grateful look, and there was something else in his eyes; a little bit of his usual anxiety, certainly, but also a strange bit of sureness. "I don''t know how, but I think he did figure out thebined Sign," he said.
"We''d have to see it in action," Unea finally said.
"I''d like to see it in action, too," Noram said, and they all startled, turning to look at the wizard. The little otter let out a yawn, stretching and pulling tiny fists above his head. "That was a good nap. Didn''t think I''d wake up to see you all here, though."
"I''ll go get Helg," Anton said with a sigh.
"Go on," Noram said, nodding at Derivan. The armor hesitated for a moment, but eventually called on the mana again, guiding it to his gauntlet; once again, he drew the book-shield glyph he''de upon just the previous night. Noram stared at it contemtively, even when the shield formed in front of Derivan.
Then, without warning and without Noram really moving at all mana darted in front of him, flowing rapidly into a glyph that looked to be a terriblebination of open maw and sharp fang; what rushed forward from it wasn''t so much a physical spell as it was the impression of something gnashing. Yet Derivan felt with certainty that anything in front of that psychic impression would be shredded to pieces
It struck his shield and shattered, psychic teeth flying everywhere. At the same time, Vex grimaced slightly, and then his mouth opened and he blinked, staring at Noram.
"If you''re right about what that spell does," Noram said, "then you''re probably right about whatever else you figured out from that spell. "
Vex nodded, seeming to take a moment to breathe. "I''ll tell you what I know."
88 - Book 2: Chapter 25: A Hint of the Past
88 - Book 2: Chapter 25: A Hint of the Past
Vex frowned, and took a moment to concentrate.
The system always presented information about skills and spells in a neat, orderly sort of way. His Glyph did the opposite, in the sense that it fed the information directly into his skull and didn''t seem to bother to filter it, meaning he got a whole lot of irrelevant information on top of the actually useful stuff.
Not unlike the way he tended to take research notes, actually. So on that front there was a possibility that this was slightly his fault.
Just a bit.
It took him a second to sort through and organize the most important information in his mind.
Sign of Renewal
The result of a merge between the personal Sign of the great archmage ###a#, merged with the Sign of the Great Wyrm during their confrontation many eons ago. The original Sign of Devouring is a unique-ss Sign that takes on the form of a set of metaphysical teeth, consuming everything in its path. Tempered with ###a#''s unique Sign of Birth, the result is a spell that consumes the essence of an object and turns it into a seed, to be grown anew.
There was a lot of information that Vex had to discard to put even that together. Part of it was a scrambled list of things the Sign had previously been used on, and the resultant seed that had been created; Noram or this version of Noram had evidently used it on a number of nts that Vex recognized as the same as the ones that along the streets of Teque.
Derivan''s spell was, interestingly, not on that list.
Then there was a mess of information about the emotional state of the caster, the names of everyone that knew the spell useless information that Vex had to sort and discard before it crowded out the more useful stuff. He did learn why the nts had been Renewed, though; apparently, many of them were nts on the surface that they''d lost ess to after the mana had closed it off. The Sign didn''t keep everything the same, but it was close enough.
It was a small reminder of the breadth of the world they''d once had.
"Renewal," Vex finally said, looking at Noram; the otter widened his eyes slightly in response, but didn''t say anything. "It consumes something on a metaphysical level, and then rebirths it, a little different than before. You use it to preserve some legacies from the surface that don''tst down here in Teque."
"An information-gathering personal Sign, then," Noram said thoughtfully. The otter hopped to his feet and nced at the door, where Anton was bringing a grumpy-looking Helg into the building not that Helg ever looked not-grumpy, as far as Vex could tell. "Those are... rare. And not often as potent as yours."
"We don''t know that it''s mine," Vex said, embarrassed.
"The fact that it''s feeding that information back to you and not your friend is good enough evidence for me," Noram said with a shrug. "Though how your friend discovered your Sign for you and managed to integrate it with his own is another question entirely."
"It is because I was thinking about Vex, I believe," Derivan supplied. "He is the reason I am close to magic at all."
"I''m" Vex started, and then promptly buried his snout into his hands. He wanted to hide behind Derivan, except that was what he always did, and this time Derivan was the source of the embarrassment, so he couldn''t hide behind him
Noram, watching the two of them, snorted and grinned. "Yeah, okay, nevermind, I figured it out."
"Doesn''t take long, does it?" Sevmented.
"If you tease him any more he might explode," Misa said. "Can''t have him exploding. It''s bad for wizards."
"Have experience with that, do you?" Noram asked, raising a single, ottery brow.
"So much," Misa sighed. She pulled Vex close to give him a presence to anchor to, and he gratefully hugged into her. She''d always had the most understanding of his anxiety next to Derivan, and Derivan at the moment seemed to be too busy trying to figure out what everyone was talking about...
"He''ll figure it out," Misa whispered to him. "I think he just did, actually. Fuckin'' finally."
Vex decided he really needed to figure out that sink-into-floor spell. If only his friends would let him try. It had only blown up twice before! It absolutely wasn''t the big deal everyone seemed to think it was
"Can we get back on topic, please?" Helg finally spoke up, looking disgruntled and vaguely annoyed. Her arms were crossed, and her antennae twitched slighty in irritation. "In case you forgot, we have rogue elements loose in the city, and the Guard can''t deal with them because apparently they don''t hide using spells."
"You said your spell gave you some information on them," Noram said. "What kind of information was that, exactly?"
"It''s kind of iplete," Vex said, grimacing a little as he spoke. Maybe he''d yed it up too much all he knew was that the Patchers gave him a very bad feeling, along with an assorted set of impressions. Every time they struck Derivan''s shield, it was like he could feel something being drained away, but it was much harder for him to learn what the Patchers were doingpared to what Noram''s spell was doing...
Though that made sense, he supposed. The Patchers were part of the system, and his Sign or Glyph was part of the magic here in Teque, or whatever they called their greater world. They opposed each other, in a way.
"It''s a lot fuzzier than trying to read the spell," Vex borated when he saw the others looking at him; he tried not to fidget, and he felt Derivan stepping behind him again. Therge armor''s presence somehow let him feel a little calmer, and he sighed, trying to sort through his thoughts. "I can start with the obvious, I guess the Patchers work the same way the system does, since they''re its agents. They can edit aspects of the system, grant themselves skills, and to a limited extent they can cause minor shifts in reality."
"The thing is, the ones here are trying to do something specific, and that''s what I''m struggling with." Vex hesitated, searching his mind for the words. "It''s not... whatever it is they''re doing, it''s not good. But I need more. It''s just..."
The Patchers were gone, were the words left unsaid.
Helg frowned. She pulled out an arm quite literally, in fact; Vex felt the shift in mana as she dragged the literal arm of one of the Patchers out of some dimensional space and held it forward. "Can you use this?"
"Um," Vex said, and then nced helplessly at Noram. "Probably?"
"You might want to try Signing yourself," the otter told him, as gently as he could. "It may open new aspects of your spell that aren''t avable in thebined Sign. Also no offense but your currentbined Sign is amateurish at best." He nced at Derivan.
Derivan simply shrugged. "It was my first attempt," he said. "I am not surprised. But I am eager to learn what it could do, if properlybined."
"One might call that a rather intimate act,bining two personal Signs," Noram said, his tone just a bit teasing, and Vex tried to ignore the way Derivan nced contemtively at him.
"Anyway!" he said, trying to ignore the way his voice pitched a little higher than usual. "How do I Um. Right. I have this." He rummaged around in his tailbag, eventually pulling out the brush that he''d gotten from Anyati, back in the shop; Noram watched him with something that looked like a spark of recognition, but didn''t say anything.
Vex used [Ssh of Mana], and then... he hesitated.
This was, already, different from anything that the people of Teque did when casting their magics. He''d never seen any of them use manaitself as a paint; their glyphs were all preprepared, with the only exception being Noram''s use of the Sign of Renewal just now. Did it matter?
"What is that?" Helg muttered, staring at him, and Noram shook his head and shushed her. Vex decided to ignore them both, for now.
He needed something that represented him. And he had some idea of what his Sign might look like, thanks to Derivan; it would be something like a book...
He still hesitated after letting some of the light-green mana he''d generated soak into the brush. The bristles gleamed, and he knew, with an instinct he hadn''t known he had, that he could now use it to cast but the thought of what he should draw left him entirely. His Sign was a book, certainly, but what kind of book? Was it open or closed? What were the details
Derivan ced a hand on his shoulder. "You are overthinking," the armor said quietly. "Clear your mind. Draw whates to you."
Vex... breathed. And then he began to paint.
He could sense, somehow, that Derivan was guiding him that the armor himself wasn''t exactly sure what he was doing, only that he was helping. He felt himself being guided, slowly, towards a clearer image. His hand was moving on its own, now; the brush strokes were familiar, like he''d been drawing and painting all his life, and when he was done...
"Oh," he said softly.
The Glyph represented his first empty notebook.
There were a few glittering shards beside it no doubt mana slivers. Vex remembered what the shopkeeper-Anyati had said, that the mana would award an act of true creation with some slivers; he wondered if there was significance in the number or the size. Judging by the look Noram was giving him...
But he didn''t care about that right now. More importantly was the surge of emotion the glyph brought with it.
For all that his family had a focus on studying and researching magic, not all of them enjoyed it; some of his brothers and sisters, he knew, found greater joy in understanding thebat applications of magic, or how illusions could be twisted towards beauty. He was the only one among his brothers that had taken to studying and documenting everything, and the memory of his first notebook was something...
He didn''t treasure the memory. Not exactly. But it was his first gift. The first thing he could truly call his own, gifted to him after his parents had seen how he spent all his time analyzing and studying every piece of magic he came across; it was a small thing, loose papers held together by a copper binder that spiralled through the pages, but it was his.
And that was the form the glyph had taken.
Vex swallowed the well ofplicated emotion that rose up inside him. He watched instead, silent, as the mana around him began to move flowing from the great river of mana up above and drifting slowly, carefully towards his glyph at first; then faster and faster, charging it to a brighter potency with every passing second. Noram''s eyes widened slightly. Helg reached out, as if about to say something
"Give me the arm," Vex said, as a small piece of the puzzle unravelled for him, and he understood how to use the glyph a little bit more.
The waspdy handed it over without another word, her eyes lingering on the mana slivers he had created, or been awarded. Vex took the arm, a small part of him disturbed by the fact that he was essentially holding on to a part of a corpse, but the rest automatically following the instinctive instructions that came along with the casting of the spell; he ced it in front of his glyph, and thin tendrils of magic burst from the notebook,tching on to it
Vex felt the information flow in, and his face paled quickly, even beneath his scales.
89 - Book 2: Chapter 26: On the Nature of Being
89 - Book 2: Chapter 26: On the Nature of Being
Vex had known it was bad.
He''d known it was something that scared him; there had been enough spillover, enough intrinsic understanding from the Patcher''s attacks that he could grasp that bare essence of it.
But this?
This... he didn''t know how to fix this. He didn''t know if they could! He didn''t even know how to begin
"Vex," Derivan said gently, and Vex heard the note of worry in the armor''s voice. Derivan''s presence helped, and he tried to calm himself.
The purpose and intent of the Patchersid bare in front of him, resonating in his mind.
They were here to fix a problem. That problem was the fact that the bonus room hadn''t activated properly, all the way back when Noram had activated it; the partial activation meant that the system had created a shallow, not-quite-there shadow of the real Teque, if there was a real Teque. Vex still wasn''t exactly sure what the system drew from. And the system was still trying to fix that error only ''fixing'' the problem meant, in this case, that the bonus room had to be fully activated.
And the resources it had to do so were limited.
There was another reason, too, he sensed, but his mind was more upied with an understanding that left him feeling slightly sick.
"Misa," Vex said. He tried to control the anxious dread creeping through him. "You know how you said maybe Fendal is the bonus room, but we don''t have the full picture?"
"Yes," Misa said, cautiously. From the look on her face, she knew she wasn''t going to like whatever Vex was about to tell her.
"Most bonus rooms aren''t like your vige," Vex said. "I''ve read about how adventurers have tried to talk to the people in bonus rooms, and they give... canned responses. They''re shadows of the real thing; a simtion by the system. But our bonus rooms are different."
"Right."
"The people in our bonus rooms are... well, they''re people." Vex hesitated. He was stating the obvious; avoiding the truth. "But a lot of people in Fendal were kind of like the shadows I''m talking about. You noticed how the guards reacted to us, right? And the way Gensen behaved."
"Noram felt real," Derivan pointed out. "Anyati... Well. We did not interact much with her. But she did not feel as Gensen did."
"Yeah," Vex said. He tried to steady himself; felt the panic creeping into his voice again as he spoke, and looked to Derivan forfort. One hand found the armor''s own, and Derivan squeezed his hand gently, as if to reassure him. Vex wasn''t even sure it was a good idea to say what he was about to say out loud, but...
It didn''t seem right to keep it a secret, either.
"You were kinda right," Vex said to Misa; his gaze flickered to Noram and Helg and Anton and Unea, and he felt that unease in his heart growing. "But it''s... not that simple. Fendal is bing a bonus room the regr kind, the one where the people just have to follow a script while Teque is bing more like J''rokksur was, where everyone here is real and whole. The system doesn''t have enough juice, or whatever it is it uses to make things real, and it''s stealing it from Fendal and putting it here, and the Patchers are what''s doing it, and I don''t I don''t know"
Vex''s voice cracked a little. He felt Derivan pulling him into his arms, and he leaned into that touch, unable to find the words toplete his thought.
The implications terrified him. Because he understood what was happening, now, and it was worse than he found himself able to express. He understood what the raids were, exactly the idea that there were mistranted residents of Teque harassing the people of Fendal had been badly wrong.
There were residents of Teque in Fendal. That exined the greater poption of magical species there. Teque was muchrger than Fendal in poption, and so the system had diverted some of them towards the small town those deemed not necessary for the bonus room''s objectives were effectively piloted into Fendal, so they could be harvested like the rest.
And the raids, then, weren''t raids at all.
They were perceived as such, because Fendal was a town that was near-constantly paranoid of the monsters swarming near them, and whatever the Patchers were taking from them required a weakness to exploit. A crack in the psyche of those it stole from. It manifested in their memories as a small point of irritation against something they held close; too much noise outside an inn, or precious flowers being chewed on. Guard patrols being disrupted by goblins, ruining the clockwork order in the city.
Every ''raid'' was a Patcher, stealing something precious and copying it for Teque. Anyati-the-shopkeeper and Noram-the-otter those were almost certainly not their original names, maybe not even their original selves. How long had the otter version of Noram here been named Noram? Had his name been something else before the Patchers hade along?
And how could they fix this? Destroying the Patchers wasn''t enough; the system might send more, or if it didn''t, then half of Fendal and half of Teque would be stuck halfway betweenplete and iplete. Uneptable. As was sacrificing the people of either town to allow the other to function,plete and whole. He couldn''t help but search for a solution, trying to find something that would fix this; a way to let both the people of Teque and Fendal live fully
"Vex."
Vex startled at the sound of his name; he nced up, and realized that Misa was staring at him, a worried look on her face. Derivan was still holding him gently, but even the armor seemed worried; the glow in his eyes was dim, and he held him like he was worried he would break.
"I''m okay," he said, even though he wasn''t.
"No you''re fucking not," Misa snorted. Something like anger passed over her face, but it was gone as quickly as it appeared; it didn''t seem to be anger at him, in any case. It was reced quickly by sorrow, and then a pained sort of eptance. "But it''s fine. You''re allowed to be not okay."
Vex didn''t want to talk about it. He looked around instead; Noram and Helg had vanished; only Anton and Unea stood around still, somewhat awkwardly. "Where..."
"You were muttering to yourself the whole time," Derivan told him gently. "They went to talk to the other mages. To try to find a fix."
"I don''t think they can find one," Vex said quietly, numbly. "I don''t... I''m not sure there are any good answers here."
"Maybe not," Sev finally spoke up. He''d been quiet for a while, contemting, and now he finally spoke. There was a shadow over his face, too no one here was happy, really. "But we''ll decide after we know everything. We still don''t know why the Patchers were raiding for mana crystals and slivers; those actually went missing, in both Fendal and Teque. We checked. Do you know why they''re gone?"
Vex was silent for a moment. The information was there. He''d forgotten about it in the flood of everything else, and now he took a breath, trying to steady himself, in case what he found was even worse. "I think so," he said.
Derivan hummed aforting tune next to him, squeezing his hand, and Vex gave him a grateful smile before turning his mind to the task.
Mana crystals and mana slivers. What did the Patchers want with them?
The information on what mana crystals and mana slivers actually were was locked away from him too far away from what the Patchers were doing. He''d have to run the spell on one of the slivers himself, and he had the feeling that his glyph wouldn''t be nearly as effective at deciphering what they did; he needed to spend some time understanding the real limitations of the spell.
But it was still enough for him to understand why the Patchers were stealing the crystals and the slivers. The crystals were easy: They needed more crystals. The usual mechanism of having them be spent on maintaining a connection to the system wasn''t enough, especially now that those in Fendal were cut off from it. Why the system needed those crystals, when it was the one that awarded them to begin with... that was a little more up in the air.
The mana slivers, on the other hand, wereplicated. As far as Vex could tell, the Patchers thought that the slivers could be useful for something to the system; they had a protocol they had to follow for items like that. They would have stolen more at a time, even, but for whatever reason it was difficult for them to transport the slivers. That was the other reason this bonus room had priority: the system recognized something useful in it.
"It needs the crystals for something," Vex said. "The system, I mean. And it thinks it can use the slivers somehow. But I don''t think that... helps us."
Sev looked down; Misa clenched her fists, then unclenched them when she saw that Vex was watching her. Derivan simply stayed close, and Vex found that he was grateful for it; he just wished...
Now wasn''t the time.
"Can you tell us a little more?" Anton asked; he sounded worried, as he had every right to be. He sounded like he''d been holding back that question for a while, and was only speaking now that it was silent and he couldn''t stand that silence any longer. "Helg and Noram believed you. But I do not understand. What do you mean, what makes a person? Why would there be anything we need to fuel us to be real?"
"I wish we could answer that question." Sev spoke up when he saw that Vex didn''t seem to want to reply; he was busy resting, staring at the glyph he''d drawn as it slowly dissipated into motes of light green in the air. "You know what the system is?"
"It is some sort of globe-spanning spellwork, as I understand it," Anton said. "One that grants power and the ability to cast spells within it."
"Not a spell," Sev said, shaking his head. "But close enough. It''s been there as long as we can remember."
"Which is only a few hundred years," Vex added, though his words were mumbled. Anton caught on anyway, and his eyes narrowed, making the same connection they had.
"About since the mana began shepherding us underground," Anton said.
"That''s what we think," Sev said with a sigh. "The system''s been known to... I dunno, it''s going to sound ridiculous. It handles many of the basic facets of reality."
"The skills it gives us let us do things that mana wouldn''t let us do," Vex offered quietly.
"The two forces are opposed?" Anton suggested.
"Mana doesn''t seem to like it when we use spells through the system," Vex said with a sigh. "I can imagine why, after seeing the magic here. It''s all so much more... alive. There''s so much meaning when you cast spells."
"Your spells aren''t like that," Anton said, and Vex shook his head.
"No," he said. "They''re empty. They... I don''t think it kills the mana, exactly, but it takes something out of mana. Makes it something lesser."
Anton nodded, looking troubled; Unea, beside him, remained silent. She still hadn''t said a word.
"Your exnation makes sense," Anton finally said. "I do not want to believe it, but... it exins all those months of me seeing everyone act so strangely. Like I was in a dream."
"Why''re you able to remember that?" Unea asked suddenly. She looked at him, stepping back for a moment. "I don''t. I don''t remember nothin''. I remember the Roads dying off a week ago, not months."
Anton frowned. He paused for a moment, like he hadn''t really thought about it until now, and Vex watched him; there was a nagging feeling in the back of his mind, like maybe the answer to this question was important.
"...Now that you mention it," Anton said, and then he looked at the table, where the mana slivers Vex had been rewarded were still glowing. "I believe it may be because of those."
90 - Book 2: Chapter 27: Rock and a Hard Place
90 - Book 2: Chapter 27: Rock and a Hard ce
Anton, it quickly came out, had happened to be carrying arge load of mana slivers when the Roads had shut down presumably the exact moment the bonus room had been created, and this little pocket of reality had be ''real''. There was, he exined, a blip in his memory there. He''d been overwhelmed by a harrowing sensation of deep nothingness before his thoughts had flowed back to him, and when he came back to himself, he was lying copsed on the ground, the mana slivers scattered all over the ground.
He hadn''t managed to be properly real immediately. What Anton remembered and had never really questioned until now, when the memory was directly called to his attention was that he''d simply carried those slivers around and gone about his daily routine. It''d been what he was doing at the time, after all, and so he kept going on autopilot.
Anton''s face couldn''t go ashen. But Vex watched as he slowed his words mid-exnation, as though he was finally thinking about the state he''d been in, and he just... stopped talking. He sat there for a moment, not saying a word, and Unea nced at him in concern a moment before he shook off whatever fugue had briefly taken him.
"...At some point," Anton eventually continued, "I suppose I remembered enough of myself to divert from the path. I finished delivering the slivers I was carrying, and then I wandered."
"You just wandered?" Misa asked. Anton shrugged.
"I do not think I was fully awake, even then," he asked. "I did not think anything was wrong, explicitly; I remember only the vague thought that the closure of the Roads made everyone subdued."
"The important thing here," Sev said, "is that the slivers can fix this."
"I think so," Anton agreed, but he looked hesitant. "But it still took a long time, and it took a lot of them. When I finished delivering them, I think about half the original load was gone. I assumed I lost them while carrying them around, but..."
"It''s possible you absorbed them somehow." Vex nced at the slivers he''d inadvertently created while trying to understand his own personal glyph; they shone there, oddly tempting, shimmering with a prismatic light. Now that he was actually paying attention to them...
They weren''t like mana crystals at all. He didn''t sense mana in them, the same way he did with mana crystals.
"Why are they called mana slivers, anyway?" he asked. "Do you know what they are?"
"The mana only started rewarding them after we got stuck down here," Anton said. He shook his head. "They help us cast. Extend the effects of some spells, or let other spells do things they should not be able to do. They are valuable. That is why Teque keeps a store of them we do not store it for citizens, but so that we can cast citywide magics if we need to."
"Have you ever needed to?" It was Misa that asked the question. It wasn''t sharp and pointed, exactly, but there was a certain tenseness in her words.
"...Once." Anton frowned, and Unea looked at him; thedybug-woman looked like she wanted to speak up. When Anton didn''t continue, she did.
"It was hard for him," Unea said. "He had ta make the call to use it. Parasites got in here through the Roads nasty little fes. Latched on to mana signatures and ate away at people, then puppeted them with their own personal mana. And in case you''re wonderin'', no, that ain''t happening now. They''re shit at pretending, and we checked."
"It was one of the first things I looked into," Anton muttered softly. Unea shot him a sympathetic nce.
"He lost his family in that spell," she said. "Though I s''ppose they were lost before that spell was ever cast. A lot of us lost someone. We have magic, but we ain''t got any signs to fix anything like that."
They were silent, at that. What was there to say?
"I''m sorry," Vex offered quietly, and Anton tilted his head slightly in acknowledgement.
"The important thing," he said, changing the subject, "is that the slivers might be able to reverse the effect you speak of, somehow. Or if not reverse it... Then perhaps rece whatever it is that your system takes away from us. Took away from us, when it brought us here."
"We need to understand more about these slivers," Sev said with a frown. "I thought they were just a currency, but it''s obviously a lot more than that."
"We have tried," Anton said. "It was and still is a focus of study for many of our mages. But the slivers are mostly opaque to our magic, and we have not discovered any signs that can manipte them. Perhaps yours will be able to identify something we have not?"
Anton gave Vex a significant nce, here, and the lizardkin nched slightly under the weight of the beetle-man''s gaze. "I... maybe," he said, his words hesitant. "But I don''t think it''s going to be that easy."
He didn''t say the words he wanted to say that the use of his Sign wasn''t exactlyfortable for him. The memory of his first notebook was certainly arge part of who he was, but it was also a reminder of many things he didn''t want to remember.
Derivan saw, of course. A metallic hand came up to rest on his shoulder, and for once, Vex didn''t feel that much better. It still helped, but...
He shook his head, and drew on the mana once more; the brush danced beneath his fingers with a practiced ease he shouldn''t have had, and the glyph he drew shone brightly.
And yet, when those tendrils reached out for the sliver, they seemed to slip straight through.
"Nope," Vex said. His heart was heavy. "Whatever it is, it doesn''t really seem like mana can act on it. It can act on mana, though."
"And we are no closer to understanding them than when they first began to appear," Anton muttered. "I am not sure this is a solution. It brought me back into myself, but it was a process that took time, and even then it did not fully restore my person. Even if it workedpletely over a longer period of time..."
"There are more people in Fendal and Teque than you have the slivers for," Vex said with a sigh. He''d seen what they had stored up in the so-called warehouse, and considering the number of people in Teque, let alone the poption of Teque and Fendalbined
"Acts of creation great enough to be rewarded with mana slivers are... not rare, as such, but perhaps umon," Anton said, confirming Vex''s worries. "And while we try to use them sparingly, there are still dangers here we use the slivers tobat. Though... not as much now, I suppose. Not since the Roads were closed."
"Trying to restore people using slivers is going to be a long and slow process," Sev said with a sigh. "I guess we could take advantage of the time distortion? Bring people into Teque, give them some time with some slivers..."
"Or," Helg said, "we let your system keep doing what it''s doing."
Her interruption was met with silence. Helg stood at the top of the stairs of the tower, looking down at them with something that looked like a cross between a frown and a look of sympathetic pity yet there was a hardness in her gaze, too, of a sort that made Vex flinch and recoil away from her.
He was familiar with that look. That was the ''hard decisions'' look; the kind of look someone gave before they said they were making a decision that was hard, but necessary.
Except sometimes many times those necessary decisions weren''t necessary at all.
Misa bristled at her words almost immediately, and she took a step forward, her fists clenched. "You can''t sacrifice a whole other town"
"Misa," Sev said quietly, and the woman stopped, putting visible effort into restraining herself. Her fists clenched and unclenched, and Helg watched her, impassive to her fit of rage. "Helg, we''reing up with a solution. You don''t have to go that far."
"You don''t know that your solution will work," Helg said. "And I don''t trust that you won''t interfere with what your system is doing. Especially since our individuality is at stake. Even if I trusted you, I''m not sure I''d be willing to bet on something like that."
"We won''t," Sev said. "We want to find a way to fix this, not"
"The slivers you want to use are crucial to our security," Helg said. "Let''s say I do trust you, and we go ahead with this n of yours. Do you think the people of Fendal that we save are going to be grateful? Or are they going to look at their friends and family, half-alive, and decide that we''re the ones causing it? Because we are, whether we choose to do that or not, and there''s one very obvious solution to that. Kill every single one of us so that your system doesn''t have to choose. Meanwhile, we throw away one of the tools that make us as effective as we are."
"Fendal isn''t equipped for fighting," Sev argued.
"Neither are we," Helg snapped. "We have mages that can fight, but the majority of our poption isn''t built for fighting. Their signs are for learning and studying the nature of the world, notbat. I am not risking our people, and you are mistaking this for a discussion. It is not.
"I am telling you to leave both Fendal and Teque. Your presence here is no longer wee. You have two hours to grab your things and leave, after which we will use force."
Sev clenched his fists now, angry. Vex wanted to speak up, but he saw the burning in Helg''s eyes, and his words caught in his throat; what could he say, here, that could help?
He should have seen thising. Should have kept what was happening a secret, so they could figure out a fix before
"You''re justpletely fine with letting others suffer for your sake?" Misa asked. She was angry, too, but she kept her voice controlled, like a tightly-wound spring. "Noram? Even you?"
Vex hadn''t even seen the otter. But now that otter version of Noram or perhaps he wasn''t Noram at all, and simply someone that had taken on Noram''s name in the exchange of whatever reality-stuff it took to make a person stepped forward, a little ways down the stairs. He''d been hidden in Helg''s shadow before.
And he looked awful.
Not physically, exactly. But there was a sense of defeat in his shoulders, and the spark he normally had was gone; he stared nkly at the four of them like he didn''t know what to say.
"Well?" Misa demanded.
Noram looked down, and then away; that alone spoke volumes. Vex couldn''t help but wonder exactly what Helg had said to the archmage to get him to look so downtrodden.
"This is wrong." It was, surprisingly, Anton that spoke up in their defense. The beetle-man stared straight up at Helg. "We should at least look into helping them"
"Maybe years from now, if we have enough slivers and we''re confident that we can take on Fendal," Helg said. "But you gave up your right to make these decisions because you couldn''t take it. You gave this position to me. And I am using that authority."
Helg stared down at the four of them. "Two hours," she said. "And then you leave. Whether you want to or not."
91 - Book 2: Chapter 28: No Good Answers
91 - Book 2: Chapter 28: No Good Answers
Two hours.
It wasn''t a lot of time. It was barely any time at all, Vex thought, and maybe that was exactly why Helg had chosen it it was just long enough to seem kind, but not long enough for them to actually do anything with it.
Not that she seemed kind at all, if that was her goal. Vex nced around the room Sev was gearing up to argue with her, and Misa was stepping forward with her fists clenched, ready for a fight. Derivan was the only one that was standing back, observing what was happening, and Vex saw the armor''s gaze flicker to him asionally, as if trying to see how he was doing.
Vex wasn''t sure. There was a panic roiling in him, still, but he was in crisis mode; he would have the time to panic properlyter.
Anton and Unea stood out, among the six of them. Anton''s countenance was indignant and fiercely protective; Unea was standing a little ways back, as if not really wanting to involve herself, but from the way she leaned towards Anton, Vex suspected she agreed with him.
"It''s not up for debate." With her hood off, Helg seemed much fiercer than she had before and it revealed that she wasn''t entirely like a wasp, either. Her sharp, angr face was slightly more flesh than chitin, though her mandibles were still ted and shone with polish.
More interesting were the glyphs tattooed onto her face. One was a sharp, angry-looking spiral, which Vex didn''t recognize but understood to be aggressive, likely something forbat; the other was strangely symmetrical and perfect, orderly.
"Helg," Sev tried, and it was obvious he was doing his best to be reasonable. Vex had seen him do this before, usually negotiating with other adventurers. "Some of the people in Fendal are your own people. I''ve seen them. You can''t let the system take away everything that makes them them just so you and a handful of others in Teque can carry on like nothing''s happened."
The wasp-woman stiffened and glowered, in a strange twist of her mandibles. "You''re acting like I''m the viin here," she said. "If there''s a viin here, it''s your system. Your world. All I''m doing is making sure what''s left of us stay that way."
"At the cost of everyone else," Misa said. "That sounds like cowardice to me."
"Your solutions are not better." Helg red. "You have empty promises and the beginnings of a solution you don''t know will work. I am protecting what''s left of us. It is not an easy decision."
Helg shook her head. "We aren''t going to agree on this. I''m leaving. Like I said, you have two hours. If you figure something out in that time, you''re wee to find me. Otherwise, settle whatever affairs you have left here and leave."
Before any of them could respond, Helg withdrew a staff from her cloak; where she''d been hiding it, Vex had no idea, though the swirl of mana made him suspect it was the same sort of magic that she''d used to store the Patcher''s arm. She tapped it once on the ground, and Vex caught a rapid shift of mana moving like lightning striking from the stone at the tip of the staff to a little glyph she kept on her waist. The glyph red with magic
and then she was gone.
Noram, too, Vex noticed btedly. The otter had gone with her. Vex had wanted to ask him why he''d agreed to her n in the first ce; she''d clearly had to convince him, and that was the reason she''d dragged him with her upstairs to begin with. She didn''t want them there while she spoke with Noram. Which meant she knew they''d be able to change his mind.
But... there was nothing to be done about that, now, short of finding them again. There was no trace of mana in the air he could use to find out where they''d gone.
"Anton," Sev said, clearly thinking the same thing. "Do you know where she went?"
"No." The beetle-mage looked frustrated. "We can go pretty much anywhere in the city with that teleport. It''s good for emergencies, but we don''t have a way to track each other when we do it."
"Shit." Sev scowled, the expression uncharacteristically fierce on the normally calm cleric.
"Doesn''t that apply to her, too?" Misa frowned. "She''s not going to be able to know where we are. How exactly is she going to make us leave?"
"I don''t know." Sev nced at Anton, who shook his head.
"I suspect that is why she took Noram with her," he said. "There are some magics she could use, probably, but nothing usbat mages would know."
Vex could feel a headache growing. "I shouldn''t have said anything," he said quietly. "I''m sorry. If I kept quiet about it, maybe we could''ve figured out how to fix it ourselves."
Sev''s face softened. "No use worrying about that now," he said. "Keeping a secret like that would demolish any trust they have in us."
"They already don''t trust us," Vex said.
"They trust us enough that this didn''t immediatelye to blows." Sev paused for a moment, trying to find the words. "If we''d tried to keep that a secret, and it came out that we were hiding this... That might have been an immediate fight. Two hours isn''t much, but it''s time for us to figure some things out. It gave us time to talk to Anton and find out that mana slivers can help with the problem."
"Speaking of which," Anton said. He picked up the slivers that appeared earlier, when Vex cast his spell, and gently pressed them into the lizardkin''s hands. "You should keep these."
"Don''t you need the slivers?" Vex asked, looking up at Anton.
"We have enough," Anton answered mildly. "And if you keep them, you can keep doing research on them once you leave. Maybe figure something out on your end, while we work on things on our end."
"Right. We don''t have to give up even if Helg does make us leave." Misa frowned for a moment, staring into the air as she presumably brought up her system interface. "...You don''t have ess to the system yet, though. We can''tmunicate that way."
"There aremunication glyphs," Anton said. "I''ll find one to pair with you, and we can stay in touch."
"I think," Derivan spoke up for the first time in a while, and Vex nced up at him. "That perhaps leaving may be for the best, as much as I disagree with what Helg wishes to happen."
"But... if we can figure out what''s happening here..." Vex protested.
"Yes," Derivan agreed. He crouched down, leaning low so he could speak face-to-face with Vex. Vex felt himself freezing up in response, and yet... he couldn''t deny that small bit offort he took from the gentle kindness of the armor''s voice. "But this ce... it is a copy of another. Perhaps the answers we seek are not here; perhaps we can learn more about mana slivers and their true nature there, in the full bonus room in the depths of the Prime Dungeon in Elyra."
Maybe Derivan had a point. Or maybe Vex just really wanted to believe him.
"We don''t know that that''s where that is..." Misa frowned. "But I guess it seems likely."
"If we''re going to be leaving," Vex said. "I want to go back to Fendal. I want... I want to talk to the other Noram."
He reminded him the most of himself, and he''d promised to share the glyph. The least he could do the least all of them could do, really was to warn everyone in Fendal that still had their selves intact to leave. That way, the worst that could happen with Helg''s n was that everything here would stay the same...
...which seemed to be more or less what she wanted, anyway.
It was with a subdued air that they left. Anton got them themunication glyph he''d mentioned in short order, pairing the carved rock with one of his own, and this time while they were making their way back through towards the Roads Vex paid attention to the people of Teque.
Not just the magic, though that was still awe-inspiring. The river of mana still flowed above, indifferent to everything they had discovered and was about to happen. Vex knew that mana could feel, or at least he knew that it behaved like it could, but if any part of it knew about what was happening, it didn''t seem to care.
Teque was far different from any city or vige Vex had ever been to. Very few of the people they ran into were of the same species, unless they were together as a group; many of those species would be designated as ''monster'' under the system, a condition they still didn''t fully understand. There was a set of koboldsughing and talking amongst themselves, for example, running down the street; there was an ogre managing a stall; there was a butterfly-looking person, flitting about between themp-glyphs, filling in any parts that had eroded with a flutter of their wings and a touch of glitter on the ground.
...Then they passed that same group of kobolds once more, as they circled around the building, and Vex realized how much of the city was an illusion a construct of the system, used to make it feel alive. For all that the system was draining from Fendal and feeding it to Teque, Teque itself still needed these so-called ''minor characters'', to prevent the people from realizing that something was wrong; that their city was much smaller than it should have been, and the people much lesser.
A little bit of perception maniption kept the illusion just real enough. And people like Helg, the ones that were willing to ept things as they were, because it was safe... They would be able to make themselves believe that illusion, even if they knew otherwise.
Because it was easier.
Because taking something at face value was easier than peering into the ws within and correcting it, and risking the pain that might cause.
Vex''s fists tightened, though he didn''t realize it, and it didn''t loosen until he felt Derivan''s hand rest gently on his shoulder; without thinking, he reached up to put his hand in the armor''s instead, a split second before he realized what he was doing
and then he rxed.
It wasforting. It felt right.
He''d worry about the specificster, when he wasn''t worried about the very nature of their existence, and how to save the people of Teque.
It was enough, at least, to set his mind turning over the puzzle of the mana slivers.
The end of the Roads brought Vex and the others back into Fendal, albeit in a much more somber mood. They went straight back towards the Sleeping Bird to gather their things, brushing past this version of Anyati and the rest of the half-real peoples of the town; it ured to Vex that everything they learned exined why they''d appeared out of nowhere, too, like the system had only bothered to bring them in when it was necessary.
Noram, Charise, and the two trackers Vro and Juni sat in a small table in the corner of the inn. Their expressions made Vex do a double-take the lizardkin almost instantly on edge and he wasn''t the only one, either. "Mom?" she asked, concern heavy in her voice. "What''s up?"
Charise looked up to meet Misa''s eyes, and then nodded towards Noram.
"Hey!" Noram said, waving; his words were bright, but his eyes were not. Vex felt his heart sink. "Good to see you. I wanted to ask; do you think you can teach me anything about magic? I''ll pay you."
92 - Book 2: Chapter 29: Sentiments
92 - Book 2: Chapter 29: Sentiments
Vex felt like his words were caught in his throat. He''d spoken to Noram not long ago at all; it had been a little over a day in Teque, and with the time differential between the two ces, only about an hour in Fendal.
Noram couldn''t have changed this much in that time; if it happened this quickly, it would have been too obvious. Fendal would''ve sent for help from the Guild sooner. The Patchers didn''t even move this fast! And they''d been beaten. Shoved back.
As far as he knew, a treacherous voice whispered, and Vex tried his hardest to shut that voice up.
"We already talked about teaching you magic," Vex said, his wordsing out stumbling and awkward; his heart felt like it was sitting in his throat. Some small part of him almost felt like he was just watching himself talk from a distance, and for a single absurd moment he wondered if this was what it was like for all those who had their personhood stripped away by the system if they were forced to watch themselves follow some unseen script, designed to create an illusion of life.
"We did?" Noram frowned, cocking his head; he seemed to give the idea barely a moment of thought before smiling enthusiastically. "Did you agree? I''d love to learn some magic! I want to be an adventurer."
"He''s been like this for a while," Charise said. There was a certain heaviness in her voice that brought home exactly how she felt about all this. "We just brought him back here. He seems... morefortable." She hesitated before saying thest words, as if holding back something else she wanted to say.
"It''s where I''m supposed to be," Noram said, oblivious to the tone of the conversation, and smiled blithely in a way that made Vex''s heart drop further.
"This is pretty fucked up," Vro said. He wore a scowl along with a graying beard, and his arms were crossed over his chest; Vex saw the faint lines of tension in his shoulders. He was acting angry, but a small part of him was scared.
Understandably, of course.
"We haven''t gotten much in the way of updates. You know what''s going on here?"
They did, of course. And they exined, a little haltingly, and mostly without Vex''s help; the lizardkin tried once or twice, but his gaze kept sliding back to Noram and the way the younger wizard didn''t say a word to even acknowledge the conversation they were having, and that was...
That stung.
The exnation helped, but only a little. Charise nodded as if she was expecting something like this to be the case all along, but both Vro and Juni grew more tense; they looked around like they were expecting to be attacked by the Patchers at any moment. It took a rap on the table from Charise to calm them both down, and even then it was clear that Vro was pissed, and Juni was scared.
"We''re safe," Charise said. "We''re not really here. Everyone else, though..."
Charise nced rather significantly at Misa, and then at the rest of the party. Derivan shook his head and stepped in.
"I will sense the Patchers should they arrive," he said. "It should not be a significant risk... though given the difficulty we had fighting them, I do not know if we want to engage in a second fight before we understand more."
"How fast did it happen?" Vex asked quietly. He nced again at Noram, and watched as the lizardkin just smiled back at him. Part of him hadn''tpletely epted what had happened yet. He didn''t know Noram well, but he''d resonated with him; they were alike in so many ways...
...He still had that sketch in his notebook to give him.
It was eerie, too, how easy it would have been to pretend that there was nothing wrong. He wondered how many people in Fendal was doing exactly that maybe some of them had noticed, and simply chose not to acknowledge it. He wondered if that was Helg''s n, to ignore what was obviously wrong in favor of security and safety.
"It happened fast." Charise nced over at Noram and sighed. "I thought something was wrong, but I couldn''t figure out what, and we didn''t have anything that could stop it. I think the feelingsted about five minutes, and then he was just..."
Her voice trailed off; she didn''t know how to continue. Vex fidgeted slightly in the ensuing silence, and then made a decision.
"Hey, Noram?" he said. The other lizardkin looked up at him, offering a bright smile, and Vex tried not to let his voice shake. A part of him a small part, he told himself was reminded of his little brother, and it made everything about this worse.
But he would do whatever he could, no matter how small that act was. And so he took out the majority of the mana slivers that he''d only just created, as well as the notebook he had on the runic circles in those ruins; he''d promised those to Noram anyway. His concerns about the little drawings he''d left in the margins of the book seemed so far away, now.
He kept one sliver for himself a promise, a reminder, and something he could do research on. The rest he ced on top of the notebook, and handed it over to Noram.
Anton had said something about mana slivers helping him recover his self, over time. He didn''t know how many slivers that took, or how long that process took, but... maybe this would be enough.
And if it wasn''t? It wasn''t like they were giving up.
"Here," Vex said, and gently pushed the notebook and the small pile of slivers over to Noram. "You wanted to learn magic, right? Here are the notes I promised."
"You promised me notes?" Noram blinked once at Vex. "Well, sure! Thank you. Let me get you a reward"
"Please don''t," Vex interrupted, shaking his head. Thest thing he wanted was a reward for this.
"But I gotta," Noram told him, and something about the way he said it made Vex look up cautiously.
He wasn''t awake. Not exactly. But something here seemed to be important, and whatever it was he was picking up on, Charise seemed to pick up on it as well; the woman frowned a little bit and then nodded quietly to Vex, as if encouraging him to take whatever the reward was.
"...Okay then," Vex said, a little reluctantly, and Noram reached into his pocket and withdrew something he definitely should not have had.
This was a quest reward. Not the kind of quest reward that was obtained from the Guild, when a quest there waspleted; it was the kind of quest reward that was obtained frompleting sub-objectives in a bonus room. It was not an item but an Item, recognized by the system.
Part of him was almost angry that even the simple act of helping someone else had be something transactional.
The other part of him paid attention to exactly what it was he was being given, and that pushed him over into a genuine anger. Not at Noram, and maybe not even at the system, but at the cruelty of turning something like this into a quest reward.
[Spelldisk] [Grade: Rare]
A sentimental item that belonged to a young would-be adventurer. He crafted this in the dead of the night, where his parents would not be able to see, each day pressing a new rune into the circuit along the edges.
On the surface, it casts a simple Light spell. But Light exists to cast away the shadow, and so this item may hold a deeper personal secret, as well.
"Are you sure you want to give me this?" Vex asked Noram. He didn''t know why he bothered; he knew what the answer would be, and yet it felt wrong not to ask.
"Of course!" Noram said, as Vex knew he would, but then he leaned forward and nodded as well.
How much of Noram was still in there, exactly?
Maybe there was something here that could help.
"...Okay," Vex said, and took the spelldisk from Noram. "Thank you."
"Thank you," Noram told him; he smiled yet again, taking the slivers and the notebook and vanishing them into his pocket. Vex didn''t know what to say, so he only swallowed and nodded, and nced back to the others for support.
Each of them had equally grim expressions on their faces.
"I don''t like the idea of leaving like this," Misa said. One hand gripped at the mace at her side, and she gave the weapon an almost absent-minded twirl that made several other patrons of the bar flinch. "If we know what we need to find is in Elyra, then that''s one thing, but this feels too much like just abandoning them to this shit."
"I''m not okay with leaving like this either," Sev said, shaking his head. "We''ve got Anton to help out on the inside... what about Charise and Vro and Juni?"
"We can stay, but it''ll mean that Misa can''t summon us again in Elyra if we''re needed, or we''ll need to be dismissed here before that can happen." Charise considered this for a moment. "As long as this isn''t a permanent cost in some way, I think we should stay. We can help coordinate things if you end up being forced to leave."
"Good fucking luck forcing us to leave," Misa muttered, but Vex noticed that she looked worried. There was very much a possibility that there was nothing further here to find, but
Before Vex could follow that train of thought any further, there was a re of magic.
Vex startled. Derivan did, too, the prickle of intensity making him look up towards the Road where Tequey; even Noram, with most of his self stripped away, nced towards the direction of Teque almost instinctively.
A massive barrier of pure mana rose up from the underground city, traveling through the Road at speed; it did nothing as it touched Fendal, passing through the buildings and people that lived there like it wasn''t even there. But there was no reason to cast a magic like this save for one
"Misa," Vex said quickly. She was already on it; her mace glowed in front of her, but the glow flickered and died, and she shook her head in frustration.
"It''s not an attack," she said.
Not an attack. But it was a wave of solid mana that was approaching them at speed it certainly looked like an attack, and Vex worked fast to try to interpret exactly what the magic did; the problem here was that there was no runic circle for him to decode, and no glyph for him to even try to look at.
"It is shifting everything," Derivan said. He was concentrating on the magic as well. "Not a lot. But just slightly, to be out of tune with everything else. I do not think"
And they were out of time; the barrier struck them.
Like Misa said, it wasn''t an attack.
It pushed them backwards, though; them and everything they owned, catching on the edge of the bubble of mana like foreign objects in a magical filter. The strangest part was when they were pushed through the walls of the inn, no longer quite on the same wavelength as everything else.
There was a moment of vertigo, before they were all dumped rather unceremoniously outside of Fendal.
The good news was that their caravan had been pushed out, too; whatever spell that was, Helg had at least been considerate enough to include everything that belonged to them. Charise and Vro and Juni all stayed in, presumably because they were a product of the skill instead of being anything ''real''.
The bad news was that this barrier was solid. That act of reality-shifting was only a small element of it, the element needed to push them out without harm. Now that it was in ce, it was a solid chunk of pure mana with no ws Vex could see, even with his advanced version of mana sight.
Misa looked quite understandably pissed. "That fucker," she cursed.
93 - Book 2: Chapter 30: Interlude - Velykos 2
93 - Book 2: Chapter 30: Interlude - Velykos 2
Velykos was not entirely sure how he had ended up in this situation.
Intellectually, he supposed, he understood exactly how he''d ended up like this; the strides he could take as arge, towering stone elemental were muchrger than the strides of any of his skeletalpanions, and as a result, he could move much faster with less effort than the other five. This was fine and expected, and he had intentionally slowed down so they could move at the same pace. He did not need to get anywhere in a rush.
They didn''t particrly seem to agree, though, once they noticed. It hadn''t taken too long after that for Iliss-the-lizardkindy to suggest that they simply sit on his shoulders, and Velykos hadn''t really had any reason to object; they were all rtively light, and it took no great effort for him to carry any of them.
It was just that, well... they didn''t all fit on his shoulders.
Which was how he''d ended up walking along the desert with two skeletons on each shoulder, and the captain perched on his head.
Velykos almost sighed, but didn''t; the act would have disrupted Harold''s bnce, and the poor man had already fallen off once.
Besides. He didn''t hate this. He''d grown fond of hispanions, over time, and as awkward as this was, it was one way they would leave a permanent mark on his history anything they did would be permanently etched into his stone, even if it was only by the smallest amounts. Every tiny chip and small bit of rock that eroded away because of them was another memory of the people he''de to consider friends.
Normally, he''d say that it was a way for mortals to leave a permanent mark on him, even after they were gone but he supposed that this particr group ofpanions weren''t necessarily mortal, anymore. Maybe now he could have smaller friends that would stick around for a long time...
He rather liked that thought, he found. It had been a long time since he could consider having friends that wouldst. There was a reason he had chosen to devote himself to his chosen god instead, keeping most of his interactions with mortals to something short.
But kind, of course. Always kind.
"What''re ya thinking about, big guy?" Harold asked him from atop his head, and Velykos chuckled. "You''re makin'' them thinking sounds again."
"I do not make thinking sounds," Velykos rumbled, amusement clear in the rolling pebbles of his voice or at least, he thought his amusement was clear.
"Ya do. I can hear ''em. Sounds like sand trickin'' down." Harold nodded, and Velykos felt the movement through the tiny vibrations in his stone. "...Not that I''m sayin'' your brain is like sand or anything. But there''s a sound, I''m tellin'' ya!"
"You''ve been going on about this sound for days," Iliss grumbled from his left shoulder. "He doesn''t make thinking sounds! I can''t hear anything!"
"Just cause you don''t hear any sounds don''t mean he don''t make any! You just ain''t got any ears."
"Neither do you, captain," Iliss pointed out, folding her arms obstinately. Ixiss who was in fact her brother, Velykos had learned, and was sitting next to her groaned.
"Oh by the gods you two have been arguing about this for days," he said. "Who cares! It''s just a noise!"
"It''s a noise that doesn''t exist!" Iliss protested. "Our captain is hearing things!"
"I can hear you," Harold said, ring at her.
"See! He''s hearing things."
"When did ya get this sassy, I swear," Harold grumbled.
Velykos, who was quite content to simply wait them out while they bantered, let out a chuckle when they were done. He didn''t address the conversation at all he didn''t think he made any noises, though Harold did have an uncanny ability to notice when he was lost in thought, so perhaps there was in fact something the captain was picking up on. Instead, he changed the subject. "We are close to the next marker. We can take a break there, I think."
"By ''we'', you mostly just mean you," Iliss snarked. "Wait, do you even need to rest?"
"He''s got no muscles," Ixissined, punching his sister in the shoulder and making her bones ck ufortably; she red at him. "Why would he need to rest?"
"I don''t know, maybe his magic gets tired?" Iliss shrugged. "I don''t know how stone elementals work, do you?"
"I do not need rest, necessarily," Velykos interrupted before the argument could go any further; as much as he found the banter between the two siblings amusing, he found it could get to be a bit much rather quickly. "But I find it is good to have structure. It is easy to lose track of time and self if you simply wander with no regard for what surrounds you."
"You speak from experience?"
It was g, that time, who spoke. The orc sat on his right shoulder, with his human friend half curled up beside him; Nathan was still having trouble actually participating in the conversation.
"I do, yes," Velykos answered. "There was a time when I did little but wander. It is... easy to lose time when you do this. And I suppose I was grieving, in my own way."
The others fell silent. He''d spoken of his story to them before, of the priest that had guided him through so much of his early life and then simply vanished; his mortal friends didn''t seem to know quite how to react.
"Sometimes we need a little time to get used to our circumstances," Velykos added gently, and this time the words were directed towards Nathan; the man in question twitched slightly, but didn''t say anything further.
He''d tried, over thest couple of days, to see if he could reach out and connect with him but it was difficult. Depression was the barest beginning of what he was going through; he was half-catatonic most of the time, staring at the missing flesh on his hands.
Velykos understood. He''d even tried to help, in his own way; tried to find a healing spell that would reverse their condition.
But there was nothing. Not even when he spoke to Nillea; she had no clue of a solution, either. Their state wasn''t a status effect, was the problem. The system didn''t recognize it. It was simply something that was, due to an odd circumstance that would almost certainly never be replicated again. He''d heard a little bit about that from them, and what Misa had managed to pull off was certainly an impressive feat.
Everyone was grateful, even if not necessarily happy with the circumstance they were now stuck in all of them except for Nathan, who simply curled tighter in on himself.
So all he could provide for Nathan waspanionship, and hope that the young man would find a way to growfortable with his body in time. Or perhaps they would find a new solution for him! A way to move his soul into another body?
It was a thought, at least.
"I can hear ya thinkin'' again," Harold told him, and Velykos... well, he didn''t particrly understand the mortal habit of sighing, but he was very much starting to.
The desert they were in was the one where he had originally spawned; it was a breeding grounds for stone-aligned mana, although Velykos couldn''t help but notice that the concentration of it seemed rather lesser these days. Little makeshift quarries of stone were scattered across the desert, a small stone tower in the center of each acting like a little beacon to draw in more mana. That mana would slowly seep into the stone and rock around them, and over a long period of time, create a new stone elemental.
The quarry he was looking for was the one he had spawned in. The one he''d met that priest in, so long ago. But it was far, deep in the depths of the desert, and so for the time being
"Oh fer cryin'' out loud," Harold muttered.
They would have to take refuge from the heat in yet another quarry.
Not that there was any real need to do such a thing, since none of them needed protection from the heat, exactly. They all just agreed it was ufortable, and there was always a little bit of history they could learn from each. Like it or not, his mortal friends were all learning a little bit about stone elemental culture.
...Which was mostly just a lot about stone elemental babies. Though that wasn''t quite the right word for it.
"Are we ever going to rest somewhere different?" Ixiss muttered.
"What is wrong with the quarries?" Velykos asked, framing his question as though it were an innocent one, and he felt perhaps the smallest amount of satisfaction in the way Iliss simply folded her arms and sighed.
"I just don''t want to get almost-crushed by a newborn elemental again!" the lizardkin-skeletonined. Velykos shrugged making all four of the soldiers on his shoulders yelp in response, grabbing on to steady themselves and then lowered them all down to the floor of that quarry.
"It is a learning experience," he told them sternly.
"We already learned that lesson!"
"It is a learning experience for the stone elementals," Velykos rified with what amounted to a grin, flecks of dirt and smaller stone falling from him as he chuckled. Ixiss groaned in response.
"Dammit."
There was a small ritual Velykos had taken to doing, now, at every one of these quarries they stopped at; they didn''t stop all that often, after all. So every time they did, he knelt down by the stone tower in the center, and he prayed to Nillea.
Not all that long ago, it would have been a simple prayer for protection before he moved on. Now, he tried to do a little bit of what he''d learned from Sev that the rtionship between gods and mortals perhaps did not have to be so blindly transactional, with favors rewarded in return for faith and obedience. That whole thing was merely a construct. Instead, he could begin his prayers with a single question:
How are you?
Nillea never answered directly but something about the bond he had with his chosen god pulsed, and he felt his connection to the earth deepen in response; she was, after all, the goddess of the earth. And the earth right now felt to him like it was something shallow and desperate; the soil here was that of a desert, so it was all loose sand, and yet there was something else to it
Ah. The desert was empty. That was what the connection rang with; a response to his question, an emptiness and a loneliness.
It was true that there were a lot less stone elemental children around than there should have been, on top of the strangeness of the mana. Velykos wondered how much of that was Nillea specifically, and how much of that might have been the rest of this problem of missing gods; could they really know how much was missing in their knowledge?
"Hey," he said out loud, surprising even himself; when hispanions looked up at him, he tried to smile in response, though he''d been told that his attempts at smiles werergely terrifying. "Would you like to try something together?"
"...And what is that exactly?" It was Iliss that asked.
"I would like to sculpt an offering to Nillea," Velykos said gently. "Amemorative token, if you will. And the sculpt... a small dedication to the god I may have once had."
94 - Book 2: Chapter 31: Past Traumas
94 - Book 2: Chapter 31: Past Traumas
"Fuck," Misa said, again.
It had been an hour. The four of them sat outside the barrier to Fendal, still. They''d tried everything they could think of to break through the barrier, to no sess no amount of magic broke through it, and there was a weight to it that Derivan couldn''t simply Shift through. They''d tried to dig underneath, but the barrier extended beneath the ground and up into the sky in a perfect sphere.
And it was visible. That was the worst part, Vex thought; it could call in people to see what was happening rather easily, and he wasn''t sure he wanted to know how Helg would deal with new adventurers knocking at their door.
"We''re going to have to leave, aren''t we?" Misa scowled. "She got what she wanted. Fucker."
"I don''t think we should stay," Sev said, sighing. He stared at the barrier, then beyond it, into Fendal; most of the people in the town hadn''t even reacted to them being forced back. Charise, Vro and Juni had all rushed out after them, of course, and stood on the other side of the barrier but they couldn''t do anything to break through it, either.
Misa''s connection to them via her skill was weakened, too. She couldn''t dismiss them even if she wanted, which presented... a whole host of new problems, really.
"We don''t have any way to get in," Sev borated when no one else spoke up. He was trying to justify it to himself, too. "We might be able to find another way in from somewhere else. But not if we stay here."
"I need to understand glyphs more," Vex said quietly. "I don''t mind if we finish traveling to Elyra and deliver the food. I... I need to know how Helg was able to do this. This spell is nothing like any barrier spell I''ve seen before."
Because no spell he''d seen before had interacted with a fundamental facet of reality the way Shift did. And yet, here the barrier was, doing exactly that and doing it to such an extent that even Derivan couldn''t break through it.
It meant there was something to learn. Something he could take, and make his own, and once he made it his own he could break it.
But he had to understand, first.
"I just can''t believe Helg did this," Sev exhaled, clenching his fists slightly. "I was going to try to find her and talk to her again, before it was time for us to leave. She knows this is a bad idea. But she''s throwing away the only lifeline she has, the people with a connection to the system I don''t get it."
"I don''t think Helg knows what she''s doing." The words spilled out of him before he could really think them through; he sat curled up on the ground, his tail wrapped around himself so he could hug it close. "I''ve seen this before. I think she''s just tricking herself into thinking everything will be fine. I think the system makes it easy for you to trick yourself, if you really want to; it tries to make it easy for you to pretend everything is fine, even if you know that''s wrong."
"Sounds like she knows exactly what she''s doing, to me." Misa didn''t look particrly impressed.
"I mean, yes, but..." Vex looked down, hugging his tail closer to himself. "You don''t understand. I''ve seen it before. My whole family, pretending nothing''s wrong, pretending that what they''re doing is fine, even though I was crying and screaming and begging for them to stop"
He had to stop talking there. Vex''s breathing was shallower than he wanted it to be, and he was briefly aware that he was hyperventting, sucking in air and not quite getting enough. He told himself to calm, but
he remembered those moments strapped into the chair, mana flooding into his body in a way that made every nerve scream with protest, the mana bar in his status slowly ticking up, and his parents whispering sweet, encouraging nothings to him to try to help him through the pain
He wasn''t fucking calm. He couldn''t be.
The association, he was aware, was dim. But it was the same thing he saw in the eyes of his older brothers and sisters, all the time; they had been through the same thing, and wasn''t it normal, to grow up like this? Every noble family in Elyra had to make some kind of sacrifice; the specifics were up in the air, because each one kept their own secrets, but it was very rare that the secret they kept was something pleasant.
Elyra rewarded results, after all. It didn''t particrly care how you got there. He''d never known there could be something better; not until he was allowed out into the streets, long after he had gained stats in the excess of thousands of mana even at a measly level of one, and he''d seen some children ying together in the streets.
ying. Not studying! Not learning of magic, or any of the deeper secrets of the world. One of them fell over, and started to cry, the scrape in his knees calling the attention of his mother, who fussed over him and gently bandaged the wound.
Vex had scraped his knee before. He hadn''t even flinched. That amount of pain was nothing to him.
But he understood something, that day, though he hadn''t quite been able to put it into words at the time: he understood how easy it could be to force someone to make a choice without ever using force at all, simply by not letting them know there was another option out there.
His parents had never forced him into that chair. He hated it, of course, and he whined and begged to not have to do it, but they would nod at him sternly, and he would sag and sit in the chair anyway. It was what he was supposed to do. Every sibling he spoke to would say they felt the same way that they had hated the process, but it had been necessary to make their family strong, to keep them within the noble ss. And how they had celebrated that strength! Every point of mana was awarded with a new desert, or a new toy, or more often a new book about magic he could study. His love for magic was genuine, and he could always spare a few more seconds in that chair if it meant he could get another book.
All of these were technically choices he had made. His parents had spent those few years telling him how brave he was, how special he was; how he would do great things. He believed them. How could he do otherwise? They were his parents. He''d grown up with those stories of believing in great heroes with massive mana pools. He''d seen his siblings go through the same thing.
He''d never understood that it wasn''t something he had to do. He never considered the possibility that there was any other choice at all. And now he saw the same thing, reflected in so many others: people making choices they didn''t really have to, because they felt they were forced into it by their circumstances.
Helg, too, here.
"She thinks she''s making the hard choices," Vex said. "But she''s not. She''s making the easy one. The one where she doesn''t have to trust anyone else, the one where she doesn''t have to make her or her people vulnerable. But she doesn''t know that things will stay that way. She can''t know that the system will keep finding them useful. Once it''s done with the mana slivers..."
"Her logic is sound," Derivan said quietly, and Vex opened his mouth to protest; it shut again when he saw the light of Derivan''s eyes, the way they dimmed slightly, sadly. "She is right to be scared. But fear does not justify her path, nor does that path lead to a better future. If she were more willing to explore the options avable..."
"I don''t want this to be my fault," Vex said, looking down. "This is my bonus room. I feel like I''m responsible, at least in part. And I feel like I should do something. I don''t want to leave now, and let this just... continue."
"Look," Misa said. She looked like she''d finally calmed down a little which wasn''t saying much, considering the fact that she still looked pissed, but she was visibly controlling herself now. "ming yourself for something the system assigned to you isn''t going to get us anywhere. You weren''t involved in any of this not the creation of the room, not whatever made this room get copied."
Hearing the words... helped. A little. It helped less than he thought it might, but maybe that was because they would be heading back to Elyra again, and the dread for that was clouding his mind. Or maybe it was just the thought of Noram, stripped away of whatever element it was that made him alive and real.
"We can''t do anything else here," Sev said quietly. "We have people on the inside. We''ll keep getting updates as we go. I''ll send the Guild an update, too, and see if anyone they''ve got can break in through the barrier. We don''t have to do this alone, but our next option is figuring out another way in, and like Derivan said, it looks like options for that might be all the way in Elyra."
Vex heaved out a sigh.
Right. Elyra. Home.
Sev gave him a sympathetic nce. "Not looking forward to it?"
"No," Vex said, and he hesitated for a moment. "And I think I should exin why. Just... it''s going to be a long story. Let''s talk about it once we get back in the caravan."
"Sure," Sev said. He looked like he wanted to say something else, too, but backed off after a moment, ncing back at the barrier instead and then sighing. "...Fuck. Feels a bit like losing, doesn''t it."
"Feels a lot like losing," Misa said. "I don''t like it."
"We have gained new tools," Derivan said. "I gained a new stat, too, in the fight against the Patchers, but it is... different from the others. It feels more dangerous to use. I would like to take the time to explore it."
"And I need to learn more about glyphs." Vex grimaced a little, watching the patterns of mana in the air; outside of Fendal and Teque, it all seemed a lot more lifeless. He wasn''t even sure if glyphs would still work out here... He reached for his brush again, a small, almost automatic cast of [Ssh of Mana] supplying him with the necessary paint, but he paused a moment before he would have drawn his glyph.
"I would like to help," Derivan said quietly, watching him. "There are many signs we do not know of, I am sure. We could learn some from Anton, but perhaps more crucially we should learn how they discover or create them in the first ce."
"Right," Vex said. He put the brush away, letting the mana-paint fall to the ground and soak into the grass. "I... that''d be useful, yeah. I''d love your help. Oh! Especially if you can quantify how you were able to figure out our signs. I need to make some notes, and sketch them both out, and then maybe we can get Sev and Misa to figure out their own too..."
Vex trailed off a bit, trying not to get too lost in thought in the face of what just happened.
"Let''s go," he said instead. Misa exchanged a quick goodbye with her mom, though Vex didn''t miss the worried nces they shared with each other, even as Sev went to prepare it; their food, luckily, all seemed fine. There was one more stop they had to make before Elyra, but that quest was not a dangerous quest at all.
A small part of him knew it would be a good break; a way to rest and reset. But therger part of Vex wanted to rush to Elyra and demand ess to the dungeon, and resolve the Fendal problem as soon as possible.
He sighed.
But maybe, he thought, he needed to trust the people they were leaving in Fendal instead.
Now he just needed to gather the courage to talk about his family, and the reason he wanted so badly to get his brother out.
95 - Book 2: Chapter 32: Catharsis
95 - Book 2: Chapter 32: Catharsis
They were back in the caravan, Derivan and Vex seated across from Sev and Misa as it chugged along the road. They''d given breaking through the barrier into Fendal a few more tries, but every attempt they made simply failed, and so they had decided it was time to move on.
Not before Anton had sent them an update through the glyph, though: Time dtion has been failing. Fendal and Teque now operate at a 1:2 dtion.
Which had been a relief. If nothing else, Teque wouldn''t have months or years to prepare for them to return, which might have proven disastrous.
And so, with nothing else to talk about, Vex had taken a deep breath, and exined what had happened to him when he was only six; the forcing of mana into his body just to increase the stat, and all the trappings that followed. How his love for magic had been used against him; how he''d been shut away from others, so he couldn''t know how different other childhoods were.
How pain didn''t register to him on the same scale as anyone else, now.
There was a heavy silence after Vex was done. He hung his head slightly, feeling oddly ashamed not that he thought any of what his parents did was his fault, necessarily. He''d long gotten out of that mindset. And yet... the shame was still there. Maybe he did me himself, if only subconsciously.
Sev was mostly quiet, though his apparent calm hid a certain amount of anger; Vex saw the way his fists were clenched.
Derivan''s expression was more unreadable than it usually was, but the armor''s hand was stilll gently sped over his own. He had noticed Vex starting to tremble while telling his story, and slipped a hand into his in response. This time, there was no blush, no rush of anxiety and instinctive worry. Vex had seen it for what it was a smallfort that his friend felt he could provide. He had squeezed that hand back appreciatively, not knowing if Derivan could even really feel the pressure of his touch, and continued.
Misa''s reaction was perhaps the most overt. She took a moment to gather her thoughts, still, but she was the first to speak after Vex was done. "I''m going to kill them," she said simply, and Vex felt a certain horror at the way she seemed entirely serious.
"Misa," Sev said quietly.
"What," Misa snapped once, rounding on the cleric, and then stopped when she saw the stricken expression on Vex''s face; she sagged abruptly. "Fuck."
"This is why you mentioned kidnapping your brother," Derivan said; it wasn''t a question, but Vex nodded anyway.
"He was three when I left," Vex said softly. He let himself get lost in the gentle reverberations of the caravan; it helped, the sensation of something smooth and rhythmic, pulling his mind away from the memories. "They start the process when you''re six. I tried to get them to stop, to at least wait for him to grow older, or something, but..."
He trailed off, and let the gentle hum of the caravan take over. Misa was the first one to speak.
"Elyra just allows this?" she asked. "There''s no fuckin'' way they just allow this."
But the anger in her face said otherwise; she didn''t believe what she was saying. She remembered just as well as Vex did, what had happened with the scientists back at the dungeon what had happened to Kestel, simply because he had tried to dy reporting back, worried about what would happen to the soldiers.
He still needed mana crystals to be cured. They hadn''t had the chance to gather any; not yet. The hope was that they would get some while in Elyra''s Prime Dungeon; hopefully enough to heal Kestel and more.
"Noble houses can do whatever they want," Vex said, shaking his head; Misa snorted, but she seemed like she had more or less expected his response. "It''s... that''s the core thing Elyra is founded on, or at least what they tell us. Anyone can be nobility, if they discover something important enough; nobility is awarded on merit, not blood. At least not entirely. And they don''t ask that you share your secrets, only that the results of those secrets are used to benefit the Kingdom."
"That''s..." Sev frowned, like he wanted to say something more, but eventually he sighed and shook his head; maybe he''d decided it wasn''t worth saying. Instead he gave Vex a small, pained sort of smile - the kind of smile that wasn''t really a smile at all, but was the bestfort he could offer. "Thank you for telling us, Vex," he said, and his words were genuine.
"Where do you want to bring your brother?" Derivan asked him softly. Vex wasn''t sure when it had happened, but he found his one hand sped between two of Derivan''s; they held him gently, as if afraid he would break.
"I don''t know," Vex answered honestly. "I haven''t thought about it that much. I just anywhere that''s not here. Maybe not in Elyra at all. I want to bring him with us, but"
"Adventuring is just a bit dangerous for a child," Sev agreed. The cleric hesitated for a moment, as if debating whether he wanted to say his next words or not, but then he closed his eyes and exhaled, and said them anyway. "Do you if you want to take care of him, we wouldn''t me you."
Vex felt Derivan''s hands tighten over his own, though the armor didn''t say anything. He didn''t need to. Vex felt the same way; the thought of leaving, even to take care of his brother, made him nch.
"I can''t just abandon you guys," Vex said, and then he paused, trying to find the words. "I didn''t - I don''t think you understand what you did for me. I was just going to try to figure everything out on my own, you know? I was going to try to discover something big; big enough to be recognized in my family, another secret for us so Helis doesn''t have to suffer. I was alone for a year, just looking for something, ignoring everything that wasn''t magic.
"It''s so easy to get lost, even when you''re doing something you love." Vex fidgeted slightly as he spoke, his ws digging into the wooden floor of the caravan. "I didn''t think it would happen to me. But it did. I had idea after idea, but nothing worked, and I...
"I forgot why I loved magic," he said, the wordsing out in almost a whisper; the thought was almost sacrilegious to him now. He bowed his head, ashamed.
His memory of that time was a blur, in truth. He had little notes and research papers filled with theories, a desperate search for a secret he didn''t know was there. He remembered night after night of checking off his ideas, one failure after another, each one feeling like his only chance at giving his brother a better life was slipping away.
Slowly forgetting why he cared about magic at all. Vex shook a bit, feeling his eyes fill with tears, and the worst part was that he didn''t even know why; this was over and done with!
"You guys insisting oning with me on that quest was dumb," he said, the wordsing out fiercer than he intended; it was what he had felt at the time, irritation and exhaustion. The idea of needing to adventure with other people felt like it was something that would slow him down. But...
"I was dumb for wanting to go on that quest at all," he admitted. It wasn''t something he could have done alone. "But you came with me, and you kept asking me questions, and you were so kind, but you never asked for anything in return the way my parents did-"
Vex''s voice cracked, then, and he curled a little up into himself; he didn''t know why he felt so emotional, only that he did. These were the first true friends that he''d had, and he''d met them at the age of twenty. Before that he had his family and no one else, really, and now
"Vex," Misa said quietly, and before the lizard knew what was happening, she had pulled him into her arms, tugging Sev along with her. Derivan followed by dint of not letting go of Vex, and in a short instant they were in an awkward pile on the floor of the caravan, hugging his still slightly-trembling form, and he did cry, then.
Because he knew he wouldn''t be judged; because he knew nothing more would be asked of him. Because he knew they were grateful he had shared, and just wanted to show him that they cared.
And he''d never put it into words before, how much he genuinely loved them; what they had done for him, just by virtue of being there for him, even when he hadn''t known he needed it.
"Thank you," he said eventually, because he didn''t know how to put everything he felt into words, and those two words seemed to epass everything he felt; the caravan hummed quietly beneath them, a gentle white noise to make the silence a little morefortable. "I made more progress with you guys than I ever did without. You made me believe in magic again."
"I''m d," Misa said, and then just to cut into the mood a little, she gave Vex a yful sort of smirk. "Even if it did mean that you blew up the cauldron a couple of times."
"I had reagents I wanted to test!"
"You also blew up your room."
"I was testing out a spell!"
"And that one poor innkeeper."
"He was a fire elemental! He was fine! He ate the explosion!"
Vex was protesting, but he felt a little warmer than before, and he could tell his friends felt a little better, too. He''d been so afraid of telling them all this for so long not because he thought they would judge him, or because he was worried about what they would do. He just... hadn''t wanted to revisit those memories.
But revisit those memories he had, and it turned out it wasn''t quite as scary as he remembered, when he was doing it with his friends.
A few minutester, the four of them untangled themselves to go back to their seats; as nice as the moment was, the wooden floor of the caravan just wasn''t a pleasant ce to be spending their time. It jostled and jerked with every movement in a way that the seats didn''t, magically stabilized against the walls as they were.
"Now you know why I''m nervous about going back to Elyra," Vex said, trying to smile, although he thought he mostly failed; if he did, no one acknowledged it.
"If your parents try anything, I''ll beat their skulls in," Misa said bluntly. "I have a mace for a reason."
"Please don''t," Sev sighed. "Not unless Vex gives you permission."
"Thanks," Vex said, a little wryly. He appreciated the thought, at least. It was just... He had a hard time divorcing himself from the idea that his parents were kind, even now. He resented them for what they had done to him in his childhood, and would do to his brother, and yet...
There was that small voice in his head, telling him it could have been worse.
And it could have been, certainly. They could have been crueler, withheld even a single drop of kindness, forced it to go longer. They were themselves victims, after all, of the same treatment from their own parents.
But no. The choices they were making now were their own.
Vex leaned back in his seat and sighed.
The situation in Fendal wasn''t gone from his mind, even with all of this; far from it. There was an air that hung around all four of them a little bit of tension that didn''t quite go away, even in moments like these, because for all that they weren''t done for all that they nned on finding a way back in, and on finding a solution
It still felt like they''d lost.
Because they had.
But losing didn''t mean that things were over. Vex had learned that from this group of friends, too, the same way he''d learned how to care about his magic again. There was always something new to do; always another path to take.
"Hey, Derivan," Vex said, ncing at the armor. He tried to keep his voice casual; he didn''t know why he felt so nervous. "Let''s train a bit tomorrow? I want to see if glyphs still work out here. And maybe we can figure out how your new stat works, too."
"Of course," Derivan agreed easily, with that signature tilt of his head and shift in his eyes that signified a smile. "I look forward to it."
96 - Book 2: Chapter 33: A New Magic
96 - Book 2: Chapter 33: A New Magic
That night, once again, Derivan cast [Starry Night]. They took a break on the side of the road for it, though they could have let the caravan keep running through the night; this was important to them, and they needed to use some crystals to refresh their connection to the system besides. So they gathered in a small circle, and Derivan allowed the magic of the skill to flow.
As always, he paid attention to the way the mana flowed.
Derivan had cast this spell a number of times, since the first time he had tested it back in the forest with Vex; each time, he told himself to pay attention to the mana, and each time he found that he couldn''t quite keep his attention on it, like something was obscuring part of the process. Vex found he had the same problem. There was a point where the mana seemed to vanish, obfuscated by something that wasn''t quite an infolock, or Shift.
This time, he looked at it with the new sense he had gained with Patch and he realized why.
[Starry Night] wasn''t a spell. Maybe it had been, at one point Derivan saw the way the mana shed into shapes that looked remakably simr to glyphs, even while it was being absorbed by the system but this was a system skill, and the mana was simply being pulled into the system, used to turn some metaphysical gears and call the effect of the skill into existence.
He wondered why. What made this a skill, and most other simr effects a spell?
Thest of the mana finished running into the system. A few hundred points in total, something like a puddle''s worth of that liquid energy; he felt something click in the gears of the system, and...
...something in the nearest reality anchor responded. The one Misa was holding on to, that was being held inside her interface, somehow.
Once more, those balls of fire manifested in the sky, this time smaller and brighter than before. Once more, a cool mist flooded out among the stars in striated shades of blue, creating what looked just for a moment like a living painting. Gently, he pulled on those mechanisms in the skill, watching with Patch as the reality anchor responded, and the stars shrank and multiplied ordingly, until it was as close as he remembered to how the Serpent of the Night Sky had looked.
That, presumably, was what the night sky had looked like. They still didn''t know when it had vanished; only that it had most likely been recent.
"Looking at it always makes me feel a little sad," Vex said into the silence, staring up at the sky.
"Because we know it''s supposed to mean something to us," Sev said quietly. "But it doesn''t."
"We''ll give it new meaning." Misa folded her arms. "It''s what we''ve always done, right? We''re the ones giving meaning to things anyway. So if some shit takes it away, we''ll invent something new, and we''ll hold it even closer than before. See if these fucks can take it away then."
"Misa." Sev chuckled a bit, the word more affectionate than anything else. Derivan noticed, though, that there was something about the cleric that was just a little bit tense the topic had touched on something personal for him. "Not everything is a fight, you know."
"I think they made it one when they took the stars away from us," Misa said with a shrug. "I''m not an expert on sentimentality, but the sky is one of the things that stays mostly the same no matter where you are. If I had to guess, they were one of the things different cultures had inmon; something rted to the stars. I bet there were skills and sses centered around them, even."
"We know there are skills centered around them," Derivan said, even as [Starry Night] slowly faded from his control. "And that means there were sses. I wonder what happened to them."
"Knowing the system? Nothing good," Misa said with a sigh. She picked out the four mana crystals she''d brought out from the caravan, tossing one to each of them. "Time to use the crystals?"
"I will keep an eye on what they do," Derivan said, because he thought perhaps he could observe something about how this usage of the crystals functioned. A tap on the system''s interface brought up the appropriate window.
Fill this week''s mana crystal quota? Your System link will degrade if you do not.
0/1 crystals required
ACCEPT
For a moment, Derivan thought about how absurd it was that the system box didn''t even have an option to ''reject'', even if he could back out of the screen if he wanted. Then he reached out to tap the button anyway. They''d agreed to do this one by one, in case there was anything Derivan needed to focus on in the process, and so he had the time to figure out if there was anything different for each of them. He would go first, then Vex, then Misa, and finally Sev.
In the dark of the night, with nothing but the moon to light up the grass and the road around them, Derivan felt Patch resonate. He almost flinched as he felt the heavy machinery of the reality anchor suddenly expand around him, descending upon him; he saw Vex give him a worried look, and realized he probably had flinched.
He couldn''t help it. The machinery was enormous. Was this happening everywhere, every time a crystal was ''donated'' to the system?
Metaphorical pincers reached down to grab the crystal he was holding on to, and he saw with his eyes as it began to dissolve; in his mind''s eye, with thebination of [Mana Maniption] and Patch, he saw what was actually happening. The mana was being drawn up into the system, and then something happened to it; whatever that something was, the mana that fell out afterwards seemed dim and lifeless. What was left of the crystal the ''shell'' disintegrated into so blue dust, and that blue dust was fed back into thatplicated core at the center of his soul, where he was attached to the system
except for him, that dust simply fell to the floor, his particr system too broken to utilize it. Derivan frowned.
"Vex," the armor prompted gently, and the lizardkin nodded, and did tapped his own system interface.
Once again, the same thing happened. This time, that dust took root somewhere in Vex''s connection with the system, reinforcing it; he saw the entire line trailing back to the nearest reality anchor shimmer as that blue poured into it.
It was the same with Sev and Misa, too.
"I do not think I need to use a crystal to stay connected with the system," Derivan said slowly.
"What?" Sev blinked.
"Are you sure?" That was Misa.
"That''s that could help so many people, if we can figure out how to break other people''s systems like that," Vex said; his tail curled around again, a little nervous tic, and for a distracted moment Derivan thought about how endearing such a small thing was; he shook it off after a moment, not certain why his mind had gone in that direction.
More importantly, Vex was right.
"I am unsure if we can break other systems the way mine is broken," he said carefully. "But if we can, then perhaps we should. It is best we first make sure I am right, in any case."
"We''ll skip this for you next week?" Misa proposed, and the four nodded in agreement. A quick dinner again, this time with some prepared, preserved food rather than cooking anyrge meal, and they were back on the caravan; Derivan''s mind, however, was still spinning with thoughts about what he had seen.
Because he had just the faintest nagging feeling that he had seen that machinery before.
It would be another day before they arrived at the town where the next sidequest was situated they debated rushing ahead to Elyra and ignoring the quest, but it seemed to be a short and rtively harmless one, and they didn''t expect it to take more than a couple hours of time.
For now, they had most of the day to themselves, even if that time would be spent in the somewhat cramped interior of the caravan.
"I don''t get how you can look at your notes," Sev grumbled; he looked a little green, and Derivan blinked curiously. He''d never seen a human look like that before.
"Are you doing okay?" he asked.
"Just a little nauseous," Sev answered, waving a hand a little dismissively. "Shouldn''t have tried to read."
"Can''t heal yourself?" Misa raised an eyebrow.
"I can only heal these kinds of status effects by absorbing them, remember?" Sev grimaced slightly. "Can''t exactly absorb my own pain. Don''t worry about it, I''ll be fine."
Vex looked rather unconvinced, but he continued going through his notes anyway the ones about what had happened in Teque were a little sparse, and evidently not as filled out as he would''ve liked them to be. The lizardkin sighed after a moment. "Hard to look through these notes without thinking about what happened back there," he said. "Maybe if I understood those glyphs a little better..."
"That is what we are trying to do now, is it not?" Derivan prompted. "We will return I am certain. And if we want to break the barrier or make our way back here through the dungeon, we must first understand glyphs."
"Yeah." Vex nced outside the caravan, staring at the passing trees. "...Do you think those Patchers are going to be a problem again? They didn''t seem to be able to fight off glyph-spells very well. I don''t know how they''d fare against system-spells."
"They''ll definitely be a problem again." It was Misa that spoke up, that time, her tone grim. "I''ve been thinking about that too. I don''t like how useless I was against them."
"You fought three of them at the same time," Vex pointed out.
"And I didn''t kill a single one," Misa said. "Holding them off isn''t good enough, and considering what they''re doing, I just... we need to figure out something more. If we''d killed all of them back there"
"The system might have just sent more," Sev said. "Let''s... try not to dwell too hard on the what-ifs. Stick to what we need to focus on which is that we need a way to deal with Patchers that isn''t just shoving them back where they came from, since they still get to do whatever they want if they do that."
"Didn''t you manage to kill two of them, Derivan?" Misa asked.
"I shattered the core of one of them," Derivan said. "And they... fixed it, after that. When I gained the new stat, I used it to shatter a second one, but the stat resonated strangely, and I thought it unwise to push without understanding what was happening."
"Resonated?" Vex asked, perking up a little bit. He''d started to look worried and withdrawn again, but this seemed to give him something to focus on.
"Like the stat was decreasing, if only slightly." Derivan did his impression of a frown. "I am not worried about losing it... but I had the feeling that something worse than just a stat decrease might have happened, if I had pushed it more. I am uncertain."
"The stat is for patching, but you were using it to break?" Vex guessed.
"That is my suspicion," Derivan said. "I will have to test it carefully, when I get the chance. It is difficult to do so now, since all of us are attached to our systems, and my tools are still limited; I suspect working with anyplicated mechanism is likely to break it entirely. For now, you wanted to focus on signs, did you not?"
"I did," Vex said, and nced over his notebook again with a frown. He sighed, closing it after a moment. "But I don''t really know where to start. It''s a whole new magic system..."
"You have the perfect way to start," Misa pointed out. "Your sign lets you learn about things. So... use it on itself. And the concept of glyphs."
Vex paused. "I feel like that shouldn''t work," he said, uncertain.
"Do it anyway," Sev smiled a bit. "We''re long overdue some new exploits."
"I don''t think I''d call it an exploit," Vexined. "I don''t even know if glyphs will work, now that we''re back under the system..."
But the lizardkin obeyed anyway, a little nervous, beginning the process of drawing that glyph into the air; in front of him was the notebook where he''d recorded what his sign look like, as soon as he''d gotten the chance. Derivan gave him an encouraging little smile when the lizardkin looked over at him, and it seemed to settle what remained of his nerves.
Mana flowed. It hesitated, arriving at the glyph in the air but then something seemed to change.
And for the first time in a long time, in a world dominated by the system, magic happened.
97 - Book 2: Chapter 34: The Basics of Magic
97 - Book 2: Chapter 34: The Basics of Magic
It wasn''t until Vex was back within the confines of the system that he could feel how different this form of magic was, strangely enough. It had been overwhelming and wonderful in Teque, but there something had been dampened in his senses. Perhaps it was the nature of Teque itself as a half-realized space, or perhaps he''d simply been preupied by what was happening to the city. Perhaps it was the tension of knowing that they were going back to Elyra, hovering at the back of his mind; the knowledge that he had to tell his friends, exin what had happened to him...
...Well, he hadn''t had to. But he''d wanted to, and he had, and things had turned out all the better for it, and now there was a weight on his heart that wasn''t gone but lessened, that he''d never noticed before.
Either way, the magic blossomed in front of him, vibrant and alive, and he understood that he understood nothing at all; that glyphs and signs only began to scratch the surface of what real magic could do, if given the opportunity.
It had just... never been given the opportunity. Not here.
His Sign floated in the air in front of him, that same outline of his old notebook, drawn with perhaps a slightly shakier hand now that he was sitting on the inside of a caravan as it moved and bumped its way along the road; stabilization magics could only do so much to keep it steady. But it was enough for the magic to activate, for those same small tendrils of light to emerge from his notebook, and now here was a difference: He could almost feel what the magic was doing.
It was remembering.
Not learning about what he was looking at, necessarily; not going through the motions of what he would have done, the research he would have had to pore through, although the information that poured into his head was certainly organized like he''d personally sorted it. It was like there was something within the mana itself that was unfolding, and it was picking information out of a massive fractal of knowledge
though as soon as he glimpsed it, that fractal vanished. He was left with the knowledge he had acquired, which felt surprisingly small in the wake of what he''d seen, and he scrambled to pen it all down in his notebook before it left his mind.
Sign of Research
The result of a young wizard making his first foray into True Magic, the Sign of Research represents not only a schr eager to learn, but one that is willing to discover. Years of research and love for that research haspressed that process into a Sign that represents all of that work. Make no mistake, however: knowledge rarelyes for free.
...Thest part was a small note tucked away in the corner of his mind as he cast it; Vex recognized, albeit somewhat distantly, that the system was helping him sort this information out. He certainly wouldn''t have described himself in the third person like that. It seemed the system couldn''t interfere in the magic itself, but its presence and connection with him gave it ess to the information he was discovering.
He wasn''t sure he liked that.
But it had given him information and knowledge that he would have missed on his own. He had the feeling that if he leaned on that, he could push all that information into a system box, to organize and share it... but he didn''t. Not yet.
Derivan was leaning forward, too, watching him intently; he wasn''t sure why, and he felt slightly embarrassed to be under the armor''s keen gaze. Still, he kept at it, pushing the spell a little further trying, like Misa had suggested, to focus the spell on the concept of Signs, and not on his Sign in particr.
And to his surprise it worked. Not well; not nearly as in-depth as he wanted it to. But it gave him what he needed to know. He sorted that information again in his head, noting that there were two types of Signs, and mentally designating one of them ''glyphs''.
Once again, he wrote a little section in his notes, not sorting it beyond what was being fed to him.
Glyphs and Signs
Signs form the foundation of True Magic an odd paradox, given that the greatest feats of magic involve no Signs at all. A Sign is foundationally a tribute that is paid by the mana towards a great work of art, simplified down into a form that can be easily painted and recognized; almost every Sign created has a basis in some great work that was created and remembered by many, with the main exceptions being personal Signs.
Personal Notes:
''Glyph'' will be designated as the term used to describe these great works art that has passed into history, and now forms the foundation of magic. Many of the basic mana elements have glyphs to represent them, and moreplex glyphs are oftenbinations of these smaller, basic glyphs.
''Sign'' will be designated as the term used to describe something meaningful not to the world atrge, but to the person using the magic. Such magic is inherently far less effective when used by someone who the Sign does not belong to, and though personal Signs can also bebined with one another, both individuals must feel a true connection for thatbined Sign to operate. Such Signs can change in effect as the nature of the rtionship between those individuals change.
Note that although many glyphs and signs are visual constructions in nature, not all works of art are visual. Some magics are invoked by song, and still others by the sensation of rhythm; there are mages who express themselves entirely through their food, or by arranging a perfect bouquet of flowers, such that their aromas form something unique.
"Well?" Misa asked, raising an eyebrow at him.
"It sort of worked," Vex admitted; he couldn''t keep the disbelief entirely out of his voice, and Misaughed at him, the half-orc folding her arms and leaning back in the caravan like she''d won.
"I knew it," she said, smug. Vex pouted at her.
"What did you learn?" Derivan asked him curiously.
"Not as much as Misa was probably hoping," Vex said, giving her the most petnt look he could manage, which wasn''t actually very petnt at all. "But still, important basics. We can split this new magic into two categories for now glyphs, for any general magic that anyone can use, and Signs, which I''ve decided to use to refer to the personal Signs the people in Teque were talking about."
"Why Signs for that?" Sev asked, cocking his head, and Vex shrugged.
"That way I can call it Signing," he said, sounding entirely too smug about it. Sev groaned, and Vex''s grin only grew wider. "Everyone has a signature! It makes sense!"
"I never said it didn''t," Sev grumbled. "It making too much sense is the problem."
"Spoilsport," Vex said dismissively, but his grin hadn''t faded; the byy was just a normal part of a good pun.
Derivan hummed in consideration, letting the banter pass by him. "We need a way to know what the general glyphs are, then," he said thoughtfully. "We have two Signs, and we know the glyph for light."
"I made a note of it when we went to inspect some of those lights in Teque," Vex said with a nod. He flipped through his notebook to find the glyph in question, and cast the Sign of Research once more.
Glyph of Light
A simplification of the sun, worshiped by many in old times. Though the first representation of this was a mere circle in the sand, it was a means by which many found meaning.
This glyph is capable of producing minor amounts of light.
"Not a lot of information," Vex said, but a part of him was bubbling with excitement. His magic wasn''t just telling him what the magic did it was giving him a story. Pieces of history! There was every chance that he would be able to stumble upon something from before the System this way, if only he could find the right glyphs, the right piece of art
though his excitement was quickly dampened as he realized there was every possibility that the mana was giving him information from Teque''s history, and not his own.
But that... didn''t make sense. Right? Teque was a product of a bonus room the mana he was using, the mana he was interacting with now this was the mana of this world. There was no reason it would know anything about Teque, or about the alternate history that happened in that version of the world.
Yet the mana was remembering, and that memory came from something he''d managed to glimpse. He wondered if there was a way for him to ess that archive, beyond the limitations of his spell; if he could see the entirety of what the mana remembered, what would he discover?
"Vex?" Misa prompted, raising an eyebrow at him, and Vex jumped; he realized that everyone was looking at him.
"Uh, sorry," he said awkwardly. He''d been focusing on the magic and the potential paths he''d be able to take; maybe if he could find a glyph that focused on memory, or something that focused on essing spaces... "What was the question again?"
"He''s still distracted," Misa muttered to Sev, though she was half-grinning, teasing him; Vex huffed a little bit.
"I can focus!" he said. "It''s just new magic, I get to be a little excited about it."
"I think it is cute," Derivan said, and that made Vex shrink into his chair a bit, covering his face. Derivan''s tone gained a touch of worry. "...Did I say something wrong?"
"No, buddy," Sev said, giving him a sympathetic smile. "It''s just"
"Magic!" Vex interrupted, iling his arms to try to get their attention. He wanted to talk to Derivan about this, but he wanted to do it in private, and not in the caravan where everyone could listen in on him. "Um. I still don''t know what you asked. But the glyph for light basically just lets me produce light. Nothing special."
"But special enough to get you lost in thought for five minutes?" Misa was still wearing that half-grin.
"It''s not that part that got me." Vex struggled for a moment to try to find words for his fascination with what the mana was doing; how it was delivering this information to him. "It''s what the magic is doing. It''s not just telling me what the glyph can do it''s telling me how it was discovered, what it was based on..."
"You''re telling me you get lore?" Sev asked.
"Yes! I could put it into a system box, too, I think, but that''s..." Vex frowned. "I don''t know how I feel about that yet. That feels like I''m letting the system have ess to what I discover. But I think... it already does? It''s not doing anything with the information I have. Just kind of organizing it for me. As far as I can tell."
"I did notice an oddity in the way the system was acting, with Patch," Derivanmented. That had been why the armor was staring so closely at him, then. Vex wasn''t sure if he was relieved or disappointed. "I was uncertain what it was doing, but strangely, it seemed to be acting from Misa''s reality anchor."
Misa straightened, at that, her half-grin slipping away and turning into something serious; her eyes steeled, and a hand fell upon her mace. Vex blinked at her, unsure why she''d gotten serious so suddenly. "What was it doing?"
"I do not know." Derivan shook his head. "I only know that it was the source of the system''s actions."
"Did it do the same thing when we were using the mana crystals?" Misa asked.
Derivan hesitated. "I did not think to observe in that direction," he said slowly. "When the apparatus for handling the crystals descends, it is...rge. It is difficult to see past it, to a source. But I will try to pay attention should a new notification pop up, or should we notice any new oddities."
"Please," Misa said, and she sighed, leaning back against the wall of the caravan once again; she stared into the air, a telltale sign of her looking at a system screen. Vex could guess what she was looking at.
"Did the integrity go down by a lot?" There was a thin tremor of nervousness in his voice; Vex wasn''t sure he wanted to know the answer.
"No." Misa hesitated. "It went... it went up."
98 - Book 2: Chapter 35: The Basics of Magic
98 - Book 2: Chapter 35: The Basics of Magic
"That''s... a good thing, right?" Vex wasn''t sure how to phrase his question, exactly, but Misa looked more tense than he would have expected for such a revtion.
"It''s not that it going up is a problem," Misa said, but she looked frustrated anyway; her brows furrowing as she spoke. "It''s that I don''t know what''s causing it to go up and down like this, and my my family relies on this. My whole vige. It''s linked directly to me, and I don''t even get a notification when it happens."
"That means something happened to raise it, though," Vex said. "We know that, now. It''s more than we knew before. We can figure out what we did... it''s probably rted to the magic, right?"
"Maybe," Misa grunted. She didn''t look too much happier. "We''d have to keep testing. I don''t know when this happened, so it could have been from something back in Teque."
"I may be able to fix the notification problem," Derivan said. Misa blinked once, turning her gaze to him and staring, and even Vex looked at Derivan in askance; the armor tilted his head slightly, as if he was confused by the stares being directed at him. "That is the purpose of Patch, is it not? Or it appears to be. Patch allows me to fix issues with the system. I do not know how to use it yet, but with enough practice..."
"Are you sure you can do that?" Misa asked.
"Not sure," Derivan admitted. "But it should be possible."
"We''d be able to change so much, if Patch is able to do what you think," Sev muttered out loud. He shook his head, looking contemtive. "It can''t be that easy."
"It likely will not be. But I am willing to try."
"We should work on figuring out what Patch can do," Sev decided. "I mean, we were going to do that anyway, I guess, but we can put together some ideas. Figure out a way for you to train the stat. Maybe smaller problems you can fix?"
"At the moment, the stat appears to let me sense aspects of the system, and influence them in some small way," Derivan said. "But it is rather like wielding a hammer when a smaller tool would do a better job imprecise, and difficult to handle."
"So we need a small problem for you to handle?" Misa frowned. "We know the system has a dozen little errors in it, but..."
"Rather," Derivan said. "We need a problem that does not require an intricate solution; something I can hammer back into ce, so to speak."
"I can''t think of anything at the moment." Misa nced around to everyone else. "You guys got anything?"
"We don''t have a reference point for errors," Vex said. "The best we can do is wait for the next time an error shows up, and see what it looks like for Derivan."
"The good news is that at the rate we encounter errors, that shouldn''t take long at all," Sev said, and a light scattering of chuckles broke the tension in the caravan.
"Any chance we''ll encounter any with the next quest?" Misa asked. "You said it was a short one that we should do before we go to Elyra proper, right?"
"It should be a diversion of a couple of hours at most." Sev nced at the paper he held in his hands, wincing a little bit. "It''s another one of those quests a lot of adventurers don''t pick up because it''s too easy. Need to help someone pick some of her vegetables."
"And... Why do we need to help someone pick their vegetables, again?" Misa gave Sev a bemused stare. Sev shrugged.
"They''re magic," he said. "Apparently they''re kind of hard to harvest."
"You could''ve just said she needed help harvesting magical reagents."
"Calling them vegetables was funnier."
"He''s got you there," Vex said, grinning a little bit, and Misa rolled her eyes.
"Of the four of us," she grumbled, "I would''ve expected you to care most about being urate with terminology."
"I do!" Vex protested. Frustrated as she was, Misa still managed a slight smile at that, and the caravanpsed into another small silence.
"Do you have a n for discovering more glyphs?" Derivan asked after a moment passed Vex looked over at him.
"I''m not sure," the lizardkin answered honestly. "I was thinking I was just going to ask Anton for some of the basic ones through the glyph, the next time he... wait. That''s right. We have another glyph." Vex''s eyes gleamed, though inwardly he felt a little guilty for being so excited about this; the circumstances by which they had been given this glyph were, after all, far from ideal.
He took the glyph they were using tomunicate out of his bag a little reverently. It was the only line of contact they had with Anton; Charise was still within the barrier, and Misa could chat with her mother through the system, though Charise informed her that the version of her within the barrier was quickly losing ess to both the system itself and the skills offered by the system. It was only because she was in two ces at once that she was unaffected the version of her in the new J''rokksur was still fully connected.
Charise was not, however, in contact with Anton and from what they''d been informed from both sides, Fendal and Teque had both been sealed off from one another. Anton was trying to find a way to work through that inner barrier, even now; he imed that it would be an easier task than working through the outer one, for the nature of the barriers were different, though when pushed he wouldn''t exin exactly why or how they were different.
All of which Vex was worried about.
But! Communication glyph! What could he find out from this?
"Is it costing you any mana to cast these new spells?" Sev asked curiously, and Vex blinked; he hadn''t even thought about it.
"It does," he answered after a moment. The feeling of mana drain was all the same, even if the process was slightly different; in this case, he used [Ssh of Mana], which drew mana out of him and into the glyph and then, as the spell was cast, there was a link formed between him and the spell that continued to consume his mana.
If he tried to paint or draw the glyph himself with something other than mana, they didn''t activate and they didn''t have a way to directly activate the rune Anton had given them, either. They''d tried, and he''d dismissed it as something he would learn with time; simply pouring mana into the rock didn''t seem to work.
...Though,e to think of it, that was a rather distinct difference between how he used glyphs, and how the residents of Teque evidently used them. They almost exclusively drew their glyphs onto surfaces, and then channeled into them.
But there was another rather crucial difference there, wasn''t there? Each time someone in Teque used a spell, they had a massive river of living mana above them to fuel it; the magic would flow down towards them as if called. Vex didn''t have anything like that; if he drew a glyph without magic, the ambient mana simply didn''t react.
Vex wondered what made this different, even as he Signed his own Sign of Research, and noted down the information as it poured into his head.
Glyph of Communication
A coalesced wish, born from a woman whose husband left for war; every day, she would write letters, yet no couriers came to her house to fetch them. When he came home, he read them all and cried.
This glyph allows themunication of thoughts and ideas across vast distances, after pairing with another glyph.
Another little snippet of history. Vex wondered what it was like for that woman, that her letters were considered a great work of art, to be remembered and preserved by the mana. He wondered if he would ever do something like that of his own, some day.
"Are you doing okay?" Misa asked him. A note of worry entered her voice. "That is amunications glyph, right?"
"It is," Vex answered, realizing how his silence must have looked. "Don''t worry. I was just distracted."
"Learned something interesting?" Sev cocked a brow at him.
"Just that this glyph came from some letters someone wrote." Vex stared at the rock in his hands for a moment. Themunication glyph appeared to be a series of looping letters, though closer inspection would reveal that those letters were not real letters at all, just a looping cursive made to imitate. It was nothing nearly soplex as a series of letters one might send their love. He wondered how the mana decided, exactly, what a glyph looked like. Or when a given work of art transformed into a glyph.
But there was something else that was a little more exciting.
Vex knew two glyphs now. General glyphs that could bebined with one another, if he understood what he''d learned from his Sign correctly, and it wouldn''t even be all thatplicated tobine these two the glyph for light was a rtively simple circle, surrounded on four points by a series of simple mes, and all Vex had to do was write the false script of the glyph formunication along the inner circle.
He wasn''t sure how he knew that was the way tobine the glyphs, only that it made the most sense that way; the looping letters of Communication fit perfectly on the inside of the circle for Light, and Vex barely even realized that he was painting this with mana, not merely scribbling it in his notes.
His tongue stuck out the side of his mouth in concentration as he finished thest loopingtter
mana red. A yellow-green light erupted from the glyph, throwing the caravan''s cabin into stark contrast and bathing all four of them in light; Vex flinched at first, and Misa reached out for her mace like she was expecting to have to block an explosion, but nothing further happened, and Misa slowly lowered her mace, although she still stared suspiciously at the rune.
"What was that?" she asked.
"I, uh... don''t know." It had been, it ured to Vex, a little reckless of him to cast that spell in an enclosed space. Especially since he didn''t know what it did. There was no reason to expect that anything bad would happen ''light'' and munication'' hardly spelled an explosion but still.
"Vex," Misa said, a touch of fond exasperation in her tone, and Vex squeaked.
"I''ll be more careful next time!" he said. "I got excited."
And he was still excited, because he had another confirmed spell he could look at with his Sign, and he did, taking down his notes as he did so.
Glyph of Letterlight
Abination of the glyphs of Light and Communication, the glyph of Letterlight represents the desire to share meaning through the visual mediums of art.
This glyph is capable of one-way transmission of thoughts, concepts and ideas to any being thates in contact with the light emitted from it.
Ah. That made sense.
Vex hadn''t been particrly prepared for the spell, and so the only thought he''d put into it while the spell was casting was that he hoped it worked; the thought had been easy enough to dismiss, though each of the three others did admit they felt something along those lines when Vex had cast his spell.
"Lotta applications for that spell," Misa said with a low whistle when Vex described what it did. "As long as you can direct that light."
"It may be worth experimenting with," Derivan agreed.
"No slivers for thatbination, though," Vex noted, looking a little bit worried. "What if I can''t get any more?"
"You didn''t give all your slivers to Noram, did you?" Misa asked.
"No," Vex said; he rummaged around in his tailpouch, trying to find the one sliver he''d kept for himself. "But I was hoping we''d be able to get more now that we know how magic works..."
He paused.
His fingers had brushed against the sliver in his tailpouch, and the system had responded.
[Unknown Shard] [Grade: Unknown]
Item description still processing.
"...The system recognizes the slivers, now," Vex said slowly, staring at the box. He didn''t know how he felt about it. For some reason, he felt a strange, creeping dread.
"Does it tell you what it is?" Derivan asked.
"No. It says it''s still processing." Vex fidgeted. "But this does mean that the system is actively studying the slivers... I''m worried about what will happen when it''s done."
"Next time Anton contacts us," Misa suggested. "You should ask about glyphs for making this trip faster. Just in case."
"Was there any change in integrity?" Vex asked. The half-orc nced at her status and sighed.
"Too small for now, if there was anything," she said. "But let me know the next time you work on this magic, and I''ll keep an eye on it."
Vex nodded. "I need to know what other base glyphs there are," he said, his tive. He was always excited about new magic, of course, but this was something new, and here he was just starting to get a glimpse at it...
He wanted to learn more.
And it would help him with his family in Elyra, too, he hoped.
98 - Book 2: Chapter 35: Combinatorics
98 - Book 2: Chapter 35: Combinatorics
"That''s... a good thing, right?" Vex wasn''t sure how to phrase his question, exactly, but Misa looked more tense than he would have expected for such a revtion.
"It''s not that it going up is a problem," Misa said, but she looked frustrated anyway; her brows furrowing as she spoke. "It''s that I don''t know what''s causing it to go up and down like this, and my my family relies on this. My whole vige. It''s linked directly to me, and I don''t even get a notification when it happens."
"That means something happened to raise it, though," Vex said. "We know that, now. It''s more than we knew before. We can figure out what we did... it''s probably rted to the magic, right?"
"Maybe," Misa grunted. She didn''t look too much happier. "We''d have to keep testing. I don''t know when this happened, so it could have been from something back in Teque."
"I may be able to fix the notification problem," Derivan said. Misa blinked once, turning her gaze to him and staring, and even Vex looked at Derivan in askance; the armor tilted his head slightly, as if he was confused by the stares being directed at him. "That is the purpose of Patch, is it not? Or it appears to be. Patch allows me to fix issues with the system. I do not know how to use it yet, but with enough practice..."
"Are you sure you can do that?" Misa asked.
"Not sure," Derivan admitted. "But it should be possible."
"We''d be able to change so much, if Patch is able to do what you think," Sev muttered out loud. He shook his head, looking contemtive. "It can''t be that easy."
"It likely will not be. But I am willing to try."
"We should work on figuring out what Patch can do," Sev decided. "I mean, we were going to do that anyway, I guess, but we can put together some ideas. Figure out a way for you to train the stat. Maybe smaller problems you can fix?"
"At the moment, the stat appears to let me sense aspects of the system, and influence them in some small way," Derivan said. "But it is rather like wielding a hammer when a smaller tool would do a better job imprecise, and difficult to handle."
"So we need a small problem for you to handle?" Misa frowned. "We know the system has a dozen little errors in it, but..."
"Rather," Derivan said. "We need a problem that does not require an intricate solution; something I can hammer back into ce, so to speak."
"I can''t think of anything at the moment." Misa nced around to everyone else. "You guys got anything?"
"We don''t have a reference point for errors," Vex said. "The best we can do is wait for the next time an error shows up, and see what it looks like for Derivan."
"The good news is that at the rate we encounter errors, that shouldn''t take long at all," Sev said, and a light scattering of chuckles broke the tension in the caravan.
"Any chance we''ll encounter any with the next quest?" Misa asked. "You said it was a short one that we should do before we go to Elyra proper, right?"
"It should be a diversion of a couple of hours at most." Sev nced at the paper he held in his hands, wincing a little bit. "It''s another one of those quests a lot of adventurers don''t pick up because it''s too easy. Need to help someone pick some of her vegetables."
"And... Why do we need to help someone pick their vegetables, again?" Misa gave Sev a bemused stare. Sev shrugged.
"They''re magic," he said. "Apparently they''re kind of hard to harvest."
"You could''ve just said she needed help harvesting magical reagents."
"Calling them vegetables was funnier."
"He''s got you there," Vex said, grinning a little bit, and Misa rolled her eyes.
"Of the four of us," she grumbled, "I would''ve expected you to care most about being urate with terminology."
"I do!" Vex protested. Frustrated as she was, Misa still managed a slight smile at that, and the caravanpsed into another small silence.
"Do you have a n for discovering more glyphs?" Derivan asked after a moment passed Vex looked over at him.
"I''m not sure," the lizardkin answered honestly. "I was thinking I was just going to ask Anton for some of the basic ones through the glyph, the next time he... wait. That''s right. We have another glyph." Vex''s eyes gleamed, though inwardly he felt a little guilty for being so excited about this; the circumstances by which they had been given this glyph were, after all, far from ideal.
He took the glyph they were using tomunicate out of his bag a little reverently. It was the only line of contact they had with Anton; Charise was still within the barrier, and Misa could chat with her mother through the system, though Charise informed her that the version of her within the barrier was quickly losing ess to both the system itself and the skills offered by the system. It was only because she was in two ces at once that she was unaffected the version of her in the new J''rokksur was still fully connected.
Charise was not, however, in contact with Anton and from what they''d been informed from both sides, Fendal and Teque had both been sealed off from one another. Anton was trying to find a way to work through that inner barrier, even now; he imed that it would be an easier task than working through the outer one, for the nature of the barriers were different, though when pushed he wouldn''t exin exactly why or how they were different.
All of which Vex was worried about.
But! Communication glyph! What could he find out from this?
"Is it costing you any mana to cast these new spells?" Sev asked curiously, and Vex blinked; he hadn''t even thought about it.
"It does," he answered after a moment. The feeling of mana drain was all the same, even if the process was slightly different; in this case, he used [Ssh of Mana], which drew mana out of him and into the glyph and then, as the spell was cast, there was a link formed between him and the spell that continued to consume his mana.
If he tried to paint or draw the glyph himself with something other than mana, they didn''t activate and they didn''t have a way to directly activate the rune Anton had given them, either. They''d tried, and he''d dismissed it as something he would learn with time; simply pouring mana into the rock didn''t seem to work.
...Though,e to think of it, that was a rather distinct difference between how he used glyphs, and how the residents of Teque evidently used them. They almost exclusively drew their glyphs onto surfaces, and then channeled into them.
But there was another rather crucial difference there, wasn''t there? Each time someone in Teque used a spell, they had a massive river of living mana above them to fuel it; the magic would flow down towards them as if called. Vex didn''t have anything like that; if he drew a glyph without magic, the ambient mana simply didn''t react.
Vex wondered what made this different, even as he Signed his own Sign of Research, and noted down the information as it poured into his head.
Glyph of Communication
A coalesced wish, born from a woman whose husband left for war; every day, she would write letters, yet no couriers came to her house to fetch them. When he came home, he read them all and cried.
This glyph allows themunication of thoughts and ideas across vast distances, after pairing with another glyph.
Another little snippet of history. Vex wondered what it was like for that woman, that her letters were considered a great work of art, to be remembered and preserved by the mana. He wondered if he would ever do something like that of his own, some day.
"Are you doing okay?" Misa asked him. A note of worry entered her voice. "That is amunications glyph, right?"
"It is," Vex answered, realizing how his silence must have looked. "Don''t worry. I was just distracted."
"Learned something interesting?" Sev cocked a brow at him.
"Just that this glyph came from some letters someone wrote." Vex stared at the rock in his hands for a moment. Themunication glyph appeared to be a series of looping letters, though closer inspection would reveal that those letters were not real letters at all, just a looping cursive made to imitate. It was nothing nearly soplex as a series of letters one might send their love. He wondered how the mana decided, exactly, what a glyph looked like. Or when a given work of art transformed into a glyph.
But there was something else that was a little more exciting.
Vex knew two glyphs now. General glyphs that could bebined with one another, if he understood what he''d learned from his Sign correctly, and it wouldn''t even be all thatplicated tobine these two the glyph for light was a rtively simple circle, surrounded on four points by a series of simple mes, and all Vex had to do was write the false script of the glyph formunication along the inner circle.
He wasn''t sure how he knew that was the way tobine the glyphs, only that it made the most sense that way; the looping letters of Communication fit perfectly on the inside of the circle for Light, and Vex barely even realized that he was painting this with mana, not merely scribbling it in his notes.
His tongue stuck out the side of his mouth in concentration as he finished thest loopingtter
mana red. A yellow-green light erupted from the glyph, throwing the caravan''s cabin into stark contrast and bathing all four of them in light; Vex flinched at first, and Misa reached out for her mace like she was expecting to have to block an explosion, but nothing further happened, and Misa slowly lowered her mace, although she still stared suspiciously at the rune.
"What was that?" she asked.
"I, uh... don''t know." It had been, it ured to Vex, a little reckless of him to cast that spell in an enclosed space. Especially since he didn''t know what it did. There was no reason to expect that anything bad would happen ''light'' and munication'' hardly spelled an explosion but still.
"Vex," Misa said, a touch of fond exasperation in her tone, and Vex squeaked.
"I''ll be more careful next time!" he said. "I got excited."
And he was still excited, because he had another confirmed spell he could look at with his Sign, and he did, taking down his notes as he did so.
Glyph of Letterlight
Abination of the glyphs of Light and Communication, the glyph of Letterlight represents the desire to share meaning through the visual mediums of art.
This glyph is capable of one-way transmission of thoughts, concepts and ideas to any being thates in contact with the light emitted from it.
Ah. That made sense.
Vex hadn''t been particrly prepared for the spell, and so the only thought he''d put into it while the spell was casting was that he hoped it worked; the thought had been easy enough to dismiss, though each of the three others did admit they felt something along those lines when Vex had cast his spell.
"Lotta applications for that spell," Misa said with a low whistle when Vex described what it did. "As long as you can direct that light."
"It may be worth experimenting with," Derivan agreed.
"No slivers for thatbination, though," Vex noted, looking a little bit worried. "What if I can''t get any more?"
"You didn''t give all your slivers to Noram, did you?" Misa asked.
"No," Vex said; he rummaged around in his tailpouch, trying to find the one sliver he''d kept for himself. "But I was hoping we''d be able to get more now that we know how magic works..."
He paused.
His fingers had brushed against the sliver in his tailpouch, and the system had responded.
[Unknown Shard] [Grade: Unknown]
Item description still processing.
"...The system recognizes the slivers, now," Vex said slowly, staring at the box. He didn''t know how he felt about it. For some reason, he felt a strange, creeping dread.
"Does it tell you what it is?" Derivan asked.
"No. It says it''s still processing." Vex fidgeted. "But this does mean that the system is actively studying the slivers... I''m worried about what will happen when it''s done."
"Next time Anton contacts us," Misa suggested. "You should ask about glyphs for making this trip faster. Just in case."
"Was there any change in integrity?" Vex asked. The half-orc nced at her status and sighed.
"Too small for now, if there was anything," she said. "But let me know the next time you work on this magic, and I''ll keep an eye on it."
Vex nodded. "I need to know what other base glyphs there are," he said, his tive. He was always excited about new magic, of course, but this was something new, and here he was just starting to get a glimpse at it...
He wanted to learn more.
And it would help him with his family in Elyra, too, he hoped.
99 - Book 2: Chapter 36: Update
99 - Book 2: Chapter 36: Update
Anton''s call came not long after Vex was done with his first series of glyph-tests. As before, the glyph they held began to glow with mana, which was interesting; without having mana-sight, it wouldn''t be possible to notice that the glyph was ''receiving'' anything. There wasn''t even a thread of mana linking the two glyphs, which made Vex wonder how exactly the mechanics of the spell worked but that came secondary to what Anton had to say.
The beetle-mage was focused on trying to give them an update about the situation in Teque. Apparently, the time dtion had dropped to almost nothing, which was at least one worry dealt with.
On the other hand, Helg was apparently calling for the citizens of Teque to gather together, so they could determine who the system was feeding and who the system was not. It was for everyone''s safety, she imed but Anton''s words were tense, and he sounded worried.
"I do not think we should be categorizing our people," Anton said through the mana-link; a projection of him floated above the glyph so all four of them could hear him, though how Anton had unlocked that particr functionality Vex had no idea. "I am worried what that might lead to. But I have not had much luck in getting Helg to change her mind."
"Have you had a chance to speak to Noram about all this?" Vex asked. "I still don''t understand why he just... agreed to all this."
"He has been locking himself away in that sleep bubble of his." Anton frowned. "I am worried about him. I was never very close to him, but I cannot imagine what Helg said to him, to make him like this."
Vex sighed. "Keep us updated," he said, casting a significant nce to Misa; she''d been keeping in contact with her mother. Charise and her two guards were the only people in Fendal left that possessed their own faculties, it seemed, and they''d been trying to keep an eye on everyone they cared about Noram in particr.
So far, no change in behavior. Vex had hoped the slivers would do something... but maybe it took more time than this.
"Anything else before I cut the connection?" Anton asked.
"Do you know why I can''t use this glyph myself?" Vex asked. "I''ve tried pushing mana into it, but that doesn''t work. And I''d like to know a few more basic glyphs, if you don''t mind sharing them."
Anton made a bit of a face. "Magic lessons, huh?" he said, but the question was rhetorical. "I am not the best teacher of those, but... I suppose with how differently the magic in your world works..."
"I''m hoping I can understand more," Vex said. "Then we won''t be caught so off guard by magics like this."
"Helg burned part of our mana sliver supply to make that barrier as strong as she did," Anton said bluntly. "You will most likely not have to face magic like that, but..."
"We''re going to be visiting other parts of your world," Sev supplied, from his corner of the caravan. "Anything you give us will help. It might help us find a way through."
"I know." Anton fidgeted slightly, ncing away as if he was worried someone would walk in on him; Vex was abruptly reminded of his ns to learn obfuscation magics, and wondered briefly if he would be able to find something along those lines in this new system of magic, that he could teach Anton. Assuming the mage didn''t know them already. "I''ll share a few of the basic glyphs I know. But just knowing the shape of the sign isn''t everything"
"I know," Vex said. "My sign can handle the rest."
"Right," Anton said, and then grumbled slightly. "Knowledge signs."
"Do you know how they work?" Vex asked.
"Mana has memory," Anton recited, almost automatically. "And memory shapes the world. Knowledge taps into that, but I could not tell you how or where it holds that memory, exactly. Our schrs are still trying to figure that out."
Anton nced away again, and then frowned. "I will send a basic package of elemental signs, so you have somewhere to get started. Many signs build up from those basic elements. I am sure you will figure the rest out. I must get going."
Anton''s projection disappeared almost as soon as he said the words; at the same time, Vex blinked, a package of six glyphs suddenly appearing in his mind in a way that was... arguably a little intrusive. He didn''tin, though, shaking his head slightly at the small headache that that had introduced instead.
Derivan still noticed, of course. "Are you alright?" the armor asked.
"Fine," Vex said with a small smile at his at Derivan. "Just not used to themunication glyph. Don''t worry about it."
"He sent you what you needed?" Misa asked, and Vex nodded.
"It was kind of him," Vex said quietly. "He didn''t have to. I don''t know if he was... annoyed, at the end there? He''s trying to set things right in Fendal, and here we are just..."
"Stop," Misa said firmly, shaking her head. "That line of thought won''t help us."
Vex was silent for a moment, then eventually nodded; what else was he supposed to do? Misa was right. She exchanged a look with Sev that was basically unreadable to him, and he decided to focus his energies on deciphering the elemental signs that Anton had given him, instead.
It was a pretty simple set of elements, in the end. It didn''t even include the more obscure types of aspects he''d seen. Just fire, water, earth, air, light, and dark; light was redundant, too, given he already knew the rune for that.
But even with just that set plus the glyph formunication, and their own personal signs there was so much he could do. Experiment with.
"Do you think that magic stat of yours can help you find new glyphs, Deri?" Vex asked, angling his gaze towards the armor, who tilted his head in consideration.
"...Perhaps," Derivan eventually answered. "Thest time I tried, I ended up creating abination of our Signs instead."
Vex blinked. Derivan sounded almost embarrassed. He hadn''t really thought about it, but everyone from Teque had mentioned thatbining Signatures like that was an intimate thing, hadn''t they? And that had been corroborated by the information he''d been fed from his own glyph, when he''d tried to query what glyphs and signs were in general...
...his mind wandered, briefly, into what that meant for what Derivan thought about the two of them, and a pleasant warmth filled him at the thought. He looked down and away, not quite meeting Derivan''s eyes, and from the corner of his sight he thought he saw the armor look down, too.
Neither Sev nor Misa said anything. They seemed to sense that the moment was private, however small it was. And after a moment, Vex gathered himself, and managed to speak with more confidence than he felt.
"I''m looking forward to exploring magic together," he said honestly, and Derivan did that almost-smile he always did, reaching out for him; Vex reached back, taking his hand, and that was that.
A moment of quiet affection, held in two hands.
The conversation ended there, drifting into afortable silence. Part of him wanted to spend the rest of his time experimenting, but his previous experiments and the conversation with Anton had drained more mana than he anticipated, and they were due to arrive at the site of their next quest, soon; he''d need his mana for what they were going to do there.
Which, yes, was just harvesting magical reagents. But they had more than one purpose for picking that quest, and not simply skipping it to rush to Elyra after what had happened in Fendal: magical reagents or not, many of the nts the questgiver had were still crops. Food.
And since she was versed in magic herself, there was a chance she would have some insight into the food and crops shortage guing Elyra.
Vex knew about this woman, though he''d done a poor job of exining who she was to Sev and the others, before. Talking about Elyra still made him nervous, and eventually Sev had simply asked if he was ready to talk about it; when Vex shook his head no, he had hugged him, and told him it didn''t matter unless it was the sort of thing that would affect their quest. And it wouldn''t! It was just that this woman was semi-famous within Elyra''s walls, and, well, she was personally funded for the benefit she was able to provide to Elyra.
Technically, in fact, she even counted as nobility. She would be a full Lady, if she chose to move into Elyra''s walls at any point, but she seemed content out here, and as far as Vex was concerned that was a point in her favor.
Okay, it was probably best that he mention that fact before they actually arrived. He could already see her hut in the distance, and the massive fields that she apparently maintained alone.
"So, uh, Lady well. Emily is Elyran nobility, technically," Vex said, breaking the silence in the caravan; Sev nced at him, but didn''t seem particrly surprised, and Misa just blinked several times at him in askance. Derivan barely even had a reaction, which made sense, given he understood little about the nuances of nobility.
"Does that... matter?" Misa eventually asked.
"Not really." Vex shrugged. "I just felt like I should mention it. Just in case."
Misaughed a little bit, and Sev smiled; Derivan reached over to ruffle the frill-spikes on the back of his head, and Vex felt himself rx.
It was the first time he''d been able to talk about Elyra without the surge of tension and fear that came along with remembering everything that happened there; without the constant worry that he wouldn''t be able to save his brother from what had happened to him.
It was nice.
"Hi!"
Emily was very, very pretty. Vex noticed this in an abstract sort of way, the way one might notice a beautiful painting andment on how technically brilliant it was; her skin was dark but wless, and she sported tightly braided hair that hung down to her shoulders. She wore a perfectly tailored, sunset-yellow dress, too, right down to a flowing skirt that Vex couldn''t help but think was a nightmare to work in the fields with.
But no, actually; there was a faint shimmer of magic around it. That made sense.
"Hello," Sev greeted with a small but polite smile. "We''re from the Adventurer''s Guild."
"Here to help with the harvest, right?" Emily smiled brightly. "Thank god. I was worried I was going to have to ask someone from Elyra toe."
"You don''t like working with Elyra?" Vex couldn''t help but ask, perking up slightly.
"God no. Have you worked with Elyra? Half the time they send these pretentious little mages that can''t tell the difference between magic and makeup." Emily mimicked a false shudder, her lips quirking in momentary disgust. Vex couldn''t help but snicker.
"I''ve worked with a few Elyran mages in my time," he agreed, and then, in a fit of bravery, continued. "Um... I was one. Technically. But I left."
"Good!" Emily said, and then turned to open the door to her cottage and wave the four of them inside. "Come in. You''re going to need some gloves if you want to help me with the harvest. We''ll need to split into teams, and... you know some magic, right? The lizard. I should have gotten your names, sorry."
"I''m Sev," Sev said, and gestured to the other three. "Misa. Derivan. The lizardkin is Vex."
"I''m going to mix up those names a bunch, I''m warning you now," Emily said immediately.
"We''re used to it," Sev said with a shrug, and she grinned and led them in.
100 - Book 2: Chapter 37: Meeting
100 - Book 2: Chapter 37: Meeting
Emily''s home was unremarkable, for all that she was apparently a witch of sufficient prowess to warrant the coveted position of nobility in Elyra.
Derivan thought it was cozy, certainly; there was clearly a lot of care and effort put into every detail of the house. The ce was spotless. The walls were painted a bright white, and had paintings of a multitude of exotic nts hanging up on them; nothing Derivan had ever seen before. One of them even looked like it had a mouth! Which was... a choice, certainly.
Handwoven baskets hung from the ceiling, with flowering vines drooping from them, dangling low enough to touch even Vex''s head. Derivan almost didn''t have the space to walk around. Even the baskets were about the same height as his helmet, forcing him to duck and weave between them to get to a seat on Emily''s couch.
Before long, however, they were all seated, and Emily was preparing some tea for all of them, despite their protests. Derivan in particr had no idea what he was meant to do with his tea, and was vaguely tempted to pour it into the slits in his helmet that were meant for his eyes.
That would probably be stranger than just not drinking the tea, though.
"I have to thank you again for helping me out with this," Emily said. "I was a little worried no one was going to pick up the request."
"You said you would''ve asked Elyra for help if that happened, right?" Vex asked.
"Yeah, but like I also said, I don''t want to." Emily made a face.
"I was more wondering if you knew anything about the food and crop issues they''ve been having." Vex nced outside at the fields; as far as he could tell, all of Emily''s nts were healthy.
"Ah." Emily seemed to sober up a little; Derivan noticed a small spark of reluctance, like she didn''t entirely want to talk about this. "I''ve noticed that it''s taking a lot more mana to push my crops to grow," she said. "Do not tell Elyra that, though. I don''t want them toe over here to ''investigate'', again."
"Had issues with that before?" It was Misa that asked the question, an eyebrow raising slightly at their host.
"Mostly because I keep refusing to live inside the main kingdom and benefit from being a noble or whatever, yeah. They want to know how I make my reagents." Emily shrugged and smiled. "I''m not telling them, though. And they''re not going to get me to live in Elyra so I can be one of their spoiled little nobles."
Vex coughed at that, snickering a little bit. Sev cocked his head. "I mean, shouldn''t you be worried that we''re from Elyra?" he asked. "We haven''t shown you a Guild badge or anything..."
"You also haven''t tried to pry any secrets from me or climb into my fields without my permission." Emily grinned a slight grin. "I would''ve known if you were from Elyra, trust me. You''re adventurers. Though now that you mention it, yes, I would like to see your badge."
Sev handed them over, and she whistled. "Gold? I didn''t think they''d be sending gold-ranked adventurers."
"Silver, by leveling standards," Sev said, sounding a little embarrassed. "It''s not that impressive."
"If you''re silver by the normal standard and the guild gave you gold badges anyway, I think I''m entitled to be even more impressed." Emily handed the badges back with a shake of her head. "Now I''m worried that I''m keeping you from doing more important things. Don''t you have ancient dungeons to delve? Deep secrets to uncover? Maybe a town to save?"
Derivan didn''t react but Sev, Misa, and Vex all grimaced a little bit at that.
Emily noticed, of course. The smile faded from her face, and she frowned a small frown. "Am I actually keeping you from a town to save?"
"Not exactly," Sev hedged. "Think of it as... we can''t do anything about it right now. We''re going to work our way there, though."
"Not giving up." Emily nodded to herself, pouring herself a second cup of tea. She''d apparently already finished the first. "You''re ssic adventurers, I see. The heroic types."
"I don''t know if heroic is the right word." Vex fidgeted. "We''re just trying to do the right thing?"
"...What do you think heroism is?"
Vex deted a little. "I just don''t think it should be all that special," he said quietly.
Emily took a sip of her tea, then sighed and sat back in her seat, looking over the four of them. She didn''t respond for a moment, but she seemed to be taking them a little more seriously than before. "You already spoke to the Guild?"
"They''ve made a couple of attempts, but it hasn''t worked," Sev said. Not even Max''s [Right ce, Right Time] had been able to break through the barrier. "It''s not... It''s probably not correct to say that it isn''t urgent. But it''s reversible, hopefully, and no one is dying."
Yet, was the unspoken word that all three of the other adventurers heard. Derivan cast a nce to Emily to see how she would react, and saw that she seemed... contemtive.
"Do you want to talk about it?" she finally asked. "I''m not a therapist or anything, but I''ve had a few people use this ce to let out their worries."
"Well, it''s not why we''re here," Sev said, ncing around to make sure that no one else seemed to want to take her up on her offer; no one did. "Thank you for the offer, though. We''re just here to help you with the harvest. We''ve, uh, had our moment of catharsis."
"Speaking of," Vex said, changing the subject. "That thing about it taking more mana to grow your crops is really weird. It''s not a mana shortage problem, right? If that were it Elyra would definitely have a means of getting enough mana."
"Right. The Ashion house." Vex flinched a little bit when Emily said the name, but a lot less than he usually did. Misa gave him an encouraging thumbs up. "Keep in mind, you''re still not in Elyra proper. The effect is a lot stronger closer to the Elyran agricultural fields, I''ve heard. To the point where all the mana put into those spells get instantly sucked up."
"Oh. That''s... worrying." Vex frowned. It matched up with what his brother had told him; growth magic suppression.
"Yup." Emily ced her empty teacup on the saucer in front of her. "Nothing to be done about it, though. At least the Guild is kind enough to send assistance... Anyway! The harvest. How many of you are versed in magical reagent collection?"
Vex raised his hand, and the other three stayed silent. Emily watched them for a while, pursing her lips, and then nodded to herself.
"Yeah, I can work with that," she said. "One is better than nothing. So!
"First thing to know: magical nts are very sensitive to mana usage! That''s not to say you can''t use mana at all, but if you use it, you better know what you''re doing. A stray [Mana Maniption] can ruin a whole nt, and all the ones next to it. Any skill that uses mana shouldn''t be used, whether it''s a spell or not. That''s worse than [Mana Maniption]."
Derivan''s eyes narrowed slightly; he wondered if that had something to do with the way the system interacted with mana. They''d seen the difference in mana now between Teque and the rest of the world, and Vex had talked about how the usage of system skills could chase ambient mana away. From what he could see, Emily''s fields had the same carefree mana they usually observed in forests and ins, away from people.
"Second! I have gloves for you. They''re gloves that are specifically enchanted to provide some mana instion, and also protect you from the harmful side-effects some of these reagents have on contact. Keep them on at all times. Do not ever, ever touch your eyes with those gloves. Actually, just don''t touch any body part with the gloves. Unless you want to experience an unnecessary amount of pain."
"...Concerning," Sevmented, picking up a pair of gloves and staring at it with what was probably an undue amount of suspicion. Misa did, too. Vex just put his on, looking a little bit silly with how the too-big gloves fit onto his hands; the sleeves fit all the way up to his biceps, and made bending his arms awkward. He seemed used to it, though.
Derivan stated nkly at the set of gloves that Emily was offering him, and then nced around at his party helplessly. They did not look like they would remotely fit on his armor.
"Is that amenable to a size enchantment?" Vex asked, evidently deciding to help him. Emily blinked, nced at Derivan, and then nced back at the pair of gloves she was holding.
"Can you not just take off the gauntlets or something?" she asked. "A size enchantment would probably break the magics on this thing."
"I am afraid they are quite stuck," Derivan said. "As is the rest of my armor, unfortunately."
Emily nced at him, then at the ne he still wore; he''d almost forgotten about it after the Guildmaster had gifted it to him. "I won''t ask," she said, without questioning it any further. "I''m honestly not sure if I can replicate the enchantment on your armor. Do you know if it protects you from magical effects?"
"What sort of magical effects?" Derivan asked.
"Just the usual ones," Emily said, and when Derivan looked at her nkly, she borated. "Heat is probably the one you need to worry about most; there are some ice effects, and some more esoteric ones that might warp flesh if in direct contact"
Sev choked a little on his tea as she said those words, and she ignored him. "But nothing that should affect metal, as far as I know. As long as your armor itself isn''t too magical, it shouldn''t be a problem."
"I am... unsure how magical my armor is," Derivan said, ncing at Vex for help. He essentially was just magic armor.
"His armor''s pretty magical, but the effect is mostly focused inwards," Vex said. "It shouldn''t affect your nts it hasn''t affected any of my magic."
"I''m going to tentatively trust you on that," Emily said with a slight frown. "I''ll want you working with him, to make sure that doesn''t affect the nts, and I''m going to be present for the first few harvests before I go help out the other two. Just in case."
"We''re splitting into teams, then?" Sev asked.
"Sev and Derivan on one team, Misa and Vex on the other," Emily said with a nod, and then paused. "Wait, which one is the lizard again?"
"I''m Vex," Vex said.
"...Vex and Derivan on one team, Misa and Sev on the other." Emily gave them a yful scowl. "Your names are way too simr."
"Believe me," Sev said with a weary sigh, although he sounded amused. "It''s not the first time we''ve gotten that."
101 - Book 2: Chapter 38: Finally
101 - Book 2: Chapter 38: Finally
Derivan had to admit to himself that he felt a little lost. Of all the things that he''d had practice doing ever since leaving the dungeon that had spawned him, harvesting magical crops wasn''t one of them nevermind the intricacies that apparently went into harvesting these particr magical crops. It wasn''t that it was overwhelming, exactly; he just didn''t understand why there were so many steps.
"The leaves of the Heuna maloris need to be plucked one by one," Emily instructed. Apparently, even Vex didn''t know about some of these nts; the lizardkin was watching Emily in fascination, his eyes glowing with his version of mana sight. Derivan wasn''t sure what he saw; his own skill wasn''t advanced enough to show him the way mana was moving within the nts. "Only pluck the leaves that have turned green, and keep in mind the leaves might change color once you start plucking them."
"Fascinating," Vex murmured. "The mana''s moving around every time you pluck a leaf. The green ones are the ones with the most mana?"
"You can see that?" Emily raised an eyebrow, impressed. "Yeah, that''s basically what''s happening."
"Is that a defense mechanism or something?" Vex asked.
"It''s hard to say." Emily shrugged. She plucked another leaf carefully, and Derivan watched as the entire nt shifted hues; some green leaves turned a deep red, and red leaves shifted into a vibrant yellow. It would have been startling if he hadn''t seen it a few times already. "It''s not a very good defense mechanism, if that''s what it is. It might be able to confuse some insects and pests that prey on high-mana leaves, and make them waste energy moving around, but it''s not going to stop other animals from just eating the whole nt."
Vex was frowning, tapping a finger on his chin. "But it''s pretty good against those specific pests," he said, more to himself than to Emily, and she nodded.
"A lot of these nts are only magical because I worked on them, though," she said. "So it''s not like there''s evolutionary pressure to force it to be a certain way. Maybe magic guides it to behave in ways to protect itself? But I''m mostly interested in growing the nts better, and not the why of the magic."
"That''s where Ie in," Vex said cheerfully, and Emilyughed a little.
"Sure, if that''s what you want," she said. "You''re wee to try to understand, and if you figure it out, let me know. I''m not telling you how I make them, though."
"Don''t, don''t." Vex waved her off. "I want to figure it out myself!"
Derivan hummed, pleased, watching the two of them interact. He didn''t feel a need to step in, nor did he have much to contribute to the conversation. Emily led them through a few more of the nts that Vex wasn''t familiar with harvesting, and each time had Derivan try harvesting the nt at least once while they both observed to make sure his armor didn''t mess with any of the intrinsic magic of the nts; fortunately, it didn''t.
There was a flower that needed to be watered right before being picked, or else it would explode into mes. There was a strange, long flower, embedded with red beads that Emily said was her attempt at recreating ''corn'', though if plucked too violently each bead would puff up and release a cloud of water-aspect mana, drenching the harvester. There was a root vegetable that needed all its aboveground leaves to be pulled together, or else the leaves would detach and it would jet all the collected mana straight up into the air.
Very, very strange nts, all in all. Derivan could practically hear Sevining.
"Aw, man," Emily muttered, looking a little bit put out once she was done. "I just realized I should''ve kept you four together exining those. Now I''m going to need to exin these to your friends all over again."
"Good luck," Vex said sympathetically, hiding a grin.
"...Why good luck?" Emily squinted suspiciously at Vex. "Am I going to have problems?"
"Oh, no reason." Vex kept his expression as straight and innocent as possible. Emily stared at him for a moment, narrowing her eyes.
"Right," she said, and then straightened. "Well, I''m going to go teach them how to harvest nts, then. And you better be half-done with your section by the time I''m done!"
There were quite a lot of nts in their section. Derivan was about to protest, and then Vex just shrugged and said that was fine, and that made Emily narrow her eyes all the more... but she turned and left anyway, and Vex almost immediately burst into giggles once she was out of earshot.
"Sev is not going to like this," Derivan said, sharing in Vex''s amusement.
"And Misa''s going to want to try so many things." Vex grinned. "I mean, I have questions too, but I want to try to figure this out myself, first. There''s so much new here! And I still have the glyphs to figure out I dunno, maybe I can find some ce where magical nts intersect with glyphs, natural mana seems to interact with the environment in mostly the same way when the system isn''t involved and now that I think about it, we don''t actually know how mages in Teque figure out the glyphs at all. I mean, what counts as ''a great artwork''? How do they know when the mana decides something is worthy of being remembered? How do they figure out what the glyph to represent that art piece is?"
"There are many questions to answer," Derivan agreed. They were good questions, though he found himself instead watching Vex carefully. The lizardkin was buzzing with the questions he always had when he found something new, but this time without the pressure of a mystery on his back, and for just an instant he let go of everything he was worried about; Elyra, his brother, his parents, Teque and Fendal...
It wasn''t intentional, exactly. It was just Vex getting excited over something like he always did. But the moment felt significant to Derivan, and he wasn''t sure why, until he searched his own emotions and realized the answer:
He wanted Vex to live in a world where he could just do this. Where he could ask a million questions about anything that intrigued him, and pour all that excited love and energy into whatever new project came of it. He wanted Vex to be able to do this without the stress and worry that came with others being in danger, or ming himself for whatever new thing was going wrong, or having his heart broken by a stray cruelty from a stranger.
He wanted to protect him.
And what a strange thought that was! He wanted to protect all of his friends, of course; Vex was not special in that regard, and yet his feelings felt different, when it came to the lizard.
"Deri?" Vex said, looking up at him, and Derivan blinked, suddenly realizing that Vex was standing on his tiptoes and trying to wave his hands in front of his face though he could barely reach, even with the tiptoes.
"I was distracted," Derivan said by way of exnation, and smiled kindly down at his friend. "I apologize. Shall we get on with the harvest?"
"Oh yeah, definitely," Vex nodded. Sev''s voice echoed across the field to them, a dismayed cry of ''but what''s the point of exploding if it''s harvested wrong?!'', followed by Misaughing boisterously. "We only have like two hours before those two are done, probably."
Derivan chuckled. "I feel you may be underestimating them."
"Three hours, then?"
"That is not what I meant." But Derivan smiled, and Vex grinned back at him; the lizardkin suddenly ran forward and gave him a hug for no reason at all, and then went straight back to looking at the nts.
"I''m going to start in this row, okay?" he said. "And you can start in the one next to me, and let me know if you forget how to harvest anything, or if you get to a nt Emily didn''t cover."
"Yes," Derivan agreed.
And so they got to work.
They worked in apanionable silence for a while; there were words to be spoken, but neither of them knew what to say, and so they distracted themselves with the harvest instead. They''d been supplied with handwoven baskets that were not unlike the ones that Emily used for decoration in her home. Vex kept a whole half-dozen of those baskets floating behind them, using some odd spell he refused to name, citing embarrassment because it was ''too specific''.
Derivan was careful to sort his pickings into those baskets. It was repetitive work, but it drew him into a peaceful lull, enough so that he was surprised when Vex broke the silence. "Hey, Deri?"
Derivan looked up to find the lizardkin watching him with an inscrutable expression. Well, inscrutable to most. Physical Empathy told him the lizardkin was nervous, determined, and a little bit scared, all at once. "Yes?" he asked, not knowing what else to say.
Vex took a breath. "I''ve been meaning to talk to you about this for a while, but it never felt like it was a good time," he said. "And now is... maybe the best time we''re going to have in a long time. So I wanted to say it now."
"Say what?" Derivan asked. He''d gotten an inkling before, back down in Teque, but he''d dismissed it as something he didn''t understand; even now, he only thought he understood.
"I like you a lot, Deri," Vex said, and he hesitated a little bit, as if searching for the right words to exin himself. He''d stopped with harvesting the nts, and instead stepped up close to the armor; Derivan noted with some amount of surprise that for the first time in a while Vex wasn''t being shy. He was nervous, certainly, but there was a determined sort of look in his eyes.
He''d been thinking about saying this for a while, it ured to Derivan. It was on his mind while they were harvesting, and it had been on his mind even before that. He recognized this countenance, the look in the lizardkin''s eyes, even if he didn''t have the words for it.
"I want to try to be more than we are," Vex said quietly. He looked up at Derivan, his gaze earnest. "If you''re okay with that, I mean."
Derivan was silent, and Vex waited. Oddly, he didn''t seem nervous anymore. It was like all of his nerves had gone with finally saying the words that he''d been wanting to say, and now he was simply waiting for a response.
So Derivan finally found the words to speak.
"A few moments ago," Derivan said, "I was thinking about how I feel differently for you than I do for Sev, or Misa, or any of the other individuals in our lives. It is... difficult to put to words. I care for all of you, and I wish to build a future with all of you, strange as that may seem.
"Sev and Misa are the closest analogue is ''family'', I believe. They are family to me. And yet you are the one thates to mind when I think of who I wish to protect. You are the one I wish tofort and hold, the one I do not wish to see hurt, and... I do not know more than that. These feelings are unfamiliar to me. But I do know that you are important. And so I would like to try, so long as you know that I have much to learn."
Derivan gazed at Vex for a while after he finished speaking. The lizardkin had started to fidget as Derivan spoke, and now he avoided the armor''s gaze entirely; whatever confidence he''d gained in his confession had slowly slipped away as Derivan spoke, and now he seemed shy again.
It was cute.
Derivan reached out to take one of Vex''s hands, and made a small, surprised sort of hum.
"You are very warm," he said.
"Yeah, well," Vex muttered, still not meeting his eyes, but managing a barely-held-back smile. "That''s what happens when you say romantic things to me."
"Was that romantic?"
"It was to me." Vex tugged on Derivan''s hand, and the armor knelt down obligingly; he leaned forward to press his forehead against Derivan''s helmet. It was a small moment of intimacy. They had shared simr ones, too, before and yet this one somehow felt closer than all the other times they had shared those small touches and quiet moments.
"Thank you," the lizardkin said to him, softly. And it was only now, stripped away of all the nervousness and fear and awkward shyness, that Derivan felt Physical Empathy ping with the emotion underlying it all: not love, for it was still too early for that, but hope. A simple joy in sharing in hispany.
And in that, at least, he knew he felt the same.
102 - Book 2: Chapter 39: Mechanisms of Magic, and a Small Break
102 - Book 2: Chapter 39: Mechanisms of Magic, and a Small Break
The harvest went rapidly after Vex''s impromptu confession. That had, apparently, been the only thing holding the lizardkin back from putting all his efforts into the harvest and more importantly, into trying to identify the problem with growth spells that had apparently affected Elyra.
"I was afraid I wouldn''t get the chance to talk to you about it if I didn''t do it then," Vex admitted, when Derivan asked. "We''re going to go to Elyra after this... And we need to figure out what''s going on with the crops, we need to get into the Elyran dungeon, we need to find a way to backdoor into Teque, if we can. Maybe just learn enough of their magic to break the barrier. And I doubt we''re going to be doing any of that without having to deal with the nobility, and with my family in particr."
"You are not looking forward to that," Derivan noted with sympathy, and Vex just shrugged.
"I have you guys," he said. "It''s... more than I had before. And I feel good about what I can do with your help."
Vex offered him a small smile, then, before turning his attention back to the magic he was casting. Derivan watched curiously they''d long since finished their section of the field, and a full dozen baskets were sitting beside them, each filled with a variety of magical nts that had been... well, not perfectly harvested, but very close to perfect. Vex had examined them and dered them ''good enough'', and Derivan knew Vex well enough to know that if he thought it was good enough, it was likely to be perfect to anyone else.
Now the lizardkin sat beside a small nt that he''d acquired permission from Emily to experiment with. A half-dozen runes floated around the nt, circling it almostzily.
"There''s nothing wrong with the mana cirction or absorption as far as I can tell..." Vex muttered. "But the growth spell is still taking more mana to take effect. I don''t understand."
"Which one is the growth spell?" Derivan asked.
"This one." Vex flicked his dagger at a runic circle that was glowing a ruddy green; Derivan watched the mana flowing from into the circle, and frowned slightly. There was a fraction of mana that seemed to just... vanish, as it moved into the circle. "The other spells are stabilizing and reversing any output from the growth spell. I''m trying to avoid too many mutations in the nt."
"Mutations?" Derivan felt a little lost in this conversation, admittedly.
"neshifter science," Vex exined, a little distracted. "The more times you try to grow the same nt, the more likely it is to gain deformities. It''s fine if you just do it once in regr crop-harvesting, but quite a lot more dangerous if you''re constantly growing and, uh... un-growing a nt, forck of a better word. Hence the stability spell."
"I see," Derivan said. Strange! He was learning new things about the world every day, with Vex. That wasn''t something he could help with, though, and so he focused his attention on the disappearing mana, instead.
He''d seen pretty much that exact thing before, after all, many times over. Mana disappeared when it was being consumed by the system, and the system freely Shifted it around to obfuscate that fact...
...except that didn''t seem to be happening here.
"It does not appear to be Shift-rted," Derivan remarked, surprised, and Vex blinked at him.
"I was about to ask you to check that next," he said with a sigh. "The mana can''t just be disappearing. Mana doesn''t just... disappear. It changes, or it turns into energy, but it doesn''t vanish."
"Perhaps it is something the runic circle itself is doing," Derivan suggested. Patch didn''t reveal anything strange happening with the system, either.
"I... don''t think it''s absorbing the mana." Vex hesitated slightly, bringing both runic circles closer to him, so he could examine them; the circles for [nt Growth] and [Gic Stability] hovered in front of him. "They generate the same amount of waste heat, so it''s not that. The circle itself doesn''t seem to be any stronger. But [nt Growth] is taking almost five times more mana than it usually does."
Derivan considered the issue for a moment. "Perhaps we could try casting it like it was a glyph?"
"Drawing it out?" Vex frowned. "They''re kind of simr in how they work, but runic circles work more like circuitry, and glyphs are an imprint that the mana acts on. And runic circles are usually tooplicated to draw without System assistance."
"The broad strokes, then," Derivan said; he was already doing it as he spoke, painting purple lines into the air. The runic circle for [nt Growth] wasplex, with dozens of tiny, branching lines that werepletely iprehensible to him but he could see the general shape and direction of those branching lines...
His Magic stat was at work, he realized btedly. Vex was watching him with undisguised interest.
"Are circles and glyphs rted?" he muttered to himself. "I didn''t think they were since they operate in ways that are so different but if runic circles are just the system trying to replicate what mana can already do... Maybe the system uses the glyphs as a base, and then turns it into a circuit to replicate the effect..."
"I believe it does not need to," Derivan said. "But I suspect that it does, because it needs a base to work off of... but I am only guessing."
The glyphpleted. Mana sung, dancing into the shape he''d created; it worked
but that mana vanished, too. Only the smallest remnant of the effect followed, a slight jolt in the nt he''d been trying to enchant; [nt Growth Reversal] quickly pushed it back into ce.
Derivan and Vex both paused, and frowned. Vex narrowed his eyes. "It''s not system-rted."
"I do not know what else it could be," Derivan said, but he scoured his mind, and a small memory tugged at him; a strange behavior they''d experienced before, when it came to mana. Something familiar. "But... I believe we may have seen this before?"
"I think so, too," Vex said.
"Let us ask the others," Derivan suggested. "Perhaps they will remember."
Almost entirely on impulse, Derivan held his hand out to Vex. Vex nced at it, and, as though suddenly remembering what they''d had a conversation about not too long ago, promptly colored.
He still took Derivan''s hand, though.
The n to check with the others was, unfortunately, somewhat stalled by Sev and what he''d managed to do the one time Misa had her back turned. This was, to be fair, close to the end of the harvest a good six hours into picking magical reagents and following a host of rules. Vex and Derivan had only gotten done so quickly by virtue of Vex''s Agility score and his experience with these things.
Still, though, for Sev of all of them to trigger a reaction from the nts! He was normally the most careful of them all. He looked fully disgruntled, too, and halfway torn between amusement and annoyance.
"You need to sit still," Emily said, a bit of amusement in her voice. Vex, Derivan, and Misa had all gathered back in her home, and sat scattered around the house while Sev grumbled, sitting on what Emily had jokingly called ''the throne of shame''.
It wasn''t much of a throne, really. Just a magically enchanted stool designed to slowly strip away any remaining magical effects on a person, while allowing Emily to cast repair spells so that all the tears and burns in Sev''s robes could be fixed. It was a rather impressive construction, from what Derivan could see, though he would need to ask Vex for the details...
"I can''t believe you have this," Misa said, amused. Emily chuckled.
"This kind of work isplicated at the best of times," she exined, not looking up from her work. Sev sat as still as he could in the light of her magic, pouting only slightly. "I always expect at least one ident when I get help. I didn''t expect Sev to set off a chain reaction, but it''s good to know that kind of thing can happen."
"I have many questions about the kind of operation you''re running here," Sev muttered, mostly to himself.
"I have many answers!" Emily said cheerfully. "But just so you know, most of them will start with ''that''s proprietary'', or ''it''s just a private farm''."
"What did you do, anyway?" Vex asked, apparently finally unable to hold the question back.
"I picked a leaf too early," Sev said, not looking him in the eye. "Which would have been fine, because it just administers a light shock, but I was stepping on the root of a nt that reacts to electricity, and that nt apparently summons wind des if you shock it."
"To be fair," Emily said. "That part was kind of my fault. I probably should''ve kept those farther apart."
"Why would you make a nt that summons wind des when shocked."
"I don''t know." Emily shrugged. "It seemed interesting at the time? I wanted, specifically, to see how magical nts deal with mana aspect conversion, because they do it very quicklypared to spells and mana maniption."
"Why wind des, then?" Sev asked, exasperated.
"Magical nt development is an art, not a science," Emily said severely. "I don''t control the effects thate out, I just rapidly iterate and nudge them in different directions. It''s just in its wind de phase. It''ll grow out of it."
Sev paused, and then stared at her. "I can''t tell if you''re joking or not."
"It''s part of how I manage to keep my secrets so well." Emily grinned at him. "Seriously, though, thank you all for your help. This was going to take days if I did it all myself."
"Why did you need our help, anyway?" Misa asked. "I know it''d take longer, but you''d still have gotten it done before we managed to get here, I''m pretty sure. And you wouldn''t have to wait for Elyra to send people to help you."
"Proprietary."
"So she probably has to harvest all the nts in a small timeframe, for whatever reason," Vex concluded.
"I will neither confirm nor deny that."
"It doesn''t matter," Sev said, as the finishing touches on the repairs to his robes were done; he stood up, brushing himself off gingerly. "We''re not going to try to figure out her secrets; she already told us she wants to keep them, and we''re going to Elyra right after this so it''s better that we don''t know."
Emily beamed. "Thank you! I knew I made the right choice."
"The right... choice?" Sev blinked at her.
"The right choice of chair."
Sev stared, then shook his head. "I''m not going to ask."
"Good choice!"
Derivan chuckled at the byy, enjoying the lighthearted conversation, even as his mind continued to ruminate on the problem of mana, and what was happening with Growth spells in particr.
They exchanged a few more friendly words before they left Emily insisted on leaving them with a ratherrge package of reagents, which Vex had seemed rather excited about, and a small batch of seeds that Vex had seemed awed and honored by. Sev and Misa clearly didn''t quite get it, but could tell from Vex''s reaction that it was valuable, and so were appropriately grateful anyway; Derivan just offered a small bow.
And then they were back on the road. They''d let the caravan keep going through the night, this time, Sev said; they were only twelve or so hours away from Elyra, and that would mean they would arrive in the morning, which gave them plenty of time to get settled and start looking for ess into the dungeon.
Next, to Elyra; to the dungeon it held, and the bonus room that was likely there; to Vex''s family, and all that dealing with them would entail. And, hopefully, to solving the food shortage.
"Hey," Misa said after a moment, breaking the low hum of their caravan with her words. "Isn''t it weird that those nts damaged Sev''s clothes? Usually health stops that."
"The nts weren''t really a system hazard," Vex said. "They''re probably just not part of the system. Non-health damage and all."
"...So what you''re telling me is that Derivan can strip off people''s clothes?"
"What?!" Vex spluttered. "No, wait"
"If he doesn''t have health, he can just use a fireball, and it''ll destroy most armor! We can just use shame to win fights!"
"Do I get a choice in this?" Derivan asked, amused.
"It''s all just hypothetical"
"I told Derivan I liked him," Vex interrupted, desperately trying to change the subject.
There wasplete silence for a moment.
Then the caravan erupted in questions, and Derivan chuckled faintly to himself, allowing most of it to pass over him, except when Vex wanted his input on something.
At least they were going to be entering Elyra on a good note.
103 - Book 2: Chapter 40: The Gates of Elyra, At Last
103 - Book 2: Chapter 40: The Gates of Elyra, At Last
Elyra''s walls loomed over the horizon.
Vex''s stomach turned a bit as he stared at them he never thought he''d see them again so soon. He knew, objectively, that it had been more than a year since he''d left; it still felt like he was returning too early. He''d expected to have three years before being forced to return.
It had only been one and a half.
Only a few weeks ago, Vex would have said he wasn''t ready, even with all the progress he''d made with the Guild and with his friends. Now?
He still didn''t feel like he was ready; he wasn''t sure he ever would. But at least he felt like he could do it, even if he wasn''t ready. He could face down his parents and demand they give up his little brother, and convince all his siblings to turn against them...
...well, no, that second goal was a little more far-fetched. Vex knew most of them bought into what his parents had told them. Even his sister, who sympathized with him the most, believed it was simply a necessity to maintain their noble status.
And they weren''t even wrong, was the thing. He couldn''t dispute that it was the truth. It was the fact of what they were doing that rubbed him the wrong way starting at the age of six, too young for them to really understand what they were epting, what they were giving up
"Are you okay?" Derivan''s voice interrupted his thoughts. He spoke in his usual calm baritone. The lizardkin paused, brought back to reality, and gave Derivan a small smile.
"I will be," he said, turning to stare back up at the walls.
"You have us, whatever you need," Misa said. "Although if I get my hands on your fucking parents"
"Misa," Sev warned quietly. Vex could tell his heart wasn''t in it, though; it was more an automatic response than anything else.
"I know," Misa said, looking down and gritting her teeth. "I know. Just... why aren''t you angry?" she blurted, directing the words to Derivan. "Even Sev is mad, no matter how good he is at hiding it, and you''re not? I don''t get it."
Derivan was silent, and for a moment, so was the cabin; Misa opened her mouth to apologize, looking awkward, when Derivan finally responded.
"No matter how much I wish to be like all of you," he said. "I am different, I think. My thoughts do not turn towards anger. I do not understand revenge, except perhaps in a very abstract sense. When those that are close to me are hurt, I think only about protecting them, not about harming those that caused it. And... perhaps this is a blessing, or perhaps it is a failing. I do not know.
"I do know that I have little control over it. Perhaps I will feel differently when we meet them. But I find my thoughts veer more towards the direction of keeping his brother safe.
"I am sorry if that answer was disappointing."
Misa just sighed. "No, I''m sorry," she said. "I shouldn''t have put that on you. It just... it feels fuckin'' weird that I''m the one most angry about all of this."
"Is it that weird?" Sev nced at her, offering a small smile, though it was a little tentative. "Aren''t you always?"
"Kind of." Misa frowned a bit. "I dunno. This feels different, you know?"
"Let''s not talk about this?" Vex gave them all a strained smile. He appreciated them all, but he didn''t know how to handle that; having people angry on his behalf or wanting to protect him, in Derivan''s case was somewhat foreign to him still. "Come on. We''re almost at the walls."
And they were.
The gates were well-guarded, built several lengths high with spellcraft-shaped red stone; the mana traces were a telltale giveaway, and they created lovely little striations in the rock, too, for anyone with mana vision.
Near the far-too-ornate gate was a troop of about ten guards; two stationed on either side of the gate, two at the center, and the remaining six lining the walls on top equipped with ranged weaponry, if the shadows of their staffs and bows were anything to go by.
His mana sense brought up several people skulking around, too, invisible to the naked eye. He had no doubt there were a few more that even his sight wouldn''t catch; at least, not at his level.
All of it was more theater than it was anything else. When was thest time any force had tried to invade or sneak into Elyra? If anything, people were more likely to try to sneak out. But maybe that was his bias speaking.
"State your business," one of the guards spoke to them, his voice gruff.
"We''re adventurers on a diplomatic mission," Sev answered, shing their adventurer''s badges at the guard and gesturing towards the back of the caravan. "Bringing a delivery of supplies. The Guild here should be expecting us."
"We haven''t received word of this," the guard said with a frown.
"You haven''t?" Sev''s brow furrowed. "We should have been expected for since a week ago"
"The badges are legitimate, either way," one of the other guards said. "Adventurers are allowed in the city. We might as well let them in."
"Corelius." The first guard scowled, something in his expression turning ugly. "What have I told you about speaking up without being prompted?"
"...To not do it, sir," Corelius said. The man stepped back and bowed his head slightly, though Vex saw his lips twist slightly, as though in disgust.
"The entrance fee is ten gold," the first guard said bluntly. "You can''te in if you don''t pay."
"What? Ten gold is exorbitant." Sev frowned. "Give me a moment to send a message to the Guildmaster"
"Twelve gold," the guard said.
"Oh. This isn''t a rule at all, you just want a bribe." Sev narrowed his eyes slightly. "I''m not inclined to bribe you. We''re here to help Elyra; we''ll be donating to your food supplies regardless."
"Food, eh?" the guard''s eyes immediately lit up with greed. "Shit, you should''ve told me, I thought your supplies were just wood and junk. If you''re giving us food, then all you need to do is give me ten percent, and I''ll let you in."
"What? No! Do you have any idea" Sev mped his mouth shut as he spoke, and red instead.
"You will let us in," Vex said quietly.
"Who the hell are you?" the guard sneered at him. "Don''t interrupt when the big boys are talking."
"Who the hell calls themselves ''the big boys''?" Misa muttered in the back, to Vex''s amusement; he''d flinched a little bit when the guard spoke to him, and that remark made a smirk tug at the corner of his snout, and he straightened instead.
"I am Vex, of House Ashion," the lizardkin said, ring at the man with his haughtiest look. "You''re going to let us in."
"...No you''re fucking not," the guard said, but his face was considerably paler.
"Richard," one of the other guards warned; this one hadn''t spoken before, but he clearly recognized Vex, because his face was much paler than the man who was presumably named Richard. "Do the test, or you''re going to get us all in trouble."
Richard grit his teeth. "If you''re a noble," he said. "And I''m not saying that you are. Then share a drop of your blood, and we will validate your bloodline."
Thest words were recited and well-practiced; Vex still frowned, then held out his hand anyway. He was used to this. The guard stared at him for a moment, and then promptly used a small ck box threaded with a gold needle to pierce through Vex''s scales. Blue blood oozed out for a second, and the guardsman allowed the blood to flow into the well of a second, smaller device.
For a moment, nothing happened, and a satisfied grin began to spread across Richard''s face
until the whole thing lit up with a buzzing green, and Richard flinched, almost dropping the box. "Shit," he said, and frantically waved at the men atop the gate to start opening it. "I''m so sorry for the inconvenience, sir. Please don''t report me."
"I won''t," Vex said, not meaning a word of it. The guard looked relieved anyway, apparently trusting the lizardkin to keep to that promise; he wondered how many nobles the man had met before, to think that he could gain their favor just by following their every whim.
Probably too many.
He hated this, though. This was another part of the reason he''d left Elyra in the first ce too much worship and attachment that came with his name. No one treated him like a person.
He just wasn''t above using his status to let them get into the city faster.
"There''s something wrong with the Guild here," Sev muttered to himself, already busy with his system and apparently rapidly scanning through a message, if the way his eyes flickered was any indication. "They haven''t responded properly to Guildmunications in days."
"They went dark?" Misa asked.
"No." Sev shook his head. "They''re responding. Just disregarding all themunications protocols. The Guildmaster says she tries to rotate people here to make sure corruption doesn''t take root, and thest shift was pretty recent, so I can''t imagine..."
"I guess we better visit the Guild branch here first thing, then," Vex said quietly. "It''s this way."
He knew the way by heart, and he quietly adjusted the caravan''s magic to ount for the new route. He''d been nning his journey for so long, after all he knew that the Guild was his one shot at getting out of Elyra and having a chance at earning something close to prestige. There were, technically, more opportunities by his parents'' sides, but...
Those opportunities felt tainted, somehow. Bing an adventurer was, at least, his own choice.
The roads of Elyra, unlike many of the towns they had been in prior, were more built for caravans to make their way through and so they had no issue navigating the surprisingly crowded streets. There were other caravans on the street, too, doubtless owned by nobles, for how big and ostentatious they were; the streets were only built as wide as they were so they could amodate the absurdly overbearing vehicles.
And yet, besides the prominence of moving caravans as a mode of transport, the ce felt surprisingly... quiet.
Part of it was doubtless the food shortage. Vex''s heart sank to see how different it was to what he was used to he was not a fan of Elyra at the best of times, but often there were people in the streets that were happy, at least; now there was an empty listlessness with which they walked the streets, and too many people seemed too thin for their clothes.
Hunger was a very real ailment, despite the system. Health wouldn''t prevent death by hunger; it would simply appear as a [Malnourished] status effect that got steadily worse, cutting off more and more maximum health.
Sev let out a sharp breath, at this point, and Vex looked up, rmed.
"Is the Guild building supposed to be that... you know..." Sev gestured, staring up at the Guild branch.
And he really did have to stare up.
The building definitely had not looked like that when Vex had left.
When he had left, the Guild had certainly been a well-maintained building, with ample space for its adventurers to room and sleep in, as all the Guild branches did. It had not been a massive cathedral, which was the best word Vex could think of to exin the vast change in architecture that had urred. He was pretty sure at least two adjacent buildings had been demolished just to make room for the damn thing.
"Uh... no?" Vex managed. "No. It definitely didn''t look like that before."
"Something''s up?" Misa said.
"Something''s definitely up," Sev agreed.
"I have a number of concerns," Derivan said, and cocked his head forward slightly. "One of which is rted to the fact that that building is connected to the system."
"It what?" Vex jerked in his seat. "A building? That''s"
"It appears to be connected to the system in the way that monsters are, yes," Derivan said. "If it is any constion... there are many smaller signals within, as well. So the Guild branch here is not dead, at the very least."
"Gods forbid we have to deal with a building-sized mimic," Sev muttered. "Okay,e on. Let''s go."
104 - Book 2: Chapter 41: Entrenched Systems
104 - Book 2: Chapter 41: Entrenched Systems
There was at least one good thing that mighte out of whatever was going on with the Guild building, Derivan thought, once they found a spot within the Guild''s grounds where they could leave the caravan. A small magical barrier flickered into ce, automatically activated by their badges once they left.
He''d been needing a target to test Patch on for a while, now he couldn''t use it on himself or any of his friends without risking breaking all theplex mechanisms that went into maintaining it, and they hadn''t encountered any monsters along the way to Elyra for him to practice on.
As such, he hadn''t really been able to work on training the new stat at all. He could use it to observe things, certainly, but that evidently didn''t count as training it, considering it remained at a steady ''1''.
But now there was something clearly happening with the Elyran branch of the Guild, and whatever that something was, it was rted to the system in some way. Derivan had not forgotten what Xothok and the others had said, that they had tried to get help here, and had been rejected. Internal corruption had seemed like a likely possibility at the time, despite the Guildmaster''s attempts to circumvent it.
The presence of the strange system-structure over the entire building seemed to discount that possibility.
The Guild cathedral towered over all of them, spires of gold and white rising into the sky. Without Patch without Vex to tell them that it had changed Derivan wasn''t sure he would have noticed anything wrong with it at all. But the w of the system hovering above it had been clear the moment he had looked.
He had never seen anything soplex.
"Any ideas, yet?" Sev asked beside him, and Derivan shook his head.
"It is connected to the system, as I said," he said. "But I do not yet have the ability to examine its interface. Perhaps if we knew someone who could [Identify] it..."
"You''d think someone would''ve done that already." Misa stared up at the building. "You can''t tell me this fucking thing popped up overnight and no one tried to check it out."
"It would be unusual to try to [Identify] a building," Derivan noted.
"And maybe someone did," Vex said quietly. He shook his head after a moment followed closely by a full-body shake, like a wiggle to force himself to focus. "We won''t know more until we go in. Derivan, can you make sure nothing happens to us with the system? I''ll keep an eye out on the magic side."
"I''m still here, you know," Misa grumbled. "I can block these things."
"Please stay prepared for anything we can''t see, Misa." Vex''s eyes were still locked on the front doors of the building; for whatever reason, the lizardkin seemed to have decided to take charge here. Maybe it was because Elyra was so close to him, personally, or maybe it was because this was where he''d first joined the Guild at all, and the ce that had given him the opportunity to leave.
Derivan, Sev, and Misa all stood behind Vex, in silent support of that decision, and the lizardkin pushed open the doors.
There was no reaction from the building, as far as Derivan could tell. The system still hovered there, far too present for Derivan''s liking and here, from the inside, he could see the problem was worse than he had realized.
For most people, the system was simply something that attached itself to them, stemming from the closest reality anchor and creating aplex metaphysical cage that seemed to interact with their souls and substance. In here, it looked like that cage had... metastasized. Derivan might not have understood precisely how the system worked, as yet, but the mishmash of broken gears reminded him of the mess that his own connection to the system was, and made him feel distinctly ufortable.
"Hello!" someone from the front desk called a broad orcish man that was just a hair taller than Misa, just enough that it looked like he fit rather ufortably in the small space behind the desk. The wall behind him was covered in scratches. He was some sort of warrior archetype, judging by the bewilderinglyrge, two-sided de strapped to his back. Except he was... a receptionist? "Shit, is that you, Vex?"
"Rekka?" Vex blinked at him. "I thought receptionist duty was punishment duty. You''re still here?"
"I decided I liked being a receptionist," Rekka said, puffing his chest out proudly, a statement that struck Derivan as very at odds with the weapon on his back. "What''re you doing back here, man? I thought you were gonna go out and... you know, you didn''t tell me what you were gonna do. But you said it''d take a while! Years!"
"It''s been a year and a half," Vex pointed out.
"But not two years, man!" Rekka leaned forward, and shed a bright smile. "You look a lot better than you did before. And you found a team! I was worried you weren''t going to look for one."
"I didn''t," Vex admitted. "They sort of found me."
"Vex is the team mascot," Sev said dryly.
"Hey!"
"We did sort of adopt him." Misa chuckled.
"You gonna introduce me to your friends?" Rekka said, grinning. Vex huffed, folding his arms together obstinately for a moment, and Derivan chuckled fondly.
"Fine," the lizardkin said, sticking his tongue out. He gestured to the rest of the team. "This is Sev; he''s the party leader, most of the time. This is Misa. And this is Derivan."
"Hello," Derivan said. Misa just waved, rxed.
"Pleasure to meet you all!" Rekka said, boisterous as ever. "I''m guessing you''re here for a room? Registering... What are you all doing in Elyra, anyway?"
"We''re the diplomatic envoy that the Guildmaster sent," Vex said, a slight frown entering his expression. "You didn''t get word?"
"I''m... not sure." A flicker of uncertainty and something else, dancing across Rekka''s face almost too quick for Derivan to catch. The armor traced both the lines of magic in the air and the system-structures he could feel with Patch as carefully as he could, to watch for anything strange...
Nothing that he could see. But the resolution of his vision wasn''t perfect, as yet, and he stayed cautious.
"But let me check my records," Rekka added cheerfully, and started flipping through a number of binders he kept behind his desk. Vex watched him, and Sev nced carefully at Derivan the cleric seemed like he was worried, too. Misa pretended to be rxed, but one hand rested just near her hip, where she kept her mace...
Everyone was still cautious, and no one was letting their guard down. Good.
Nothing happened, fortunately. Rekka simply looked up from his books with a small frown. "Found it," he said. "I''m not sure how I missed this. It says we sent out a message to the guards to let you in, too. Did you get any trouble?"
"A little," Vex said. "Nothing I couldn''t handle."
"Ah, nobility." Rekka wrinkled his nose a bit, then leaned in. "We might get that chance too, you know. Shh. It''s a secret."
"What do you mean?" Vex blinked at him, but Rekka had already straightened, and was pretending he hadn''t said anything at all. "Rekka?"
"I didn''t tell you anything," Rekka said with a wink. "I''ve got a room for you guys, and if you''ve parked your caravan outside, I can get people to start unloading and delivering the food to the nobles so they can distribute it."
"Um," Vex said, and then nced at the others for a moment; he visibly steeled himself, and shook his head. "Don''t do that yet, please."
"No?" Rekka frowned at him. "Why not?"
"We want to deliver it ourselves," he lied.
Rekka stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. "Suit yourself," he said. "Want me to get the documentation ready for dungeon entry? I see the Guildmaster sent some correspondence about that. High-priority, dungeon entry... It might still take a couple weeks to get everything in order."
"You had a couple of weeks," Sev objected, his brows furrowing.
"We sent in the request as soon as we could." Rekka shrugged. "There''s a long queue. Sorry, man."
"It''s pretty important," Vex said. "Please? We need to get in there. People might... people might be hurt if we don''t do it fast."
Rekka nced down at Vex, and he softened slightly. "Aw, you know I can''t say no to you, buddy," he said. "I can try, but there really is a long queue. It might help if I can use your name to speed things along..."
"Go ahead," Vex said. "If you need to. Please."
"Really?" Rekka looked surprised. "You didn''t want to leverage being a noble before... Alright, man, if you say so."
"I still don''t," Vex said. "But this is important, and I don''t know if it can wait."
"I getcha," Rekka said. He plucked four keys deftly from the drawer, and then tossed them to Vex, who caught them all without flinching; Derivan saw Rekka''s eyes widen slightly, impressed. "Whew. Wasn''t expecting you to catch ''em all. Got your agility up?"
"We''re all Silver now," Vex said.
"Whoa," Rekka said. "Fast! Shit, I thought you could only level that quick with noble support, or something. The Guild help you out with that? Cause if they have programs like that I''m going to have some words, lemme tell you."
"No, we just, uh... got into some dangerous situations," Vex said, shifting a bit ufortably. "Nothing you''d want to get involved with, trust me."
"If you say so," Rekka said, crossing his arms and looking just a little bit disbelieving. His expression rxed a bit in a second, though. "d you''re doing alright, little man. Anything else I can help you with?"
"No?" Vex said, sounding out the word as a question. He nced around at the rtively-empty Guild hall, and then sighed. "Rekka, I thought you didn''t... care about being a noble? Do you want to be one now?"
"Oh,e on now, that''s a bit of a personal question to ask in front of your friends," the orc grumbled.
"It''s important," Vex said. "I can ask them to go away if you want."
"Nah, nah, it''s whatever," Rekka said, waving a hand. He leaned back, the overwhelminglyrge sword on his back scratching into the wall with a thunk, and Derivan realized exactly why the wall behind him had so many scratches. "I dunno. I''ve been rotated in and out of Elyra a few times, right? And it''s just annoying getting in without being a noble. So it''d be cool if I was? Then I wouldn''t have to deal with all that bureaucracy."
"Isn''t nobility supposed to be a status applied to families?" Sev asked.
"Yup!" Rekka said. "That''s the big deal about all this. They''re thinking about granting the status to the Guild as a whole, but it''s very hush-hush. I''m not actually supposed to tell anyone anything, but Vex is cool, and his friends are cool by proxy, so."
Misa and Sev exchanged nces, and Derivan frowned slightly, the lights in his eyes shifting visibly. Vex seemed ufortable.
"But you''ve seen what the nobility here does," Vex said.
"We can do better."
"But you didn''t." Vex suddenly seemed to straighten, a little bit more fire in his eyes. "We fought off some bandits when we were on our way here, and if it was almost anyone besides us that had fought them, either the bandits would be dead, or they would be. They told us they tried to join the Guild before resorting to banditry. You''re supposed to ept anyone that applies, as long as they don''t fail a basic standard"
Vex trembled, then took a breath; he turned his eyes to Rekka, who suddenly looked ufortable. "Did they fail some standard?" he asked. "Were they terrible people? I only know their side of the story, so maybe I''m missing something. What happened?"
"...if the Guild is to gain noble status..." Rekka began, and then hepsed into silence. He sounded a little sullen, and then suddenly angry. "FUCK. I didn''t think I was at the meeting when we discussed epting them. I didn''t vote. But you can''t me"
He cut himself off before continuing that sentence, half-growling under his breath. Vex waited, and Rekka calmed himself down, slowly. Derivan watched the mechanism of the system ticking away behind him, and his eyes narrowed, when he saw something click and fall; the system tried to push it back and fix it, but a flex of Patch solved that, breaking the mechanical arm that tried to slot it back into ce and leaving the shard on the ground.
No diminishing of Patch with that action. Interesting.
"...I''m making excuses, aren''t I," Rekka said, slumping just a bit.
"Their actions aren''t your direct responsibility," Vex said. "But the Guild chose to take responsibility this is what we do. We''re supposed to give people a path. You did it for me."
"You were nobility," Rekka said. "Are. You would have been epted anyway."
"My parents didn''t want me to be, and you could have denied me for that reason." Vex tried to soften his voice, but the lizardkin was wound up.
Rekka was silent for a solid minute that felt like it stretched for too long.
"It didn''t seem like much at the time," he muttered to himself, and then he shook his head; when he looked up again, his eyes were bright. "I''m going to talk to the Guildmaster. We''ve been in talks for ages. I''m seeing shit, I''m seeing what they might be doing now. I''m not sure. It just looked harmless but they didn''t want us to tell the Guildmaster and maybe that should''ve made it fucking obvious "
Rekka interrupted himself with a half-snarl. "I''m gonna find out," he said. "It shouldn''t have taken you guysing in to make that obvious. Something happened there and I don''t fucking like it."
"We''ll help," Vex said.
"You need to focus on getting into the dungeon," Rekka said. "And knowing you, you want to look at the crop thing too, right? We have some documentation on that. I''ll hand it off to you."
"Thank you," Vex said, blinking.
"I need some time to think," Rekka said. "You guys go up I''ll talk to you againter. We need some eyes on this that aren''t us. Fucking... fuck. Okay. Sorry. Just... give me some time."
"Of course." Vex had softened a little, seeing the orc''s clear anger. "We''ll, uh,e back downter. Or when you call us."
"I''ll call youter," Rekka confirmed, and pulled out what was probably thergest binder Derivan had ever seen; it mmed onto the desk, and he began flipping through it fervently.
As they left to go up to their room, Derivan surreptitiously used Patch to pick up the little shard he''d seen break off from the system, holding it in metaphorical hands.
"This better not be another mystery to solve," Misa grumbled. "I''m tired of not knowing shit. Rekka didn''t even tell us why they were going to get noble status."
"No mystery," Derivan said with a shake of his head. "I believe he will tell us, when he is less angry at himself. But also... I believe I understand the gist of it."
Using Patch, he picked up the little shard he had observed, invisible to everyone else.
It was a small fraction of a system window.
105 - Book 2: Chapter 42: Avoiding the Mystery Arc (This Time)
105 - Book 2: Chapter 42: Avoiding the Mystery Arc (This Time)
[CONNECTION BROKEN]
Reconnecting...
There was some text above that, but it had been cut off; all Derivan could see were scattered letter-fragments that didn''t mean anything to him. It was strange that the window looked like this to him at all no matter what errors the system had encountered before, he''d never seen the system windows themselves break. They weren''t a physical thing to begin with.
But then he was observing this with Patch, and not with his conventional senses, so... perhaps that made sense. There was an impulse in him, even, if he paid attention an impulse to fix.
Mildly concerning. Derivan tucked that fact away, to be re-examinedter.
More important was the fact that that wasn''t all he could see with Patch.
It took him a moment to see it, and he had to dig deeper; like with his other stats, there was an intuitive understanding of how to use them, but he had to find the lever to pull first. Derivan was barely aware of Patch slowly ticking upwards. He noticed it when he paid attention, like a faint humming in his soul, but the rest of him was consumed by that process the process of pulling apart the details, trying to find what was wrong..
There was a problem here that needed to be fixed. For a problem to be fixed, he needed to understand it. And the facts unfolded in front of him, through the little fragment he held and in the raw, twisted machinery of the system that oozed through the building.
He couldn''t see the interface, exactly, but with this shard to lens Patch through, to see how the ''connection'' was interpreted
"The building is able to grow in levels and acquire skills," Derivan said out loud, though he was only dimly aware of his own voice; the majority of his senses were still focused on what the Patch stat was feeding him. "That exins its change in appearance."
"...That sounds like something Elyra would award nobility for," Vex said slowly. "You think it''s connected?"
"Almost certainly," Derivan said. His Patch-vision swam a little, and for a moment he worried that it was the system shifting to attack them but no, it was his own sight, unable to keep steady. Sev was watching him with slightly narrowed eyes, like he''d sensed that he might need to act.
"At the very least, the building is artificially connected to the system; many of the problems are caused directly by this. Therger system is unable to recognize the nature of this connection. This has created several side effects one, the system does not know how to connect to it fully, and so many of its normal mechanisms are simply growing out of control; two, in its attempts to fix itself without any Patchers, it is simply linking itself to and piggybacking off of working systems."
"Meaning the people who live in this building." Vex shifted ufortably, his grip on his dagger tightening. "Including us?"
"No," Derivan said, and then observed for a moment more, trying to ignore the growing headache he was developing. What a strange sensation that was; he''d never had to contend with difort in any real capacity. "I am unsure why. Or... no. I believe I know."
He had to push both Patch and Shiftto be able to see it. None of their systems were attached to the Elyran dungeon like the system in the Guild building was; he could almost sense the trail that led off to where the dungeon presumably was, deep, deep underground. "Our systems are not connected with the local dungeon," he said. "I do not think the building knows we are here."
"Is it alive?" It was Misa that asked that question; she was tense, ncing around the room as if she expected it to attack her.
"There are two levels the system uses to fix errors, I believe," Derivan said. "There are automatic protocols that activate to try to resolve problems, and if those problems cannot be solved, they are elevated to either Patchers or an Administrator, depending on the nature of the issue."
"But the Patchers are upied with Teque and Fendal," Misa said out loud, her brows creasing with worry. "Are they sending every Patcher there? That''s..."
"Those shards you hold are important, although it is difficult to articte why." Derivan nodded towards Vex.
"I have some guesses," Vex said, one hand going to the pouch; the lizardkin''s tail shifted nervously behind him.
"So why not summon an Administrator?" Sev asked. "Not that I want them to do that, obviously, it''s basically been a disaster every time we''ve fought one. The first one we beat by literal deus-ex-machina and the second one we could only defeat because there was a reality-stripping barrier around the vige the system was trying to defeat. If one appeared in the middle of Elyra"
"Elyra''s own tinums would be able to handle it," Vex said.
"Would they?" Sev asked, frowning slightly. "I''m not so sure about that. Look at what Misa had to do just to be able to block that [Meteor Swarm]."
"I... maybe," Vex admitted, losing a little bit of his surety. "I haven''t worked with most of them. But I know they''re powerful."
"It is not a situation we want to risk, but it is also likely irrelevant," Derivan said. "This falls strictly into the Patcher territory; there is no need for someone to make a decision, or to coerce us into changing our paths. Those are the only times Administrators are called upon."
"And you''re sure about this?" Sev frowned slightly, looking at Derivan. The armor stared back impassively, though the floor felt like it was tilting slightly...
"Deri?" Vex said, suddenly sounding worried.
"Derivan," Sev suddenly snapped out, his eyes sharpening. "Stop focusing on Patch. Now."
Themand came through more sluggishly than it should have but Derivan obeyed, nheless. When Sev spoke like that, most of the team reacted automatically; it had saved their lives more times than they could count.
And it was like a fog lifted from his head.
Derivan blinked several times, the lights in his helmet flickering, and he realized that he''d been swaying on his feet. The armor shook his head, straightening. "I... do not know what happened."
"Is Patch draining you somehow?" Sev asked. "You need to tell us."
"It is... I do not know. I do not think so," Derivan said. He nced at his status, bringing it up briefly to check on the numbers, and was unsurprised to see that Patch had gone up by two points. If anything, he was surprised it hadn''t been more. "It has grown to three. I suspect that because this stat is likely used by the Patchers themselves, it carries with it many of the instincts that the Patchers carry."
"You think most of your stats are things that have fallen by the wayside in the system," Sev said slowly. "But this one is something the system is actively using."
"In essence," Derivan agreed. "It is moreplete than the others."
"But you can turn it off, right?" Vex asked, a tinge of worry in his voice, and Derivan found it in himself to smile at the worried lizardkin, though there was a certain exhaustion that was now bleeding through his soul from resisting the stat, most likely.
"I can," Derivan agreed. "As long as I am not focusing on the stat, it is not a problem."
"It''s something we should keep an eye on, though, just in case," Misa said, folding her arms. "At least we know I can block bullshit system instinct stuff. We''ve done it before. There''s no reason we can''t do it again."
"You are right, of course," Derivan said. "But thest time we did that, it broke the system and if we were to do this, it would likely break the stat. It is something we should keep in mind, but perhaps not the first option to jump to."
"If you say so." Misa grumbled lightly under her breath. "Anyway, if you know what''s going on, then I think we''re wasting time here. We just came here to discuss what''s happening, right? We kinda know what''s happening now. I say we find Rekka or whoever''s in charge of this ce and tell them to stop with the bullshit."
"The building''s system piggybacking on all the systems within it is likely what has led to the change in behavior of the Guild''s upants," Derivan said, nodding. "The system is linked to our souls, in some way, and a corruption of that link can lead to a corruption of the soul in turn... I suspect. We should not waste time."
Misa nodded. "Then let''s go," she dered, kicking the door open.
"I''m telling you we gotta stop whatever the fuck you''ve been doing!" Rekka practically roared out the words; rmingly, he had his weapon in his hands. Derivan still didn''t know what it was, but he wielded it like it weighed nothing. How high level was Rekka, exactly?
"And you haven''t given us a single good reason why!" the man that he was arguing with thundered right back, not the least bit intimidated. The man was clearly a high-ranking adventurer of some sort, judging by the gold Adventurer''s Guild pin on his cloak; he was an older man with a thick beard dotted with small, white hairs. The kind crinkle in the corners of his eyes contrasted sharply with the angry look he was giving Rekka.
"Excuse me," Sev said politely. They''d walked into the room mid-argument, using Derivan''s ability to sense systems to find Rekka. Both Rekka and the other adventurer turned sharply to face them,nced with irritation, but Rekka''s expression quickly copsed into surprise.
"I thought you were gonna settle in," he said, and then he grimaced slightly. "I didn''t want you guys to see this, man, I''m sorry."
The other adventurer snorted. "They''re the reason you came in here yelling about nobility and the project?" he said, folding his arms. "You know better than to let new adventurers know about that, Rekka. We want to surprise the Guildmaster. And most of the time they react like this. I thought better of you."
"And I thought better of you," Rekka said steadily. "I thought better of us. You''re not seeing it, but this is the whole reason the Guildmaster kept us rotating out of Elyra"
"What rank even are you?" the man said, staring at the four adventurers. "You can''t be more than Silver."
"See!" Rekkatched on to that, ring. "That''s exactly what I fucking mean, Lendel! When did you give a flying fuck what people''s ranks were?"
Lendel leveled an exasperated stare at Rekka. "It''s the chain ofmand, Rekka," he said. "I have to care. You have to care. It''s how the Guild is organized."
"And yet we have to get approved before going up a rank." Rekka''s anger had calmed, now; Derivan was just watching. Their whole team was, really. This seemed... personal. "Why is that, Lendel?"
Lendel frowned. "...To ensure that those of themensurate rank use their power appropriately."
"Exactly." Rekka''s gaze sharpened. "And what the fuck is all this, Lendel?"
Lendel hesitated.
Derivan watched carefully, and with a little bit more care, now that he knew that Patch affected him began to watch what was happening through Patch.
And what he saw was... concerning.
Rekka''s system hadn''t been corrupted in any significant way, beyond the little piece that had broken off; that mechanism was what the building used to connect to him, and as far as Derivan could see, that mechanism had yet to be repaired. Rekka was still safe from being reattached to whatever was going on here, as yet.
Lendel''s, on the other hand?
Most people had systems that acted like cages around themselves; Derivan would look at them, and see the intricate mechanisms of the system hovering around them. He had no ability to perceive the souls of others, but he could use the shape of the system around them to identify where it probably was, even if he was only guessing. For all that the system did, these were beautiful, tightly-woven constructs.
Lendel''s system wasn''t broken, but it certainly wasn''t a beautiful, tightly-woven construct. It had what could best be described as masses; where Rekka had a single exposed connector to connect to the guild building, Lendel had four or five. Each of them looked almost grotesque, like swollen tumors not unlike the nodes Derivan had seen in the building...
It ured to Derivan that the sense of repulsion he felt might have been part of the Patch stat, and he quickly shut off his connection to it. He''d seen enough. Rekka had been able to break off his connection fairly easily; Lendel''s connections were twitching, like they were being stressed, but it certainly wasn''t enough to break them.
He could break them, though. Patch was at 3, and still didn''t have nearly the kind of finesse he would have wanted before he wasfortable using it to actually fix and tweak his system.
Sometimes things had to be broken before they could be fixed.
Lendel was still considering his response to Rekka.
Before he could finish, Derivan signaled to his party that a fight might break out; he saw all three of the others shift slightly in stance.
Three things happened, almost simultaneously.
One, Derivan reached forward and snapped every connection Lendel still had to the Guild building.
Two, Lendel stumbled forward and screamed, loud enough to make Derivan flinch.
Three, two other people that Derivan didn''t recognize rushed out of a side door he''d failed to notice and judging by the red cloaks they wore, they were part of Lendel''s team.
"Ah, shit," Misa muttered. Derivan couldn''t help but agree.
106 - Book 2: Chapter 43: Battle of the Golds
106 - Book 2: Chapter 43: Battle of the Golds
There was, unfortunately, no time for a conversation. Derivan woulde to regret being quite so impulsive with breaking Lendel''s connections, in time, but he''d had no reason to believe that it would make the man fly into a rage; Rekka''s connection had broken, and all that had happened was that the orc had learned exactly how he''d been acting all this time.
That was not at all what happened with Lendel.
The man''s scream turned into an enraged yell and his party members, running out of the side room, didn''t spare a moment to think. In a way, Derivan admired how quickly they reacted; they''d worked together for a long time, if they knew to immediately jump to the defense of their teammate.
It still would have been nice if they''d tried to understand what was going on, though. But their weapons were already out. Lendel had a human teammate that was a wizard, if the book he held and the robes he wore were any indication; his other teammate was an orc and a cleric, if the holy symbol she wielded was any indication
"Derivan!" Misa snapped out and then she snapped out, suddenly materializing in front of him right as Lendel''s enraged face appeared in his field of view. Derivan took a step back, his hand reaching for his sword automatically even as odd, sickle-shaped weapons appeared in Misa''s hands, to mirror the ones that Lendel was wielding.
"Flickerdes!" Vex called out, identifying them quickly. The lizardkin was already beginning to cut into the air with his daggers, but a sh of motion distracted him; the opposing team''s wizard was casting, a runic circle appearing in the air for a split second and gathering an immense amount of fire mana
Derivan didn''t have the time to react, but Vex evidently did. The little wizard acted fast, leaping forward with a flicker of motion that made Derivan wonder exactly how many points he''d put into Agility. His dagger stabbed up, almost directly towards the enemy mage''s face and missing only by a hair''s breadth, and if Derivan hadn''t thought to keep his [Mana Sight] running, he wouldn''t have seen the way the dagger nicked a cut into the opposing mage''s circle.
He hadn''t even known that was something that could be done.
The wizard clearly hadn''t known that either his face shed up to his circle in a panic, and he let out a sharp curse, pedaling backwards desperately; Vex moved forward, upromising, and stepped deliberately on wizard robes as they dragged on the floor
And the wizard tumbled backwards with a yelp and a panicked scream, iling. Vex didn''t miss a beat. A second cut in the runic circle made it shatter, his version of [Mana Maniption] apparently superceding whatever iteration the other wizard had; he began to lunge at the fallen wizard a momentter, ready to pin him to the ground, and it was only the enemy healer tackling him out of the way that forced him on the defense.
Sev was chanting, his eyes locked steadily on the battlefield; Derivan could feel the buffs slowly rising around them. The other healer was behind, forced to stop in order to protect their wizard from Vex.
"Stop fuckin'' fighting!" Rekka yelled. "They''re not here to fight dammit, Tibeus, Lore, Lendel started this!"
"If Lendel started this, he had a good reason," Lore said steadily; she was the healer of the team, and she was facing Vex with a wary look on her face. "He doesn''t get angry for no reason."
"I''m tellin'' you he did," Rekka said angrily.
And then Derivan didn''t have time to pay attention to their conversation anymore.
Lendel had been held off by Misa for long enough, but he couldn''t be held back for long; the Gold badge wasn''t just for show. Derivan vaguely recalled what Flickerdes were Vex had talked about them at one point, and it was part of a briefing on esoteric weapons he insisted they all listen to, at some other point.
They were weapons that "could be in any position they had a reasonable chance of being in".
And now, Derivan saw exactly what that meant.
In theory, they were deadly weapons that could readjust and skewer an enemy in a moment''s notice; in practice, they were... well, they were still those things, but they looked rather ridiculous. Lendel''s arms flickered quite literally into different positions, and Misa kept up the same, her block calling her own flickerdes into existence that countered every strike precisely.
But it could onlyst for so long. She disengaged after a moment, gritting her teeth and leaping backwards, and Lendel almost immediately changed targets; once more the angry man came barreling towards him, and this time, Derivan was prepared; his own sword leapt to hand, and moved to block
Except it was a feint, of course. He wore armor that could keep most weapons at bay; he wasn''t that interested in the possibility of those des hurting him. He was more interested in knocking Lendel out so that they could discuss what had just happened. There was a blind rage in his eyes, but also something close to desperation. Physical Empathy was pinging at him, telling him there was something more there, something underlying his actions that was close to a physical need...
That would exin a lot about all of this, really.
Derivan feinted his block and then shoved the entirety of his body weight into Lendel; Lendel stumbled backwards and then snarled at him, but he was harder to knock off bnce than Derivan had imagined. Misa came in again from the side, her own weapon back to its default form of a mace, and she swung the full weight of it towards Lendel''s head.
Lendel ducked. One de flickered into existence beside Misa''s arm just as shepleted the swing, and she had to abort the momentum entirely to avoid impaling her own arm onto the sickle; she twisted her arm with a grimace, the point of the de still drawing a line of red on her skin. Derivan came at him, then, trying to distract him from Misa, and the second de flickered into existence with the point nearly within his throat, in that gap in his armor that enemies that did not know his nature always seemed to target
except the thing was headed towards his amulet, and he twisted at thest second to avoid it; if he had a heart, it would have been hammering. The amulet wasn''t a weak spot, exactly. All it did was prevent him from being identified. But it was important to him, and Lendel seemed to have pinpointed that, even in his rage
The man used some sort of skill and vanished, reappearing in position just behind Misa; the half-orc didn''t bother trying to turn in time. Instead, she closed her eyes and let her block skill take over, her body twisting unnaturally so she could meet the de. A chunk of mana tore itself out of her and disappeared into nothing.
Derivan took that moment while Lendel was still engaged to charge. His de was quickly caught, nearly wrenched out of his grip by thebination of two sickles creating a powerful twisting force; he fought that by letting go of his de, just long enough to let the twistplete and not long enough that he couldn''t grab a hold of it after
In the corner of his vision, he could see Sev, Vex, and Rekka engaging the wizard and healer together; to their credit, they were managing to put up a serious fight despite being outnumbered. The wizard Tibeus wasn''t letting Vex close anymore after seeing how easily his spell had been modified, and the healer had created some sort of barrier around them that couldn''t easily be broken.
Rekka''s attempts with his two-sided de created rippling cracks of dark purple in the gemstone barrier, and Vex had some sort of drill-construct breaking chipping away at it, but both of them periodically had to stop to ount for the fireballs the wizard would pepper them with. They hung around him like small pellets, little shooting stars that darted out of the barrier and struck with unerring uracy; it was mostly Sev''s efforts that kept them at bay, his own light barriers deflecting or forcing them to implode early.
If only he had skills, too; his glyph-styled magic still wasn''t nearly fast enough for him to use freely in a fight, and [Barrier] was too weak to reliably use in a battle
but he didn''t just have his skills, did he?
He had stats. They were different, sure, but they functioned like skills, and the way the Flickerdes worked reminded him of the way Misa''s skill worked, reaching into different iterations of the same timeline. That was in effect just another application of Shift, the way that many system functions were.
It was subtle. But he saw it, when he looked; the way the sickles spread out into a range of possibilities, disappearing outside the apparent range he could see through Shift. That didn''t matter he didn''t need to see every single possibility for the sickles.
He just needed to be able to lock them to one.
But not yet.
It needed to be timed well. Misa charged at Lendel again, and Derivan followed up at nearly the same time, allowing himself to fall a half-beat out of step with Misa. It gave Lendel just one extra thing to think about, one extra thing he needed to time himself to match; small, for an experienced Gold adventurer, but nevertheless just enough that it would likely be a distraction
There.
Lendel''s des locked with his own and with Misa''s mace, nearly simultaneously; he saw from the way the man tensed that he was nning to flicker into another position at a moment''s notice, both with his de and with his body, and a split second before he could in that fraction of a second between decision and action Derivan reached out with all the force of Shift, and hammered down on it.
Even with that unexpected and unprepared as Lendel was the man almost broke through his lock. But almost was not the same as seeding; and instead a brief look of panic overtook Lendel as his skills failed him. Misa didn''t hesitate or question what happened. She saw the change in his expression, and knew it to be an opportunity; she shifted with her mace and mmed it into Lendel''s stomach, the spiked ball denting armor and splitting flesh for just a second before Health pushed it all back into ce
What happened next wasn''t nned, and was born just from Derivan and Misa having fought together long enough that they could almost read each other''s thoughts.
Misa let go of her mace.
Derivan grabbed it.
It was hard for him to inflict injury with his sword; anything he did with it would inflict either too much damage or too little, or be vaguely horrifying in its impact. Derivan wasn''t particrly inclined to cutting off a limb just to make Lendel listen, even if it was something that could be fixed. He had less qualms about repeating the mace-smash into Lendel''s stomach a second time.
He didn''t have the same strength stat as Misa, of course; his strength was based nearly entirely on the magic moving through him. He was strong, certainly, but not as strong as someone enforced by the system.
It was still enough to tear both metal and flesh, denting armor inward and into the wound.
Lendel screamed for a second time, and this time it was a raw sound of pain. "What what the fuck did you do," he said, his words caught somewhere between breathless and agonized. "What did you do to me! It was you, wasn''t it"
"Calm down," Derivan said, though he knew as he was saying it that his words were likely futile.
Lendel screamed for a second time, and this time it was a sound of pain. "What what the fuck did you do," he said, sounding halfway between bewildered and pained. "What did you do to me! It was you, wasn''t it"
"Calm down," Derivan said.
"I''m not going to fucking calm"
"Shut your damn mouth and think for a second," Rekka snapped at him. "Why the hell did you get so angry?"
"He did something to me." Lendel red at Derivan, panting heavily, his hands clutching at his des as though they could help him; instead of getting up to fight, though, he stayed sitting on the ground. The pain was throwing him off enough that he couldn''t think clearly.
"Sev," Derivan said. "Heal him."
"What Are you sure?" Sev asked. The other three had managed to take down the wizard and healer both, though they were slumped, unconscious; Derivan didn''t know how they''d won, but the scorch marks around them suggested the process hadn''t been pretty.
"He''s... out of bnce." Derivan hesitated. "It''s hard to exin. I think you could help him. Would it harm you?"
Sev was silent for a moment, staring at Lendel. Derivan felt the flicker of a skill activating before the cleric answered. "...I think I can do it," he said slowly. "But healing anything that has a mental effect is... tricky. I''ll need you to hold me down."
"Are you sure?" Misa''s tone was sharp and worried. "We can find another way, if we need to."
"We don''t." Sev looked more sure of himself, now, leaning down over Lendel, who flinched away from him; for an old warrior, he wasn''t used to extended pain, if he still wasn''t fighting.
Or... no. He was waiting to be healed so he could fight again; Physical Empathy pinged easily on that.
That was fine. The healing would remove the anger. Derivan saw it now, how the system attached to him throbbed in sympathetic rage.
He saw how to fix it.
"I will be helping," Derivan said. "It should minimize the effect it has on you."
He readied Patch; the stat was hardly a scalpel, but it was no longer a hammer. He could wield it with enough finesse, as long as someone else helped.
That was the hope, anyway.
107 - Book 2: Chapter 44: Cracks in the Soul
107 - Book 2: Chapter 44: Cracks in the Soul
The trouble with Lendel was that his system was a mess.
Derivan knew that his own system was in a far worse state but there was a difference in the way their systems were broken. His own system was something like a broken cage, the pieces scattered around him; it was still attached in only the most abstract of ways.
With Lendel, it was a different story.
Derivan did not have [Soul Sight], or whatever system skill would have allowed him to touch upon another''s soul; he didn''t know if such a thing was even possible in the context of the system. He''d always been able to sense his own soul which, now that he thought about it, was perhaps an oddity but he''d never been able to sense anyone else''s.
But now there was... something. It came from Patch, oddly enough; the stat had grown high enough that he could see more than he could before. It could sense the way Lendel''s system had grown into him, instead of breaking around him, and through that, Derivan saw something he hadn''t noticed before.
Everyone had that, to a certain degree.
Rekka, Vex, Misa even Sev, though there was something strange about what he saw there. Even himself, as broken as it was. The system dug itself into all of them in a way that had previously registered as their connection to the system, but the connection was so much more than that; it was the way the machinery of the system infused itself into them...
...and yet, it made sense. Derivan hesitated to think the thought at all, but it fit with everything that happened in Teque and Fendal, all too well.
The system was supporting them in some fundamental way. He''d seen it in Teque and Fendal, the way it seemed to be able to give and take away realness, like that was a transferable property. He wondered now if this was how it worked, beneath the surface.
The people of Fendal had lost ess to the system, and had begun to lose themselves; in turn, the people of Teque gained life, and system boxes had begun appearing for them. If he''d had Patch at a higher level if he''d been able to level it up, instead of being forced to leave what would he have seen?
What was the system for?
Derivan was beginning to see an answer, and he wasn''t sure he liked it.
"The system attaches itself to people and reinforces both substance and soul," Derivan said out loud, tasting the words; they felt strange to him, resonating with an odd familiarity.
"What?" Sev gave him a strange look.
"I... It is nothing." Derivan shook his head. But his mind was spinning. If he was right, then the reason that was necessary at all... "I will talk about itter," he added softly, seeing that Sev was still giving him a strange look, and the cleric paused for a moment and nodded at him.
There was a chance he was wrong. He forced himself to focus his attention back on Lendel''s system, and on what had triggered this whole chain of thought to begin with; the way the system was growing into Lendel''s soul and substance. He thought he could see where cracks had begun to form, and if he traced them back he almost thought he could see the causality of it all.
The system''s growth hadn''t exactly been intentionally malicious, here. The cracks had formed first, and then the system had grown in, preventing them from healing. If he ripped out those pieces of the system, it might be able to heal on its own
but the cracks were deep enough that the system was now also the only thing that was holding Lendel together. If he simply ripped out those overgrown pieces, Lendel would fall apart, and the rather horrifying thought ured to Derivan that he might fall apart in more ways than one. It would not just be his soul; it would be his substance; that thing that made him real.
"Sev," Derivan said. "Are you ready?"
"I''ve been ready." Sev paused for a moment, looking worriedly over Lendel. "He''s... pretty badly damaged, on some fundamental level. I don''t think this kind of damage is normal."
"It is a damage that goes beyond Health," Derivan agreed. "You will need to heal him after I pull out the pieces of the system that have grown into him."
Sev jerked. "Is that what''s happening?"
"Yes." Derivan paused to consider the certainty of his words, and then nodded. "I think if you tried to heal him as is, now... I am unsure what would happen. But you would fight with the system on some level."
"Yeah, let''s not... let''s not do that." Sev grimaced a little bit at the thought, massaging his head like he could already feel the headache forming. Misa came up behind him, steadying him, and Sev took a breath. "This is going to hurt. Derivan?"
"Go." Even as he spoke the words, Derivan was reaching out with Patch; he grabbed at those intrusive tendrils of the system, the ones that should not have been there, and yanked them out with all the subtlety of a warrior which is to say, with very little subtlety at all. Patch didn''t yet have the precision it could afford to him, if he worked on the stat.
He wasn''t sure he wanted to.
Pulling out those overgrown system-tendrils felt like a relief, though, a balm to his soul; he felt something inside him, probably Patch itself, uncoil and rx as he did so. At the same time, Sev grit his teeth and let out a groan. A bright glow began to emerge from his fingers as he cast.
[Divine Inhtion] again, no doubt. Derivan could already see the cracks closing, which was good, because a moment longer and they would have begun to widen instead.
Even with the both of them working, it took time. Derivan had to be more careful with some of the system-tendrils; he left the mostplicated ones forst, so he could rely on any increase in Patch to afford him the precision he needed to pull them out. Some of them were entrenched deep within Lendel, coiled inside of him in a way that would have torn him apart if Derivan had simply ripped it out.
By the time he reached those, though, Patch had risen to 10, and that was just enough to give him what he needed to pull it out safely, to nudge all those individual pieces out of the cracks and wedges before he began to pull. Even as he did, Sev was healing
But Misa had to hold him back, too. There was a terrible, uncharacteristic anger in his eyes. The skill continued running, like Sev had intentionally left it on autopilot, but Misa was grimacing as she pinned the cleric''s arms behind his back and he fought to get loose. Rekka was staring, eyes wide. Vex watched with a nervous sort of fear, ready to help in any way he could if he was needed.
Sev was screaming, shouting something angry. Derivan focused, pulled out thest of the tendrils, felt thest of the cracks heal over notpletely, but just enough
"Stop," he said. "This is enough."
Sev panted heavily. There was a wildness in his eyes that wasn''t there before. For a moment, Derivan was afraid the skill wouldn''t cut out at all
A runic circle formed in the air in front of Vex, and mana drifted forward, enveloping Sev; the cleric slumped over, and [Divine Inhtion] failed.
Derivan took a breath he didn''t need.
"Thank you," he said.
Vex nodded. "I wasn''t sure if I''d need it, but I was preparing, just in case..." he said quietly.
Derivan could almost see the source of Sev''s anger. He could almost feel those selfsame cracks imposed over the cleric''s psyche, this time with Physical Empathy instead of Patch; the damage wasn''t the same. It wasn''t to his soul it was to his mind.
But in very small ways, he could see those same cracks beginning to form in Sev''s soul, too. Not sorge that they would be a problem, and likely the kind that could heal, but...
"We made a hell of a sacrifice for you," Misa said, ring at Lendel. "Tell us what the fuck is going on here."
Lendel just stared.
Derivan saw what was going on with him, in a way. The man was off-bnce he had no context for what had just happened to him. He knew that he had been angry and that that anger had been unnatural, but he didn''t know why, yet; all he knew was that they had done something, and his anger had vanished.
But Lendel had a few more points of context, too. He could see the way Rekka was ring at him. He remembered the conversation, and Derivan saw him slowly putting the pieces together.
"Fuck," Lendel said after a moment. He stared at his still-unconsciouspanions, and then at Misa''s re, which was, at this point, only growing in intensity. And then he mmed his fist into the ground, hard enough to crack the wood and make Rekka jump. "Fuck."
"Hey, man, it got me too" Rekka started, even though he didn''t really know what ''it'' was.
"You don''t know how this works," Lendel said, staring at Rekka, and then shaking his head; he turned to look at Derivan, at Sev, at Vex and Misa. Sev was still copsed in Misa''s arms, and from what Derivan could tell, those small cracks were already beginning to heal...
...but it was going to be hard to tell until they got to speak to Sev directly.
"What are you talking about?" Rekka asked.
"I''m saying it didn''t ''get'' me. Or you, for that matter." Lendel took a breath. "That''s not how it works. There''s an element of that, but it doesn''t make us believe anything we don''t let ourselves believe first. I have some ideas about what happened, but this is... dammit.
"This project was supposed to help the Guild," Lendel said softly, looking toward Misa. "A lot of our smaller branches can''t handle dungeon breaks if they happen; we''ve had one or two branches get run over. We thought if we could..."
Hepsed into a brief silence.
"I know that," Rekka said. "That''s why I was on board to begin with."
"But Elyra funded most of this." Lendel''s gaze sharpened. "They''re partially aware of how this works. Some of them were trying to take advantage."
"No fucking kidding," Misa said. She nced at Lendel''s twopanions, and then at Sev, still unconscious.
"We can wake them up," Lendel said. "They should be awake. We need to talk about this. Get you all set up for your dungeon visit, and n around whatever the hell Elyra was trying to do here, or at least the noble families we were working with."
"I don''t know if waking Sev up is safe," Vex objected softly.
"Your friend incurs a cost for healing," Lendel said; it wasn''t a question. "You don''t want to let him sleep through it, in most cases. The sooner he''s awake the sooner we''ll know if anything''s wrong and we need to get him a healer. We''ll wake him back up, and then we''ll talk. Rekka, can you get"
"I''m on it," Rekka said, and he began to walk out of the room but as he stepped out, he nced back. "You better have a damn good exnation, Lendel," he said shortly. "Something here is fucked, and frankly, I''m not sure these guys should have saved you at all."
Lendel''s eyes hardened. "I know," he said.
108 - Book 2: Chapter 45: Malus
108 - Book 2: Chapter 45: Malus
Sev woke up gagging.
[Smelling Salts]. He recognized the smell of them; it wasn''t the first time they''d been used to force him to consciousness, although he really hoped it would be thest.
"Enough," he said, waving them away; he saw his team staring at him cautiously, worried, and he blinked away thest of the [Sleep]. "I''m okay. Don''t worry about me. You made the right call cutting that off when you did, Vex."
The lizardkin in question rxed a little, looking relieved. Sev managed a small smile. He looked around the room they were in the same room, it looked like, though some of the furniture had been destroyed in the fight. He hadn''t even noticed. Lendel was standing off to the side, far enough away to not seem like a threat.
...The sight of the man made a smoldering anger slowly rise within Sev; he closed his eyes and took a breath, letting it cool again.
That anger wasn''t his own.
It faded after a moment, back to a burning that was far in the back of his mind. He could remember being angry; that memory was nearly at the forefront. When he''d begun healing Lendel, the divine magic had transformed the nature of Lendel''s injuries into memory, as it always did and where those injuries had affected Lendel''s mind, Sev had taken them on, feeling the same anger Lendel did. The fact that Misa had to hold him back...
Sev wasn''t sure how he felt about it. Ashamed, maybe; the thought came to him that he should have dealt with that anger better. What would he have done, if he''d been able to pull himself free?
On the other side of it... He understood how Lendel had felt now, perhaps better than even Derivan could with Physical Empathy. The anger he''d felt was... unnatural, a soul-injury; an overwhelming sense of vition directed at the person that had caused it and that knowledge had been instant and explicit.
Sev felt an echo of that, though thankfully undirected and loose. It would have been more difficult for him if he''d gained that anger whole, focused unterally on Derivan and those associated with him.
Thankfully, that wasn''t the case.
"Give me a moment," he said to the others, and tried to settle himself.
He was used to this. It had been a long time since he''d done it, for something that was this significant; it was on the bare edge of what he could do, now. Sev grimaced a little bit, hoped his friends hadn''t seen it, and brought up his status.
Sev, Level 49
ss: [Traces of the Lost]
Health: 980/980
Mana: 370/370
Stats:
Strength: 16
Intelligence: 37
Wisdom: 55
Agility: 21
Status Effects:
[Memory Loss] [Malus]
Applied by [Sacrifice to the Lost]. Your maximum memory capacity is limited, and you must sacrifice memories to remember more. Current capacity: 501/500
[Fatebroken] [Malus]
Applied by [Sacrifice to the Lost]. Modified by . Details of this malus are obfuscated. You are not your own.
[#######] [Malus]
Applied by. Details of this malus are obfuscated. You have chosen your path.
Skill List:
Base ss Skills (Cleric): [Light st], [Triage], [Diagnose], [Heal], [Greater Heal], [Greater Buff]
Divine ss Skills: [Divine Barrier], [Divine Inhtion]
ss Specific Skills: [Sacrifice to the Lost], [Traces]
Sev hated looking at his status. He hated the reminder of all the debuffs he had that he didn''t know anything about there was so little he knew about himself, about what had happened to him when he''d first arrived on... Velus? Hestia?
What the fuck was the name of the world?
A terrible fear gripped him for a second, like he''d lost something else that was precious; yet another thing taken from him, despite all the measures he took to control his ss and the maluses applied by his skills; [Memory Loss] was an obvious counter to the effects of [Divine Inhtion], which could convert status effects into memory, but...
There was usually still something lost in that process. It wasn''t a perfect workaround. He could control what [Memory Loss] took, to an extent. It was a small mercy granted to him. But it wasn''t enough; memories were associative, and every time the malus kicked in to steal pieces of his memory, small things were taken along with it.
Sev let out a breath.
It was fine. It was nothing he hadn''t dealt with before.
[Memory Loss] said his memory was overextended; the number would tick down, and he would direct it to strip away the anger he now remembered. He tried not to look at the rest of his status, the parts that threw him off the most the small messages built into his other two maluses.
You are not your own.
You have chosen your path.
The system didn''t lie, generally, but he felt like he was his own person... what did it mean that he wasn''t? What did it mean that he''d chosen his path? He didn''t remember choosing anything.
Worst of all, he still couldn''t tell his friends about those aspects of his status. He''d tried. There was a momenting soon when he would be able to; [Fatebroken] ate at him every time he tried to tell them before it was the right moment, which told him a lot about what that effect probably was...
Derivan might be able to do something about it, he thought. As long as he noticed. The Patch stat gave him a better opportunity than ever to break free from the constraints he''d apparently put upon himself, though once more he was forced to confront the idea that he might not want to.
If he''d chosen this path, then surely he''d had a reason.
Something to think aboutter.
"I''m ready," he said, his voice sounding a little more distant to his own ears than he had wanted. [Memory Loss] was operating full time. It never entirely stripped away the memory of the pain, like the system didn''t want him abusing thatbination in quite that manner, but it was good enough. "How is Lendel doing?"
"I''m fine," the adventurer grunted. "Not sure exactly what you did, but it reversed... everything. Left me with a hell of a headache. But... thank you."
"You should be more careful when you''re leveling a building next time." Sev tried for a joke, and cracked a slight smirk when Misa groaned.
"Oh by the gods," she muttered. "I was fuckin'' worried about you, but nope. You''re fine. He''s fine, everyone. He''s making puns."
"You have to be careful when you''re leveling a building!" Sev objected. "I''m not wrong!"
Vex snickered a bit, and Derivan gave him a light, if still slightly worried smile, conveyed the way he always did with a tilt of his head, a slight dimming in the lights of his eyes in his helmet. They all still kept an eye on him, though, each of them still a little worried.
Not enough of a facade. He almost smiled. They were all too clever by half.
"We need to talk about what we were doing here," Rekka said, pulling the topic back on track. He stared at Lendel, then at his twopanions, both of whom were now awake and silent. "What exactly happened to us? You said it doesn''t make us believe anything we don''t already believe."
Lendel was silent for a moment. Then he sighed, and began to exin.
"It took me a bit to connect the dots," he said. "But I think I get it. Sort of. This project began in secret several years ago, when some nobles came by and dropped off a donation enough to renovate the entire Guild, if we felt like it."
"And you didn''t report that to the Guildmaster?" Sev asked, incredulous.
"The donation was conditional on me not doing that," Lendel said, grimacing slightly. "They had ways to know. And I didn''t... I figured I could do things to benefit the Guild, even without the Guildmaster knowing. It''s part of being Gold you make some decisions on your own. There is implicit trust."
"A system that failed here, clearly," Misa said, a little harshly. Lendel winced, but didn''t protest.
"I figured they were up to something. I didn''t think they were maneuvering me into my own corner," he said. "I had a project I was already working on, along with Tibeus and Lore there." He nodded to the wizard and healer he was working with; they nodded at him and shifted, looking distinctly ufortable.
"A while back, we thought about how mana crystals are used to maintain a connection to the system," Lendel said. "And we thought we wondered if we could take that process and apply it to something else. Create weapons and shelters that could level alongside us.
"Back then, Tibeus had a [Create Familiar] skill. It''s a skill that requires the sacrifice of a grade 1 mana crystal, and it creates a small, low-level creature that bonds to you. We thought maybe the mechanism there was simr; it had the same cost as maintaining a connection to the system, and it created a new creature that was connected to the system.
"But [Create Familiar] doesn''t work on objects, obviously. It creates something new, it doesn''t try to attach the system to an existing object. For that we had to do research, and for that research we needed gold."
"How exactly would you even begin to do research on that?" Vex asked, frowning. "How would gold help you?"
"By letting us pay people to reveal their skill details to us." Lendel''s lip curled slightly in distaste. "People don''t like sharing the particrs of their skills, so we needed to find people with umon or rarer sses, with a skill that allowed us to retarget an existing skill. That took a lot of people to get through. Can you believe that we eventually found it in a series ofmon sses? It was a bunch of old, niche skills no one talked about, too."
"Yes," Misa said, her tone as dry as a desert. Sev almost smiled at that; he remembered the image of her vige fighting off a swarm of meteor. [Common] skills were easy to get, but they weren''t weak. They just needed to be used inbination with one another.
It was stranger that it had taken so long for people to figure that out. But then so much of their history was missing, or just gone entirely...
...maybe people had figured out simr things before. Maybe there was a reason it was hard for rare sses to gather.
Sev shook his head to dismiss the thought.
"I''ll spare you the details, but you can look it up, if you want. We kept all the research logs. We had to experiment with a few different variants sometimes skills didn''t work out quite the way we expected them to but we eventually got it to work. And Tibeus was able to apply the skill to a candle." Lendel nced up at his wizard friend, who took it as his cue to step forward and continue the exnation.
"It caused the skill to change," Tibeus said. "I presume we fulfilled some previously hidden prerequisite, but [Create Familiar] became [Bond Familiar]. Red rarity. We''re unsure what that means as yet."
Sev exchanged nces with Vex and the others. They''d seen red before; it rarely meant anything good. There were still a few red-coded items and skills they had yet to try...
Error rted, perhaps. Or... admin interference. Or maybe just interference in general.
"And [Bond Familiar] could be used on objects," Sev prompted.
"Correct." Tibeus frowned a little, as if he didn''t like being prompted, and Sev stopped himself from scoffing. There was a part of him that was still angry at them for causing all of this to begin with. "We used it on the Guild building, but it wouldn''t take to the whole building. I had to use it in parts bond pieces of the building at a time, until the whole building had a single status."
"That is not what you did," Derivan muttered, his voice low; he nced around as he spoke, presumably looking through the room with Patch. Sev wondered exactly what it was that the animated armor saw.
Tibeus nced at Derivan, but his gaze softened a bit, remembering exactly why he was exining all of this. "...The new Familiar came with a skill that it offered to us when we stepped and stayed in the building for long enough," Tibeus said. "It''s part of the reason we had to be a lot more discerning with who we allowed to work with us it''s a powerful buff. If we let anyone get it"
"No excuses, Tibeus," Lindel said, sounding tired. "I know what our logic was at the time. You know it conflicts with the Guild''s principles. If we really wanted to, we could have housed them elsewhere. We could have disabled the Guild, like we do when we rotate out. We made a decision because it was easier for us."
Tibeus didn''t respond for a moment, and when he did, it was slow, like he was still fighting the idea. "...Yes. I suppose that''s what we did."
"The buff the Guild building gave us was [Reinforcement]," Lindel said, smiling a slightly bitter smile. He summoned a system box, and sent it off to the four of them; Sev caught his copy, and then caught his breath.
[Reinforcement] [Buff]
Applied by [Guild''s Hope]. Reinforces health, heart, and soul. increase to Health. increase to mental resistance. Reinforcement increases with connection to [Guild''s Hope].
The Health increase alone was monumental; it exined why they''d had such a hard time defeating the cleric and wizard, even though neither ss usually had much health. But mental resistance...
Not resistance against mental attacks. Mental resistance.
At a guess, targeted propaganda, to make the Guild members believe their ideas; when they were rotated out, they kept the buff, and those ideas stuck, bing more entrenched.
"Elyra knew about the buff, I take it?" Sev asked, but he already knew the answer.
"The noble families we worked with did," Lendel said.
"And that noble families were...?" Sev''s eyes flickered to Vex, who was leaning in.
"Wisfield," Lendel said, and Vex seemed to rx by a fraction but only a fraction. And then Lendel continued. "And Ashion."
109 - Book 2: Chapter 46: A Noble Intent
109 - Book 2: Chapter 46: A Noble Intent
"Ah... shit." Sev winced a little at the words. He couldn''t help but nce towards Vex, whose face was as impassive as he could make it but he knew Vex well. He saw the way the lizardkin hunched over just a little bit more, the way his tail coiled around his leg; he saw the disappointment swim in his eyes.
He was familiar with it, even. Part of him thought he recognized that sort of disappointment. It was a hope that the people you cared about had changed for the better.
"You''re familiar with them?" Lendel asked.
"You could say that," Sev said, doing his best to keep his voice neutral. "We met up with Wisfield before, when they were negotiating for control of the new dungeon up north."
"Ah," Lendel nodded. "You''re the team that dealt with that. I remember. The researchers that came back..."
Lendel paused, trailing off; he winced slightly. Sev noticed.
He remembered how nervous the researchers had been. So many of them had fought Kestel on dying the report back to Elyra presumably, to the nobles they worked for. Kestel had been left broken and bedridden, and even now required more crystals than they had to spare to heal.
"Did anything happen to them?"
"I... don''t know." Lendel sounded reluctant to say the words, and didn''t meet Sev''s eyes when he spoke. "I would have looked into it, normally."
"Shit," Sev muttered. He nced quickly to the others Misa looked pissed, Vex looked worried, and Derivan was inscrutable as ever, though he''d moved to stand beside Vex. The lizardkin was leaning on Derivan ever-so-slightly, though, and some of his worry for his friend abated.
"We can find out," Vex said after a moment, straightening. "Wisfield handles most of the researchers, right?"
"Theye from a few different noble houses," Lendel said. "But Wisfield coordinates."
"We''ll need to talk to Wisfield anyway, if they were the ones that funded you, and if they knew all this was happening." Vex''s tailshed about behind him. "This kind of funding is standard practice, though."
"They''re not supposed to try it with the Guild, but they got us in a moment of weakness." Lendel sighed.
"That would make sense." Vex''s eyes hardened slightly. "I noticed they made a lot of progress with their Principle thest time we met up."
"Principle?" Derivan spoke up, his tone questioning.
"It''s what I mentioned before. Every noble house is founded on something valuable they discover about magic, or about the system; basically anything that improves Elyra''s security or military might. They call it their Principle."
"That''s a little pretentious," Sev voiced, frowning, and Vex gave a little snort.
"It is," he agreed wryly. "I didn''te up with it."
"What''s Wisfield''s Principle?" Misa asked, folding her arms. "I remember what you did with them, but you never exined what happened."
Vex nodded. "It''s usually considered taboo to discuss a Principle outside of the house," he said. "But I think I don''t really care right now. Wisfield''s whole thing is telepathy and mental skills munication, not control, as far as I know. It''s why they''re in charge of most negotiations. I wasn''t really sure Drunkard''s Beard would do anything to them, but I had a theory that it worked by tapping into whatever the system does to facilitate mental skills."
"And you were right. That''s how they all got fucked up when you threw some moss at them."
"I guessed they found a way to link up and make their mental skills more powerful." Vex nodded. "I... don''t like that I was right. That has implications."
"No kidding," Misa muttered.
Sev had been watching Lendel, Rekka, Tibeus and Lore as Vex spoke; the four other adventurers each had different expressions on their faces. Lendel looked frustrated, like he med himself for not being prepared for the possibility. Rekka seemed like he was inmed with righteous anger more than anything. Tibeus struck Sev as almost looking bored, and Lore seemed the same, though slightly more controlled.
"Hey, Derivan?" Sev said. Derivan nced up at him. "Do those two still have [Reinforcement] up?"
Derivan paused, and then nced at the wizard and cleric. Both of them winced. "Yes," he said. "It is... not as entrenched within them as it was with Lendel. But there will still be some damage if I break the connection to the Guild."
"I''d like to know how you can do that," Tibeus said. "It would be useful for the Guild"
"Tibeus," Lendel said, giving the wizard a withering nce. "Turn off [Bond Familiar]."
Tibeus paused. "...I can''t."
"This isn''t the time for games"
"No, I mean, I can''t," Tibeus said, a note of genuine panic entering his voice; Sev almost automatically let a pulse of [Diagnose] touch the wizard, though all he got back was that he was experiencing an entirely normal panic attack. "I just tried. [Guild''s Hope] stopped me."
"Did you really name the Guild that...?" Misa muttered, and Sev snorted; he''d had the same thought.
"I thought you said you''d be able to turn it off." Lendel''s tone was sharp. "You''ve been turning it off every time we rotated out, haven''t you?"
"I have!" Tibeus raised his arms up. "I don''t know why I can''t now!"
"He is not lying," Derivan said, glowing eyes flickering a little as he stared at Tibeus. "He is trying."
"How do you know that?!" Tibeus demanded, turning some of that panic into an entitled sort of anger, stalking towards Derivan; Misa stepped in front of him,rge and glowering and towering right over him, and he balked.
"You said you can break the connection?" Lendel turned his gaze to Derivan. "Do it."
Derivan nodded. Sev watched as the armor reached out invisibly; there was no physical movement or change save for a faint dimming of his eyes...
Tibeus shuddered and stumbled; Lore winced a secondter.
There was a moment of silence.
"You don''t have the authority to do that, Lendel," Tibeus said, his tone affronted. The wizard''s cloak billowed around him as magic began to gather, and Vex reacted, though subtly; Sev only noticed because he was used to the lizardkin. One hand slipped to his dagger, and small movements carved out a tiny rune into the air.
"I am the leader of this team." Lendel frowned at his friend. "What''s wrong with you?"
"This." Lore spoke, for the first time in this entire conversation; now that Sev paid attention to her, he saw a faint flicker of divine magic as she tried and failed to do something to heal herself. She reached out and he almost flinched, but instead a box appeared in front of him as she shared a status effect.
[Remnants] [Malus]
Leftovers of a change.
At the same time, Tibeusshed out, a runic circle suddenly forming in the air in front of him; fire mana gathered, strong enough that Sev could feel the heat even without any form of [Mana Sight].
Yet as soon as it finished gathering, the mana dissipated harmlessly; Vex''s own spell triggered, the wizard having cast it in preparation before Tibeus had even begun to cast his spell. Sev almost whistled he had to bite his lip to stop himself.
"Holy shit, Vex," Misa said, not nearly as concerned about polite self-control.
"What the hell did you do"
"Tibeus." This time, when Lendel spoke, his words resonated like he''d used a skill; Sev flinched, and even Misa looked up at him, her hand automatically going to her mace. The effect on Tibeus was far more significant the wizard''s gaze automatically flew to Lendel and stuck there, like he couldn''t look away. "Stand down."
Tibeus struggled with himself. Lore didn''t say a word, just watched her teammate struggle against the binding of whatever skill Lendel had used; she didn''t seem inclined to involve herself.
Slowly forcing himself to do it, and looking like he hated every moment of it he seemed to rx. The wizard stoodpletely still, closing his eyes and cycling his breathing.
"I want to ask if you can heal this," Lendel said, ncing at Sev, his gaze spective. "But that costs you something, doesn''t it?"
"...It does," Sev said. He would have hesitated to admit it, but it didn''t seem like there was much of a point; Lendel had already seen him copse when he cast the spell. He did want to help Tibeus and Lore if he could. "I can try"
"No, Sev," Misa interrupted, her voice harsh. "I''m not sure we should''ve let you try to heal Lendel at all, if the cost was going to be that severe. We''re going to talk about that when we get a chance, believe me."
Sev... let that go. Misa stared at him for a moment, as if she was expecting him to have a response, and she seemed to rx a fraction when he said nothing.
"Most of us need to rotate out," Lendel said, ncing at Lore and Tibeus. "This... isn''t going to work. Most of us arepromised. We''re not even the only adventurers in this building. I''m surprised no one else came running."
"Sheer luck," Rekka said. "Most of them are out right now, running errands and stuff. And it helps that we made the Guild really big, so everyone that is here is pretty scattered."
"No kidding," Misa said, eyeing the ceiling. Sev nced up
Yeah, now that he paid attention, that ceiling was really far away.
"We''ll need to break the [Reinforcement] effect before you rotate anyone out," Sev said, ignoring the slight sense of vertigo the sight gave him. "Unless you can do that manually somehow."
Derivan shook his head before Tibeus could answer. "There is no central mechanism that can be disabled," he said. "The effect will have to be manually broken, and we will need to try to reverse what has been done to the Guild."
"Can''t we leave it like this?" Lore asked, frowning. "It''s bigger. It''s nice."
"It will continue to grant [Reinforcement] if its connection to the system is not broken." Derivan nced around. "I do not know if breaking that connection will restore it to its original size. There is a chance it will not."
"That''s the first thing we need to do, then," Sev decided. "We can''t leave the Guild like this, not if it''s just handing out the buff to anyone that stays here long enough. Who''s to say Wisfield and Ashion aren''t already sending in people to take advantage of it?"
"That''s not..." Tibeus started to say, and then he frowned, stopping himself. "Shit."
"No kidding." Sev gave the wizard the most deadpan stare he could muster.
"I''ll set up a meeting with Wisfield in the meantime," Rekka said.
"Just be careful." Lendel nced at the four of them. "This meeting isn''t going to go like thest one you had with them; you don''t have the benefit of the Guild''s skill-suppression enchantments. They''re going to be able to read youpletely."
Sev nced at Vex, briefly worried but the lizardkin surprised him by grinning slightly, stepping forward with Derivan. "There might be something we can do about that."
110 - Book 2: Chapter 47: Crafting a Counter
110 - Book 2: Chapter 47: Crafting a Counter
"Goddamn that took a while," Misa grumbled.
Vex... had to agree, although he was too tired to actually say anything. He let out a small groan in response, leaning most of his weight onto Derivan who epted him with grace and put an arm around his shoulders, despite being the one that had actually done most of the work.
They''d had to spend thest several hours cleaning up the errant, overgrown system. Or, well, Derivan had to. They''d chosen to stick together while he did so, though, just in case anything else decided to happen, like it so often did around them. Vex had his notes to work on, and he''d plugged away at the glyphs every once in a while, trying to understand them and make the anti-Wisfield glyph he''d had an idea for.
For the most part, he''d ended up nowhere. He''d wanted to talk to Derivan about it, but the armor was busy, and looked... not exhausted, exactly, but Patch seemed to take a lot out of him.
Vex was pretty sure he had the right idea. The glyph for Communication was a glyph that fundamentally represented the sharing of thoughts and ideas; it was enough to touch on the very same thing that Wisfield''s mental skills operated on. The problem was that this was magic, and that didn''t work the same way system skills did.
He still had his sample of Drunkard''s Beard, and he used it periodically to test if his experiments were working. He didn''t need to block the effect he was nning to use Derivan''s Sign for that, anyway but he wanted to see if he couldtch on to whatever signal it was releasing. For testing purposes, he would try to amplify that signal instead of blocking it, directing it towards a willing victim.
Which was Misa, in this case. The conversation had gone something along the lines of:
"Hey, Misa, can I test this Glyph on you? I''m trying to amplify the effect of Drunkard''s Beard."
"Is that the weird moss that makes people drunk?"
"Yes, but I''ll make sure"
"Fuck yeah do it."
It was good to have someone like Misa on the team, Vex reflected.
Unfortunately, it had been a disappointing failure to both him and Misa. Misa had hoped that being drunk would help relieve the boredom of following Derivan around, and the failure of the spell to do anything made her grumble. On the other hand, it had been a relief for Sev, who was concerned about having to heal yet another hangover, despite Vex''s insistence that Drunkard''s Beard would do no such thing.
Ultimately, he''d ended up spending mana he hadn''t needed to, and his legs were sore from walking around the unnecessarilyrge Guild to tear out strips of the system.
But at the end of the day, Derivan''s efforts paid off.
[Guild''s Hope] was eventually stripped down to just the bare essentials of a working system, a skeleton that was attached to the spine of the building ording to Derivan, anyway, though Vex had no idea what exactly the spine of the building was supposed to be. The Patch stat had increased several times in the process, which... was a little worrying?
But Vex trusted Derivan to say something if the stat began affecting him too much.
With the system mostly repaired, Tibeus was able to disable the [Bond Familiar] skill; the structure around the Guild building didn''t go away, but it seemed to dim a bit, ording to Derivan. [Reinforcement] wouldn''t be disabled, but the effect would slowly weaken and eventually fall off entirely, as long as the adventurers with it were rotated out.
Which was Lendel''s responsibility. None of them wanted anything to do with the management of a bunch of egotistical adventurers that had been slowly guided to think that they deserved better than everyone around them. Though part of Vex did feel guilty for using his status to get them past the guard; that was one of the issues Rekka had mentioned...
He sighed. Nothing was ever simple. Nobility would benefit the Guild, it was true, but the current ''buff'' would hurt them and ruin the Guildmaster''s careful nning as far as maintaining the Guild''s culture in foreign territory went.
They were all back in their room in the Guild, now; this one was just a singlerge room that was set up for all four of them. It was simple, but it worked well enough. There were curtains around every bed that ensured they could each have a small degree of privacy, small dressers to keep their things in, and the ssic enchanted cupboard that came with every Guild room.
"This definitely took longer than I expected," Sev said with a sigh. "And now we have this Wisfield meeting to worry about. Vex, you said you wanted to distribute the food ourselves? I wanted to ask about that earlier, but..."
"If we let the noble houses take charge, they won''t distribute it fairly." Vex grimaced slightly, remembering his conversation with Rekka. "If we''re in charge we can at least make sure it gets to the people that need it, and not just to the people that the nobles like."
"Should''ve known," Sev muttered. "That''s going to be a lot of work for four people, but... good call."
"I can get us some help," Misa suggested. "Summon a few people with Anchor. And that should give us the opportunity to learn a bit more about what Elyra is like away from nobles and the like."
"There are a few people we could get help from," Vex said. He smiled slightly; part of him was excited to meet his old... he wasn''t sure he could call them friends, really. But there were a few people that had opted to help him when they didn''t have to, way back when he was trying to leave Elyra to begin with. Rekka had been one of them, and then there were others, too; small merchants, like the one that had given him the materials for his dagger; a librarian that had helped sneak him spellbooks that his family deemed unnecessary; a cartographer that had given him a map and directions to the nearest Guild branch. "I think it''s better we talk to the locals. It''ll help us connect better than bringing in half your vige. No offense."
"None taken." Misa grinned, apparently entertained by the thought. "I can always bring them in if we need them."
"Were you able to make any progress with the glyphs?" Derivan asked curiously. "If we are to meet with Wisfield..."
"Rekka did say he''d set up a meeting for sometime tomorrow, didn''t he." Sev winced slightly.
Vex nodded. "I haven''t made as much progress as I''d hoped," he said. "I was pretty sure that Communication would be able to do something, but it''s not really letting me amplify or work with Drunkard''s Beard at all, and it''s what I''ve been using to test my ideas. Mostly just slight modifications to the glyph."
"You are working with it the way you do with runic circles," Derivan noted. "Perhaps glyphs require a different method?"
"You''re probably right," Vex admitted. "But the other glyphs I have ess to are just for the basic elements; I don''t have any ideas what a new one would look like for specifically targeting mental skills... I do have onest idea."
Vex rummaged through his tailbag as he spoke, feeling his fingers eventually catch on the mana sliver. He pulled it out, staring at the way the light caught on the off-white fragment of something; at some angles, always right around the edges of the shard, it shimmered with prismatic fractals.
There was still the question of what it was. The system had been trying to identify it, earlier; maybe it had made some progress?
[Reality Shard] [Grade: Unknown]
Item description still processing. Data collection in progress. Data collection at 30%.
Vex blinked.
That was... rather more information than before. They''d already known the system was studying the shards, but now it was quantifying the amount of progress it had made.
More importantly, it had a name.
"It''s called a [Reality Shard]." Vex stared at it critically, holding it a little bit further away. "Not a mana sliver? And not unknown, anymore."
"System''s figured something out, I guess." Misa eyed it, too, clearly thinking about something. "...My anchor integrity went up thest time you did this glyph magic. And your glyph magic produces reality shards."
"Reality anchors, reality shards, magic," Vex muttered. "And reality shards have been used to amplify magic we saw that. None of us could get past the Teque barrier."
"It was Shifted very deeply across all the wavelengths of reality I could reach," Derivan agreed.
"Which is something that Helg aplished by using reality shards." Vex breathed out. "Magic doesn''t work the same way as the system. The system maniptes... the fabric of reality directly. Magic is the maniption of mana within reality? But the system can do magic, kind of; it uses runic circles, which I want to investigate further, because they look like an iteration on glyphs."
"And magic can manipte the fabric of reality, with the help of reality shards," Misa said. "Something like that?"
"That''s what I''m thinking." Vex frowned; something was tugging at his brain. "There are a lot of parallels here. Maybe just a couple of pieces we''re missing, like where divinities fit into all of it, or ''monsters'', as the system deems them."
"Aurum still hasn''t said much. And I have nothing new from Onyx." Sev fingered the holy symbol he used, tracing over the rough sculpt with his thumb; his brows were drawn together. "I''m a little worried."
"I''m sure we would have heard from Jerome if something happened to Aurum," Misa said, though she sounded sympathetic.
"Probably." Sev sighed, dropping his hand. "You think you can use the reality shard to do something?"
"I think so," Vex said, staring at it; an idea was sparking in his mind, and along with it came a touch of confidence he wasn''t used to a touch of confidence that he was finding came to him more easily, these days. "...Yes. I believe I can."
This was the element he was missing; something inside him resonated.
"Derivan," Vex said. "Can you help me out?"
"How can I help?" Derivan asked.
"I think the Magic stat will help with this," he said. "I need you to hold on to the shard and channel mana through it, the way you would if you were going to cast a glyph. And the glyph you need to draw is..." Vex paused, but only for a moment; he''d already been thinking about this, the whole time they''d been walking through the guild, trying to fix the system. He had a good idea of what they needed.
Themunication glyph was a series of loops that pretended to be letters; he knew he needed toy them on the inside of Derivan''s shield-Sign, but it urred to him as he began to draw that he didn''t actually know what that Sign looked like. All he knew was what it looked like when it wasbined with his own.
But then, Derivan had done much the same thing, hadn''t he? He''d created abined Sign without ever knowing what their individual signs looked like. Vex felt a small warmth within him at the reminder, and closed his eyes, trying to touch upon what he thought the armor''s Sign might look like.
Derivan was a source offort and warmth. More importantly, around him, Vex had always felt safe and that feeling had only grown the more time they spent together. In Derivan he found someone that was always willing to listen to what he had to say, that always took an interest; someone who never shot down his ideas or told him to focus on something else that was more important.
Derivan was interested because Vex was interested; it was that simple, to him.
In battle, Derivan often took on a secondary tank role, using what Vex now understood to be high-level tricks to defend against blows that would have decimated any of the rest of them, except perhaps Misa, who had to be aware of the blow first to block it. The shield made sense it was protective.
But Derivan was more than a protector. Misa was their protector; she would stand in the way of any blow, and in defiance of any fate that would befall them. Derivan protected them in ways both visible and invisible, acting like a buffer against any blow that missed their shield...
Vex almostughed. Of course. He was their armor.
His Sign, then, was not a simple shield; it looked like a shield, but it was a series of interlocking tes. It gave them protection without restricting them, and sought to keep them safe so they could grow. His role in the team was a little different, now he was more a strange, esoteric sword, than a form of armor but his personality hadn''t changed. He sought to keep them safe, even now, in his own way.
Vexid down the glyph for Communication in looping lines around the edges of that armored shield, humming happily to himself and then as a final detail, he drew that shard of reality in the center, like it was empowering the armor-shield; little threads of power sliding into those interlocking tes.
Something inside him was humming. Something within his soul, perhaps, though Vex was only distantly aware of it.
"There," Vex said. "I think this will work. I''m not sure, but..."
"I rather think it will work," Derivan said quietly, and pointed. Vex blinked, and nced back to the drawing.
Right where he''d drawn the shard, where it should have been ced was another one of those reality shards.
"Huh," Vex said. "I guess we can still get these outside of Teque."
Now to make sure the new glyph worked the way he was hoping it would.
111 - Book 2: Chapter 48: Private Communications
111 - Book 2: Chapter 48: Private Communications
To say the glyph worked was an understatement.
They''d done two tests. The first of them was done with Vex''s own Sign of Research, to make sure that the new glyph or sign, Vex hadn''t really considered what to call these things that were a mix of the two would do what they thought it did; there was a slight concern that casting it would consume a reality shard, and those were in limited supply at the moment.
That concern was quickly addressed when the skill fed the information back to him. He was once again reminded that the Sign imed there was a cost to using it... but he hadn''t identified what that cost was yet. Something more than mana, almost certainly.
Private Ry Glyph/Sign Combination
Thisbined glyph restricts all forms ofmunication to those whitelisted by the user, both outgoing and iing. Any hostile form of information transfer will be blocked. This protection extends to written, verbal, and mental forms ofmunication, as well as any other means by which an idea might bemunicated.
On casting, this glyph will create #### charms, which can be worn to render the wearer invulnerable to unwantedmunication.
This glyph will cost one reality shard. Charms produced will ##########,sting ### as long as ####### # #### ######.
##########.
There was a moment while interpreting the glyph where a sudden static burning filled the connection Vex shared with whatever within the mana held all this information it was enough to make the lizardkin wince, stumbling backwards. Derivan caught him, and it took a moment or two before he could hear well enough to realize that the armor was asking him if he was alright; Vex had to swallow twice before he could answer.
"I''m fine," he said, grimacing slightly at the strange hoarseness of his voice. Maybe this was the cost that had been implied. Maybe there were gaps in what the mana knew, and if he ran into them, it would hit him hard.
That was... concerning.
"What happened?" Derivan asked him, still worried, and Vex sighed.
"I''m not sure," he admitted. "I think if the information that my sign tries to retrieve is iplete, there''s some kind of bacsh. That one wasn''t too bad, but..."
There was the possibility that it would be worse in the future. He wondered if the system''s errors were a way to filter through that kind of bacsh; maybe there was a reason for him to redirect that information into system boxes for disy.
But Vex dismissed that concern for now, directing his attention instead to the knowledge he''d gained. The fact that the glyph operated by creating charms was helpful; it meant that they could attempt the spell now, and those charms would likely still protect them by the time the Wisfield meeting came around.
On the other hand, there was the possibility that the charms could be stolen. There was the still-fuzzy information about the charms, that implied they would onlyst a certain amount of time, or maybe only a certain number of uses.
"Well?" Misa raised an eyebrow. "Does it work?"
"Yes," Vex said, and then reconsidered and amended his statement. "It should. It''ll make some charms that should do the trick, but we should still test it."
"Are you sure you do not want to do it yourself?" Derivan asked him, his voice low. "I feel you have earned this."
"Thank you." Vex gave Derivan an earnest sort of smile. "But I want to see you cast, now."
"I see." Derivan sounded vaguely embarrassed, if that was possible; Vex had never heard that from the armor before. He stood up, his head threatening to scrape against the ceiling, and picked up the reality shard that Vex had left on the ground.
And then without wasting a moment more, he began to weave.
There was something about Derivan''s movements that were different when he cast the light in his helmet dimmed to almost nothing, like the magic that animated him was being supnted with something else. His movements seemed to flow in a way his constituent metal really shouldn''t have been able to.
There was something about it all that was akin to a dance.
Vex watched, enraptured, as Derivan went through the movements to draw the glyph he had created. The mana in the room gathered around Derivan, almost as if it was curious about what he was doing. It didn''t run the way it always did when a system spell was cast. It didn''t interfere with his spell, either.
Some of it even entered his gauntlet, voluntarily, joining him in creating.
In the midst of swirling mana, holding a glowing shard of reality, Derivanpleted thest part of the glyph; as he had drawn, the shard had diminished, fragments dispersing into the glowing symbol like he was drawing with chalk. By the time he was done, the shard but a single fragment.
And then that, too, dissipated.
The Ry symbol hung in the air for a moment, and the mana surrounding it rushed to meet it, like it was overjoyed to meet a new friend. There was a meeting between that ambient mana and the mana in the symbol.
In that meeting, those small fragments of reality stirred, and made it something more real than before.
Vex didn''t have the same senses that Derivan had. He did feel the oddness in the magic, the way it felt like it had suddenly gained substance to it; he felt his skills flicker in response, a few of them resonating curiously. There was something he could learn here but almost as soon as it happened, almost as soon as he realized he could do anything at all, the feeling faded.
And so did the glyph.
In its ce were nine nine small objects shimmered with the same prismatic fractals as the original reality shard. They were shaped differently, each a circle with a closed spiral within. Convenient for stringing onto a string, perhaps, though Vex doubted that the magic had been considering convenience when it had been crafting them.
No. The charms followed the pattern of mana that had coalesced around Derivan as he drew. That was a decision the mana had made on its own.
Not for the first time, Vex wondered exactly how alive the mana was.
"That''s... a lot of charms," Misamented after a moment. She reached forward gingerly, as if worried the little spiral of stone would shock her and when it didn''t, she held it critically up to an eye. "Seriously. Maybe a little too many charms."
"It''s better to have backups?" Sev phrased it like a question, eyeing the charms like they were going to explode.
Vex stared.
Something clicked.
"They''re not going to blow up!" heined, scowling.
"It''s true," Misa said, nodding at Sev. "It was Derivan that cast the spell, not Vex."
"I mean, he still made the spell," Sev said, giving Vex a yful grin. "Maybe we should just make sure?"
"Oh by the gods," Vex muttered, burying his face into his hands.
"I am sure it will work," Derivan said, giving Vex a friendly, encouraging sort of nudge, though it mostly just made Vex curl up even more. "You only need Misa to wear the charm, right?"
"Yes." The words were muffled. "Then hold the Drunkard''s Beard up to her. Have her eat a little bit of it, even."
"Eat it?" Misa said, her tone somehow haughty and affronted a weird tone to hearing from Misa, no matter that she was mocking the nobles. There was a faint clink as she strung the charm through, tying it around her neck. "I couldn''t possibly dream of nope, fuck that, can''t do it. Gimme it."
Vex rapidly pulled his face from his hands just in time to catch Misa tearing a thankfully small chunk of Drunkard''s Beard off the sample he''d collected and swallow it. And then she made a face.
"Tastes kinda gross," she said.
"You''re not really supposed to eat it," Vex muttered. Eating the moss actually diminished the effect; whatever allowed it to tap into the mechanisms the system used for mental skills though that was an assumption on his part, he reminded himself did not survive contact with the stomach acid of most species. "You just need to hold it close to your head. Or wherever your brain is."
"Then why did you tell me to eat it!" Misa made an indignant face, spluttering out the remnants of moss on her tongue.
"I didn''t tell you to eat it," Vex protested. "I told Derivan to make you eat it. Not the same thing!"
Misa''s eyes narrowed dangerously at him, and he swallowed. He was pretty sure this was just banter.
Mostly sure this was just banter.
To his relief, Misa grinned. "Whatever," she said. "Point is, the charm thing works. Didn''t feel a thing." She held it up to her head, just to make sure. "Yeah, nope."
"Want to take off the charm?" Sev said. "You know, just to make sure that it''s not the moss that''s faulty."
"That''s a great idea, Sev." Misa ripped off the charm, clearly about to say something else the moss was still held up to her head, like it was an ice pack. Instead of continuing, though, she wobbled slightly instead. "Whoa." She looked delighted. "This is like... full buzz. Instant. Dang. Howe you didn''t... share this before?"
"I wouldn''t dare damage the hallowed process of getting irresponsibly drunk by letting you skip steps," Vex said dryly, and then tried to hop up to grab the moss.
He failed, obviously. Misa was so dang tallpared to him. And also jumping to get it put his head dangerously close to the moss.
"Derivannn," he whined instead, and the armor chuckled. Reaching out, he plucked the moss away from Misa, much to her protests though she didn''t do much to stop him.
"Here you go," he said, gently depositing the sample back into Vex''s tailbag. "I wonder where I would have to hold it, for it to affect me?"
"Near your core, maybe?" Vex nced over Derivan. It hadn''t actually urred to him before that Drunkard''s Beard could likely affect even Derivan...
Actually. That seemed like a potential avenue of research. If he could figure out how to do whatever the moss did a project that veered dangerously close to figuring out the Wisfield Principle for himself then he could help Derivan taste food on his own terms.
That was something worth studying, right? Once there wasn''t some sort of ongoing crisis... which might be never. So maybe just in his free time.
"Perhaps." Derivan hummed, but didn''t seem inclined to test it and it waste enough in the day that Vex didn''t feel like pressing the matter.
"Do we want to discuss strategies for dealing with Wisfield in tomorrow''s meeting?" Sev nced out of the window. "It''s getting prettyte. I figure we''ll do thatst, get some rest, and then hopefully Rekka will have scheduled the meeting bright and early so we can get it out of the way."
"Might as well," Misa agreed with a sigh. "Hey, if Wisfield is annoying, do you think I can block conversational attacks?"
Sevughed, then looked worried. "Please don''t try. I''m pretty sure the way you block an insult is by punching them in the face."
"I would never do that," Misa said, tossed her mace in her hand casually. "Never."
Vex eyed her, and decided he was very d she was on their side. So d he went to give her a hug, which she seemed surprised by, but she smiled a genuine smile and hugged back.
So he probably wasn''t going to get maced!
With that, the four of them settled in to talk. It was... a drier conversation than even Vex would have liked, and he found himself drifting off, before long, leaning on Derivan''s arm yet again.
Rekka had, fortunately, managed to schedule the meeting for early in the morning. He''d even tried to do them one better by asking the Guildmaster for permission to use the neutral meeting room, so Wisfield would at least be suppressed the way they had been in the first meeting but that had been a dead end. It was in use, apparently, and Wisfield refused to use it besides.
Which meant they now had to meet up with whatever nobles Wisfield chose to talk to them with.
This was fine. They''d nned for this. They knew what Wisfield could do, even, an advantage that the people negotiating with them didn''t always have and they had a counter. That was something almost no one had.
Even with all of that, though, Vex didn''t expect the people that walked in through the door, as they sat in their corner of their meeting room. He froze.
Two Wisfield representatives he didn''t recognize, in the white-gold Wisfield colors. And then ck-red, the colors of the Ashion house, wrapped around one adult lizardkin man, and the tiny, fragile shoulders of a four-and-a-half year old lizardkin child.
Vex''s hands tightened into fists and didn''t let up, even when Derivan''s hand sped lightly over his own.
112 - Book 2: Chapter 49: Reunited
112 - Book 2: Chapter 49: Reunited
Breathe.
They''d known this was a possibility. Not this specific thing, perhaps Vex hadn''t even begun to consider that they might bring his little brother to a diplomatic meaning, he was only four but they''d known that Wisfield was going to do something to try to throw them off. That they''d chosen this method... sucked? It sucked. For a second it felt like all the progress he''d made was hollow, if this was all it took to undo him.
But only for a second. Because they''d known something like this was possible, even if they hadn''t identified the exact means, and there was a very, very significant advantage they had identified when it came to the Ry charms.
Allmunication was restricted to what they chose tomunicate. It didn''t apply only to the mental skills and what Wisfield might be able to derive from them. It applied to anything they said. It applied to their bodynguage. With those charms, they could speak freely, and Wisfield would hopefully be none the wiser.
Well, except for the part where they couldn''t read them. Indeed, the Wisfield representatives seemed slightly nonplussed; if Vex had to guess, they''d tried to read them and failed. But they were also trained to react minimally to surprises, so as to not reveal that they had identified from their mind-reading, and he reminded himself that he might just be reading too much into their expressions.
"Holy shit," Misa said, her voice filtered under the effects of the charm. Neither Wisfield nor Ashion reacted; they were watching carefully, apparently trying to gauge the four of them for a reaction, and they saw nothing that they chose not to share. "Is that a fucking child? Is that"
Misa cut herself off before she could continue, her own hands tightening into fists; her expression darkened like a storm, and yet there was not a flicker of reaction from Wisfield or Ashion.
So far so good.
"Is that a child?" Rekka said,pletely nonplussed and evidently not hearing Misa either. "He wasn''t on the guest list."
"I just thought I''d bring my youngest along." The adult lizardkin Karix, his father spoke with a deep baritone, smiling a charming, kind smile. The same smile he wore while strapping Vex into that chair
Breathe.
Vex stopped that train of thought before it could go any further. "He''s my brother," Vex exined tersely, making sure the charm filtered his words; he didn''t trust himself to speak yet. Not to them.
But he could only wait for so long before the silence itself became suspicious.
"They want you to ask why your brother is here," Derivan said. He was staring at the representatives of the two houses, his gaze flicking between Ashion and Wisfield; his eyes narrowed slightly on Karix. "...Wisfield wants to throw you off, emotionally. They are... anticipating. They are hoping you will stumble, and make your brother believe you do not want him here."
"That''s fucking shitty," Misa kept her voice low, though she didn''t need to. She was ring harder at Wisfield, though, and clearly she wasn''t trying to block that, because the Wisfield representatives were starting to look ufortable.
"Your father... he just wanted you to see your brother?" Derivan seemed unsure. "He is harder to read. I am sorry."
"It''s fine," Vex said quietly.
Breathe.
The sensation of Derivan''s hand on his own helped; the cool metal gave him something to focus on. Karix was still talking, saying something about how the Ashion family had all missed him, and how little Riss had missed him the most. Vex was fine with this. It gave him time to consider how he would act.
Slowly, calmly, he picked himself up from the table he was seated at, and walked over to Riss. His little brother stared up at him with wide eyes, one hand still clutched in their father''s, he seemed a little nervous to be out here. If his childhood so far was anything like Vex''s had been, then it had so far been kind, and fulfilling.
One and a half years left until that was gone.
"Hey, Riss," Vex said; he heard his own voice crack slightly, but he held firm to the magic in the cham, only letting his gentle happiness at seeing his brother through. And there was a lot of it. Thest time he''d seen Riss, he was so small, and in that small amount of time he''d grown so much
Riss'' eyes sparked with recognition, and his mouth fell open in the purest expression of joy; the kind only a child had. "It''s... it''s my brother!" he eximed, tugging excitedly on Karix''s hands. "Daddy! Look! It''s my brother!"
Karix smiled down at him, letting go of his hand. "Do you want to go greet your brother, Riss?"
"Yes!" Riss bounced on his feet a bit, and then ran forward the two steps he needed to reach Vex; he threw little arms around him, and Vex had to bend down quickly to catch his brother properly by the arms, lest the little guy end up hugging only his legs. "I missed you!"
"I''m surprised you remember me," Vex said with augh, doing his damndest to keep his tears out of his voice; no matter that he knew the charm was hiding it, it was hard for him to talk properly. His throat felt like there was a rugfly lodged in it. "You were so much smaller thest time I saw you!"
"Of course I remember you!" Riss folded his hands indignantly. "You were big. And helpful!"
"Big?" Vex chuckled. "Where did you get the idea that I was big? I''m like the smallest of all our siblings."
"You''re big here," Riss whispered, his tone almost conspiratorial. And then he pointed at Vex''s head, and then his heart.
Vex''sugh was genuine, this time, though there was a small part of him that ached. "I missed you too," he said, reaching out to poke the tip of Riss'' snout; the little lizard went cross-eyed trying to follow the movement, and wobbled on his feet. "Lemme introduce you to my friends, okay? They''re really cool."
"I don''t know..." Riss looked over Vex''s shoulder doubtfully. "They look kinda scary. Except the human."
"They''re very nice, I promise," Vex said, patting Riss on the head. "The big one lets me ride on his shoulders sometimes."
"Really?" Riss'' eyes went wide. "He''s so big!"
"Really!" Vex grinned, even though it had only happened once, and it had not been the mostfortable experience. "I can ask him for youter, if you want."
"Yes please!" Riss said, bouncing on his feet again, and Vex felt his heart go out to the lizardkin.
"He really has missed you," Karix said from above the two of them, rumbling in amusement. "For the first month after you left he talked about you nearly every day. I hope you found something that was worth it."
"...Maybe I did," Vex said, his wordsing out a little bit more curt than he intended. "But we can talk about thatter. After this meeting. What are you doing here, dad?"
"Wisfield wanted us along with the meeting, and I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to see my long-lost son again," Karix said, smiling at him. "You look like you''re doing well, Vex! Even a little bit taller. I''m proud of you."
"...Thanks, dad." Vex tried not to let his emotion show.
It would be so much easier if Karix was just pointlessly cruel. If he didn''t have so many moments of genuine kindness. If he could dismiss Karix as just evil.
A storm of mixed emotions rolled over Vex as he stood to walk back to his seat. Riss didn''t stop him; his little brother just waved happily at him, fully believing Vex would do as he promised and introduce themter; meanwhile, the Ashion and Wisfield representatives sat on the other side of the meeting table.
"Alright," one of the Wisfield representatives began he was an old, grizzled-looking human that looked just ever-so-slightly bored, his gaze flicking over the clipboard he''d brought with him. "Let''s get started. My name is Henry, and mypanion here is Wen. You already seem to know the Ashion house, so I won''t bother introducing them. The stated reason of this meeting is that you want to gain ess to the dungeon in Elyra, but there are two other agendas for this meeting. Is that correct?"
Wisfield couldn''t read them, but they could still read the minds of Rekka and the others; no doubt they''d caught on to some of what this meeting was meant to address through that. The words were meant to throw them off. Layers. They couldn''t read them, but were pretending they still could.
This was why Vex hated dealing with noble society. They had ancitipated this, though.
"And what are those other reasons?" Sev raised an eyebrow at Henry.
Henry''s brows furrowed together, almost imperceptibly. "You wanted to address your entrance to the Elyran dungeon, air your grievances with Wisfield and Ashion for our indiscretions in funding the Guild for political favor, and identify what we have done with the researchers that came back from your little dungeon excursion."
"That''s true." Sev let a flicker of admiration and respect flicker through the charm, from what Vex could tell. It seemed to help. The Wisfield representatives rxed just a bit, though Karix didn''t react at all. "The Guild isn''t particrly happy with Elyra right now, Henry."
"I''d argue that everything we''ve done has been to the Guild''s benefit." Henry folded his arms, and Vex let himself sigh.
This was going to be a long meeting.
Being able to sigh without the other party noticing was pretty cathartic, though. He fingered the charm around his neck briefly; it still seemed to be going strong, though the mana within it had dimmed slightly.
"You encouraged members of the Guild to pursue an avenue of research without the Guild''s explicit oversight, and provided funding so that this could happen. There''s no way you didn''t notice the side effect of the [Reinforcement] buff, Henry; your House would have noticed it immediately. You just took the opportunity to try to cement the Guild as another noble power in the city."
"We reward nobility to those that have earned it."
"The Guildmaster doesn''t want the Guild as a noble power here," Sev said, narrowing his eyes slightly. "We are a bridge between nobility and the average citizen. Noble status would affect our ability to recruit from themon folk. Image matters here. And, more to the point, the status of nobility would mean that the Guild would be beholden to Elyra for any military operations it wants to conduct."
"Hmm." Henry took a moment to absorb this, folding his hands across hisp. "Fine. We understand your reticence, even though we disagree with it. We apologize."
Sev paused. "An apology is not good enough for the damage you have done to the Guild. It will take time for us to heal from the effects of [Reinforcement]."
"I would argue that the damage done by that buff is hardly our fault," Henry said, shrugging. "We just provided the money. We''ll take responsibility for that. But the buff? That was all your people."
"You could have said something."
"We could have," Henry agreed easily. "But it hardly seems fair to me me for what we could have done. Not taking an action is hardly a crime."
Vex gritted his teeth slightly
"They are messing with us," Derivan said calmly, from the side. Vex turned to look at him; the armor was leaning forward in his seat, eyeing the Wisfield representatives with a sort of detached curiosity. "They are frustrated at being unable to read us, and trying to provoke a response. They truly do not feel responsible for what has been wrought here... I believe that may be a difficult avenue to approach."
"Change tacts, then?" Sev nced to Derivan.
"For now." Derivan tapped his fingers on the table, punctuating his statement with the ck of metal on wood. "There is something else that they want."
"Fine," Sev said, both to Derivan and to the Wisfield representatives; Henry frowned at him, as if confused by how long he''d taken to respond. "We''re not letting that go, but we''re tabling that, for now. I want to know when we can be allowed ess to the dungeon."
"It may take some time," Henry said. "The recent changes have caused a resurgence of research applications, which, as you know, take priority. Perhaps a month?"
"...A month." Sev almost didn''t keep the disbelief out of his voice. "This is a high-priority request from the Guild."
"A month is a short amount of time, for what you are requesting." Henry said; his words were patronizing. "Really, it''s a privilege to be able to ess the dungeon at all."
"There is a way around this." Henry''spanion, Wen, finally spoke; she nced contemtively between the adventurers. "If you were nobles, you could submit a research application, and it would be approved. With some conditions, of course. But yoru friend there cannot submit one for you."
Vex froze. "Me?"
"Yes." Karix frowned at him, the older lizardkin finally speaking up. "Really, now, we''ve let you do this long enough. You need toe home. Riss misses you."
"I do!" Riss waved at Vex,pletely oblivious to his father''s machinations.
"You''re not going to find a new magic all by yourself," Karix continued. "You''ve always been brilliant, but this is the kind of thing you need research teams for."
Ah.
There was the trap.
Nobility, or Vex rejoining the family.
Vex wasn''t sure why this, of all things, he hadn''t expected or nned for.
113 - Book 2: Chapter 50: The Beginnings of a Plan
113 - Book 2: Chapter 50: The Beginnings of a n
Whether he''d expected this or not, though, Karix''s words triggered something in Vex a seed of an idea. He had already found new magic, and if he wanted to, he could show it off right now. He could make his father eat his words. He couldn''t deny that it would be satisfying, even; the knowledge that he had a new magic in his hands was enough to give him leverage. Enough leverage to free his brother from the family''s traditions, maybe.
He wasn''t sure that was enough for him anymore.
There was something else he could do with that knowledge. Something that would mess with both Wisfield and Ashion even more.
And so despite himself, Vex grinned. "Sure," he said.
"Sure... as in yes?" Karix blinked, thrown off by Vex''s sudden eptance. "What?"
"Of course not," Vex scoffed. "Yes to your ultimatum. We''ll be nobles. Why not?"
"Vex?" Misa blinked at him. She whispered his name, even though the charm rendered it unnecessary. Vex just smiled at her and signaled that things were fine.
He had a n.
"I thought you didn''t want the Guild involved with the nobility," Henry said, clearly suspicious.
"We don''t," Vex said easily. "But let''s not talk about that right now. The process is the same, right? A household or the Guild, in our case submits a request to the Voting Council, right? Along with proof of work?"
"The process has not changed," Henry acknowledged.
"Great," Vex said. He spoke with a surprising amount of confidence. "Now, moving on to thest item on our list we want to know what happened to the researchers that came back here."
The rest of the meeting had been frustrating; Henry had been cagey and evasive, until they''d eventually convinced him to tell them what they''d done with those guards and researchers that had gone back to Elyra after the incident.
Which was nothing.
The guards and researchers had gone back to their posts with barely more than a p of the wrist, if anything, from the way Henry was couching his words, it seemed more likely than not that those researchers were rewarded.
For attacking their boss, because Kestel had been looking out for the delve team under him.
There had been a low thrum of anger through their group; even Rekka, sitting in, looked disgusted. But there was nothing they could do about it, at least not here. Not when their points of contact were the nobles that had created this system to begin with.
But that information would filter back. Just because there was nothing they could do now didn''t mean they would do nothing about it forever; it was just another process they had to get started.
Vex left the meeting feeling frustrated, but determined. He wasn''t happy with the oue, exactly, but he was eager to get started on his n.
"What was all that about?" Misa nudged him as they walked away from the meeting room; the nobles had opted to stay and partake in the food the Guild offered, which was a fairly transparent attempt at using the Guild''s resources instead of their own.
"The thing about nobility?" Vex smiled a small smile. "You''ll see. I want to go get some food distributed, first. Can''t put that off too long, right?"
And so they did.
It didn''t take them that long to get back to their caravan and recharge the mana-engine that went into it; it had already recharged mostly from the ambient mana in the city which, now that Vex was paying attention, seemed a little higher than normal.
"Where to first?" Sev asked, standing at the controls.
"I''ve got a location," Vex said; he walked over to input their destination into the controls, and the quiet rumble of the caravan slowly took over. Vex almost wanted to speak, but he didn''t; instead, he walked over to a seat, and stared out of one of the windows.
He hadn''t quite been paying attention before. Elyra had looked the same, and Vex had been distracted by the way they had been treated by the guards, and the absolutely enormous building the Guild had transformed into.
But now he was paying attention to the people, and things didn''t look... good.
No one looked like they were starving, exactly, but they were thinner than they should have been. The loud conversations and friendly banter he remembered the screaming children, even were gone. People spoke to one another quietly, in whispers; food stores no longer disyed their food out in the open, though they still existed.
When he''d left, the people of Elyra had been... happy, for a given value of happy. There were problems, certainly, but it hadn''t been too difficult to live.
Not anymore, it seemed.
It was odd how the smallest things changed a city so much. The quiet was almost disconcerting for Vex, who almost felt the urge to break the silence with chatter, and yet even that seemed disrespectful.
Instead, he remained silent until they reached the first of the merchants that had helped him so long ago, when he''d left Elyra.
The store was old and run-down a far cry from when he''dst seen it. Once-polished wood gave way to splinters and cracks, and the sign outside the door was dirty and dusty; rust ked off the once-proud symbol of this small cksmith, a metal cast of a dagger outlined in silver. Vex was almost worried that the store was closed entirely and permanently, but the warm glow of firelight beyond the door told him otherwise.
"Hello?" Vex called out, pushing the door open; he winced when it creaked at him, signalling his arrival with a high-pitched whine that echoed through the smithy. The shop was filled with its traditional rack of weapons, with a special disy for the daggers that were the smith''s favorite; even this one, Vex saw, was now mostly empty. He''d once said he''d never sell any of those daggers.
The most important one of them was still there, at least.
"One moment!" A voice called back Vex didn''t recognize it. A man emerged from the back a secondter, dusting his hands off on his apron and giving them a tired smile. "Sorry, it''s been... well, it''s been. Honestly, I can''t say it''s been busy. Just... trying to keep myself busy. You know how it is." He let out a smallugh, and then when Vex and the others didn''t join in, he blinked and looked at them again.
"Oh, shit, you''re new to Elyra," he muttered to himself. "Uh, hi! I''m Ingress. Wee to Wee to Dagger Superiority. Um. How can I help you? You''re adventurers?"
"Is Victor here?" Vex asked politely, looking around the shop. He didn''t see any trace of the man that had helped him.
"Ah." Ingress winced slightly. "He''s... not doing very well at the moment. Not able to work. I''m sorry. I assure you, though, I can do anything he can"
"Is he okay?" Vex interrupted, unable to keep the worry out of his voice, and Ingress paused.
"You knew him?" the young man asked. "Ah, shit, I''m sorry. I shouldn''t have broken it to you like that."
"He helped me a while ago," Vex said quietly. "I wanted to see him again. And ask for his help, uh... since he probably has more connections than I do here."
Ingress sighed. "He liked helping people," he said with a small smile, and then at the look Vex gave him, quickly corrected himself. "He likes. Likes helping people."
"He''s... not okay, is he?" Vex asked. Sev learned forward, touching his arm, and Vex shook his head, he would not ask Sev to heal another person and strip away another part of himself.
"He''s alive," Ingress said. He nced around and found a chair to copse into, gesturing to the other four to take a seat, too; a lot of his energy seemed to drain out of him, all in an instant. "Dad''s always been a bit too stubborn. Got a touch of rustbite a bit ago, and we didn''t have the shards or the gold to get it cured. He just kinda kept working."
"He kept working with rustbite?" Vex asked. "In a smithy?"
"We told him it was stupid," Ingress shrugged. "But... he loves this shop. It''s everything to him."
"Those daggers were, too," Vex said, ncing at the half-empty shelf he''d noticed earlier.
"He told you about them, huh?" Ingress''s smile was wry. "Yeah. He''s the one that sold them, though. Not even for a rustbite cure, can you believe that? He did it because one of our neighbours were starving."
"That sounds like him." Vex hesitated. "Is he... here?"
"He''s upstairs, but I don''t think you want to see him." Ingress winced. "Rustbite..."
"It''s not pretty, I know," Vex said quietly. "But he helped me out when I needed it; I feel like I should see him... No, you''re noting with me, Sev."
"But I can"
"Sev." This time it was Misa that spoke; she put her hand on his shoulder and shook her head. The charm saved Ingress from having to hear what they were saying. "Just... spare yourself. Late-stage rustbite can''t be healed, and if you do it, you''re going to take an even bigger hit than you did from healing Lendel."
Misa was right, of course.
Vex headed up the stairs with Derivan while Sev tried to argue with Misa argued and argued poorly, in fact; he knew she was right, too. If Vex had to guess, Sev felt it was necessary to at least see who he was refusing to heal; to remember them, and carry them with him, because it was someone he could have saved.
It was a noble thought.
Noble, but not at all healthy.
The steps up to upper floors of the smithy were remarkably clean,pared to the exterior of the building and evenpared to the shop; there wasn''t much to the upper floors. Two doors leading to two bedrooms, and a living room of some sort in the back. Vex didn''t bother looking. He could spell the tangy, metallic smell of rustbite practically radiating from one of the rooms.
"Rustbite''s a degenerative malus," Vex said quietly to Derivan, just before he opened the door; he knew the armor was curious, and he needed something to break the silence and distract himself. Derivan was probably staying quiet to stay respectful. "It''s metal umtion, basically. The name''s not entirely urate. You get clumps of metal building up in your body, and eventually it starts to grow out of it."
"That sounds... unpleasant." Derivan paused. "Should I being in with you?"
"He''s most likely too far gone for it to matter," Vex said quietly. "The way Ingress was talking about it, I can''t imagine it would. But your metal won''t have a big effect on him, either way, as long as you don''t touch him directly."
He pushed open the door.
There was a cruelty in rustbite, in that it was a magical disease that produced results that were grosteque and picturesque, all at once; the small fments forming a minuature forest would have been beautiful had it not been growing on an old man''s body. Vex barely recognized Victor beneath it all, and he had to suppress the urge to flinch away; instead, he approached Victor slowly.
"I''m sorry this happened to you," he said. The words felt wholly inadequate. "And thank you for what you did for me."
He wished there was a way to know Victor heard him, underneath it all. There was the slow shift of his chest as he breathed; that was the terrible interaction between rustbite and health. Unlike a lot of degenerative maluses, rustbite didn''t cause a reduction in health; if anything, it increased your health. It was strange. But the metal that grew was a physical impediment, and as the malus progressed, victims lost the use of their limbs.
There was a case here to be made for a merciful death; many of those with rustbite would choose that option, if they didn''t have the means to cure it. But Victor...
"Oh, I''m never gonna die." The old man grinned at a younger Vex, handing him the materials he''d requested; manaforged metal shaped like a dagger, and manashaped wood for the hilt. "Trust me. Come back whenever, and you''ll find me."
"That seems..." Vex tried to find the words. It was a little arrogant? But he couldn''t just say that.
"I just don''t ever want to die." Victor seemed quite firm about it, too. "No matter what happens. I wanna stick around to see what the world bes, ya know? As long as there''s a chance I can keep going, I''m gonna."
Victor wouldn''t have gone for a merciful death.
"I wonder," Derivan said softly. "If there is a way to truly speak with him."
Vex nced at him. "[Telepathy] doesn''t work," he said. "Rustbite eats into the parts of the brain that understandnguage."
Derivan traced a shape in the air in response; the looping letters of Communication. Vex stared at it for a moment, and then at Victor.
Sev had the ability to heal. Vex hadn''t considered that he might be able to do something, because that had never been his role, but this... this was a start?
This was what he wanted to do anyway.
"Maybe we can," he agreed.
114 - Book 2: Chapter 51: Interlude - Xothok
114 - Book 2: Chapter 51: Interlude - Xothok
Xothok was... antsy. He hated using that word to describe himself. It was a stupid word, for small, stupid people. What use was anxiety? He''d never had to worry about it before, because before, his main concern had been about getting food. There was nothing to worry about besides that, and that was a pretty easy thing to worry about: either they had food, or they didn''t.
But the Guild was giving them food, in the most baffling show of trust that Xothok had seen along with the fact that, as far as he could tell, they weren''t actually being kept at the Guild. They were given a ce to sleep, and all they had to do to get food was head down to the mess hall; they didn''t even have to fucking pay. They just had food given to them.
It wasn''t great food, by any means. It was... ptable. What they needed to eat to survive. Hardly a luxury meal, or even a greatfort like the kind you could get at the more tavern-like section of the Guild, where they served big, meaty dishes, but he couldn''t...in?
Besides, the people in the mess hall sometimes snuck them good meals, even. He could tell when they did it, because their own meals would be the gruel they were fed, and that meant they were feeding the bandits their own lunches, which was... what? Why?
He didn''t fucking understand, and he hated it.
The worst part was probably the fact that he could have left. He was pretty sure any of them could have left. Max had stopped them from leaving when they tried to escape her, back when she was escorting them to the Guild and by the gods was she terrifying when she was in battle, everywhere she needed to be and nowhere she wasn''t, with not a single person being able to get past her guard but when they''d actually arrived...
She arranged for them to have beds, and told them they could have food whenever they wanted. If they wanted to join the Guild, they would have to apply, and they would have to start from Iron. Not even Bronze Iron.
And then she left?
And he had to deal with the riot that ensued, with half the bandits under him demanding answers he didn''t have, a quarter of them asking about joining the Guild, and thest quarter determined to leave. They''d even tried to leave, for a while, except they''d quickly gotten hungry and turned right back around, because the food was just... there.
So that little rebellion had ended as quickly as it had begun, and it was frustrating, because Xothok couldn''t fucking decide what he was supposed to do. He didn''t want to just bend over and be an adventurer not only had the Elyran Guild fucked them over, but it felt like joining the Guild would be something like admitting defeat but more and more of the bandits wanted to join, and it was getting harder to find reasons not to.
If that wasn''t enough, Byrrhon was still causing trouble he was the only one that was, constantly picking fights with adventurers, even though each time Max handily shut him down but it was starting to wear on them, he saw. Byrrhon might single handedly get them all kicked out.
And then there were the dreams.
He hadn''t gotten the image of that stupid spell out of his head. The one that armored adventurer had cast that filled the air with frost and fire, the one that scattered lit fireballs into the atmosphere. It had sparked something inside him that he couldn''t quite ce, and now, every night, he would stare at the night sky and feel something inside him ache.
Xothok just couldn''t ce why. Part of him wanted to me it on some sort of curse, but he already knew that wasn''t true. All his men had seen the same damn spell, and most of them hadn''t had the same reaction. Two had a simr reaction, but Two was... he wasn''t sure what was going on with Two, actually. Sometimes the man seemed even more despondent about the sky than he was.
His dreams were rted to this, he was pretty sure. He was still staring up at the sky in his dreams but he could never remember clearly what the sky looked like. It was different, definitely. There was something about his dreams that were different from reality. What that difference was just refused to stay in his mind once he woke.
Except every so often, there would be a flicker of recognition. Usually during the night, if he happened to be awake; he would have a moment when he would remember...
But then he would forget again, and the moment would pass, and even though he''d made attempts to write it down made attempts to speak to others what he''d written remained meaningless to him. It was like the words he''d written simply passed through his head.
Which brought him back to now, tonight. The real reason he was feeling so antsy, and the reason he was sitting here thinking about things, when normally he was the sort of person that would act. He''d have to try something different, if writing it down didn''t work. He needed to wait for the moment he remembered, and he needed to find any sort of way he couldmunicate this back to himself.
Because Xothok was starting to understand that there was a part of himself locked away from him.
He stared up at where the moon hung in the sky, at the dark-blue sky beside it. The moon was a light-green disk in the air, a perfect, featureless circle. Something about that seemed strange, even though it had been that way for as long as he could remember. He felt that small ache in his heart again...
...and then something began to unravel.
Somewhere far away, someone cast [Starry Night], and a small part of Xothok remembered. It had taken time, and many casts, and he''d had to personally see the spell for it to even begin to awaken that part of him, but now that it had now that he knew there was something he was missing, and was trying to remember something broke.
Just for a second.
Stars.
Not just stars, but his entire ss he''d been an [Astral Navigator], or something very simr. There was an error on his status sheet that he couldn''t see that his eyes kept zing over, every time he looked at it
there were marks on the walls, his various attempts at trying to remind himself of what he''d forgotten, a half-dozen messages written in code and implication that he just couldn''t see
There wasn''t time to be overwhelmed. He''d been through this before, more than once. Every time he wasted those precious minutes where he remembered, overwhelmed by the density of what he''d lost. Overwhelmed by the density of what they''d all lost, really.
He wasn''t the only one.
Byrrhon had loved the stars. Two had a name. Something that was core to their selves, stripped away. Even now, with his memory of the stars returned, there were pieces and details that remained lost to him. He suspected they were lost forever. That this small piece had returned at all was a small miracle.
Writing didn''t work. He''d written a message for himself,st time, and his eyes zed over the message the same way they zed over the error in his status. He made a quick mark on his arm using the quill anyway he couldn''t remember what he''d forgotten, but this helped him remember that he''d forgotten something, and it had workedst time.
Then he scattered spilled ink onto the parchment he''d prepared, letting it spread and seep into the paper. He''d nned on writing another message to himself, but it was obvious that that route led nowhere; he''d tried enough times. Now he used the skills of his false ss to his advantage, [Steal]ing away fragments of ink to make the appearance of those stars in the sky and just so he wouldn''t misunderstand the makeshift painting for something else, he stole away arge, spherical section of ink, too, to represent the moon.
He wasn''t sure this would work. There was every chance it would simply fail again, and he
he needed to ask for help.
That was the point of the Guild.
He''d seen it, in bits and pieces, in fragments of memories that were no longer his own. An Elyran house that focused on astronomy and navigating the stars among the stars or beneath them, he didn''t know, and didn''t remember but they''d worked together with the Guild. He remembered something a clerk had told him.
We''re just here to help. But sometimes people don''t know when to ask for help, you know? No one does everything alone, but in Elyra in particr there''s this sentiment that you should do things by yourself, or just within your House; secretsyered upon secrets that end up holding back progress. Seriously, if you ever need to, just... ask. We''re always here.
He hadn''t liked asking for help even when he''d been whole. That was even worse when he''d be a bandit, because just asking for food that was already scarce never worked out well, and the one time they''d asked to join the Guild they''d been turn away. Xothok wondered for a moment if that was the real cause of the resentment he''d been harboring towards the Guild.
The fact that they''d offered to help, and they hadn''t helped, in the end.
But now they were here, and it was obvious that the Guild was more than what the Elyran branch had been. Now that he thought about it, there were other signs that the Elyran branch was unwell, as well details he hadn''t noticed before
He didn''t have the time to think about this. He had to make a decision, before the clock ran out on whatever spell that stupid armored adventurer was using
Fucking fine.
He mmed the door open.
It was simultaneously relieving and exasperating to find that Max was already there, right outside the door relieving because he didn''t know how much time he had left to remember, and exasperating because he still didn''t know how she managed to be where she needed to be. She wasn''t wearing her usual confident grin, though. Her brows were furrowed, and she stared past Xothok into the room, trying to see if anything was going on with the rest of the bandits.
"They''re fine," he snapped, not even sure if he was right.
Max frowned at him. "Are they?"
"They''re not the problem right now." Xothok was vaguely aware that he sounded ridiculous. "I need"
The lizardkin stopped, his words catching in his throat. Why was it so fucking hard to ask for help. He gritted his teeth. "I need help."
Max''s eyes sharpened. To his relief, she didn''t poke fun at him the way he''d half-expected her to do. "What''s happening?"
"I keep forgetting." Xothok fought the fog that was starting to creep in. Picturing the night sky somehow helped keep it clear, filled with those specks of light filled with stars. "Need to remember."
"Ah, shit," Max muttered. She nced into the air, presumably at an invisible system window. "Is this the same it might be... Hold on. Guildmaster''s on her way."
The Guildmaster wasing. The Guildmaster wasing? Why did this involve her? Part of him recoiled, not ready to talk to the person in charge of all of this. A woman came down the stairs, then, at precisely the wrong moment, and he almost opened his mouth tosh out
he recognized her.
Why did he recognize her?
The woman frowned at him, and then the Guildmaster spoke. "It''s the same infolock," she said to Max. "I haven''t made any progress against it. I think Gerard in the Anderstahl branch has made some steps getting around it, but his sess has been pretty limited, too."
"Sounds like we don''t have a lot of options." Max nced at Xothok, and her eyes turned sympathetic; he hated it.
"This infolock is tied... very deeply with you." The Guildmaster stared at him, and hesitated. "This is an opportunity we would not normally have. There may be something I can do here, but it is not without cost."
"Just tell me what the fuck it is."
"A perception lock." The Guildmaster looked serious. "You''re tied very closely to this infolock, and that''s the only reason this is possible at all but I can tie off this part of you, the part that remembers. Which means you''re going to have this part of yourself severed from you, and it''ll be like... a voice on your shoulder. Someone you can talk to, that remembers, but someone that''s not you. And you''ll be everything else everything that remains."
Xothok paused.
"That''s just what I am already, isn''t it?" he asked. "I can remember some shit now, but it''s not enough."
The Guildmaster remained silent, and that was answer enough.
"Do it," he said.
He wanted to see the person he could have been.
115 - Book 2: Chapter 52: The Plan?
115 - Book 2: Chapter 52: The n?
Communication was only the beginning. There was still more to be done the Communication glyph was not, on its own, able to mimic anything soplex as even the [Telepathy] spell, let alone surpass the physical limitations that rustbite imposed on its victims.
But the set of glyphs they had were limited. Given time, Vex would have loved to explore the glyph system on his own; he could have spent days diving into different glyphbinations, identifying everything that worked and why.
That wasn''t the n, though.
The n was simple.
Nobility in Elyra ruled through a majority vote, with every House agreeing to do whatever that majority vote dictated; this was primarily enforced through House Julia and House Vale the enforcers and the military, respectively. There was a rather obvious reason Wisfield had wanted the Guild to qualify as a single noble House. With a total of sixteen noble families that all mostly voted unanimously, they would be able to effectively control the Guild through their votes.
It was a tantly obvious maneuver, made all the more obvious by the fact that they were willing to let go of the usual requirement that a single House be blood rted. Though that, too, was a rule that they often let slip...
Vex sighed.
The point was that there was an obvious hole in this n that Wisfield never ounted for, and had no real reason to ount for. New noble families were few and far between for a number of reasons; the biggest one was that it was hard toe upon a discovery significant enough to be a House without the kind of funding and resources that came from nobility to begin with. The second biggest one was that it was easy to sabotage anyone that was about to hit upon any such discovery, and steal that secret for themselves.
A few noble families held more than one secret that could qualify as their Principle.
Vex had exactly one such secret but the nobles didn''t know that. Thest time Wisfield had met them was before he''d even discovered glyphs, and in the most recent meeting they''d already worked out ry glyphs. Wisfield had never had the opportunity to find out that Vex had a whole new magic
which meant that what Vex had here was an opportunity.
He had eight glyphs and two signs to work with, not including glyphbinations. One glyph to each family meant he could create eight new nobles; he needed another nine to overturn the majority vote, and many, many more if he wanted to actually affect the direction Elyra was taking. He didn''t have enough glyphs to make the changes he wanted to.
But that was fine. He only needed to nt the seeds, now; he needed only a single family that would help him.
"Let''s go downstairs," Vex said to Derivan. The armor blinked at him, surprised.
"We are leaving?" he asked. "I had assumed we would..."
"We will," Vex said. "But Communication by itself isn''t going to be enough. We''re going to need Ingress''s help, and I want to make sure he''s the right kind of person. We need to start at the right ce, at least."
He hoped his n would work. There was every chance it could backfire spectacrly.
Vex and Derivan found Ingress, Sev, and Misa lounging in the corner of the shop. In the time since they''d left, the three of them had apparently managed to find something inmon all of them were fascinated by a particr ''weapon'' Victor had apparentlye up with before he''d been taken by rustbite. It was one of hisst projects, in fact.
So really, ''lounging in the corner of the shop'' wasn''t that urate a descriptor at all; Ingress and Sev were both trapped in a corner, and Misa was poking at them with a massive stick.
"I feel like I should''ve known something like this would happen in the five minutes we were gone, but somehow I can''t imagine how," Vex remarked.
"Vex!" Misa''s eyes lit up. "Look at this. It''s such a cool fuckin'' idea. See, it''s a really long stick"
"I can see that."
"look, you know what I mean. It''s a really long stick, and there are these rotating hinged des at the end that lock in ce"
"Please tell me this isn''t a weapon used to cut people in half."
"Nope!" Misa grinned. "The des are dull; all it does it trap someone at a distance. I can''t believe something like this wasn''t already in use by the Guild. We don''t exactly have a lot of melee non-lethal options."
"There are problems with it," Ingress said. "Dad said it''s an Earth invention, so it doesn''t really ount for the system. Someone with enough dexterity could unlock those des pretty easily. Or just jump out of the hoop. We need to ount for those."
"You could probably solve part of the problem by using a mana lock instead of a physical lock," Vex said thoughtfully, and he saw the spark in Ingress''s eyes; the cksmith leapt up "Before you leave," he added hurriedly. "I need your help with something."
"Oh!" Ingress looked surprised. "Do you need a new weapon or something? You guys look pretty kitted out already, I didn''t think you needed anything new from me. Though I guess some of your stuff does look a little out of date."
Vex grimaced a little. "Not with weapons," he rified, much to Ingress''s apparent disappointment. "We need help with organising people."
"What for?" Ingress frowned at them, suddenly cautious. "We''ve tried to organize protests before. House Julia shuts us down pretty quickly."
"Not with protesting," Vex said. He gestured towards the door their caravan was still waiting outside, secured in a variety of spells and skills to keep the goods from being stolen. There were small, intentional security holes in those spells, in fact, but they were holes that would allow a thief to steal a loaf or two of bread if needed; nothing too egregious, and it stopped them from trying to break the whole setup entirely. "We need your help distributing food."
"Distributing" Ingress''s eyes went wide. "You guys came here with supplies?"
"Donation from the Guild, yeah," Sev said. "We were going to send it to the government for distribution, but"
"Oh fuck thank the gods you came here," Ingress interrupted, his eyes still a little wide, but he seemed to be rapidly calming down. Vex could almost see him trying to figure out exactly how many problems he could solve with an injection of food, and where those problems were worst. "Okay, I might need some time to get everyone together, but we can definitely help. You''re going to need more people than what I can gather though. You don''t actually have enough food for everyone, right?"
"Not quite," Sev admitted. "We''re working on figuring out the problem."
"At least someone''s doing something about it," Ingress said. "I''m half covinced it''s another one of those fucking no nevermind. Don''t mind me, I''m sorry. You actually have to deal with those guys, so you probably have it worse off than me."
"You don''t know the half of it," Vex muttered.
"Thank you," Ingress said, catching all of them off guard with his sincerity. "I seriously, thank you."
Sev watched Ingress for a moment. "...The problem''s a bit worse than it looks, isn''t it?"
"You don''t know the half of it," Ingress said, echoing Vex; he shared a significant nce with the lizardkin. "The nobles aren''t exactly fair with how they distribute food, and some of them don''t like the thought of us redistributing that food, so some families are worse off than others. We try to help when we can, but..."
"What would you do if you had nobility, Ingress?" Vex asked suddenly. "This family, I mean?"
"I don''t fucking want nobility." Ingress''s tone gained a sudden sharpness to it, and he paused only when he saw the way Vex flinched. "...Sorry. That''s a bit of a sore topic for me. For... a lot of us, actually. Not everyone. A lot of people still want it. But that''s sort of the problem."
"The idea you can just earn nobility is a trap, yeah," Vex said with a shrug, and Ingress seemed to rx a bit. "The fact that there are only sixteen noble families after all this time should say a lot on its own. That''s why I''m asking what you would do if you were one of them."
"Nothing," Ingress said. "I mean, don''t get me wrong, I''d try. But if you had any idea of how the nobles vote... one new family isn''t going to do anything. No offense. I''d sooner quit and do the work where it really matters than y around at politics."
"And if there were more than that?" Vex asked. He was d for Ingress''s answers, but also starting to hesitate; Ingress''s points were good ones. "Eight? Seventeen?"
"...You''d need to get that many of us agreeing." Ingress said warily. "I know you haven''t met that many of us, but we argue a lot about what we think is best. The only thing we really agree on is that this system doesn''t work. It might be a start, but..."
Ingress sighed. "Two major problems," he said, his tone suddenly serious. "One is that I''m not sure I should be trusted you barely know me. I know you haven''t offered, but this conversation is obviously going in a direction, and I''d rather embarrass myself a bit in a hypothetical than risk looking like I''m not taking this seriously. More than that, I don''t trust me. I try to be a good person, but I''m not immune to the shit that goes down here. I can''t live here without being affected by it, you know?
"The second issue and it''s probably the bigger one is that if you''re nning on somehow making twenty different families nobles all at the same time, or even more than that, the nobles that are currently in power can and will change the rules on you. Remember, everything is enforced through Julia and Vale; the only reason they bend to the other Houses in a vote is because they agree the majority of the time, and because each House provides a service to them that''s too valuable for them to risk losing. Introduce twenty Houses at once and Julia is just going to sit down and refuse to act, no matter how we vote on it. Hell, they could dere us illegitimate and just go after all the new Houses, and not a single one of us could stop them."
"The Guild might be able to." Vex hesitated even saying the words; he wasn''t sure they could. Maybe Ingress was right, and this approach wasn''t the right one after all; he could just show his glyphs to Karix, and force his father to both let them into the Elyran dungeon and free Riss from following in his footsteps.
He''d still make that glyph for Victor, though.
"Maybe." Ingress voice softened a bit. "To be very clear, I''m willing to risk that. But I don''t know that everyone will be. I''m just warning you ahead of time. You obviously have a n, and I''m not saying it won''t work, but..."
"I want to make everyone a noble," Vex blurted, and he colored as everyone turned to stare at him; not only Ingress, but Sev and Misa and Derivan, too; the only indication of surprise on the armor''s part was the slight widening of his eyes. "...Not just seventeen. It''d be the same as removing the idea of nobility entirely."
Ingress paused and narrowed his eyes slightly. "Are you saying you have a way to do that?"
"...Maybe." There was a sudden intensity in Ingress''s eyes.
"Right." Ingress frowned, and Vex watched the intensity suddenly vanish from his eyes. "Let me... get in touch with some others."
116 - Book 2: Chapter 53: Definitely a Progression Fantasy
116 - Book 2: Chapter 53: Definitely a Progression Fantasy
Vex sat ufortably in the caravan. The windows were all locked and spelled shut he could have dispelled it rather easily, but chose not to. Ingress had said something about taking them somewhere secret, and was sitting in the caravan with them; it was a bit of a tight squeeze with five people, but Vex didn''t figure it was a trap.
Or, well, they''d discussed it and figured there was a chance it was a trap, but Ingress had been genuine when he''d agreed to help with food distribution. Vex suspected this was a step that was even further than what he was nning to do initially.
"Ingress is kind of bad at keeping secrets," Misa said dryly, adjusting her ry charm to hide what she was saying from him.
"He''s bringing us to a meetup for some kind of rebellion, right?" Sev said.
"I think it''s likely." Vex nced at the cked-out windows again, wondering exactly what was so secret about the route there weren''t many ces to hide in the kingdom. "I remember hearing rumours about a rebellion even back when I was living here. They never really seemed to go anywhere, but..."
"I imagine it would be hard to rebel properly, in a ce like this," Derivan said. "Power does not appear to be distributed evenly, for all that the system makes it easier to gain power."
"The Guild''s the only means for most people to safely get intobat situations that will help them raise their level fast enough to matter," Vex said, nodding. "Probably part of why they want to gain the Guild as an asset. And even then, you haven''t seen how the Julia enforcers fight. They''re strong, and really loyal. It''s like the delve team thing."
"Emotional suppression?" That was Sev; the cleric leaned forward, an irritated furrow in his brows.
"That''s so fucking shitty," Misa grumbled..
"Yep." Vex sighed. "I hope there''s something more we can do. Julia recruits people by promising them power and a lot of pay a lot of people join them because it''s one of the most consistent ways to get pay. They know they''re going to be emotionally suppressed, but there''s the promise of money going back to their families..."
"What about Vale?" Derivan asked.
"Same thing, more or less," Vex said. "The enforcers and the military do almost the same things Julia and Vale even pretty much always vote together. The only reason they''re separate Houses is because they have a different Principle; Julia''s is the loyalty thing, and Vale has the enhanced leveling and training program that their enforcers and agents go through. And delve teams, when they decide to train one of those."
"Sounds like we need to break both of those Houses," Misa said bluntly. Vex winced.
"Don''t let any of them hear you say that," he said.
"Will glyphs actually help the rebels?" Sev asked. "Assuming we''re right, and that''s where Ingress is taking us, as opposed to some noble-operated trap."
Vex hesitated. "I''m... not sure," he said. "I think Ingress got some of the idea; he understands that I have a secret that can be applied broadly enough that we can make multiple noble houses out of it, enough to mess with the voting bloc."
"He also believes that won''t work," Misa said. "And he''s probably right. Sorry, Vex. It''s a good idea, but in practice..."
"Yeah, I know," Vex said, sighing. "I got a little excited. I want to get this done with as little bloodshed as possible, but... I don''t know. We''ll see what they say, I guess. And then we can figure out what we want to do about it."
There was a small silence for a while.
"We need to get ahead of the game," Misa said softly. "We''re keeping up for now, but if we get a chance if we get to the dungeon, somewhere else where time is stretched out we need to figure out everything we can do, and make sure we''re ahead for the next disaster. We''re surviving for now, but we''re doing it through tricks, and even if we n on sticking with that n... We should have more tricks. What would happen if we fought the Julia enforcers now, Vex?"
"We''d lose," Vex said firmly. "I hate to say it, but we would. None of them really have rare sses or anything, but they''re all at least Gold in terms of level, and the sheer number of them on top of the raw stats we can do a lot, but we can''t do enough."
"The more we understand the system, the better," Misa said. "It''s another reason to get into the dungeon as soon as we can. We need more time."
"I have many things about my status that I must study in detail," Derivan agreed.
"There''s more I can figure out about glyphs," Vex said. "There''s something about the way my sign works..."
"I feel like all of you guys have something," Sev said. "I''m not sure where I''m gonna go. Gain more levels?"
"You have your connection with Aurum," Vex pointed out.
"If only he would respond to me," Sev said with a sigh. "But... yeah, I''ll try something. Maybe he''s caught up in something. There''s Onyx to worry about, too. I think the Guildmaster sent a message about Velykos going to investigate that. I''ll have to keep up with what they''re doing."
"So," Ingress said, startling Vex, who had sort of forgotten that Ingress was in the cabin with them at all. "Who are you guys, anyway? I mean, I know your names now, but not really anything about you. Why do you care about Elyran politics?"
"Vex is Elyran," Sev said, giving Vex a significant nce. Vex winced a bit.
"I''m from Ashion, actually," he said. There would only be problems if he tried to hide that; he would have mentioned it earlier, but he''d forgotten.
"You''re what." Ingress'' voice was t, and his eyes turned flinty and hard; Vex saw his hands poised over an invisible keyboard, like he was ready to send off a message and call off the whole thing.
"Victor should''ve mentioned it, right?" Vex said, trying to head off the impending conflict; he saw Ingress rx slightly. "I was trying to get away from my House, and Victor helped me."
"Oh." Ingress deted a little. "Right. He didn''t exactly say that, but he said something about wanting to help your little brother."
"The practices of House Ashion are not... particrly pleasant on their children," Vex said. "Part of the reason we''re a smaller House, really."
They could have partnered with Julia and created loyal mages; Julia had even pushed for that on a number of asions. It would have made them a bigger and more influential House, even. Karix had refused. For everything else that was wrong with his father, even he disliked the emotion-cutting magics that Julia used to ensure loyalty.
"I see," Ingress said, and he looked down for a moment. "Not even their kids get away with it unscathed, huh."
Vex chuckled, though it wasn''t a happy chuckle. "Not particrly, no."
The caravan rolled to a stop, suddenly, and Ingress nced up. "We''re here," he said. "Come on."
He pushed the door open, revealing a small, cramped room that the caravan had somehow maneuvered into; it was lit by a number of ghost-blue enchanted torches. Vex recognized the design, even; they were a fairly expensive brand of torches that enhanced illusory and anti-perception based magic.
Which made a lot of sense, considering the amount of magic Vex sensed around them; it was cleverly obscured for anyone with basic mana sight, because it was colored just the same way as the walls, and distributed evenly through them. Anyone not paying attention would sense that they were like any other wall in the city. The entrance to the room was obscured with this illusory magic, making it look like they were in a dark, empty room lit only by flickering blue light.
"Kinda creepy lighting," Sev remarked. Vex had to agree. "Not very encouraging."
"Sorry," a light voice resounded; Vex blinked once, and realized that a tall lizardkin was standing in front of him, her head almost scraping against the ceiling. He recognized her, even it was the librarian that would often help him with his spellbooks. A snap of her fingers, and the ghost-blue turned into the regr orange light of a torch, though mana sight helped him see the same blue still hidden in its flickers. "It is usually simpler to keep it blue."
"The magic''s more effective that way, too," Vex said, and the older lizardkin smiled at him.
"I am d you still remember your lessons."
"I paid attention," Vex said, preening just a bit, and the old lizardkin chuckled.
"You made some friends, I see," she said. "Came back to fix this broken old kingdom?"
"Came back for a few reasons, actually," Vex admitted. "One of them is my brother. Another is to get into the dungeon. It''s... a work in progress. Wisfield is kind of forcing our hand here, though."
"They want you to do something for them?" another person spoke up this one was a grizzled-looking orc, leaning against one of the walls. He stood with his arms folded, a scowl on his face that looked like it had been etched in. "And you got out of it?"
"We tried," Vex said. "Like I said, it''s a work in progress. They want me back in the Ashion household and they want the Guild to join the nobles. Both of those things are"
"Quite bad, yes," Ingress said with a frown. "They''re angling to get the Guild as a puppet."
"Is this everyone?" Misa asked, frowning slightly. "This is some kind of rebellion, right? There''s just three people here."
"I don''t know if we''re a rebellion, dear," the old lizardkin-librarian said with a kindly chuckle. "But we needed a ce to meet up and discuss what was happening to our kingdom, away from prying eyes... this seemed as good a ce as any."
"You said you need a way to get into the Elyran dungeon?" the orc asked. "We can get you in there. But we''ll need something in return."
"I assumed that was why you brought us here," Sev said. "You want to know more about Vex''s n?"
"Not exactly," Ingress said. "Like I said, it won''t work the nobles control too much already. But you must have some kind of powerful secret, if you were nning on creating so many noble houses."
"So we want to propose a trade," the librarian said. She smiled. "I am d it''s you, Vex. I was a little worried someone had tricked poor Ingress. He can be a little easy to fool."
"Hey!" Ingress protested.
"But if anyone was going to figure out some deep secret of magic, I would have imagined it to be you," she continued,pletely ignoring Ingress.
"We aren''t just going to ask you for your secrets for free," the orc said. "If you believe this secret can help us get a leg up on the nobles, then we will pay you for it. You need to get into the dungeon, yes? We have a way in for you."
"Wisfield thinks they have a monopoly on information, but they don''t." The librarian smiled again, this time with a certain smug gleam in her eyes; Vex recognized that look, even. "They''re too selfish about their Principle to have agents everywhere, and they only read surface thoughts. So if you think this will help us, we can get you in. That''s our promise to you."
Vex was silent for a moment. Part of him was just a little bit stunned; they''d had the rys to help themmunicate without Wisfield looking at their thoughts, and these Elyrans had just been... doing it, without even a skill to help screen their thoughts. There was always the chance that Wisfield knew, but they were arrogant; if they knew, they would likely havee down on the rebels already.
"I have the beginnings of something that will help," Vex said. "It won''t be enough yet, but I think it will be, eventually."
"And what exactly is it?" Ingress peered at him closely.
"A way to gain strength without the system," Vex said. He almost added more almost said that it might be a way to talk to Victor again.
But... no. No false hope; he didn''t know for sure if he could do it. When he was sure, he would speak to Ingress again.
No sooner.
117 - Book 2: Chapter 54: Distribution
117 - Book 2: Chapter 54: Distribution
Vex had been a little concerned that his words wouldn''t be enough but it turned out that he needn''t have worried. The ''rebels'', such as they were, were strangely willing to trust him on his word, though they insisted on sending someone in with them to the dungeon. The new person wouldn''t have to apany them he''d stay at the edges of the bonus room, hopefully away from the danger, and focus on studying the glyphs that Vex gave him. In the meantime, Vex could go out to identify new glyphs and expand his knowledge of this True Magic.
First, though, they had to finish with the food distribution. They left a cartload with Ingress and the librarian, each of them promising they''d find the right people to help distribute the food to those that needed it; between them, they could cover about a third of the city, which means they still needed to find trustworthy distributors for the other two-thirds.
Vex still had the merchants he wanted to find, the ones that had helped him out to begin with but the rebels had also helped by providing a number of names they deemed trustworthy. They weren''t necessarily members of the rebellion, but they were people that were noted as being kind; the kind of people that would help as honestly and fairly as they could.
So that was who they went looking for. It wasn''t a process that was anywhere near as quick as they wanted but Ingress told them they needed time to set up a way to sneak them into the dungeon, too, so that gave them a few days to secure distribution of the food and to figure out what was happening to growth spells.
It was time that they spent... as well as they could.
"Hey, hey, hey, it''s alright," MIsa whispered. Vex was standing beside her, his dagger brandished and his eyes narrowed; he kept his back straight and his tail still, every muscle poised to strike. He was the very picture of danger, even as hisrgerpanionforted the small child that was crying on the ground. "Shhh. We''ve got you."
"Get out of the way," one of the teenagers Vex was poised against said. He was a scruffy-looking human, his hair and clothes both a mess; there were holes in his shirt, and streaks of dirt along his arms, along with hints of blood, like he''d fallen and scraped his arms. He was holding a dagger, but the dagger was trembling; Vex didn''t need Physical Empathy to see how much the kid didn''t want to do this.
The child was holding a piece of bread, clutching on to it for dear life; even that piece of bread was stained with tears and blood and dirt. Julia enforcers were nowhere to be seen, because of course they weren''t; they didn''t reallye to this part of town. Vex was starting to understand how the rebels were able to operate under Wisfield''s noses. A lot of the nobles just didn''t care enough to bother with what they considered the slums of the city, the slightly poorer outer circle that lived along the kingdom''s walls.
"No," Vex said, his voice steady. Derivan and Sev were off splitting up another conflict; they''d seen three separate fights as soon as they''d entered the district, and immediately split up to break up those fights. "Put your dagger down."
"Get the fuck out of the way," the teenager said again, gaining confidence. The two humans behind him, both smaller and younger his brothers, maybe? stared up at him with his eyes wide, but they did nothing to stop him; they stood poised to fight instead.
"You don''t want to do this," Vex said again, adding a note of warning to his voice.
"Why? What level are you?" the boy demanded. "You''re just another one of Mydsa''s thugs, aren''t you?"
"What are you you''re the ones trying to steal bread from a child!" Vex couldn''t keep the exasperation from bleeding into his voice. "You think I''m the thug in this situation?"
"You didn''t answer my question," the boy said.
"You didn''t answer mine!"
"It doesn''t matter," he said, and he charged forward. It was a reckless charge, too; the boy didn''t know anything about his level or his stats. This was pure desperation at work, and...
There were three of them charging at him, actually; the boy''s two brothers, if that was who they were, were charging with him. And even with that, Vex didn''t feel like he or Misa or the small child she was helping were in danger.
They were just too... slow.
It was hard to get away from the absolute stat disparity between them; the difference had been clear with the bandits, and they were even more clear now. Vex had plenty of time to step out of the way and push the offending daggers to the side, his tail sweeping down to knock the boy off his feet, and even arrange the subsequent fall so the kid didn''t stab himself on the way down. Likewise, his brothers posed almost no threat...
They tried an [Adjust Position] on their daggers, to force them to strike him, but even that Vex could respond to; the recent flood of levels he''d gotten allowed him to step away from the mana-focused build, giving him more of the agility he needed in closebat confrontations. When the dagger appeared in front of him, he sidestepped, letting it bounce off his leathers harmlessly.
Normally, at this point, he would''ve cast [Sleep]. But this...
"Look, you just want some food, right?" he said to them to their backs, really, as theyy groaning on the floor. He didn''tment on it. "We''ll give you some bread. We''re not looking for you, anyway."
"You''re not one of Mydsa''s men," the first teenager said, staring at him, eyes wide.
"No," Vex sighed. "Like I said, I don''t even know who that is."
"She''s the one that handles food distribution here." The words were filled with spite. "One of Julia''sckeys. She just gives out the food to the families she likes." He red at the child, who stilly trembling in Misa''s arms.
"...That doesn''t fucking give you leave to hurt a child." Misa''s tone was t.
"Well what the fuck do you want us to do?!" the kid suddenly exploded, rounding on Misa with a hostility that surprised even himself. His eyes were wet, but he spoke with defiance. "My mom hasn''t she hasn''t eaten in two weeks! The system''s gonna take her"
"We''ll get you some food," Vex interrupted, trying to calm the boy down. "For your mom. Whatever she needs to break the status effect. Just... stop. We''ll figure things out."
The boy red. But he didn''t pick up the dagger again; ity on the ground where Vex had knocked it, sparking strangely with a hint of his magic.
"Fine," he said. Not because he was really giving up, or even because he trusted Vex to give them the food he said he was going to. He just saw that he didn''t have a choice. He''d tried, and the stat disparity was simply toorge; Vex saw the defeat in his eyes.
Vex sighed again.
Some victories really didn''t feel like one.
"You don''t fucking get it," the orc told Derivan, his voice rough. "There isn''t enough for us to share. We share and we both die before the next shipment arrives. This is all we fuckin'' got. Don''te down here and judge us if you aren''t going to fucking help."
They''d set up a pseudo-tournament in this part of town, one orcish fighter against a human girl. She was smaller and faster than the orc, and the orc was clearly losing; there were bruises developing in his skin where the system failed to heal him properly, a side effect of the [Hunger] effect that lessened the protection of health.
The girl didn''t seem like she wanted to fight, though. There were tears in her eyes when she did. But her eyes were determined, and her fists were clenched; she would not lose.
Derivan couldn''t exin they were here to help; not here, where they were surrounded with an audience. He''d already tried that once before, in a different encounter, and the result had been the four of them getting swarmed by people desperate for food.
"I didn''t know it was this bad," Sev said, his voice quiet. "People didn''t look like they were starving. Are people dying already...?"
"Of course you wouldn''t see it," the orc scoffed.
"You''d only see this around the city edges," the girl told them quietly; she''d straightened, apparently deciding that the fight was over for now, and spoke with a sort of quiet confidence. "ces the nobles don''t really touch, because they don''t really consider it a part of their city."
"Sometimes adventurerse on by and help us out," the orc said. "But they''ve been doing that lesstely."
"Turns out there''s a reason for that," Sev muttered, ncing at Derivan; the armor just bowed his head slightly. He''d seen the glimmer of [Reinforcement] on more than one person while they were moving through the city, and he''d broken it where he could; the soul-cracks that resulted would still take some time to heal. He''d even broken it on some of the nobles they''de across.
"Look," Sev said, ncing around. Derivan heard the pain in his voice when he spoke, though he tried his best to hide it. "Fight''s over. Stop... watching this. It''s not don''t make a game out of this. You''re going through a lot and I get it, but..."
"Judge us when you''re the ones starving," someone in the crowd jeered, and Sev winced slightly but he didn''t say anything. He watched as the crowd slowly began to disperse; only the orc and the girl stayed, both staring at him.
"If you''re breaking up the fight, I assume you have a solution," the girl said.
"Or food," the orc rumbled.
"It is both, we hope," Derivan said quietly. "But it did not seem wise to say so in front of arge crowd."
"No," the orc agreed; he squinted his eyes at Derivan in a leer. "They would''ve torn you apart."
Derivan disagreed. They wouldn''t have been able to do anything to him. But he didn''t respond, instead staring until the orc shifted ufortably.
"...What now?" he finally asked, the word emerging almost reluctantly.
"Now we get you some food," Sev said. "And you bring us to someone that can help give it out."
Some ces were better than others. That one district in the southwest section of Elyra was probably among the worst, whether it was because it was located farthest from House Julia or for some other nebulous reason; other districts had smaller evils or smaller needs, but it wasrgely the same thing between districts there were always people who were desperate.
For Vex, it was a bit of a shock; he''d always seen Elyra as a prosperous kingdom, for all that he knew it had its faults. Yet it was clear now that it hadn''t taken much for Elyra to start to fall at all a single type of spell had stopped working properly, and already the kingdom had started to fall apart. Only at the outer edges, sure, but given enough time...
It was sobering. And maybe what was worse was the fact that most of the nobles likely weren''t aware of it, even ones that specialized in knowing; if most of them didn''t bother to spend their time in the outer edges, they would likely just assume that everything was fine. People closer to the center of the kingdom weren''t exactly hale and hearty, but they weren''t starving or desperate, either.
That was only happening where it could be hidden.
They''d given out a good two-thirds of the food by now, not distributing it by hand, but giving it to individuals they felt could be trusted to give out food in turn; the orc that had been losing in the southwest district turned out to be fighting to win food for a smallermunity of impoverished people in the area, and not just his own family, and so he''d gotten arge chunk of bread and another chunk of preserved foodstuffs that wouldst. They''d watched as they left, and saw him give a loaf of bread almost immediately to the girl he''d been fighting; she''d clutched it tightly to herself
"A lot of this is so much worse than I thought," Vex said, hugging his tail to himself. "I need to figure out what''s happening with growth spells. And why it''s growth-specific spells that are affected. The food we''re giving out isn''t going tost forever."
Derivan nodded. "Perhaps what we have learned from Teque will help?" he offered. "Or perhaps we could study this phenomenon from within the bonus room."
"I think that''s gonna be our best bet," Vex said. He leaned into Derivan, feeling a wave of exhaustion ovee him, and saw the armor look down at him in concern; Vex managed a small smile.
"Any news from Ingress, yet?" Misa asked.
"Nothing," Sev said, shaking his head. He nced at Vex and Derivan and gave them a small smile, then turned to Misa. "We still need to get another third of this distributed before we can do that anyway, so..."
"About four more stops," Misa said. "You guys see the people following us too, right?"
"Yeah." Sev nced back through the windows, towards the rooftops. "Not sure if they''re Julia enforcers or people in the city, but an ambush didn''t work too well thest time someone tried."
"I had some kids try to attack me, too." Vex said, tapping his fingers listlessly on his seat. "Not a surprise that some people noticed what we were doing. The caravan''s pretty noticeable."
"If they are enforcers, we must be prepared," Derivan said. "We cannot assume it will be an easy fight."
"No," Vex agreed. "They''ll have magic items and raw stats. So we''ll have to be careful."
And they were.
Which was probably why it was two more stops before they got attacked, instead of one.
118 - Book 2: Chapter 55: Oh, Brother
118 - Book 2: Chapter 55: Oh, Brother
It started with a fireball, which told Vex two things: one, that this was almost certainly a noble house attacking them, and two, that they didn''t care about casualties. The fireball was packed with enough mana to level several blocks of houses, and was cast despite the fact that they were surrounded by civilians.
Misa blocked it, of course.
She snapped in front of the fireball with a strange object bnced on her shoulder, a sort of cylinder decorated not with runes but with glyphs; Vex noticed this a split second before the presumably-weapon red to life and just... sucked in the fireball, along with every drop of mana packed into it.
"Run!" she shouted, startling the few people that had stayed to stare into running. It was almost remarkable how quickly the surrounding blocks cleared, in fact, and it made a distant part of Vex wonder if they''d had to do this before.
Part of Vex was also afraid that a member of his own House was here. That fireball had been an expensive one, and it would take someone from Ashion to cast it without making themselves useless for the rest of the fight. He was pretty sure no one from Ashion was here, though; none of his siblings were the types to participate in battle without shy House colors, and his father wouldn''t have allowed any of his siblings to join Julia and partake in their so-called loyalty program.
More likely, this was a cooperatively-cast fireball, which meant that the majority of enforcers they were fighting were mages.
"Derivan!" Sev called. "Anything?"
"It is strange," Derivan answered. "I can see where the system ces status effects now, I think. There is one in particr that is digging into all of them."
"You think that''s the emotional suppression?" Misa asked, and that was all the time Vex had to pay attention to the conversation. Their four opponents were casting again, this time within his sight; he saw runes forming in the air as their spell flickered into being, too rapidly for him to modify, as he had done with Tibeus. It was still slow enough for him to read, though.
They''d ounted for what Misa could do, and were in the process of casting [Rapid Firebolt]. Fun.
For the first time in a while, Vex reached for the [Chromaturgist] skills he''d been given the discovery of glyphs had distracted him, and led him down a new path, but he wasn''t ready for Wisfield or Ashion to know what he had to work with.
A [Rapid Firebolt] spell was very simr to a [Fireball], with some minor differences. Vex had studied it before, because it was one of the standard arsenal of spells used by Elyran enforcement. He was almost d he''d been made to study it.
One, the spell was a chain-cast; interrupting it was pointless, unless you killed every single one of your opponents before the spell finished casting. The first rune triggered the second one, and then the third, and so on, without any input from the caster. It was a fairly clever mechanism he''d built into a number of multi-rune spells, though he rarely had the cause or the mana to waste on them.
Two, the first few runes in the spell created a single normal [Fireball], albeit heavily overcharged; runes that wereter in the cast acted to split that single fireball into several smaller ones, using a lesser-known artifact of magic every piece of apleted spell was in itself the whole of the spell. It was a clever sort of way to circumvent spells that took time to cast. [Rapid Firebolt] created only one [Fireball], rather than several dozen, and skimmed pieces off that first fireball in order to create all the others.
It saved a few seconds, and seconds mattered.
Three, the fireballs that were created afterwards needed time to be charged with mana and that was where Vex had the time to interfere. Their downfall here was trying to create something powerful enough to take them all out at once. He needed one effect to break this spell.
[Manaburn].
But there was something odd about the mana that was going into this spell Fire-aspect mana was in there, so why were the mes flickering blue?
...Vex made sure his counterspell missed one of the fireballs. Purple flickered into the threads of his own magic, darting out like snakes; each one struck unerringly into a still-forming fireball and burned the mana out of it, making it dissipate like smoke. He let one fireball remain, draining just enough power out of it that it wouldn''t explode all over multiple blocks of the district.
"Dodge!" he called as the spellpleted, and to their credit, none of his friends questioned it; they got out of the way of that remaining fireball instead, letting the mes ssh ghost-blue on the ground.
For a moment, the two groups stood at an impasse. Their assants stared them down Vex was tense, waiting for a followup, but none came. The only thing that filled the air was the crackling of that me, burning away at nothing on the ground, fueled by raw mana.
"Who are you, and why are you attacking us?" Sev asked, his voice calm. Derivan spoke behind him, his voice filtered by the ry charm, directed towards Vex.
"I do not think that the status effect on them has anything to do with emotional suppression at all," he said. "Nor are their emotions suppressed. I believe these are not Julia enforcers."
"We are from House Julia," one of the mages called back, contradicting Derivan directly, not that he would know. "You will surrender. Or not. It''s up to you, really."
"Doesn''t exactly seem like you''re winning," Sev said. "Why exactly are we being... what is this? Arrested?"
"You''re undermining the Houses," he said. Vex narrowed his eyes slightly; the voice was... familiar. Different from what he remembered, but only slightly. Maybe his initial assumption had been wrong. If House Ashion was involved...
But Derivan had said that these enforcers weren''t emotion-suppressed, as far as he could tell. They wore the colors of Julia, but they didn''t speak like their enforcers usually did.
So this was a different group, pretending to be House Julia.
"We''re giving out food," Vex said. "I don''t see why the nobility should give a damn what we do."
The main speaker on the other side paused, as though surprised, and that was when Vex knew it was who he thought it was. Helix stared at him through the hood he wore, his eyes hidden in the shadows generated by his cloak.
Literally generated, by the enchantments woven into the fabric. He probably should have noticed that before; that sort of thing was an Ashion staple.
"You''re making us look bad," Helix said, his voice light and casual. "We can''t have that. And you''re an unauthorized distributor of food. These supplies haven''t been checked through any official channels. We''re going to have to confiscate it."
Vex stared, then sighed. "Why are you really here, Helix?"
Helix had the gall to pout at him. It was more audible through his voice than anything, since the shadows were still shrouding his face, but he could tell when his older brother was pouting. "I just wanted to see how my little brother was doing."
"Throwing a fireball is not an appropriate way of doing that," Vex said, deadpan. Misa was staring between the two of them in shock, and Sev had one eyebrow slightly raised; Derivan, as he usually did, didn''t react much at all.
He did step up beside Vex, taking hold of one hand and squeezing it protectively.
Vex didn''t protest. He squeezed Derivan''s hand back, almost defiantly, and stared straight ahead as if daring his brother to say anything about it. To his credit, Helix only stared for a second before grinning.
"Damn," he said, his words a half-whistle. "Lotta time for things to change in a year, huh?"
"Helix," Vex said, sighing.
"Okay, okay," Helix said; he nced around quickly to make sure that no one was watching them and no one was watching them; the whole ce had been cleared out by that initial fireball, blocked or not, and Vex wondered if that wasn''t pretty much the point then he pressed a hand against the ground, and a pulse of mana rang out from him.
Arge, dense cloud of mana. Helix had been the one in their family that was able to endure the mana enhancement treatments the most, and mostly hadn''te out worse off for it; golden child of the family he was not, though, given that he generally didn''t care for magical study as much as Vex had. Karix had always treated him a little bit like a disappointment, and some of that bitterness hung around him like a dark cloud...
...not now, though. Vex didn''t see that around him now. Whatever he''d done in the year and a half Vex had been away, he''d apparently managed to find some kind of purpose in it.
The mana was tuned to illusion. Vex didn''t react to it, letting it pass over him harmlessly; he saw Misa gearing up to block it, but when nothing happened, she seemed to rx a bit. Around them, the fire seemed to glow a little bit brighter and then in the edges of his mana sense Vex saw an illusion ying, one in which their fight continued.
"Ghostfire," Vex said, mouthing the word. "Illusion-enhancing ghostfire."
"Quite right," Helix said; he bounced on his feet, pulling the hood off his head and revealing a handsome older lizardkin, somewhere in histe twenties. "Can you believe I managed to figure out ghostfire?"
"Not too long ago you could only do big fireballs," Vex said, chuckling lightly. "But why are you here? Why all this deception?"
"We need to put on some kind of show," Helix said, turning serious. "Julia did actually send enforcers after you; they just didn''t know you were there, because the Houses don''t like talking to one another. Otherwise they probably wouldn''t have allowed me to volunteer."
"Are you actually...?" Vex peered closely at his brother.
"Yes and no," Helix said, shrugging his shoulders. "We figured out a way to block their emotion suppression thing, if that''s what you''re worried about, but it kind of does the opposite enhances emotional reaction."
"Ah, that''s why you''re more in tune with yourself," Vex said, only half-joking.
"It really is." Helix was silent for a moment. "And if we had more time... there''s a lot I''d want to talk to you about. But we don''t. This illusion isn''t going tost forever. Is Riss...?"
"Riss is doing good." Vex smiled a small smile, d that his brother had changed at least a little; whatever he was doing here said a lot. "You''re with the"
"Shh." Helix put a finger to his lips. "I don''t trust my magic that much. Look, we''re going to take over the food distribution, okay?"
"Why?"
"The nobles don''t want to look bad." Helix shrugged. "And this makes them look bad, random adventurers going around and giving away food, when it''s supposed to be their job."
"And you''re going to help them look... good?" Vex raised an eyebrow.
"No." Helixughed at the idea. "When I say we, I don''t mean the nobles. You know exactly what I mean. We''re still gonna make them look bad. But we''re going to do it intentionally."
"Aren''t you one of the nobles, boss?" one of Helix''s men asked him, tentatively.
"What? No! Of course not," Helix said, pressing a hand to his chest in mock-offense. "I''m very far from noble. You should know that."
"Wh no I wouldn''t," he hissed.
"Rx, we''re under illusion," Helix said, waving a hand, and ignoring the fact that he''d only just said he didn''t particrly trust his own illusions.
That was enough to tell Vex how much his brother had changed, really. When he''d left, Helix had still been questioning his ce in the family; the sheer amount of mana he had wasn''t exactly enough to elevate him to any special status when his own spells didn''t match up to the mana he had. He had the same basic spell list as a lot of the family did, but the spells were simply less effective in his hands unless he charged them with more mana; it was an artifact of runic casting. Understanding still mattered.
Like with glyphs, actually. There was a thought there that Vex needed to dig into a bit more, when he had the time.
The Helix now seemed more sure of his ce in the world, and spoke with a confidence that was real not the fake, conjured arrogance he pretended at only a year or so ago.
A year was a lot of time, it seemed.
Helix turned his attention to Vex. "We just need to put on a show. We need you guys to lose this fight or at least to look like you lost this fight so that the nobles don''t keep looking for you once you enter the dungeon. Dad wants you back in the family, and we''re doing our best to stall him"
"He hasn''t really changed, huh?" Vex said, and Helios sighed.
"Most of us have," Helix said tentatively. "You leaving... put a lot of things in perspective for us. But mom and dad stuck to their guns more than ever. I think they think that if you''re right, then they''re going to have to own up to what they did to us. And everything dad''s parents did to them. Mom''s mostly trying to stay out of it, but it''s not great."
"I wish you''d said something," Vex said quietly. "I just thought you all agreed with Dad."
"We were going to?" Helix hesitated. "But we were worried it''d just look like a ploy, or something. And, uh, I''d love to have more of this conversation now, but that illusion isn''t going tost forever, so let''s do it after we get you into the dungeon?"
"You''re ready?" Misa asked. "This is it?"
"Yeah," Helix said. "We would''ve given you more warning, but uh, we wanted a realistic reaction before we got the illusions going. Sorry. We wouldn''t have hurt you, probably."
Misa glowered at the ''probably'', and Helix let out an awkwardugh. "We trusted in your capabilities?"
Sev grimaced a little bit. "Not really a good approach, but points for drama," he said.
"My brother would''ve spotted a fireball like thating a mile away," Helix said, just a touch defensively. "...But maybe that wasn''t the best n."
"I''m more ashamed I didn''t realize it was you," Vex said.
"Anyway." Helix paused. "This is the part where I ask all of you to climb into a cart, so we can get you into the dungeon."
Sev blinked. "Uh."
"Look I didn''t realize how this woulde off until I had to say it," Helix said. "It''ll be fine! Trust me!"
"We tried to tell him it was a bad idea," the same man spoke up from behind Helix, who threw up his hands.
"Everyone''s a critic," heined. "Just get in the cart! The cart''s fine! It''s totally safe and not a trap!"
"Not helping my confidence here," Sev said.
"Honestly, I''m starting to get worried, and I''m in on the n," one of his men said.
"You should probably get in the cart before Helix makes it worse," another one added.
"I''m not making it worse!"
Sev sighed. "Okay, we''re going to need like, five contigency ns for this," he said. "Give us three minutes."
119 - Book 2: Chapter 56: Wagon
119 - Book 2: Chapter 56: Wagon
If there was anywhere Vex hadn''t expected to be about an hour from where that battle started, it was being carted around the city in a wagon. Particrly not in a small crawlspace underneath the floorboards of a wagon, lit only by illusion-enhancing ghostme.
All four of them were being carted around, in fact, piled together in the same cart. A tiny bit of spatial magic gave them just a bit more space than they appeared to have, but it was really only enough to make them fit; not quite enough to make them fitfortably.
Probably because Derivan''s armor was sort of stabby.
Which was a problem they were trying to solve, given they had nothing else to do while pressed together in the wagon. The tarp above them pped about in the wind, an unpleasant reminder of exactly how flimsy this whole n appeared.
Hopefully Helix had gotten... a little better at nning since thest time they''d spoken. He''d managed to grow in every other way that was important.
"How much more mana do you need?" Vex asked. He was tucked up against Derivan''s chestte, trying desperately to keep his tone as neutral as possible a task that he was spectacrly failing at, so he was mostly just trying not to speak. He''d gained confidencetely! But not enough confidence for being trapped pressed against Derivan.
It wasn''t that he was being shy. He''d already spoken to Derivan about his feelings. But these particr circumstances
Anyway.
"About 1500," Derivan said. His slime stat was up to 49; another level would bring it to 50, which would hopefullye with something that would help him mold his armor into something a little more malleable. Golden Geas hadn''t given him any bonus passives, but passives with stat milestone requirements weren''t a sure thing anyway. They were a function of your aplishments and understanding more than they were a fixed thing awarded on reaching a milestone. If you aplished something stat-rted, and had enough points in that stat... you would be awarded a passive.
The hope here was that Derivan already had what he needed for a passive except for the stat requirement, and that the passive he got would be something slime-rted, and help Derivan dull his spikes somewhat. It was a dim hope, but it wasn''t like they had anything else to do.
Vex nodded in response to Derivan. He tried to duck his head, and mostly only seeded in butting his snout against the armor''s chestte, causing a dull bong to resound in their limited space.
...It was probably a good thing that there was a soundproofing enchantment, built in with the spatial one.
"I feel like I should tell you guys to get a room," Misa said, her back pressed up against the other side of the wagon.
"That''s not exactly practical right now," Sev said. His back was pressed against Vex''s awkward, considering Vex had a tail that was taking up more space than either of them wanted and he was stuck staring at the side of the wagon.
"Shut up, guys," Vex grumbled.
More time passed in silence none of them really wanted to strain the enchantment on the cart. Derivan''s mana slowly ticked up towards the next inevitable stat point. Part of Vex was jealous. The process had so many simrities to what had been done to him, except... Derivan didn''t feel any pain. Maybe it was because he had the stat, and the Ashion family was forcing the issue.
Whatever the case was, Derivan''s stat tipped over into 50, and something changed. For one thing, Derivan was suddenly a lot morefortable to press against.
"Whoa," Misa said.
"Did something happen?" Sev asked."I can''t see anything. I''ve been counting the grains in the wood for the past three days."
"Sev, it''s been thirty minutes."
"Three days."
"Do I need to be worried about time magic?" Vex paused, distracted, and then refocused. "Wait, no. Deri, you''re... soft. Did you?"
"I have received a passive bonus," Derivan said; there was a touch of wonder in his voice. He flicked out a box to them, and Vex focused quickly on it, ignoring Sev squawking in indignation as the box presumably interfered with his grain-counting.
[Slime Adjacence] [Passive]
You are partially Slime. +50% pliability when choosing to be pliable. +100 units of slime generation per minute when choosing to generate slime. +50% slime-rted mana gathering.
Slime can be used to store mana at 10 mana per unit of slime. Your slime is always a part of you.
Vex blinked. "That''s... a lot."
"There are so many uses for this," Misa said, her voice vaguely muffled from where her face had sunken slightly into Derivan''s back. "Do you think actual slimes have a simr ability?"
"They do, actually," Derivan said. He brought an arm around Vex, seeming to take a moment to absorb the feeling of having the lizardkin pressed against him; for a moment, he was silent, and then he spoke again. "This is... very different from what I am used to feeling."
"Your armor is soft," Vex said, wonderingly.
"It''s kinda weird," Misa said, though there was a teasing smile in her voice.
"I feel like I''m missing out here," Sev called, his face still pressed against the side of the wagon.
"I liked you anyway," Vex confessed, a little bit of his shyness creeping back up on him. "But this is... nice? It''s nice."
"It is," Derivan agreed. "And I cannot hurt you with my armor anymore, which I am pleased by."
"As long as you choose to be ''pliable''," Misaughed.
"This is really interesting, though," Vex said. "Can you generate some slime? I feel almost like we should do some testing... I mean, not now. But now I feel like we should''ve done more testing on slimes in general. There''s an obvious link between slimes and mana."
"I can try," Derivan offered; there wasn''t a lot of space for him to hold up a hand, but he managed to wriggle an arm free from underneath Vex anyway, and he held it up where there was space. A moment of concentration followed, his light-purple eyes flickering off as he focused
and a small wellspring of lc slime began to emerge from his armor, waving about in the air.
"...That''s pretty cool." Vex watched the mini-figurine for a second; the shape of it was slowly changing, resolving itself into something shaped almost like him, down to his frills and a tiny tail. It was a fantastic disy of fine control and the instantaneous understanding granted by the system.
It was also very cute.
Mana-sight offered him only a little more in terms of understanding; there was mana in the slime by default, and it was mana that was pre-aligned with an aspect he hadn''t seen before. It rang with a certain familiarity, and he spent a moment trying to chase that familiarity down, but the manner of it eluded him; he only knew that it was familiar.
Potential infolock. He noted it down in his notebook
Well, no, he couldn''t reach his notebook.
"Um." Vex paused, trying to figure out how to phrase his request. "Deri, can you get my notebook for me? I can''t reach."
"Of course." The little mini-Vex standing in Derivan''s palm shivered for a moment, then abruptly extended into a tendril of goo, slithering down towards Vex''s tailbag; the lizardkin kept himself as still as possible as it slowly pulled the sp open, then the bag itself, and managed to navigate to his notebook.
"You''re really good with that thing," Vex noted.
"It is... rather intuitive to use." Derivan brought Vex''s notebook up to his hands, and gently ced it there; the tendril retracting didn''t leave even a trace of lc slime on the notebook. "Perhaps because the stat is already so high to begin with."
"It''s not too weird, if you think about it," Misa said. "Some higher-level slimes can do that kind of thing."
"I still can''t see any of what you''re talking about," Sevined.
"Well, you agreed to this n, so deal with it."
"Bah."
"Shhh." Vex''s tone was lightly reprimanding as Derivan handed him his quill and he made a quick note; the familiarity of slime-aspect mana. He had a suspicion about it, even. Slime was rted to mana capacity, and the whole Principle of House Ashion was about mana capacity. Maybe there was more to mana than just system stats...
The cart they were in shook to a stop, and there was the sound of a tarp being pulled off; Vex stilled himself, trying not to move, even though he knew it wouldn''t make a difference. They wouldn''t see anything even if he did. He''d tested the illusion spells on the wagon himself, as one of their many contingencies. He felt his anxiety spike a bit anyway, not quite used to being trapped in a small space and unable to act.
Outside, they heard the sounds of a soldier discussing something with Helix, who had schooled his voice into something monotone and emotionless. Vex had to admit, Helix was... surprisingly good at acting, now. It wasn''t something he would have expected of his brother.
It didn''t take long before the cart began to move again, and Vex sighed a small sigh of relief; the soldier hadn''t noticed anything untoward.
"Worried about the illusion spell?" Sev asked.
"I''m just worried we''re going to have to fight." Vex''s voice was softer than it had to be, and he saw Derivan looking down at him in concern. "My family''s... more involved than I thought they would be. If a fight breaks out..."
"You''re worried someone''s going to get hurt," Misa said. She sounded sympathetic, and a hand reached over Derivan to pat him on the head; Vex, not expecting it, almost flinched away from the touch before he realized that the hand descending on him was just Misa''s.
"I am," the lizardkin admitted.
"I believe it will note to that," Derivan said. "Or I suppose I hope that it will not."
"It''ll help once we''re in the dungeon," Misa offered. "Right now our presence here is... disruptive? So that kinda fuckin'' sucks. But without us"
"There''s still going to be a fight," Sev said, his voice slightly muffled from echoing against the wall. "They''ve been gearing up for one. The food problem is just pushing existing tensions over the edge; they''re noting back from this without some kind of rebellion, which means a fight, which means that some people are going to get hurt. I could heal them"
"Sev," Misa said, a note of warning in her voice. Vex only made a small sound of hurt, and Sev sighed.
"...It''s probably a good thing I have you guys," he said after a moment.
"Damn straight," Misa said. She squirmed a bit, iling an arm, and then spoke again, this time her voice slightly muffled against Derivan''s armor. "Pretend I just punched you in the shoulder. I can''t reach."
"Agh," Sev said, his voicepletely deadpan. "I think you broke my shoulder."
"...Thanks, Sev."
"You''re wee."
Vex smiled a little bit at the banter, though his attention was still focused on the idea of the slime stat; Derivan was still ying around with a single tendril of the stuff, making it dance and coil around in his hand with wonder. Every so often he would make it take the shape of a glyph, forming that glyph almost instantaneously and Vex could see tiny particles of mana begin to move towards that glyph almost the moment it formed.
It looked almost like Teque''s form of casting like the way they could just carve glyphs into objects and have the manae to it, instead of having to use [Mana Maniption] to start the effect. They didn''t have an active mana river flowing through the world, but mana had acted on its own before; on the painting of the [Starry Night] skill, primarily, but also whenever it moved away from the activation of a rune, or when it went gathered around the residents of Fendal, as they had their agency taken away...
Vex wondered, briefly, if the mana had been trying to warn them.
Every time, Derivan changed the shape of the slime before the mana finished trying to gather into the glyph and cast a spell probably because he saw the same mana-gathering phenomenon, and wanted to avoid bringing attention to them.
"You''ll be able to cast glyph spells faster, now," Vex noted.
"I believe so," Derivan agreed. "Though I am unsure if casting it in such a way will change the effect... Perhaps we can find out, when we are in the bonus room. We will have time to examine things then."
"I need to start testing out these glyphbinations." Vex paused. "Or, well, I told Ingress about the glyphs already, and it sounds like they''re going to explore a lot of the basicbinations. We can let the rebels focus on the majority of the basicbinations. I want to discover more glyphs, and figure outbinations for those."
"We do not yet have a way to discover new glyphs," Derivan noted.
"Anton didn''t have much for us there," Vex sighed. "I tried asking, but they haven''t discovered a new glyph in ages, and all the old ones are just recorded in their libraries. If I just had a way to find new ones..."
As he spoke, the wagon rolled to a stop. Vex heard the sound of the tarp getting yanked off and then the floorboards being pulled open, yanked out of ce rather frantically. Helix''s face appeared above them, vaguely worried, though his expression schooled itself into one of relief when he saw them.
"Oh, good," he said. "I was worried you fell through the bottom."
"...You what?" Vex blinked, staring at his brother.
"I forgot to check the bottom of the wagon," Helix said. "It''s fine! Don''t worry about it. We''re all safe. And we''re here now, too! Look."
Vex... decided not to question it.
Instead, he stared out at the familiar sight of the Elyran dungeon. He''d been here before, though he''d never been inside.
Now it seemed he would be sooner than he''d expected, even.
120 - Book 2: Chapter 57: Elyras Prime Dungeon
120 - Book 2: Chapter 57: Elyra''s Prime Dungeon
A dungeon to some small degree reflected the space around it when it first came into being. The Prime Dungeons, though the dungeons that were the core of every Kingdom, and powered most of their supply of mana crystals those were the exceptions to the rule. Over time, they''d grown to reflect the kingdoms they belonged to, though those kingdoms had been built long after those dungeons appeared.
The dungeon that now stood before them was one example of three. Vex had no idea what the Anderstahl dungeon looked like; the Elyran one was the only Prime he''d had the opportunity to study. And even then, in the year and a half since he''d been gone, it had changed.
The major details were the same. The dungeon was still underground, located in a crater in the center of a massive cavern. That crater was host to what was effectively a enormous chandelier that hung from the ceiling. A long time ago, that had been nothing but rocks and stctites; the original dungeon had been one of earth and stone, and as the kingdom of Elyra had grown...
It had turned into crystal. In some ways it seemed like a dedication to wealth and opulence, which caused no small amount of debate amongst schrs; in other ways, it simply looked like a reflection of Elyran society itself. The upper tiers of the chandelier were lit in the colors of the various noble Houses, casting multicolored lights onto the rest of the crystal. Crystals on the lower tiers of the chandelier reflected and refracted those upper-tier lights, bouncing light around until it struck the walls of the cavern.
Where it was different was the fact that some of the crystals that represented their noble Houses had cracks in them. Some of the crystals that represented the lower tiers of the chandelier had grown. And the thing it all hung on a long string of indestructible metal looked considerably thinner than Vex remembered.
Vex couldn''t help but notice that the Ashion crystal was cracked nearly all the way through.
"Holy shit," Misa said, whistling. "I didn''t think Prime Dungeons looked like this. Damn. It''s actually kinda beautiful."
"Very deadly, though," Vex noted, trying to ignore what he saw of his own family''s crystal. The dungeon wasn''t a predictive force, he told himself; it was a reflection. And that reflection was... not inurate, the way things were now.
The dungeon wasn''t for low-level adventurers. Vale had more or less perfected the art of dungeon-delving, at least for this particr dungeon they were familiar with almost all the tricks and traps the dungeon had to offer and even then they didn''t have aplete sess rate when it came to dungeonpletion. The dungeon would oftene up with something new, as if in a deliberate attempt to throw them off.
Fortunately, even without the dtion of a bonus room, this dungeon itself dted time by about three or four times, fluctuating based on ambient mana levels. Which meant they''d at least have the time to be careful.
"I''d give you a tour, but I really don''t have time," Helix said, ncing around nervously. "I think Vex knows everything he needs to get you guys into the dungeon. Try to avoid any delve or research teams youe across. There shouldn''t be one scheduled right now we got you in during a shift swap but the research guys wander where they shouldn''t all the time and the delvers follow them around, so be careful."
"I''m kind of amazed you got us here at all," Vex said, then paused, giving his brother a hesitant smile. "I''m d it wasn''t a trap. Thanks."
"I wasn''t that bad," Helix said. He pulled the wagon around, starting to cart it off back the way he came. "Uh, I mean, maybe I was. Sorry. We should... catch up sometime."
Vex nodded, and his brother disappeared quickly around the corner. The lizardkin didn''t wait before he started mbering towards the chandelier-dungeon; the glittering crystals scattered on the floor made traversing that terrain a challenge, but he picked his way across fairly easily. Derivan had an even easier time of it, where he would have had trouble before. His armor simply molded around the ground.
Sev and Misa... tripped a few times. It was fine, probably, even if Misa grumbled a bit.
"Your family has that [Reinforcement] buff too, right?" Misa asked him quietly, as they were headed towards the chandelier.
"...Yeah," Vex said. "I''ve been trying not to think too hard about it. Most of them already bought into Elyran philosophy in the first ce, so I don''t think it changed them too much. It might even have helped Helix and the others in the opposite direction. I''m hoping they didn''t apply it to Riss."
"They did not," Derivan said. "I did not see evidence of that buff on your father, either, for what that is worth."
"...I was hoping that he did have it on him," Vex said quietly. "Would''ve been nice to have something to me. I mean, Helix changed his mind after I left. The fact that Dad didn''t"
"He''s not worth your time, Vex," Misa said. She softened a little bit when she saw the way the lizardkin sagged, and ced a hand on his shoulder. "If he hasn''t changed by now, I don''t think he''s going to. And even if he does, are you actually going to forgive him?"
"I don''t know," Vex answered honestly. "I''ve been trying not to think about it."
"Well," Sev said. "You''re going to have all the time you need to think about it soon. Because we''re here."
The entrance to the Elyran dungeon sat right at the bottom of the massive, ethereal-looking chandelier; it was a small doorway carved into the very tip, arge crystal hanging just an inch off the ground and slowly rotating. Within that crystal was a room that was barely enough to fit four people, though Vex knew from experience that the internal space was much, muchrger than it initially appeared. There was some debate about whether or not that first room simply teleported you to a different space or whether it was actually engaging extreme spatialpression, but with what he now knew of the system, it was probably yet another Shift.
"I don''t see any research teams around," Misa said, ncing around quickly; [Guard Stance] flickered quickly over her body, along with a few other skills, as she rotated through the various forms of precognition she had. "Nothing in adjacent timelines either. I think we''re good. Once we go in it''ll close off the dungeon to others, right?"
"Yes," Vex said. "But we need to do it one at a time. The dungeon likes separating people that enter together; if you enter one at a time, there are better odds that you end up in the same ce as someone else." He pointed up. "Once we get through the starting room, we''ll end up in any one of those spires up there. We can meet up when we head towards the center."
"Any idea where the bonus room is going to be?" Sev asked.
"No," Vex said, then hesitated. "...But if it''s anywhere, it''s going to be in the Ashion wing."
He pointed to the colors of his House in particr, in one of the southwest spires of the chandelier. The cracks that ran through it were uglier, from up close, and he tried not to look too closely at them. Maybe the cracks were there because of his bonus room, and not because of anything rted to his family.
"We should meet up in the center first still, though," Vex said. "We''ll appear in the lower tier and have to make our way up to the upper tier together, anyway, and then head for the Ashion section."
"What should we expect in the starter room?" Misa asked.
"It''s a pretty simple puzzle. The point of it is mostly to make it take longer for people that enter one by one, I think," Vex said, wincing slightly. "It''s just a maze. The faster you make your way through it, the faster the rest of us can get in. The time dtion works against it, here, so you have more time to try to make your way through."
"But it does mean we have to stay outside the dungeon and wait," Sev noted.
"Yeah," Vex said. "It''s not... the best n. Worst case, we can head in together, and just deal with being separated."
"We''ll try the one-by-one strategy," Sev decided. "If the next shift starts heading over, whoever''s left should just jump in. They might be separated from whoever went in before them, but that''s better than all of us being separated."
"Then we better get started," Misa said. She stepped forward, through the barrier
"Shift," Derivan noted with curiosity. He stared at the entrance to the dungeon. "And... hmm. I would like to best, if that is possible. There is an oddity I would like to examine."
Misa, Sev, Vex, then Derivan. That was the order they settled on, mostly because Misa had gone through first before they could fully settle on a n; otherwise they probably would have sent Sev through first. Vex would stay behind for his knowledge of the dungeon, if it was needed, and Derivan would best so he could observe all three of them pass through the dungeon barrier.
"It''ll sh with light when Misa is done with the starter room," Vex said. "And in the meantime, the dungeon will start summoning monsters outside. We don''t have to worry about that, though. There are enchantments to automatically deal with the summons."
"So entering the dungeon one by one is an intended mechanic?" Sev asked. "It doesn''t even guarantee that you end up at the same ce."
"Intended implies that dungeons have intent to them, and there''s obviously some measure of intent, but I don''t know if it''s something that was explicitly designed," Vex said. "I''m of the opinion that most dungeon challenges are emergent. There are basically four possible locations we can end up. If we enter together, we each end up in a different spot. If we enter one by one, the odds that one of us appears in the same spot as someone else is minimally 25%. When people discovered that, the dungeon evolved a counter. It''s not necessarily intended, but it is cooperative design."
"Which is weird for a dungeon that''s trying to kill us," Sev noted.
"I''ll give you that, yeah," Vex agreed. He nced at the dungeon entrance again there was no trace of Misa, still, though he knew that she was there. Derivan was half-paying attention to them, and half-paying attention to the dungeon entrance. "How''s Misa doing, Deri?"
"I can sort of... sense her," Derivan said hesitantly. "Through Shift. But it keeps changing, like she''s constantly moving Oh. She''s using her timeline skill."
The entrance room shed with light; it had taken her all of a minute to get through the maze. Vex was fairly certain that was record-breaking.
"She has left markers for us," Derivan said. "...Interesting. I believe Shift is used to contain her timelines... the dungeon is attempting to scrub her markers, but it is taking longer, as she has left them across many different versions of herself."
"Then I''ll be quick," Sev said. He stepped into the entrance, leaving only Vex and Derivan standing behind; Derivan seemed focused on the dungeon, leaving Vex to stay on the lookout for anything approaching them.
The Elyran dungeon had many, many automated traps and enchantments built into the area, specifically to make this process easier. Vex could already feel the outpouring of mana into their environment as various traps triggered, interrupting monsters as they were created. There was a question here he wanted to answer.
What were monsters?
The opportunity he had here was unique. He''d wanted to answer this question for Derivan before, but they hadn''t yete across anything that could answer that question. Here, though, was a unique opportunity the Elyran dungeon didn''t just call to monsters like mana nuclei did during crystal collection.
It created them.
The monsters that attacked when it was being entered came from spawn points that their researchers had identified and categorized. It was a predictable, reproducible response, and therefore it had been easy to create a defense against them; there''d even been some attempts to study how those monsters were created, though not much progress had ever been made in those studies. There was a gathering of mana around each spawn point, but no apparent spell being cast.
Mana and monsters were rted. But they weren''t the same thing. If there had been a spell, then Elyra would have found it long ago; if there was simply some way to turn mana into a creature, then Vex felt he would have detected that process in some way.
There was a secret here. What was it?
Vex felt more mana gathering, this time somewhere close by.
Slowly, with an application of [Ssh of Mana] and his paintbrush, he began to draw his Sign.
121 - Book 2: Chapter 58: Interlude - Xothok 2
121 - Book 2: Chapter 58: Interlude - Xothok 2
This time, when his memories were once more torn away from him, Xothok was awake to see it.
In a way, it helped that he was choosing for this to happen. The Guildmaster was standing too-close-forfort, for someone of her level, one hand hovering just an inch in front of his chest; Xothok was struck once again by that odd impression of familiarity, like this was someone he had known once. Not something intentional on the Guildmaster''s behalf, he was pretty sure; she seemed to be a pretty private person. Nor was it that he''d simply interacted with the Guildmaster before.
Had he known the Guildmaster before she''d taken on the role?
That train of thought was torn immediately asunder by a sharp pain in his skull; Xothok grimaced, nearly copsing forward, and only Max catching him and helping him up prevented him from smacking snout-first into the corridor.
"I didn''t need your help," Xothok grumbled. Max just looked at him; she didn''t say anything. She didn''t even give him one of her signature grins.
"Are you okay?" she asked instead.
"I''m fine."
He really wasn''t. He felt empty. He was exactly who he would have been if a multitude of things hadn''t happened if he hadn''t been born a noble, if he hadn''t pursued the path of astronomy that he had, if he hadn''t grown into his own as a leader of a small group of navigators.
There was a bitter sort of knowledge in knowing that without that bit of help from his birth, he would''ve been this. A bandit. A failed bandit, even, for all that they''d managed to survive for a little while; that was less than a year out on their own before they''d been captured.
And now that was all he was and ever would be, because the piece of him that had been those things was torn out. That other-Xothok was standing in front of him now, as far as he could tell visible only to him. He was a little scrawnier, but he seemed healthier; less gaunt, brighter scales, a kinder smile. He wore a strange, flowing garb that touched the ground, decorated with long stretches of cloth colored like the night sky, with tiny pinpricks of white and lines drawn between them.
Xothok hated him, almost instinctively. Or maybe he just hated what he represented.
"They''re constetions," the other-Xothok told him, noticing his staring. "Patterns in the stars."
"Do they mean anything?"
"Only historically." Other-Xothok chuckled. "And I mean that very literally. The stars used to sing, you know."
"...How would we hear them?" Xothok was vaguely aware of both Max and the Guildmaster staring at him, curious; neither of them said a word, though.
"Through the mana." Other-Xothok smiled at him. "They sang about everything that had happened, and sometimes about things that would happen. They were archives of history in the mana. We could visit them, even. There was so much to learn that was what our House did. We went to visit those archives, and drew what knowledge we could from them."
"...Fuck."
Xothok had never cared much for history or at least, this version of him hadn''t. But even he understood the implications. Other-Xothok spoke of the stars being a repository of information, and the fact that they were all gone reflected the spotty nature of their own history...
There was a more pertinent detail there.
The stars had changed.
They once sang through the mana, and at some point they had be nothing more than balls of burning fire; Xothok remembered how Derivan''s spell had looked. That was presumably the version of stars that came about after they had started burning. Now Xothok imagined libraries in the sky, filled with the history of the universe, slowly burning out.
"We have just one left," Other-Xothok said, pointing up. It was more a symbolic gesture than anything; the only thing above them was the wood of the Guild''s ceilings, but Xothok understood what he meant. Other-Xothok smiled again, this time a small, sad smile. "One more archive, burning in the sky."
Xothok might not have given a shit about their history, but he didn''t want it gone. Not like this.
The Guildmaster saw the look on Xothok''s face, clearly, because she seemed almost immediately concerned. "If there''s anything important we should know," she said. "You''ll have to be careful about how you tell us. You''re still under infolock you can just bypass it while you''re talking to your echo. And you''ll need to remember that you can talk to your echo."
Xothok nodded stiffly, not trusting himself to speak quite yet. This was far above his paygrade
but it hadn''t always been, a small part of him whispered. He saw proof of that right in front of him, in this gentler version of himself that once navigated the stars.
"I''m not sure what I can tell you," Xothok said. "But I think I''d like to join the Guild."
The decision had been an impulsive one, but Xothok didn''t regret it. Not even when his men yelled and shouted at him, though some of them seemed quietly relieved; they had been afraid he would ask them to join him as he left, to return to a life of banditry or what-have-you. Those were the ones that had grownfortable here, that secretly wanted to try this new life.
The ones that yelled and shouted those were the men under Byrrhon, moslty. They led the charge by far, with Byrrhon himself being the loudest and angriest among them.
"Coward!" Byrrhon was hissing at him. Xothok watched, trying to keep himself impartial. There was a time when he would lost his temper and mmed the man into a wall, demanding subservience, but in light of everything else he''d learned... no. All these problems seemed to small inparison.
"He used to be one of us, too," his echo observed, looking at Byrrhon with no small amount of pity. "Not one of the most talented, but maybe one of the most dedicated."
Xothok swallowed his questions; it would be strange to ask them now, in full view of all his men. Other-Xothok seemed to sense what he wanted to ask perfectly well, though.
"You aren''t all rted by blood," he said. "The Principle our House was based on was in the method we used to get to the stars; we were quite happy to let anyone who was interested join, as long as they shared anything they found."
"Are you fucking listening to me?!" Byrrhon spat.
"No," Xothok replied bluntly; he ignored the outraged sputtering that followed, turning his attention instead to the way the rest of his men were looking at him. Half of them looked genuinely hopeful, and the other half looked like they were more worried about what was happening with Byrrhon
Xothok faintly registered that Byrrhon was throwing a punch.
Other-Xothok moved before he did, surprisingly. He moved before Byrrhon even did, but as a creature of perception he couldn''t do anything to block or prevent that punch he just showed Xothok what to do.
Traditionally, Xothok handled fighting by taking the blows, rolling into them with his body, and dishing them back; the way other-Xothok fought waspletely different. He slid between them like he saw them before they even happened, and Xothok found that while he didn''t himself remember how fighting like this worked
his body did.
Skill Acquired: [Martial Navigation]
Byrrhon couldn''t hit him.
He tried. The man was getting increasingly furious, and it urred to Xothok that perhaps he should have just let him have a blow; maybe Byrrhon would calm down if he could get a good hit in and work off that anger. But the other man had invested heavily into strength, too, and regardless of health taking that blow would hurt.
"Byrrhon," Xothok tried. "Listen to me."
"I''m fucking done listening to you," Byrrhon snarled. "I''ve been listening to you, and look where that''s got us!"
"It''s gotten us a ce to sleep and food to eat," Xothok said calmly; he saw a few of his men agreeing with nervous nods, though all out of Byrrhon''s sight.
"It''s got us workin'' with the enemy," Byrrhon said.
...That was really the way he thought, wasn''t it? This version of him, anyway. Now that he thought about it, he''d only ever seen Byrrhon angry; he had no memory of the man being happy, except when he was taking joy in fucking someone up. The man was a sadist
he was a danger. A liability.
"And?" Xothok asked, just to test him. "We get to eat now. We''re not sleeping in the grass. We aren''t constantly hungry and waiting for a traveler to past buy."
"We''re not us anymore."
"And you think ''us'' is starving? Sleeping on awful, ufortable dirt beds? Always afraid of fucking dying? Some people in the Guild fucked us over, but clearly that was just the Elyran branch, and we know exactly how Elyra treats just about anyone that doesn''t fit into their idea of value."
"It made us us," Byrrhon said, but he sounded like he couldn''t further defend his position; even his own men were starting to look disheartened. "It made us stronger."
"Starving did not make us stronger." It wasn''t even Xothok that answered; it was Two. Xothok blinked; he hadn''t expected Two of all people to speak up. The man had been mostly taciturn for as long as Xothok could remember. "It just made us tired and weak."
Byrrhon just scoffed. "Cowards," he said again, but without the same heat in his voice; there was instead a resigned anger, as he red around at all of the crew. Xothok didn''t think he was any less angry he just wasn''t willing to take all of them on at the same time. "You''re all just cowards."
He stalked out of the room.
Morkar frowned after him. "If he''s not gotten better ''bout bein'' here by now..."
"He''s not going to," Xothok said, finishing the thought. He frowned at the door Byrrhon had left through for a moment, like he could summon the man back by ring hard enough but then he shook his head.
"Give him time," someone suggested.
"He''s had time," Xothok said. "It''s not going to help. But keep an eye on him. He''s going to try something."
"And what''re we gonna do when he does?" one of Byrrhon''s own men said he wore a scowl on his face, but it was a slightly worried sort of scowl.
Xothok shook his head. "Whatever we have to," he said.
Byrrhon was powerful. He was weak to spellcasters, but in melee was second only to him; Morkar was almost as good as him, but still consistently lost their duels, and even Xothok had a hard time winning consistently.
If it came down to it, though... he could win.
It was telling that even Byrrhon''s own men said nothing to this pronouncement.
"That man," other-Xothok said, pointing to Two, and providing a rather convenient distraction. "What''s his name?"
"Two," Xothok said, causing Two to look up at him curiously.
"It used to be Twice-In-Starlight," other-Xothok said thoughtfully. "We didn''t know where he was from; we thought he might be a neshifter, but he never really confirmed it. He still doesn''t talk much?"
"You don''t talk much," Xothok said, both to Two and to his echo. Two inclined his head and shrugged slightly.
"I speak when I have to."
"He was always like that," other-Xothok said with a small smile. "He spoke the most when it was about the stars. I hope we figure out what''s going on."
"I do too," Xothok said softly. He nced back to where he slept; a lot of the notes he''d left for himself were fading away, getting harder to notice. Even his echo looked more transparent than anything else, now.
"You''ll be able to call on me whenever you remember," other-Xothok said. "The workaround is a good one, but you still need to trigger it."
"It''s a good thing I made a note, then," Xothok said; his gaze lingered on the ink-drawing he''d made of the stars. It wasn''t fading out of sight like everything else; it stayed solid in his perception. Had he avoided the lock somehow? His men were looking at him a bit strangely, perhaps because he''d been talking to himself, but he ignored them and went to pick up the drawing, then held it up. "Two do you recognize this?"
Two nced at the drawing, and his brows furrowed, just slightly. "The sky," he said. "It is... familiar. But not."
"Hey, I recognize that too," Morkar said. "What the shit?"
"This has a pull to it," other-Xothok muttered; his copy touched the parchment, and seemed to solidify, just a bit. At the same time, the drawing deepened, the ink running into the darker ck of the night.
Small gasps rose from his audience, and Xothok''s eyes narrowed.
"Seems you''ve created something special," other-Xothok said.
"We''re joining the Guild," Xothok said to his men. "And I think we have a mission."
They were going to find out what happened to the stars.
122 - Book 2: Chapter 59: Separated
122 - Book 2: Chapter 59: Separated
############
[Dungeon Spawner]
Mental static ripped through Vex first. He''d forgotten that this was a product of the system, and it didn''t tap into the same library of knowledge that glyphs were contained in; this was something he should have known. The lizardkin nearly copsed as sudden pain ripped through his skull, and he only barely heard the rmed sound that Derivan made as metal arms wrapped around him and caught him just before he would have fallen.
"Shit," Vex said, his own words sounding distant and airy to him; the mana in him was still reaching, tapping into a different library of knowledge. Somehow Vex knew exactly what it was doing it was trying to tap into the system itself. Wherever the system stored its knowledge, what it was doing the mana was stretching itself across the wavelengths of reality, trying to tap into it. He could almost feel the reality shard he kept in his tailbag dissolving as something was drawn out of it.
"Vex." Derivan''s voice was worried. "Tell me what is happening."
"Just... tried something I shouldn''t have." Vex grimaced his voice still sounded strange, the ringing in his head distorting it with a painful warble. His mana was being drained faster than he''d ever experienced, and that added an unpleasant sense of nausea to this whole experience. "But it''s working. It''s just taking a second."
"There are peopleing." Derivan looked around, still holding Vex steady in his arms. Vex wasn''t surprised; the distortions in the mana would have drawn the researchers regardless. He''d been hoping they''d have enough time for all of them to go in one by one.
"Give me... a moment." Speaking was still a little more difficult than it should have been, but it was nothing he couldn''t handle. Vex felt like he was dragging his mind through water or mud, struggling to stay afloat. "I need this spell toplete. Then just... carry us in."
"I do not know if there is time." Vex felt himself being lifted as Derivan got to his feet, staying just a step away from the dungeon entrance; his boyfriend kept ncing around, presumably using mana sense to find the researchers. Vex himself couldn''t use his mana sense in this state, and his vision was blurry. He didn''t see anyone nearby. He did see the entrance room sh with light, which was good. Sev had made it through. That technically meant it was his turn. "But I will give you as much time as I can."
"Good... good." Vex blinked a few times, trying to clear up his vision not that it helped. His gaze flickered a bit as mana poured through him and into his sign, going dark in brief increments; he was almost worried he was going to pass out, and clung to consciousness as closely as he could.
The spell wouldplete, as long as he stayed conscious. One of his hands found Derivan''s, and he gripped it forfort, trying to focus and steady his mind
Something clicked. Like the mana had found the key to an old, forgotten lock.
[Dungeon Spawner]
Not all memories are desired, and not everything that is forgotten loses its mark on the world.
When something is erased, an echo is created. [Dungeon Spawner]s reach into those echoes, pulling into existence wholecloth something that has been forgotten. These echoes are never quiteplete, and arergely a mere mockery of the creatures they once were.
[Dungeon Spawner]s are one type of spawner of many. Different spawners reach into different sorts of echoes; the creatures they bring into being are always a reflection of something that was, but not always hostile, and not always angry. Dungeon-spawned remain connected to their host dungeon, and act as outlets for the waste products created by a dungeon during its run.
Vex''s only thought was "what does a dungeon do, then?" as thest of his mana drained out of him. He felt himself slipping out of consciousness and he felt Derivan tighten his grip on his body and move. There was a sharp jostle, like they''d been attacked, or maybe Derivan had simply leapt into the dungeon entrance.
Then the strange sensation of entering a dungeon hit him, and though the effect was mild, it was thest thing his mind could take; he felt himself slipping into blessed unconsciousness.
Derivan was rtively certain that the way Vex exined it, he should have appeared in the entrance room with Vex. What was supposed to happen was that they would appear in the maze and make their way through it together; once they got through the maze, they would each appear in one of the designated starting points in the dungeon.
This was not what had happened.
Derivan was also rtively certain that what had happened was not part of the normal function of the dungeon he could feel, through Shift and Patch both, the way the dungeon reacted as he entered. Vex had entered the dungeon a split second before him, and the moment his tail made contact with the dungeon barrier, the dungeon had reacted; the system descended on Vex, and something Shifted him away, in a way that was different from how Sev or Misa had been Shifted.
His reflex had been to hammer at the descending system with Patch. He''d even tried. But whatever this mechanism was, it was farrger than he was; his grip slipped off of it like a ncing blow, and Vex was snatched away.
The rest of his momentum carried him into the dungeon before he could hesitate and step back, which was probably for the best. The teams that were rushing towards them seemedrger than standard research teams; an optimistic guess would be that it was just a research team and a delve team, and the less optimistic guess would be that they had found Helix, or Helix had betrayed them.
And then Derivan found himself in the maze Vex had mentioned. Towering walls of crystal stood before him, each glittering internally with light; the design of it all reminded him of the extravagance of the dungeon design itself.
"I wonder if it has always been like this," Derivan muttered to himself. Then he shook his head that was not his primary concern. His primary concern was Vex.
And, secondary to that, was what he had noticed as he''d stepped through the dungeon entrance and Shifted.
First, he opened his system interface and crafted a message to send off to the party. [Vex attempted to use his glyph just before we went into the dungeon,] he typed and sent. He tried to keep his worry out of his words. [He copsed, and I grabbed him and brought him in. The dungeon took him away as he entered. I do not know where he is.]
[Shit,] Misa sent back almost immediately. [I''m not with Sev either. You''ve got 50/50 odds on joining one of us. Vex isn''t with me.]
[Or with me,] Sev sent. [What are the odds hended at a normal starting point?]
[None,] Derivan answered; he could sense the mechanism that ''chose'' a starting location for them, and while it was just asrge and immutable as the one that targeted Vex had been, it was a very different mechanism that hadn''t so much as moved. [I believe Vex is most likely at the Ashion point of the dungeon, where he suspected his bonus room would be.]
[That makes as much sense as anything,] Sevmented. [Okay, if Vex is missing, we need to hurry. And Vex, if you see this, please let us know if you''re okay as soon as you can.]
[Please,] Derivan added. It was an unnecessary addition, but something in himpelled him to add it.
Vex was... fine. The party interface showed them his health, and Vex was fine; he wasn''t conscious yet, probably, or he would have sent them a reply. But he hadn''t been drained of health or forcibly kicked from the party, and so they knew he was alive.
But they were in a dungeon. Even if he was fine for now, there was every chance they wouldn''t stay that way.
Derivan began to race through the maze.
Fortunately for him, he''d spent a good chunk of the time waiting for Sev and Misa examining the maze through Shift; the stat wasn''t exactly the same as having actual sight, but he could sense the presence of the maze as a whole, and he could vaguely sense what the other two had been doing in the maze. Each time, the maze as a whole had changed slightly, to make it harder for the next person but since versions of Misa had left markers on all the nearby wavelengths of reality, no matter what the dungeon changed, Sev still had markers left to follow.
Derivan wasn''t so lucky with Sev through, the dungeon was able to clear out the majority of the markers. But he could see the maze in his head, still; he knew all the nearby variations, and if he was right...
...the end of the maze was right in front of him.
He ran for it, as quickly as he could; this was the first time in a while he''d truly regretted the loss of his Agility stat. As he ran, his mind turned to what he''d noticed as he stepped into the dungeon and been brought over into this wavelength of reality.
The amount of ''distance'' forck of a better word that he could sense through Shift had been slowly increasing, but for the most part, examining something with that sense was difficult. The further things got from him, the more everything dissolved into ambient noise. It was hard for him to distinguish one wavelength from another, stepped too far away from him.
When Misa stepped into the dungeon, though and when Sev had stepped in he''d been able to sense the ripples they sent through the dungeon''s particr wavelength of reality.
And that had struck him in particr, because if his spatial sense was correct, the Shifted ne the dungeon existed on spread across all of the main kingdom of Elyra. Not all of its territories it didn''t include Fendal, or the patch ofnd that Emily lived on, or anything like that but the city they''d just been in? It matched the borders almost exactly.
It matched the strange chill he''d felt when crossing into the city, too. It was the same chill he''d felt when they crossed territories towards Fendal, and there had been one more when heading towards Emily...
The false dungeon created by Misa''s bonus room had a reality anchor marked by a letter-numberbination. The error message in Fendal had listed a letter-numberbination, too, except that letter-numberbination had clearly been referring to Fendal and the area surrounding it. So those letter-numberbinations referenced... zones?
And every zone had a dungeon.
Derivan felt like he was starting to get an idea of what dungeons were what reality anchors were. If every dungeon had a reality anchor, and one dungeon was present in every zone... if running a dungeon helped to stabilize reality anchors, and reality anchors stabilized existence which was certainly part of what they did, evidenced by the return of Misa''s vige and family...
Derivan had a thought.
The assumption for a long time had been that the expansion of the wild dungeons on the edges of their continent had stopped,rgely held in check by the remaining poption of the three Kingdoms. Vex had exined to him that every skill that measured the size of those wild zones returned a result that said they were roughly the same size. But if the outer edges were also being lost entirely, dissolving into the abyss?
Then the continent as a whole might still be shrinking, all avable space still being slowly lost as towns and cities were lost to dungeon breaks because those dungeon breaks were still happening. Rarely, but they did happen.
Derivan reached that thought right as he reached the end of the maze, and he plunged through the light there. He felt the dungeon''s mechanisms reaching for him and grabbing him, spinning an invisible wheel to choose where he would go.
He reacted more on instinct than anything else. The wheel was about to stop,nding him in a third position, away from both Misa and Sev and not at all close to Vex; he reached out with Patch, and nudged the needle so that he would appear with Sev. The light picked him up and took him away
And he appeared just in time to stop a sword from stabbing Sev through the back. The ng of that sword against his armor echoed through the room.
"Holy shit," Sev said, turning around and doing a double-take; the suit of armor that had been sitting quietly in the corner of the room had moved, and only Derivan''s sudden presence had stopped that sword from skewering him. "The moment I turn my back... Um. Good timing, Deri."
"You are wee," Derivan said. He nced at the door, and then sent a message through the system.
[I am through,] he said. [We must find Vex. Let us proceed.]
[Way ahead of you, buddy,] Misa sent back.
123 - Book 2: Chapter 60: Heartbreak
123 - Book 2: Chapter 60: Heartbreak
Vex woke up leaning against a door.
It was a nice door, at least. There were no splinters digging into the scales on his back or the leather on his armor, which was a nice step uppared to some of the doors he''d had the misfortune of sleeping against in the past. Those doors had all been old, decrepit doors in ruins he''d been investigating, though, so the bar wasn''t exactly set high on him for the ''sleeping against a door'' category.
Part of that, to be fair, was because every time he fell asleep in an unusual or ufortable position, Derivan took the time to move him somewhere morefortable
It was that thought that jolted him properly awake. Vex snapped to his feet, his dagger held out in front of him to ward off attack; his breathing came quick and fast, and his eyes darted around, trying to pick out attackers in the darkness.
But there was nothing there. Only the flickering of firelight greeted him, magical mes slowly licking away against wood without consuming it.
The space around him ached with a strange sense of familiarity. Vex knew, almost instinctively, what he would find if he turned around.
He turned around anyway.
His back had been pressed against the door that was a replica of the front doors of the mansion that House Ashion lived in. A shining emblem sat embedded in the stone just above that door, the logo of the House a slightly abstract depiction of a lizardkin mage glowing with internal mana, represented by light-blue mes lit around the mage.
It was a reference to the pain they went through for their power, too.
Vex had never been here before. He knew where this was it wasn''t the true entrance to his home. The air around him was too heavy with strange mana, and the door to the Ashion mansion was certainly not located in the middle of a dimly-lit room with no apparent entrance besides the door he''d been found sleeping against.
Which meant that this had to be the Ashion tower of the dungeon. Alternatively, it could be a very borate trap... But somehow he doubted that was the case.
Vex brought up the system interface, scanning through it for any messages left by his friends but something in his mind buzzed painfully when he tried. He could see that they''d left something for him, but his connection with the system seemed... strange. Fuzzier than normal. Some result of his magic trying to interface directly with the system, maybe.
He couldn''t contact his friends.
The thought was less worrying than it should have been. Vex trusted them, and this was where they said they''d meet up anyway he could stay exactly where he was, and they would no doubte and find him with time.
And yet... he felt a pull towards the door. Something inside him, telling him to open it and go through it; telling him that he would be home, if he only took a step through.
Vex paused, reaching for the door handle...
...then sighed and rolled his eyes.
"Really? That''s not going to work," he said, speaking to the air and yet somehow confident he would be heard. "This ce isn''t my fucking home. Don''t even try it."
With that, he sat on the floor, and pulled open his notebook.
If the dungeon wanted to confront him, it was going to have toe to him. He was just going to periodically check his system interface to see if he could contact his friends yet, and in the meantime, study the system of glyphs. He was pretty sure he was on the verge of some kind of breakthrough.
It took about fifteen minutes before whatever dungeon presence had brought him here to begin with showed itself. It almost startled Vex, who had just started to really get into his research he was several pages deep into his notes by the time the door mmed open, and he was so flustered by how sudden it was that his immediate reaction was lessbat and more "damnit, my notes!"
Which was about the moment he recognized that there was, in fact, a legitimate threat in front of him because the man glowering in front of him was his father.
Not his real father. He was toorge to be his real father, besides the base impossibility of the idea that Karix had somehow managed to make his way into the dungeon,promise its spawning mechanisms, and sit in wait behind arge ornate door just to discipline him, or something. This was a dungeon creation, and it wasn''tpletely unheard of for the Elyran dungeon in particr to do something like this; it seemed particrly in tune with the peoples of Elyra.
But to find his father, and use it against him? That seemed almost too personlike to be an act of the dungeon.
"What do you want?" Vex said. He tried to keep his tone measured and controlled. If someone was doing this, like he suspected, then giving them a reaction was thest thing he wanted; they no doubt knew exactly what they were doing.
"You should rejoin our house," the false-Karix said. His tone was almost kind. "We''ve missed you."
"No thank you," Vex said politely. His faux father narrowed his eyes, then, and Vex felt a gathering of power
Fifteen minutes was a lot of time. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to practice some of the magic he''d just recently acquired.
Karix was gathering fire magic. Vex spun the paintbrush he''d been given, imbuing it with [Ssh of Mana] and letting colored mana stream out of its bristles; he didn''t paint his response on any particr surface, just in the air, the same way Derivan had before.
The glyph for Water spiralled into existence just a second after he thought of it, the mana spreading through his brush; it channeled his thought, it didn''t require physical movement. And then he added in a touch of Light because light represented expansion and growth, in some manner, the idea of something that could be lit and touch every corner.
Glyph of Watermist
This glyph represents the first depiction of the Great Waterfall, in the continent of Hureat, where magic has carved a hole into the earth so deep that the bottom cannot be seen from the top. At the bottom of the caverns, though, light magic shines from a guild of mages that have established a presence there and the glittering sight of their light reflecting and refracting through the mist at the bottom of that waterfall created the Watermist, a prismatic fog that extends for miles around the Hole.
Watermist is a magical counter effect that has exceptional power against fire magics,pletely suppressing any attempt to cast fire within its radius. It also induces a mild hypnotic effect with its prismatic rays, though this hypnotic effectrgely serves as a mild tranquilizer; it cannot be used for mind control, or even for suggestions.
The mist exploded from his glyph. He''d tested it in smaller quantities before, channeling only a small amount of mana into the Watermist and observing what would happen; the tiny, prismatic cloud that emerged reminded him almost of rainclouds. He remembered back when he was a child, when the only phenomenons of nature he could observe from his room were the things that happened with the weather...
The clouds he liked the most were the clouds that came after the rain, when they would shine brightly as the sun shone off its edges.
Now the mist that emerged from his glyph was thick and dense; Vex didn''t hold back. For all that this glyph imed to suppress all fire magic, Karix was a powerful mage and the dungeon''s interpretation of him was even more powerful. The amount of mana being used to fuel the spell was phenomenal. It was enough to almost make him take a step back.
But he didn''t. He was confident in his magic.
Karix''s spell formed, a runic circle appearing in the air zing with fire magic.
Just as quickly as it spawned, the mist consumed it. There was barely a sound beyond a quiet ''whff'', rather like the sound of a candle being snuffed out.
Vex took the opportunity to take a step back and close his eyes; Watermist did not discriminate with its so-called hypnotic properties. The mist absorbed the sound of his footsteps.
"Vex?" Karix''s voice was suddenly kind again; no doubt an effect of the mist. "What was that? That was incredible. You didn''t... you did discover a new magic on your own, didn''t you?"
Vex didn''t respond. This wasn''t his real father. This was the dungeon, pretending to be his father; creating an iteration of him based on
creating an iteration of him based on Shift. Based on what they knew of the system.
Which meant that on some level, this was still real. Shift didn''t create things from nothing; it plucked ideas from different timelines, different interpretations of current reality.
"You should''ve told me," Karix continued. "That was incredible. You have toe back to the House, Vex. I was wrong when I said you couldn''t discover magic on your own."
How many times had he thought about his father saying ''I was wrong''?
Except his father was still wrong, even now.
"I didn''t discover it on my own," he said. "I had help from my friends. We found out about this together. I wouldn''t have gotten this far without Derivan, either."
"Is that the armored fellow that was hanging around you?" Karix asked him curiously. His voice still hadn''t moved he was still speaking from the same position. Vex held no illusions about responding; every time he spoke, he was revealing to Karix where he was. He''d given in once, but...
...actually, he had a solution for this.
Communication and Water. The glyph of the Bubbling Stream.
It created a small river in the ground near him, and he took several steps away from it; the idea behind it was simple. It was like a sound illusion it was something he could speak through.
"And my boyfriend, yes," Vex said, speaking through the stream. He didn''t know how his father was going to react to hearing that he''d chosen a partner. His fake father, he reminded himself.
"You know you could''ve found even more if you''d had our resources," Karix told him, speaking through the fog. This time Vex saw that he was moving he saw a vague shape shifting through the fog, and could trace Karix''s voice moving with it, towards the stream. "Imagine how much you could''ve found if you were doing it with us."
Vex almost reacted. Because that was his father dismissing what he''d done on his own, in a way that was Karix saying that he was still right. That what he''d set out to prove that Elyra''s system was broken, that his brother didn''t need to be treated this way was wrong.
But this wasn''t his father.
He had to tell himself that again. He could have responded the words sat in his throat, ready for him to speak them but he found that they stuck there, unable toe out; his mind was a whirlwind of thoughts.
"Vex?" Karix prompted. "I''m not trying to hurt you. I feel like you''re hiding from me. I''m just... look, we miss having you around in the house. We want you back."
Because he''d been their chance at additional glory. Because they''d pinned so many of their hopes on him, the child that had taken to magic like windbeaks to elemental storms.
Because they missed him?
There was a genuine sort of hurt in Karix''s voice. If it had been anyone else saying those words to him, he would have taken them at face value; it was only his history with his father that told him otherwise. His father would say these things, and he would mean them.
"No you don''t," he said quietly, through the stream. "You miss what I could have been for you. For the house."
"I"
And for the first time, Karix paused.
"Is that what you think?" he said quietly.
"You''ve never given me reason to think otherwise." The stream burbled. "You won''t even listen to me about Riss. I''ve been telling you for years that we don''t need this stupid Principle. All it does is hurt our family. Lyssa flinches whenever she''s wearing anything remotely tight. Helix likes pretending he''s in charge all the time. Varon spends mana like it''s water, until he passes out. Xirrashes out in anger at anyone that looks at her the wrong way."
"That isn''t my fault"
"You don''t think so?" Vex asked. He didn''t yell the question he said the words softly, almost dangerously.
And his response was silence.
The mist receded. Karix stood there, in front of the door, looking somehow smaller.
And then from behind him, a dagger stabbed through the door, right through the center of his chest.
124 - Book 2: Chapter 61: What Could Have Been
124 - Book 2: Chapter 61: What Could Have Been
Karix staggered forward. His face twisted into a rictus of anger and betrayal Vex saw that the wound wasn''t healing. Did this version of his father not have health? The system shouldn''t have been this broken down already; a dungeon-created monster of all things should still be connected to the system...
Unless this Karix wasn''t dungeon-created.
It still wasn''t the true Karix. Too many details were wrong for that, unless someone had captured and altered his father significantly, and the amount of power and resources someone would need to be able to do that without sending all of Elyra into a frenzy was too great to be worth considering. But if this Karix wasn''t created by the dungeon or the system
"Boring," someone said, yawning slightly. The figure that walked out from behind the door to House Ashion was just a regr human, as far as Vex could tell but he felt a chill running through his body anyway.
They were worried they''d run into this man again. Misa had warned them it was a possibility. Whatever creature it was she''d met hiding among the delvers in the first dungeon, the one that would have ughtered that entire group of delvers were it not for Misa blocking his [Inexorable Bolt] he''d implied he would being back.
Vex looked at the man, and he saw hatred in his eyes.
"I was hoping you''d have more of a fight," he said when Vex didn''t speak. The lizardkin reached for both his dagger and his paintbrush, uncertain how to react he didn''t have the same defensive skills that Derivan and Misa did, nor did he have them to back him up. "I go to all the trouble of summoning a version of your father, and you just talk to him? Come on. At least try to give me a little more entertainment."
"Is that what that was to you?" Vex asked, his voice low. His father twitched on the ground Vex tried to remind himself that version of his father wasn''t real
But he was, wasn''t he?
The past month or so had been more than enough to call into question his understanding of reality time and time again, but one thing they''d learned was that the system didn''t really create things that weren''t real; it drew from different timelines, different possibilities, differentyers of reality.
This version of Karix wasn''t his father. But he was still a person.
"Yes?" the man said, raising an eyebrow at him like his answer was the most obvious one in the world. "Why else would I go to all that trouble?"
"Who the hell... is this..." Karix rasped. His voice gurgled a bit as he spoke, and Vex''s heart broke a bit.
There was a part of him that was very, very angry at his father. There was a part of him that was fairly certain he wouldn''t be able to forgive him, even if Karix did learn to change his ways, not that he thought his father would.
That didn''t mean he wanted his father to die. Especially not like this.
"Oh, you''re still alive." The man crouched to stare at Karix. "You should''ve just stayed quiet and died. Really, bringing attention to yourself. What are you thinking?"
Mana gathered. Karix red at the strange man, and mana began to gather, though his chest heaved and his arms shook with every small movement; the manughed, stepping a half-step back and folding his arms in a smug, self-satisfied sort of way.
"You stay... away... from Vex..." Karix rasped.
"What''re you gonna do about it?" the man taunted. One hand flicked out
Vex had had enough.
A month ago, when they''d encountered the first Overseer, he''d cast a massive spell to try to kill it; a spell loaded with [Manaburn] and all the power he could pack into it. It was a modified [Ray of Frost] spell, with the essence swapped out for [Manaburn] and the entire array designed to draw in ambient mana, so that every inch of distance it crossed it would keep drawing in ambient mana, growing in strength and power for every step it took. Back then, it had the power to to smash even the Overseer against the walls of the Nucleus, and while it hadn''t killed it, it had been enough to do significant damage.
This dungeon was full of ambient mana, too. There wasn''t nearly enough distance or time to carry that amount of mana
But he still had a reality shard. It was hisst one. He hadn''t used it with the system yet. He didn''t know what it would do. But he knew the effect that he wanted, and he knew it was possible; he had a theory regarding the way runes and glyphs worked.
Runes were glyphs without life or art. They were the system''s attempt at replicating glyphs, but without something alive to look at it, they were a mere copy; the reason they took so much more adjusting, and had so many more small details to control various elements of the spell, was because it lost whatever made it magic.
It wasn''t a spell under the system. Not really. It was the system''s best attempt at a copy a program.
But that meant he could copy runes. Because runes were still based on glyphs; he''d seen the simrities between the runic circles for various fire spells and the fire glyph itself. The glyph made him realize the underlying simrity they all had.
So he cast his [Ray of Frost], modified it with [Manaburn], then oveyed on top of it his own Sign of Research, with a slot in the middle of the book drawn for his crystal.
He wanted to know who this was, and he doubted the man was going to answer any questions.
With the increases to his agility, he could do all this very, very fast but even as fast as he did it, he could see the man reacting to what he was doing. He started to turn towards Vex, and then, as if realizing he wouldn''t have the time to interrupt the spell, began to weave his own defensive sigil.
Vex ignored him. Manaburn would burn through it all. He mmed the reality shard into the slot he''d created for it, and watched as it began to gather every spare scrap of mana in the room and beyond. That was the whole point of the reality shard, after all. The idea was for it to help the spell Shift into all those alternate wavelengths of reality, ripping mana away from them and fueling this one spell...
It helped, too, that Karix was gathering his own magic. The spell could draw directly from him, pulling mana away from his spell and wrapping it into Vex''s own. What emerged from Karix''s spell was naught but a small, ineffectual fireball, but it was fine; Karix had seen what Vex was doing, and freely gave his own mana to the cause.
Vex saw the strange man''s eyes widen.
But it was toote. The ray ripped across the room with a sound that reverberated like the air itself was being ripped apart, and shredded the shield that the man had drawn up; it sted into him and threw him backwards through the door and then through the wall behind it
and just like that, as the spell tore into the man and ate away at his flesh, Vex knew who he was.
Irvis, Spectre of Mana
A product of a failed reality anchor. He knows nothing except hatred.
And even then... it told him almost nothing.
Vex was distracted from his contemtion by a pained wheeze from the lizardkin that was not his father. He didn''t exactly know what he was doing when he rushed over he''d spoken with Derivan before, and they''d talked about how his magic didn''t have to be limited to ; with ess to glyphs he could reach into areas of magic that he couldn''t before.
But he hadn''t figured it out. Not in the fifteen minutes he''d had before Karix had shown up through the door; before Irvis had presumably gotten bored enough to trigger this whole scenario. He didn''t even know if Irvis was dead, he was just more worried about what was happening to Karix, who was breathing unsteadily.
Karix, whose eyes were unfocused, whose blood was pooled on the ground in a volume that Vex was pretty sure meant he was guaranteed to die.
Vex''s emotions were in turmoil.
He didn''t like his father. That didn''t mean he wanted to see Karix die like this, bleeding out on the floor in a dungeon. It didn''t mean he wanted to see his father struggling to breathe, making pained efforts to get up
"Here," Vex muttered before his brain could stop him. He reached forward and let his father use his arm as leverage, pulling himself up to his feet; Karix staggered unsteadily as he stood, but he didn''t fall.
Somehow.
Karix stared at him, eyes still unsteady. "You got... strong."
"No shit," Vex said, channeling a bit of Misa. He didn''t know what else to say. What was he supposed to say? That he forgave the man?
He didn''t.
Did he hate him?
That wasn''t a question Vex felt prepared to answer. He didn''t feel like he hated him. He didn''t really want to care. He just wanted his brother to not have to go through what he had.
"Good," Karix told him. He didn''t seem to care about whatever internal struggle Vex was having. He seemed mostly pleased that his son had made it exactly where he thought he would. Proud, even. It felt oddly hollow. Vex didn''t say anything, even as his father''s gaze focused sharply behind him. "He''s... still alive."
Vex''s blood ran cold.
"Won''t... die easily." Karix kept talking. Vex was fairly certain his father''s level was in the 80s; he was powerful, and had all the resources of the nobles to boot, but... this was a version of Karix that had his connection with the system sabotaged in some way. He didn''t know how much of that strength Karix still had. He was, frankly, amazed that his father was still standing. "Step back, Vex."
Vex paused, and took a step back. He nced in the direction Irvis had gone; there was a smoking ruin there, little bits of the manaburn effect eating away at the mana-saturated walls of the dungeon. There was a slowly-moving concentration of mana behind all the smoke and fire.
"I''m not... the real Karix, am I?" Karix asked, though the question wasrgely rhetorical. The lizardkinughed an odd, bubbling sort ofugh, of the kind that made Vex take another step back. "Bastard summoned me to fuck with you. You tell your Karix... Tell him he fucked up. Tell your mother, too."
"I''ve been trying to," Vex said quietly.
"You gonna forgive him?" Karix asked. He coughed violently, gathering his mana for some kind of spell Vex didn''t recognize this one. He wondered how much his father knew that he kept from him, even now.
"I don''t know," Vex answered honestly. Even this version of his father one that was dying hadn''t apologized. He didn''t want him to, really; he wasn''t the father that had hurt him. Maybe this Karix understood that.
"That''s fine," Karix said. His chest wasn''t bleeding so much anymore. Vex didn''t know if it was because he had some way of healing, or because he''d just run out of blood. Probably the former, since Karix was speaking more clearly but who knew, when the system was involved. "You don''t have to."
"Don''t I?" Vex''s tone was almost miserable. "I feel like I''m supposed to."
Karixughed. "Fuck that. Ashions don''t do anything we''re supposed to. You think I did when I was your age?"
He smiled at Vex, not unkindly. "Live better than I did. Forgive him or don''t. It''s not even your responsibility to make sure he understands."
"It''s my responsibility to make sure he does," Vex said. On this, at least, his voice was firm. "Because Riss shouldn''t have to go through what I did."
"Ah. Riss is still alive here... That''s good." Karix''s words made Vex''s blood run cold, just briefly. Or the implications did. "Okay. Do that. Take care of your brother."
A small pause.
"And take care of me, if you have to."
"What''s that supposed to"
Vex didn''t get the chance to finish his sentence. A spark of magic red where Irvis had been left and this version of his father had been prepared for it, clearly, if the corresponding re from Karix was any indication. This version of his father stepped in front of him, shielding him from whatever spell was being used, a runic circle snapping into ce in front of him and scattering frost and ice; the beam of light from Irvis struck and promptly split into a dozen smaller ones. It was like watching light getting physically ripped apart by ice. It spread into the light, even, freezing it solid in tant disregard for thews of physics, not unlike most system skills.
Several rooms away, presumably where Irvis was, there was an enraged scream.
Karix sighed, the remainder of his body already turning into nothing but remnants of frost. "I did my best," he said. "He''s still alive. I''m sorry. But that spell will buy you a few minutes. You''ve got this."
"I" Vex said, and his voice was half-choked, half-horrified; somehow this seemed even worse. "Dad, you can''t"
"Sorry," Karix said. "No... no time left. Love you, kid. I''m sorry we fucked up. Maybe in another lifetime, we could''ve been a real family."
Those words hit Vex hard. He didn''t quite know what he was saying when he responded. "I found a real one anyway."
Karix smiled softly, and this version of him spoke hisst word.
"Good."
125 - Book 2: Chapter 62: Creative Uses of Power
125 - Book 2: Chapter 62: Creative Uses of Power
Derivan paused, awkwardly, after the de struck him in the back; he didn''t know how to react. The monster that attacked Sev was... well, it was like him.
In a manner of speaking, anyway.
It didn''t seem like it was intelligent the same way he was. Its sword struck him, and it did not react to theck of damage; it simply stepped back and then moved again in a traditional stab. It didn''t take much effort for Derivan to simply step to the side and move Sev with him, though he kept the cleric behind him.
In any other situation, he would have stopped to examine this being that was like him, yet not.
But if Vex was in danger... he would leave this forter examination. It took him no effort at all to reach for Patch and snap the one link it held with the system he remembered that link, because it was the same one he''d had. The same one that had taken all three of the others to break before.
The stat suffered a slight decrease from that action, but it was nothing he couldn''t deal with.
"Let''s go," he told Sev, who raised an eyebrow slightly and nced between him and the monster that was attacking them. He nodded after a moment, appearing to understand.
"Are we just going to leave it?" he asked.
"...As long as it does not follow us." Derivan nced back at the armor. The monster had stopped moving, apparently confused without the routines it had been following.
Perhaps it was cruel, to awaken it and then leave it to fend for itself. It was strange that it was so simr to him at all the armor was certainly different, but not by that much. But the one dungeon that had been created with all four of them as a temte had been broken and scattered throughout the others.
It was surprising, but... maybe it wasn''t that surprising.
Derivan sighed.
"If you are at all like me," he said, not at all unkindly; the armor he spoke to stared at him, uprehending but listening all the same. "Then you will be confused. There was a time that confusion was frustrating to me, but I think... I think that it is okay to be confused, and to take your time. Once you figure your system out, you may use it to contact me, and I will help you where I can."
"We gotta go," Sev said, but gave the armor Derivan was speaking to a concerned sort of look not fearful, just worried. "He''s right, though. Be careful who you trust, but don''t be afraid to ask for help, or ept it."
The armor still didn''t respond. Derivan and Sev took that as their cue to leave; it wasn''t for several minutes, as they traveled along a surprisingly empty brick corridor, that Sev spoke again. "Also, Derivan, can you just... do that, now?"
"...I did it without thinking," Derivan admitted. "But it appears that I can, at a minor cost to my Patch skill."
"We could get through our section of the dungeon really quickly if you used that."
"I... should I?" Derivan asked, hesitating. "It seems potentially irresponsible..."
"It depends, I suppose," Sev admitted. "On how it works. If you''re creating a new person when you do that, then yeah, that''s not very responsible. But if you''re just freeing someone from being controlled by the system"
"Ah. Yes." Derivan paused. "I see what you mean. That is... I had not considered that."
"You just acted?"
"It was like me." Derivan nced ahead in the corridor, to see if there was any threat there yet, but everything ahead of them was curiously empty. It was strangely hard to find the words to exin what he''d done. He''d felt a moment of kinship and reacted entirely from that.
Or maybe there had been something more than that. Maybe a part of him hadtched on to small elements of something he''d seen in the way the other armor had behaved, and he''d sensed something that needed to be freed...
Or he was projecting.
It was hard to say.
"That''s fair," Sev said, misinterpreting his silence as ack of willingness to continue. The cleric sighed. "It would be so much easier if we understood why the system''s doing all this. I feel like we have so many pieces of the puzzle, and if we just put it all together..."
"I have some ideas," Derivan said quietly. "But every one of them worries me. I worry that stating them will make them real."
"...Yeah, I get where you''reing from there." Sev''s eyes unfocused slightly. "We''re gonna put it all together soon. And we''re not going to like what we find. We need to hold on to ourselves once that happens."
Derivan looked at his friend curiously. "What do you mean?"
Sev blinked. "I... I don''t know." He wobbled on his feet slightly. "That was strange. I''m sorry. We should get going."
"...Indeed we should." Derivan almost pushed on the subject more, but as he did, something in Sev''s version of the system pulsed strangely, almost as though it was warning him away he sensed it through both Shift and Patch, and it gave him pause.
So, instead of saying anything, he quietly wrote a note to Misa and Vex.
Of the four of them, Sev was the one still most bound to the system, and the one whose bonds they''d loosened the least. This felt like an indication that their time with that wasing to an end.
There was no response from either of them yet, but that was fine; he hadn''t expected one. They were both likely going through their own brand of problems. He just hoped they''d be able to catch up to them in time.
"Shit!" Misa let out an undignified sort of yelp as she just barely ducked out of the way of a descending de. If there was anything she hated, it was traps not because she couldn''t block them, although the fast ones gave her a run for her money. She still needed time to react to attacks to be able to block them, after all.
But traps were harder to block than people. People were easy to read. Traps had very little in the way of warning, especially when it came to the more advanced dungeons simpler ones would have things like light-up sequences to show that a trap was about to go off.
Good trap design? No. Convenient? Very. Misa wasn''t exactlyining.
The Elyran dungeon was far from a simple dungeon, though. She was already using her skills to examine the corridor ahead of her to the fullest, and in every one of them, the traps were slightly different the dungeon was changing the traps on her as her actions changed. It meant she couldn''t cheat. If she reacted differently to a trap, the next trap would be different as well, so even copying everything that Misa-from-another-timeline did wasn''t a guarantee
A runic circle formed in front of her, and Misa let a half-growl rip out of her throat. This, at least, she had a concrete way to deal with. She''d spoken with Vex about it before, the application of [The de Arcane] to spell constructs. Arcane mana tended to take on the traits of other mana aspects it came into contact with, which meant it did an excellent job of hijacking other spells.
One straight line through the runic circle. Misa shed a moment before the spell fired, watching with satisfaction as the circle fell apart; she didn''t have the same knowledge Vex did and couldn''t outright hijack a spell, but she could certainly destroy it.
Once Vex had told her the trick to it, anyway. She really hoped that little guy was alright.
"Well, well," someone said, and Misa froze, spinning to face the intruder. The voice came from behind her there shouldn''t have been anyone behind her. "We meet again. I see you actually survived."
It took a moment for her to parse who she was looking at. There was a man standing there, in as he could be. Brown hair, ck eyes, entirely too much stubble; familiar
"Oh," Misa said, narrowing her eyes. "You''re the piece of shit from the dungeon."
"Irvis, yes," the man said, giving her a mocking bow. There was a hint of distaste in the way the name rolled off his tongue. "I would say ''well met'', but that would be a lie."
"Please stop talking like a viin for two fucking seconds," Misa said. "It''s exhausting."
Irvis frowned at her and tutted his tongue. "Kids these days," he said. "No respect for the ssics."
What the fuck were the ssics? He gestured, and Misa tensed.
The timeline skill was... aplicated one to use. She could choose to do different actions in other timelines, and see how they yed out; she could see what would have happened if she had done something just slightly different a few minutes ago in the past. That was useful, but it was a lot of information to focus on.
Which made it all the more worrying when every single other version of her was blown back. Not killed she was harder to kill than that but more than half her health was gone in most of them, from attacks too fast for her to see and block.
Even more worrying was that nothing happened to her here.
"Something wrong?" Irvis asked her, mock-concerncing his voice. "All I did was move slightly. Why do you look scared?"
"I''m not scared," Misa spat. She wasn''t. There was a low anger thrumming inside her instead, calling her to violence. Irvis'' words were designed to make her angry, to fight at less than her best.
Like she''d fall for that.
She''d been feeling that thread of anger ever since she''d entered Elyra. It''d be nice to have something to take that anger out on. There''d been too many fightstely where she had to hold back.
She would have burned timelines... but no. Irvis could see into them, for some reason or the other; could even choose how differently he acted in each one. In some way he was aware of her skills, and was using them against her. She had no doubt that he''d do the same if she tried to summon anyone from her vige, but that didn''t mean that her bag of tricks was empty.
She wasn''t one to use skills conventionally, after all.
But first, a little test to see how Irvis reacted to conventional attacks.
Misa leapt forward, drawing [The de Arcane]; Irvis met her with a savage grin. She didn''t even see him wielding any sort of weapon against her. He wore a standard, well-trimmed suit, and when his reaction to her attack was simply to reach for her weapon, she allowed it. It was clear that something would happen, and that something would give her information.
Arcane mana twisted.
The nature of arcane mana was that in some sense it took on the properties of any mana type it encountered; this she understood in an abstract sort of way, from the half-dozen lectures Vex had given about it. It still surprised her when the swordpressed and warped, eyes and nails and teeth growing along its length in a way that looked unnervingly like Irvis
It snapped at her, and she mentally released her lock on it. Strange mana-flesh faded away almost immediately, reced once more with the serene purple-red arcane energy that normally formed the de, and Misa leapt back before Irvis could retaliate.
Not that he seemed to want to. He merely smiled at her, infuriatingly self-satisfied. "Learn anything useful?" he asked, his voice still mocking.
Misa smiled back. "I did."
Irvis was a creature of mana. Just like the mana abomination they''d fought, way back when all this first started.
"Wanna know something really weird I can do?" Misa asked, her tone nonchnt.
"What''s that?" Irvis'' tone was almost bored.
Misa attacked with [The de Arcane] again, throwing it towards Irvis.
It was, technically, a mana-based attack.
The instant before it struck, she blocked it. Reality shifted, and her mace took on a set of rapidly-shifting prismatic colors as she blocked her own strike with a ng, and in that moment in that instant between her mace reverting into a normal mace, while her weapon existed as whatever was optimal for blocking a mana-based attack
She also used it to strike Irvis, as part of the same motion used to block the sword.
The prismatic colors of the mace settled into a single solid tone of blue and rang like a bell; it sent her sword flying, and more importantly, burned into Irvis'' flesh with a loud crackle-pop. The thud as Irvis'' body struck the wall hit her a secondter, followed shortly by an enraged scream.
It was, Misa decided, very satisfying.
126 - Book 2: Chapter 63: Tricks and Alchemy
126 - Book 2: Chapter 63: Tricks and Alchemy
"Two of you," Irvis snarled; his face twisted in a raw, sudden sort of fury that almost made Misa take a step back. "Two of you! The mage I understand, but you? You don''t have any magic!"
Shit, he''s hit Vex. Misa''s first thought was worry, before it resolved into a more determined narrowing of her eyes. Irvis had waited for this. This man or whatever he was had known about them at least since she''d blocked his attempt at killing Elyra''s delve team only a month or so ago. That he had only chosen to show up again now...
It seemed like a choice.
He''d waited for them to split up, and that meant he didn''t want to face them together. Vex had been targeted first, and she had been targeted second, from what he''d said. She wasn''t sure what to make of that. Maybe he was avoiding one of the two of them, or maybe he just didn''t want to face Sev and Derivan together.
Either way, he wasn''t as invulnerable as he pretended to be. Of course, she could have figured them out from the bleeding wound she''d left with her mace, where specks of light drifted out from his skin. It looked raw and painful.
Misa smirked at him, spun, and threw her de far into the corridor, past the traps. She could sense Irvis trying to attack her in that moment of opportunity [Guard Stance] tried to activate to push her into the right position to stop him but she deactivated the skill before she could, and activated Endless Echoes.
The world spun into a fractal. One version of her was more familiar than all the others; the one she used most frequently to block, when she wasn''t in the right position for it. Some version of her had acquired a [Teleporting Mace], and it had be her favorite shtick there.
Misa reappeared halfway down the corridor, ducking underneath the trap that sprung almost immediately; pure instinct, this time, from her observations of the traps this dungeon liked to throw at her. It was sort of ufortable that the dungeon was adapting to her strategies, including her use of Echoes, but that was a distant concern to the threat of Irvis.
He was already catching up.
She had to lead him towards the center of the dungeon, where Sev and Derivan would be headed. Part of Misa wanted to try to fight him alone, to take a stand and see exactly how well she could fare against this monster, but she quashed that impulse; it would''ve been the same kind of stupidity she''d been reprimanding Sev over. No more of that, she told herself.
Instead, Misa scanned ahead, looking for a good way to stay ahead of Irvis and lure him where she wanted him. She could use her blocking trick a few more times she had more than enough mana banked for it but Irvis would no doubt be prepared. He''d figure it out the moment she pulled out her sword.
The corridor ahead of her was uniform to the point of being almost boring. Perfect square tiles, each of which Misa knew from experience could either trigger a trap or be a trap; there was no telling what was behind any given tile, and they all seemed identical, besides in color; they ran in long white stripes and shorter ck ones along the length of the corridor. There was nothing there she could use, as far as she knew. She cursed under her breath and nced back.
He was already catching up to her, bastard that he was he moved in an odd, flickering sort of way. She never quite caught him running. She''d see the initial moment of him starting to move, and then he''d fade out of her sight, only to reappear closer to her. Always in a spot of the dungeon without a trap. Always on one of those empty tiles along the corridor, where he would reorient and move again.
It was creepy. He was also almost certainly shifting the way Derivan could the way her own other selves touched on, albeit in a slightly more distant way. It exined how he could see those other versions of her...
Ah. That gave her an idea a few ideas, even. Misa grinned again, and it wasn''t a nice grin; she wasn''t in a very good mood.
To start with, if the dungeon was going to adapt to her, then she would have to make it adapt in her favor, against Irvis.
"Stop running," Irvis hissed at her. The sound carried across the corridor, and it was only the tone and strangeness of how that sound carried that made her think to block. Her mace flickered into the appearance of a flute, and something in Irvis'' words was sucked into it, a shimmering red mist expelled from the other end of the flute a momentter. Irvis growled in exasperation, and Misa wondered what exactly she''d just avoided.
No matter. She stopped, just like he wanted; Irvis almost seemed startled by it. He charged at her a secondter, some sort of bolt appearing in his hand, and she activated [Guard Stance] in response. She just needed the instant of precognition it provided her
There. Misa twisted on her feet right as Irvis appeared next to her, taking a single step forward and shoving her bodyweight in. She felt a grim satisfaction take hold as Irvis gasped in surprise, and she kept going. One fist wrapped around the stupid tie he wore with his stupid suit, and she yanked as hard as she could.
Which was pretty hard, first of all. She''d invested a fair number of points into Strength. Second, and perhaps something that shouldn''t have surprised her, the man was light.
Irvis went sprawling.
She would have followed up, but she''d thrown him with intent. Her echoes rolled the dice on the traps, stepping on a half-dozen different ones in the instant. Every physical trap that wasunched she blocked, and every mana-based one she''d gritted her teeth and allowed herself to get hit; if she was right about what the dungeon was doing...
A hole opened up in a nearby wall, and the hair on her skin prickled as mana gathered. Misa couldn''t see the process, but she saw the result mana so concentrated that it glowed a deep blue light. Itunched out of the hole in a fraction of a second, at a speed so blisteringly fast Misa wasn''t sure she could have triggered her block in time if she''d been the one to set off the trap.
Irvis certainly didn''t react in time. Whatever his stats were if he had any at all they weren''t oriented around speed and reaction; thence of mana impaled him through the head and chest with enough force to send him flying back and into the wall.
In the instant before thence struck, though, Misa caught a glimpse of him starting to smile.
She didn''t wait to see what happened she could guess. Conventional mana-based attacks wouldn''t work on Irvis; she needed the specific anti-magic weapons she summoned when blocking magical attacks, or else she would be hard-pressed to do any real damage to Irvis.
Better yet, she needed Vex. From what Irvis had said, he hadn''t been particrly sessful in his attack on her friend, but she still worried; there was nothing from him through the system, yet. But the little guy was resourceful, she told herself.
Sure enough, in the corner of her eye even as she ran, and dodged the traps in her way, sometimes only barely Misa saw Irvis pulling the manance out of his head and looking at it in what almost seemed like disdain; he clenched his fist, and thence shattered with the sound of a ringing bell.
Not encouraging. But not, she reminded herself, the end of it.
This fight, as far as she was concerned, was an opportunity to gather information. Arcane mana didn''t react well to Irvis, but there had always been the chance that that was just a quirk of arcane mana as a whole. Now she''d learned that he had some immunity to standard mana attacks, too. She doubted Irvis was very concerned about physical attacks she remembered how the delve captain, Harold, had attacked him only to have his sword phase straight through.
Time to lean fully into getting to the end of this fucking corridor, then. She was getting a little tired of all the nning.
"We must hurry," Derivan said, ncing sharply ahead.
"Something up?" Sev looked over at his friend.
"There is trouble... somewhere. I suspect it is with Misa." Derivan could feel reality fluctuating wildly through Shift, in the exact way he''de to expect when Misa used the upgraded [To Fall Yet Hold the Line]. Endless Echoes, she''d said it was called, though she looked oddly embarrassed while saying it.
The two of them hadn''t exactly been taking their time with the dungeon their path had been methodical and careful, but not exactly slow. The theme of the particr corridor they were going down seemed to be enchanted items and weaponry. Lined along the sides of the corridor were little alcoves styled after different workshops; everything from alchemybs to entire foundries and smithing stations.
Derivan thought Vex would have loved it. As far as he could tell, each individual alcove was a fully functioning workshop all on its own; the ingredients stocked on the shelves seemed genuine, and the halfplete items thaty scattered about made it feel like they were left there by real artisans. The only reason he knew it was dungeon-made was because of the way Patch screamed at him all of this was linked to the system, in some way.
He suspected he knew exactly what style of trap it was. Create something in these workshops, and whatever you created would then be pitted against you, further down the hall.
The problem was what happened when you didn''t create anything in those workshops.
Every one of those halfpleted projects left strewn about in them came to life if they just walked past without engaging, this time much less than the single suit of armor he''d broken the link of; these were smaller, mindless creations of the system that would fall to nothing if he snapped that link. It wasn''t worth the ding to Patch to destroy them that way, and so he and Sev resorted to fighting.
Mostly.
Animated swords and axes and whips were fine. Animated potions, on the other hand...
They''d learned very quickly that the alchemy workshops were not ones to walk past, because stray alchemical effects were strange, and animated potions were not fun to fight when a single ssh of liquid created wildly different effects.
"Ah, shit, we''ve got another oneing up," Sev said, ncing to the right. There was yet another workshop there, this time with shelves lined with an assortment of red potions and herbs. Derivan thought he recognized some of them from Emily''s garden, even. "You wanna handle this?"
"Yes," Derivan said simply.
He was quick and precise.
He also had no idea what he was doing. He enjoyed the process, though there was something about grinding random herbs and throwing them into liquid and watching the reaction that was fun but there was a solid chance that the whole mixture would just explode, which had happened once or twice. After the first one Sev had dered that Derivan would have to handle all the potion-mixing from now on, unless there were ingredients that he explicitly recognized from priesthood.
Sev had mixed one sessful potion and kept it, at least.
The potion Derivan made settled and stopped drawing in mana after a second, and Derivan would have let out a relieved sigh if he''d been capable of such a thing. He simted one anyway, ncing back at Sev and giving him a thumbs up.
"Nice," Sev said. "Any idea what kind of potion you made?"
"I do not," Derivan said.
"Hopefully it''s not anything too bad. It looks like that''s thest workshop we need to work through." Sev gestured to the corridor ahead of them it led to a big, central room of some sort, and there was the sound of a very familiar orc yelling something that sounded suspiciously like e and get me, fucker".
Sev paused. "Okay, you weren''t kidding. We better hurry Hey!"
Derivan didn''t bother waiting for Sev. The human got tired too easily, because agility apparently didn''te with stamina, and because he hadn''t put that many points into agility to begin with. He just picked Sev up under his arm and started running.
127 - Book 2: Chapter 64: Elevator Fight
127 - Book 2: Chapter 64: Elevator Fight
There was a certain satisfaction that came with being proven right, sometimes. Derivan found that this was not one of those times. Animated potions attacking them were one thing; they''d chosen not to deal with them because the effects were chaotic and unpredictable, and that made them more dangerous fighting animated swords and slightly malformed boots.
Animated potion golems were... a little bit more of a threat. The upside of it was that all the salves Sev had made with his ''priestly knowledge'' were all rtively harmless. The downside was that all the potions Derivan had mixed were unknown quantities, and he had no idea what any of them did.
And then there was the more pressing problem of Irvis.
"Any ideas?" Misa asked. She was panting slightly, her eyes focused just ahead at the almost ordinary-looking man standing at the other end of the circr room. His name was, apparently, Irvis. "I can scratch him, but it takes some fuckin'' work to do. Also I don''t want to lose my sword and he''s probably going to try to grab it. You got magic, right, Deri? I could block that."
"That could work," Derivan agreed. Misa had exined what she''d determined about Irvis'' strengths and weaknesses mid-battle no mean feat, considering Irvis never quite stopped harassing them and even with the ry charms they still wore, Irvis seemed to be able to tell they were talking. He didn''t seem to be able to hear what they were saying, but he was certainly aware something was happening.
It seemed to piss him off.
"You lot are really stubborn about just dying, aren''t you?" Irvis said, his voice cold. He''d stopped at his end of the room, silently observing them while the potion-golems stalked towards them. "Even that little friend of yours."
"What did you do to Vex." It wasn''t even a question the words emerged from Derivan before he''d even processed saying them, and he was distantly aware that his grip on his sword had tightened.
"Oh, nothing much," Irvis said with augh. His eyes darkened. "I wouldn''t worry about it."
"He''s baiting you," Misa said quietly. Sev nodded beside him.
Derivan had Physical Empathy. He knew Irvis was baiting him; the man was pretty good at controlling his emotional cues, but the stat was high enough now that it was feeding him information without him even trying. There was almost nothing physical left about that stat. He could see the anger and hatred in Irvis'' eyes, a hint of what almost seemed like anxiety in the way he carried himself. He saw the way Irvis'' gaze flickered upwards every so often, like he was trying to check in on something.
It didn''t stop his eyes from narrowing. It didn''t stop him fromunching himself forward, a small cloud of [Barrier]s forming around him like shards of ss.
He wasn''t angry, exactly. At least, he didn''t think he was. He''d never really known anger. There was a part of him that knew that rising to Irvis'' bait was exactly what he wanted, but at the same time
One of the potion-golems lunged for him, as Irvis no doubt knew it would. Derivan had been anticipating it, too, but the golem moved faster than he expected. Liquid snapped out at him from the center of its chest, avoiding every single one of his [Barrier]s, and Derivan reacted more out of instinct than intent.
From within his armor, slime surged.
Derivan hadn''t had a lot of time to try to learn more about his Slime stat. He had some understanding of slime-theory from discussions with Vex, in particr its rtion to mana. He understood, in the abstract, that this was a new part of himself that he would have to learn to control.
Lesson one about his Slime aspect it seemed to have a bit of a mind of its own.
It was strange, feeling a part of himself stretching out and then ttening into a shield. For as long as he could remember, his body was characterized by rigidity and inflexibility, save for the limited movement provided to him by the joints in his armor. Now there was a part of him that could move and shape itself almost freely, and would do so with barely a thought.
The golem tried to whip its potionsh around his makeshift shield, to no avail; it struck the surface of his slime, and he understood.
The golem was a slime, too.
Sort of. An advanced one, with a shape impressed upon it like a shell around its form not unlike his own body. It was imbued with the properties of one of the potions he had created, and he almostughed when he realized what it did.
He didn''t, of course. All that had happened in less than a fraction of a second, and while his mind was processing what had happened, his legs had already carried him past the golems and to Irvis. Irvis'' face sat somewhere frozen between surprised and mocking, but he caught himself before Derivan actually reached him.
"Worried about your friend?" he asked, his tone still mocking.
Derivan responded by ring mana into the glyph that he''d etched into the back of a [Barrier]. It was a simple glyph the glyph for fire but Irvis still hadn''t been expecting it; he was prepared to respond to a spell, but his expression changed into one of puzzlement when the mana moved past him and infused itself into a [Barrier] that hovered just over his shoulder.
Fire red out. There was a moment of smug satisfaction from Irvis, no doubt because magic didn''t do much to him.
Then Misa appeared, her mace sucking all the fire into it in an instant. She smashed that mace directly into Irvis'' face while it was still in the process of blocking that attack, and Irvis yowled in pain as he stumbled backwards.
"Surprise, fucker," Misa said calmly, and then turned to Derivan. "You should warn me when you have a n, next time."
"I did not want him to think I had a n," Derivan admitted. "He is astute. And he was expecting me to be angry."
Really, he was mostly just worried about Vex. But they had to deal with the threat here and now before he could help their wizard and that was if Vex actually needed help at all.
"You''re lucky I know you," Misa said, smiling slightly. Derivan simply nodded in response.
"I am."
"You..." Irvis interrupted both of them one hand was clutched against his face, and the rest of his expression was twisted in a frighteningly hostile grimace. "You have ess to signs."
Irvis knew about that form of magic, then. There was something personal about it, too he wasn''t just surprised, he was... there was aplex set of emotions there; far more than he''d felt from the man in the entire time he''d known him, though that admittedly hadn''t been for very long.
Anger, still. There was always anger and hatred there, persistent in him like it was a part of his very self. A touch of nostalgia, strangely enough. A small spark of something that seemed almost like hope, but ruthlessly squashed. Grief, strangely enough.
Followed by a second wave of anger, more intense than the first.
"Alright, then," Irvis said. "You''re more dangerous than I thought. Means I can''t y with you as much. A pity."
He genuinely thought it was a pity, too.
Irvis took a step forward, and then began to melt.
Put more urately, Irvis pulled his hand away from his face, where Misa had struck him and long strings of flesh followed his hand, sticking to it like tar. In the gaps between those strings of flesh where there should have been blood and bone, there was instead a strange, pulsing gray matter. Irvis brought his other hand up to his face, and began pulling away more clumps, letting his more of his skin melt into a disgusting slurry
"Hey, guys?" Sev said. "This is really gross and all, but we''re not really going to just... stand here while he does whatever that is, right?"
"Oh, fuck no," Misa said. "Derivan?"
"Yes," Derivan said, and brought forward another two of his shards.
Fire and light. An easy enough glyphbination to make on the fly; Derivan imagined a burning ray of light, and the pseudo-ss of his [Barrier] was the perfect medium for it. Misa bounced off that ray of light again, her mace this time flickering into what seemed like a w that she shed through Irvis'' still-melting body; he didn''t even try to dodge.
He didn''t seem hurt by the attack, either.
Instead, Misa hissed in a mixture of bewilderment and pain as the Irvis-residue on her w-weapon began to crawl up the weapon and towards her. Derivan hastily canceled his spell, and the w flickered out of existence just before that residue reached her she took several steps back, and her face went slightly pale.
"That version of me is gone," she said. It wasn''t clear if she meant dead, or if it was just that she could no longer ess that version of herself.
"I sense it too," Derivan said, his tone grim. Shift had rippled strangely for a moment was still rippling strangely. A lot of those ripples wereing from the half-melted blob that was Irvis, and the three of them took cautious steps back, because maybe this was a process that would be dangerous to interrupt.
This was, of course, the moment the potion-golems decided that this was their time to shine, and began to attack in earnest.
"Shit," Misa muttered she blocked an attack almost reflexively, her mace turning briefly into a transparent shield that absorbed a potion-golem''s whip into a flicker of color. "Any idea what these do if they hit us?"
"The red one will cause you to sparkle," Derivan said, pointing at the golem he''d blocked on his way to Irvis; even now, the potion was swimming within his system, though it didn''t seem to affect him as long as it was contained in the ''slime'' portion of him. "It isrgely harmless."
"How do you know that?" Sev gave him a strange look, and Derivan shrugged helplessly.
"It is an interaction with the Slime stat, I believe," he said. "The golems operate in a simr manner"
The now-formless blob that had previously been Irvis lurched, and with it, the entire floor of the room they were on did too. Unprompted, the floor began to rise, lifting them up towards the fog above them.
And before they could respond to that, spikesnced out of Irvis'' body, piercing into every potion-golem in the room. Three of them came for Derivan, Sev, and Misa as well, but a well-timed block shattered each spike, and this time there was no residual matter that took out yet another timeline the sword Misa had conjured seemed resistant to that.
"Good to know my skill''s still working, at least," she muttered to herself. The potion-golems each sagged suddenly, like something vital had been drained from them. Then all at once, almost too fast to see, each of them were sucked up into Irvis, his spikes acting like straws through which he drained everything else from them.
And the Irvis-blob was suddenly much, muchrger. Even as Derivan watched, it split into two, and then slowly resolved into something that was very much man-shaped once again; Irvis'' face peered out at them, though this time with no real attempt at looking human.
Almost perfectly on time, the floor of the tform shed beneath them, flickering into a series of perfectly square tiles. They seemed to form a pattern on the floor that Derivan didn''t quite recognize, though he understood it to be important.
And then, echoing from the fog above them, came the sound of music.
"Thank you for waiting," Irvis said, in a way that didn''t sound thankful at all. If he was surprised by the change in the dungeon, he didn''t show it. "Let''s begin, shall we?"
128 - Book 2: Chapter 65: Music
128 - Book 2: Chapter 65: Music
Irvis began by exploding into action.
Derivan saw Misa open her mouth, presumably to respond to Irvis but she abruptly tensed instead, her expression shing into focus in an instant. No time for banter. The two Irvis-creatures lunged towards them, their bodies ttening and spreading into a mess of flesh and teeth in a fraction of a second. Misa shed forward once in a block, her body distorting slightly Derivan felt the intensity of the shift as she flickered through more realities than she normally had to.
She found one eventually, her mace morphing into something that looked like a cross between a whip and a cage of fire but Derivan saw the exhaustion in her face, even as Sev hurriedly hit her with a heal. Misa staggered back to her feet as the two Irvises were thrown back, coughing slightly.
"That was... more than two attacks," she said, looking slightly ill. "Thought I could block it. Drained all my mana, half my health."
That exined some of what was happening, but not all of it. Derivan felt for Irvis'' connection with the system, but Patch didn''t find anything there were these asional threads that would reach out from him and connect with the greater system, which was so far different from how everyone else connected with the system that Derivan had no idea what to do with it.
He still snapped those strands when he could. He just wasn''t sure that it was doing anything. Irvis certainly didn''t react to it when he did.
Sev looked like he was about to say something, but Irvis had already recovered and wasunching yet another dual attack; this time, all three of them dove out of the way, with Derivan creating [Barrier]s inyers to protect them from the pieces of Irvis that snapped forward and threatened to consume them. His forms twisted and wove around those constructs, but it still slowed him down.
"We need a n!" Misa shouted. The sound Irvis was making was a crackle of groaning teeth, overwhelming the music that yed on through the room they were in. Irvis flowed over Derivan''s barriers, his body distorting around each one with a disconcerting sound that was not unlike the snap of bone. Derivan hurriedly worked his Sign into each of his barriers, trying to make something broader
No, there was something more he could do here. If he used thebination Sign with Vex, he could at least let his lizard know that something was wrong. He hadn''t tested his own Sign in istion yet, and while this was a good time to do so, this was a way to reach out to Vex without relying on the system.
Derivan just hoped it would work.
A re of mana into his barriers brought that book-shield into being. Irvis'' eldritch forms mmed into his magic and then almost seemed to recoil, as if burned. Derivan took the opportunity to move his [Barrier]s and begin linking them up. It took him only a second each [Barrier] acted as an anchor point for a hexagonal section of a greater glyphic shield, creating a faintly glimmering green dome of shields around them, each imprinted with the faint impression of an open book.
Irvis mmed back into that shield a momentter, uncaring for the way the magic shed and reacted against him, burning small parts of his flesh. Gnashing teeth spread small cracks into the dome, and Derivan felt a small part of his soul respond, tiny shes of pain resounding inside him with every small crack.
"The shield will notst," he said, though his words were redundant. Sev and Misa both could see the cracks spreading for themselves. Derivan was more concerned about the possibility that he had trapped them. Irvis had spread around the shield so that the only source of light left was from the magic itself.
But he''d had little choice, he told himself. Irvis was faster than any of them, and Misa''s blocks would notst.
...still, he almost regretted the magic. The shield lit up Irvis in a particrly disconcerting way, in as far as it was disconcerting to have a flesh-monster surrounding them.
"We''re missing our major damage dealer," Sev said grimly. "We don''t really have a backup. Derivan?"
"I have made an attempt tomunicate with Vex," Derivan said. "And... I do not know if I can hurt him. His anatomy is different."
Which was an understatement, if there ever was one.
"There''s more." Sev hesitated. "The dungeon''s... ying music. That''s not normal, right?"
"The potion golems were part of our path," Derivan said. "Was the music part of yours?"
"I... don''t know." Misa shook her head. "I didn''t pay attention. My section of the dungeon was just a shitload of traps, but maybe there was a musical element to it?"
"If we can use the dungeon against him, we should," Sev said. He nced up at the protective dome. "Assuming west long enough."
"We can''t stay like this forever," Misa agreed. "I can push him back again."
"Do you have enough mana?" Sev nced at her. Misa winced.
"Nooo," she said.
Derivan understood, though Misa didn''t borate further. Her mana-sharing trick required her to cut into the mana supply of the reality anchor, and that wasn''t something she was particrly willing to do. Not when the integrity of that reality anchor was still supporting the existence of her entire family.
Her entire vige, even.
The cracks in his shield began to spread, and Misa let out a reluctant breath. She''d practiced this maneuver and a few others with her vige, Derivan knew. All she needed to do was send a message.
It happened quickly. Gabriel appeared and disappeared, having prepared the [Trade] before he''d even fully manifested; he wasn''t one forbat situations, and Misa didn''t want to keep him there. The moment she was ready she gave him a nod, and Derivan let the barrier go. Glyphic magic shed back into the [Barrier]s producing them, and those barriers shattered an instantter. Irvis surged forward
Misa blocked.
Like before, Irvis was disguising multiple attacks in what was apparently a single one. Derivan could sense it through Patch and Shift, now that he was watching for it there were small threads of Misa''s skill reaching out, testing with spiderlike limbs to identify the exact vector of attack. And there were a dozen hidden small attacks in what Irvis was doing. Every individual tooth coated in a different poison, slightly-Shifted limbs and even sounds that could damage them.
Without the extra mana, Misa would have died.
Even with it, she struggled. He saw the immensity of the skill as it connected with some greater structure, and a massive Shift followed, flooding her weapon with something that seemed alien even to the system. Her mace pulsed into a beacon of light that, very briefly, pushed Irvis back, sttering sections of his flesh out against the walls. The slowly-rising floor almost seemed to help Irvis, here; as it scraped against the walls, it pulled clumps of Irvis-flesh with it, leaving him in puddles on the floor that moved surprisingly quickly to re-coalesce.
This was still an opportunity, Derivan recognized.
As Irvis tried to recover, the armor shed forward with his sword, cutting into the pseudo-flesh that was closest to him. He was mindful of what had happened to Misa when her own weapon had made contact, but there was always the chance that what happened with him would be different, given how he interacted with Health.
The flesh split apart under his de, but it did nothing else different. He was lucky in that it didn''t start crawling up his sword, like it had with Misa''s mace. On the other hand, it didn''t look like Irvis had been hurt at all.
He even chuckled. "Was that your best shot?" he asked, his voice mocking. It resonated in the arena around them, a half-dozen mouths speaking the words from the little globs of him left all over the room that were slowly crawling together.
Derivan didn''t respond. Instead, he paid attention to the music. The first n hadn''t worked, so it was time to move on to the second; he could feel the way the system itself was threaded through every note. The only question was exactly what kind of challenge this was supposed to represent
Irvis didn''t give him much time to think. He surged together all at once andunched himself at Derivan, a broken sort ofugh emerging from his mouths, and Derivan instinctively held up his sword to block. No [Barrier], and he''d acted too quickly for Misa to even react.
She was there a secondter, but not before Derivan had already taken the brunt of the hit. For the first time he felt his metal twisting terribly, a long serrated gash tearing open along the length of his arm. It was sheer luck that the poison did nothing to him, that Irvis had chosen to attack him like this.
But even that wasn''t an advantage they kept for long.
Irvis re-coalesced into a single form. He seemed to be getting better and better at recovering from Misa''s blocks, and she looked more and more exhausted every time she blocked one of his attacks. Derivan almost wanted to check in with her, but...
They had more pressing problems. Sev would keep an eye on everything he needed to.
Irvis once again wore an immacte suit, though this time he didn''t bother looking particrly human. He kept himself just human enough to affect a fake, thoughtful frown. "Now that''s unexpected," Irvis said, looking at Derivan. "You''re a monster, aren''t you?"
Derivan''s hand immediately went for the amulet the Guildmaster had given him. It was gone, crushed in the weight of Irvis'' attack.
"I am who I choose to be," Derivan replied, taking an almost immediate dislike to Irvis''bel. Irvis justughed.
"Oh, that''s rich," he said with a chuckle. He paused, scanning Derivan thoughtfully. "You don''t know what you are, do you? You don''t know what we are."
Irvis was a monster? "Enlighten me," Derivan said, trying to keep himself from sounding too eager. It wasn''t an answer that he needed but it was an answer he''d been searching for for a while.
Irvis could tell, evidently. He watched Derivan for a moment before smiling carelessly. "No. I don''t think I will."
He was mocking him.
Which was all well and good. Derivan was interested in the answer, but was perfectly willing to wait on an answer if he had to; right now, it was more important that they find a solution to the situation they were trapped in, before Irvis decided to stop toying with them. Derivan had no doubt that he could have obliterated the three of them if he really wanted to.
But there had to be something they could do, or Irvis surely wouldn''t have waited for them to split up before attacking them. Unless he was confined to the dungeon somehow.
The dungeon music washed over him again, and this time, Derivan paid close attention. It was rted in some way to Misa''s section of the dungeon, he knew, but all it seemed to be was music. Nothing was reacting to it
But maybe nothing was reacting to it because someone was already solving every puzzle the dungeon threw at them in real time.
Derivan opened up Shift a little bit more, searching for everything Irvis was doing. Irvis was clearly aware of these shifted realities to some extent every variant of him was acting with deliberation, and Derivan realized for the first time that some of them were singing.
Nothing obvious. Low, pure notes, in time with the dungeon music that poured over them. And yet...
Each time the dungeon reacted, pulsing. And each time, the foundation of the whole ce shook, like it was building up to something.
"Nothing to say?" Irvis raised an eyebrow at him. "A pity. Especially since you''re like me."
If Derivan had had a mouth, it would have pressed into a thin line at that statement. Instead, he just readied his sword, and kept a mental finger on the building music.
Something was about to happen, and he needed to be ready.
He just hoped Vex got his message.
129 - Book 2: Chapter 66: Magical Studies
129 - Book 2: Chapter 66: Magical Studies
Vex was in the Ashion section of the tower, doing his damndest to ignore Irvis'' frozen body.
Something about it was unnerving. There were times he looked away and could swear that Irvis'' eyes were following him, somehow those eyes remained full of hate, in a way that made him shiver. But anything he did to interfere with his father''s magic might also free Irvis early, and Vex wasn''t ready to deal with him.
The more time he had to study Irvis, the more uncertain he was about whether he could deal with Irvis at all. Even if Derivan, Misa, and Sev had all been here with him...
His mana sense told him a lot of things. Irvis'' entire body was made out of exactly one mana aspect, though whatever aspect it was, it was nothing Vex had ever encountered before. It was more alive than any form of mana he''d seen before; every piece of Irvis showed individual, identical reactions.
His... his not-father''s freezing spell was far moreplicated than he''d thought, too. There was a reason it had taken his entire being to cast. This was a propagating stasis spell that was alive, in its own way, the mana imbued with bits of Karix''s soul; every time Irvis tried to break free, the ice-infused energy reacted, attacking that piece of Irvis until it was once again frozen solid imbued with too much ice-aspect to be able to move.
But even that was fading away. It would take a while Karix had definitely managed to buy him time but the spell that would havested for centuries on anyone else was only going tost for about an hour on Irvis.
The problem was that he''d studied just about everything he could through the ice. His glyph couldn''t make it through the potent ice to understand what was going on with Irvis in detail, which meant he couldn''t spend his time probing for a weakness.
Vex turned his attention back to the rest of the tower instead.
Behind the broken rubble was a mess of books; the Ashion section of the dungeon was constructed like a library, no doubt a reflection of his family''s propensity for study and magic. There were traps here, he knew. He''d heard plenty of tales from others that had been here. Sometimes delvers would bring materials out of the dungeon and to him, and it was from this dungeon that he''d gained some of his study material...
Having ess to this library would have made him happy in nearly any other situation.
Instead, Vex searched. His bonus room was probably somewhere here but trigger conditions for bonus rooms were strange. His room had been , and so he could only guess that the trigger conditions were in some way rted to that, the same way Misa had gained ess to her room by replicating the conditions in which she had lost her vige...
...except he had no such event in his past. He''d never been disconnected from the system. The closest he''d ever done in that regard was when he''d helped Derivan break free from it, and that had happened after the dungeon had created the bonus room...
...what type of magic had he used back there?
Vex paused, struck by the thought. He''d never considered it too relieved that he''d been able to help, and then too caught up by everything that had happened afterwards, maybe. That didn''t feel like it was enough to exin himpletely forgetting to explore this branch of magic. It didn''t exin the fuzziness with which he remembered that notification that had appeared when he''d cast his spell.
WARNING: ###### aspect magic is not allowed
He''d known what that aspect was.
He''d understood that magic, when he was casting it, but that knowledge had been taken away from him at the same moment the box had appeared. It was part of the reason he hadn''t focused on it with the intensity he otherwise would have. A magic that could interact directly with the system, that allowed him to act on it maybe the same way Derivan could with Patch and Shift having ess to that would have changed everything for him.
No wonder it had been locked away.
Even now, the memory was blurred and fuzzy to him, but now that he knew where to begin...
Vex felt his feet taking him to a particr section of the tower''s library. It was a small, shadowed section in a corner that was ufortably close to Irvis'' frozen body, but Vex did his best to ignore it; instead, he scanned the books. More than half of them were traps, if he remembered what the delver reports had said correctly; the Ashion tower tested knowledge and perception and magic, all aspects that their family purported themselves to be experts in.
Half of the books wereyered in just the faintest shimmer of Illusion those were easy enough to dismiss as fake. Another few books appeared not to be magical at all, but they were bound in a way that Karix would never have allowed in their personal library, and so Vex dismissed those as well. He''de back to thoseter, but he suspected it was the sort of detail he was supposed to notice.
It got harder from there. He picked out an older-looking tome, ncing at the cover; The Origins Of Magic, embossed in gold letters onto green leather. He frowned at it and put it back. The capitalization of the title wasn''t correct.
Another book he rejected for having inconsistent kerning, and a third one he put back because he noticed the book didn''t have a shadow. Vex went through them like this one by one, until he found a book that didn''t have any ws by his father''s standards.
He took a breath, sat down, and opened the book.
Aspects of Magic
You may ess more of the contents of this book by channeling different aspects into it.
Vex couldn''t help but raise a brow. A magic test, after all that? Why not just start with the test to begin with? It was an easy enough test, though his ss as a [Chromaturgist] had given him particr affinity with even the most esoteric of aspects. Irvis'' aspect aside, it wasn''t difficult for him to channel a whole spectrum of the different types of mana he had ess to.
Fire, water, earth, air, light, and dark; all the same elements he had ess to in the form of glyphs. Arcane, for the esoteric, to represent a type of mana that would change and adapt. Necrotic, to represent rot. Life. gue. Blood. Stranger aspects like one that, as best as he could tell, represented English, though he''d never been able to craft a useful spell out of it.
And then, like a fireblossom, text bloomed on the page in front of him.
If you can see this, you will likely have already realized that mana aspects arergely arbitrary. There are a few great secrets about magic, and here is one of them: aspects do not exist. The lines are not as distinct as the mind makes it seem, though thinking about it in that way certainly makes your spells easier to understand and cast.
The truth behind aspects are simple: they are small facets of a conceptual sphere. Anything you can conceive of is likely to be an aspect within the mana, though many of them are redundant and ovep with one another. Yet all of them are useful, and specificity can be immensely beneficial. To find an aspect of roads, for example, would be to craft a spell stronger for traveling on roads than any spell using an aspect of travel could be.
Vex paused in his reading here, his brows furrowing in thought. Here was a realization spelled out for him that had already been percting in the back of his mind, perhaps for years: why did mana divide itself into aspects? The categories seemed so arbitrary, and the elements themselves were based on an archaic understanding of the world...
This exined a lot about why the elements existed as they did.
And if aspects were simply a representation of any conceivable idea then could there be an aspect for the system? Or was the system an outside element, something that mana couldn''t intrinsically represent?
...There was still the question of how glyphs fit into all of this. Vex thought he could see the bits and pieces, the holes in the exnation where glyphs would have slotted in, if all knowledge of them hadn''t been erased. Glyphs represented art, and art represented what the book called the ''conceptual sphere''; the breadth of ideas that all living people hade up with.
If that were true... then magic was much, much broader than he had assumed. He hadn''t even considered an aspect of roads, and yet reaching for it with [Multichromal Mutation] was as simple as thinking about it, now that he knew. Many of this other attempts to use that skill had been difficult, requiring a thorough understanding of the aspect he was trying to reach, but understanding what aspects were
Well, it didn''t make using the skillpletely trivial. But it certainly made it easier.
Vex wanted to start iterating through all the ideas he had and he had so many, now that he understood more about how these aspects came about but something gave him pause, and it wasn''t just the fact that Irvis was beginning to thaw.
It was the information he received, in a very familiar sort of way, of an attack. Of a multitude of attacks. Vex had to put down the book to parse the rush of knowledge, because the flow was stronger than it had been the first time Derivan had used theirbined Sign to block an attack. A small part of him managed to mentally reach out and call out the system menu again, to see if the interference had faded, but he stumbled and had to lean on the wall to steady himself before he could read the chat.
Instead, he focused on his mind. If Derivan was using their Sign, he was trying to tell him something; if he was just blocking one of Misa''s attacks or something...
But he already knew that wasn''t the case. Derivan wouldn''t have used it for something as trivial as that; the circumstances under which he would try to contact Vex in this way were few and far between, and Vex had no reason to think this was anything less than a real attack.
He was, of course, right. But more interesting and more rming was the nature of what was attacking his friends. He felt a part of his mind chugging along, automatically sorting the information he''d gathered, and parsing it together with what he''d just learned.
Aspect of Hatred, Irvis
A physical manifestation of a single aspect in the mana, given life through a concentration and maniption of Reality. This particr form of manifestation allows him to manipte aspects of reality that are not normally essible without the use of a Reality Shard.
Poison Fang, (26)
A poisoned bite. The specific poison varies, but are almost universally drawn from shifted realities that have been rendered uninhabitable, usually due to the actions of poison mages in Elyra. gue aspect variant.
Discordant Sound, (32)
An infectious sound, gathered from an unpatched Bard ss. The sound does physical damage through a quirk in system-assisted physics and possesses a quality that will cause listeners to sing along, damaging themselves in the process. Sound aspect variant.
Biting Sight, (47)
A broken image of something that has been erased. To look upon it is to wipe away any memories that would otherwise be associated with that image, as the associated infolock spreads to any memories that are ''contaminated''. Mental aspect variant.
Vex swallowed. That was probably why he''d struggled so hard to process everything over a hundred distinct attacks, even if many of them were the same ones; he wondered if that was rted to why Misa''s health costs were per-attack. Perhaps the system had to process each one individually, the way he''d had to.
More importantly, this meant his friends were also being attacked by Irvis... and a more powerful version of him, if this was any indication. Vex nced at Irvis'' frozen body, feeling a slight chille over him that had nothing to do with the ice magic that kept the living Aspect in stasis.
If there was more than one of him, he wasn''t necessarily safe.
And with Derivan and the others in trouble, he had to decide what to do, and quickly.
130 - Book 2: Chapter 67: A Losing Battle
130 - Book 2: Chapter 67: A Losing Battle
Derivan was more hurt than he had ever been.
He was still alive, crucially. His chestte, where the runes that kept him alive were etched that was still entirely intact. But it was only intact because he''d made sacrifices elsewhere. Because when Irvis forced him to choose between damage to his chestte and damage to something else, he''d always chosen something else. He was fairly certain he''d survive even if Irvis managed to take off his head.
Not that he wanted to test that. Being deprived of sight along with his limbs didn''t sound like a good time.
Derivan had taken on almost half of Irvis'' attacks, trading ces with Misa whenever he could. She was still blocking him sessfully, but it was taking something vital out of her. There were dark circles under her eyes, and almost a gauntness to her frame that hadn''t been there before. She was spending more mana than she ever had.
Patch told him, too, that the reality anchor she held with her was straining. It wasn''t about to be destroyed, exactly, but it was a reminder that there was more at stake here than their own lives. If Misa died... Well. That was one of the reasons he was taking as many hits as he could.
Sev was healing them. He''d tried to tank a couple of hits with his barriers when he could, but most of the time he was saving mana to keep Misa healed; he could do that for less mana than it took to block one of Misa''s attacks.
All of that to say that the fact remained that they were losing.
Irvis surged towards him using one of the three bodies he''d created; Misa was dealing with the other two, and Irvis seemed to be studiously ignoring Sev, for whatever reason. There was something there, though Derivan didn''t know what. There had to be a reason he wasn''t attacking their healer
Fangs crashed towards him, and Derivan tried to pull out of the way as best he could. He twisted, and he felt a part of his body turn into slime, affording him just a touch more flexibility than his metal usually offered. He was almost out of range
But Irvis could freely change his form the same way Derivan could, and he adjusted easily, his entire body unfolding into a mouth so it could snap shut around him. Derivan wasn''t used to fighting like this, and the Slime stat wasn''t second nature to him the way Physical Empathy was. His sword was out of position, and the best he could do was bring his left arm up to stop Irvis'' teeth from just biting through his chestte, even as he shoved backwards as fast as he could with his feet.
It worked, mostly. Just like most of Irvis'' attacks before, his armor was strong enough to withstand the direct hit but it wasn''t strong enough to withstand whatever it was Irvis had on his fangs, that drooling liquid that was so much more than a simple poison. It began eating into his metal almost immediately.
Derivan didn''t hesitate. His left arm was mostly useless from the forearm onwards anyway; the metal was chipped and torn from the bits and pieces he''d been forced to hack off from Irvis'' other attacks. One quick cut was all it took.
It was fortunate his sword was strong enough to slice through his own metal.
The remnants of his left forearm fell to the floor. The saving grace here was that it didn''t hurt. There was, at most, a dull throbbing that Derivan interpreted as his version of pain. He heard Misa shout something that was muffled by the still-rising music and the sound of Irvis'' own eldritch taunting. She sounded angry.
She would be. Derivan almost smiled at the thought.
"Derivan!" Sev was closer to him, and his voice clearer; Derivan saw the way he started forward, only barely stopping himself from running right to Derivan''s side. He looked lost, desperate. "Shit, I''m I need to heal you. I''m going to try. I know we were talking about avoiding it but"
"Do it," Derivan said. He understood the need for it. The worry was that he would get the Health stat, and lose the advantage hisck thereof gave him in fights, but this was hisck of a Health stat wasn''t helping him against Irvis. He still didn''t know if Irvis had Health.
Sev shut up and cast. Derivan felt that rush of divine magic flowing over him, something he hadn''t experienced since he''d first lost the stat. Irvis was attacking him he hadn''t stopped to wait but transforming the way he did seemed to take something out of him, and he''d turned back into his humanoid form, reshaping one arm into a de instead.
That was... more manageable. Irvis was still faster than him by a long shot, but Derivan was better with a sword. This was familiar ground for him. He could survive.
Though it didn''t give him much of an opportunity to check his stats and see if he had actually regained Health. His metaphorical heart sank, though, when he realized his arm wasn''t healing.
This would qualify as a status ailment of some sort; a malus. Sev had the ability to heal those, but if he hadn''t already
He saw Sev shake his head slightly.
If he hadn''t already, then he''d probably tried and failed.
It didn''t matter. There were other ways to get his arm back. The problem in the here and now was mostly the fact that losing an entire arm threw his bnce off, and it limited his options. His options were already limited, and using the dungeon against Irvis wasn''t going as well as he hoped.
He''d managed to work out more about what they were supposed to do, partially through Patch, and partially through an observation of what Irvis did in different variations of their reality through Shift.
The room they were in was a sort of hexagonal column, and each of the six walls had a different pattern painted on them. Every wall corresponded to a different instrument, and specific parts of each pattern corresponded to a different note. In the normal case, the elevator would begin rising, and music would begin ying; the potion-golems, or whatever monsters had been triggered or created in the other sections of the dungeon, would spawn and fight until whatever song was ying was pleted'' by the delvers. Completion, in this case, was defined as participating and guiding the song to an end point. Different songpletions led to different oues, whether it was a buff for the delvers or a malus for the enemies.
And the dungeon didn''t recognize Irvis as an enemy. It thought he was one of them. That was a problem for them if they wanted to try to use the dungeon against him; anything they did would affect him, too. There was something Derivan thought he could do there Irvis wasn''t connected to the system in the same way, and so buffs and maluses would probably affect him differently, in a way he could affect with Patch...
But it was all a lot of conjecture. The possibility of damaging the stat wasn''t a concern for him at this point, at least. There was too much danger here for him to restrict his options.
"Performance issues?" Irvis smirked at him, mocking. He''d rxed a lot once he took he''d stopped restricting himself, like he wasn''t worried anymore. Derivan wondered why he''d felt the need to restrict himself in the first ce. He kept doing this, though, pausing the fight just so he could mock them. Normally they would have ignored it and kept fighting, but...
They needed the break. If Irvis was going to give it to them, even if it was to mock them, so be it. Derivan used the opportunity to surreptitiously check his status.
The good news was that he didn''t have Health, still, though he didn''t know if that news was good exactly. The... not good, but neutral news was that he had gained two new stats, which he''d sort of suspected was the other thing that might happen if Sev tried to heal him.
So, one stat from Sev, and the other was likely from Irvis.
Grace: 1
Intensity: 1
...He could tell nothing from the names. He couldn''t feel any new sense like Shift and Patch, but then Shift had taken some time for him to really understand. It didn''t mean much that he couldn''t sense anything now.
But it also meant it didn''t give him anything new to use against Irvis. Not yet, anyway.
"If you''re not going to answer me," Irvis prompted. "You might as well die."
"I have nothing to say to you," Derivan said evenly. "You wish to see me angry. I am uninterested in giving you that satisfaction."
Also, he wasn''t sure he was capable of feeling anger.
Irvis, on the other hand, certainly was.
"DERIVAN!" Misa called out, something in her voice worried and desperate, and Derivan nced towards her only to see that both of the Irvises she was fighting had disengaged and were now heading directly for him; they moved too fast for him to dodge, and the third one joined in, his body morphing into another mess of endless teeth
Misa appeared in front of him, trying to block, though he saw her system connection pulsing through Patch, as though it was being strained; vast swathes of mana were being pulled through her to power her skill, and if it had sessfully he wasn''t sure what would have happened. But that didn''t happen, because before the block couldplete, Sev threw himself in front of them both, a divine barrier lighting up in front of him
And Irvis stopped.
He didn''t hit Sev''s barrier. He pulled his own attacks back, all three of them in all his forms, and re-coalesced into one being that stared with undeniable anger at Sev.
But he didn''t attack.
"Move," Irvis said. Sev narrowed his eyes.
"You won''t attack me," he said. "You''ve been ignoring me for most of this fight. I''m the healer. I''m the first target for almost any group." Sev stalked forward. "If you''re not attacking me, there has to be a reason."
"Sev, get back," Misa said, her voice tense. "You can''t just make that gamble."
"Even if you''re right," Irvis said, his tone almost conversational. "Do you really think I can''t get around you? I''ve been doing that this whole fight. You are nothing. An exceptionally good healer, at best."
"That''s a lot of words you''re spending talking, and not a lot of time you''re spending on doing that," Sev retorted. He didn''t move but, to his credit, he didn''t step closer, either. He took Misa''s words into ount and took a careful step back, but kept himself between Irvis and the others.
Irvis sighed, and clicked his tongue.
Then heunched himself forward, his body splitting apart and going around Sev, straight towards Derivan and Misa. Derivan stepped forward, intent on not letting Misa spend yet another block, but this time Irvis seemed determined to take them both out all at once; he somehow sped up even more, faster than Derivan could react, and though he tried to block with his arm again he''d forgotten that his arm just wasn''t there anymore.
Irvis formed a spear of flesh, aimed at his chest; he saw a simr set directed at Misa, except it was a hundred disparate spears. He doubted she had the mana to block that, even with the trade. Not with all the blocks she''d managed so far.
Derivan told himself to do something.
But he didn''t know what to do.
131 - Book 2: Chapter 68: Last-Minute Research
131 - Book 2: Chapter 68: Last-Minute Research
Vex was working with an increasing sense of impending doom, not that he knew exactly what was going on. He''d regained ess to his system interface a while ago, but that didn''t do anything for him none of his teammates were responding, and there wasn''t any way for him to get into contact with them otherwise. He''d tried everything, from using the Communication glyph (which required an anchor, and thus still didn''t work) to contacting the Guildmaster directly, but even she didn''t have anyone with the ability to look inside dungeons while they were active like this.
That skill was, as far as anyone knew, exclusive to Derivan and the Shift stat. Trait. Whatever.
The only smallfort he had was that he knew they were still alive; none of them had dropped off from the party interface, though Misa''s stats seemed dangerously low. If she was low, he didn''t want to imagine what state Derivan was in. At least Sev still seemed to be alright...
Though that was strange, now that he thought about it. Was there a reason Sev in particr wasn''t being targeted? He was the healer, and normally he would have been the first target. Vex couldn''t imagine why Irvis wouldn''t try to take him out first.
But he was letting himself get distracted.
He could, in theory, have run down the Ashion tower towards wherever this battle was taking ce. If Derivan, Misa, and Sev were all embroiled in the same battle, then more likely than not they had managed to meet up; either they had appeared all at the same starting point, or they were at the central room that would take them to the upper tiers of the dungeon.
But that wasn''t a bet he was willing to take. If they were in separate fights or, worse, if Irvis was the level of threat that Vex thought he was, and even Vex''s presence would do nothing to help them except perhaps dy the inevitable then he needed a different solution, and he needed it fast.
He had the beginnings of an idea percting in his head.
Irvis was, somehow, a manifestation of a mana aspect into a living, conscious being. Vex wouldn''t pretend that he understood how that was possible. What was more important was what the book had told him the idea that aspects were just reflections of facets of something the book called a conceptual sphere. The full gamut of potential ideas and concepts, filtered through the lens of every living being that existed on the.
So if they were to go to a different world entirely wouldn''t its conceptual sphere be different? Even if Irvis followed them there, he wouldn''t be able to stay the same. Hatred was a very specific sort of emotion, but it was directed, and perhaps that direction would be different if they were in a different world.
There were books in the library that had studied the phenomenon of neshifting. Some of them, Vex suspected, he wouldn''t have been able to find if he hadn''t already known what he had about Shift and reality and the oddness of Misa''s skills with the way they interacted with different timelines.
All of their world was contained within a set of limited set of wavelengths; Shifts. Every potential timeline, every possibility that sprung from their world all just an infinite set in arger set of infinite sets. There was a baseline wavelength that all of reality existed upon, and any distance that one took from it was a little bit like stretching a rubber band; other timelines, possibilities, and realities could exist so long as the baseline was stretched over it, but it was otherwise something virtual, rather than real.
Which was all mostly just a veryplicated way of saying that their world was real, and all those other timelines that Misa pulled from weren''t; they were possibilities that existed in the ether that the system somehow let them pull from and make into reality.
neshifting was a step farther than that. neshifting was still a Shift, but it was a muchrger hop than anywhere Misa could stretch. Even the realm of the gods wasn''t as far away as a whole other reality; the phenomenon of neshifting, therefore, was still far from being understood. The abstract realm of the gods and demons were like an isted ind within their set of infinity, while other realities sat entirely outside that set.
Bonus rooms, too, operated in a simr way. At least, therge ones that contained entire viges or kingdoms or worlds did. The system wrapped a whole localized realm into a smaller set of infinity; the experiments that had been done to confirm this wereplicated, and strangely seemed to have been done by researchers in Elyra. That point confused Vex. None of their noble houses had done research that extensive on neshifting, as far as he knew, and the book itself seemed to be older than the history of their kingdom suggested.
Not that he was surprised that their history was a little bit chronologically broken, at this point. The actual experiments were interesting, and Vex would have loved to spend some time delving into it. They had asked cleric to reach out to the gods outside a dungeon, inside the dungeon, and inside a bonus room; they''d measured the amount of subjective time it had taken for a response, and the amount of energy that had been spent on that connection
It was around here that Vex shook his head, and pulled the tendrils of his Sign back, letting the Research magic fade away. He''d learned what he needed to. He knew his bonus room was the type that they needed; if the name of the dungeon wasn''t enough, they''d seen proof of that back in Fendal and Teque.
It was convenient that Research magic let him read books much, much faster than he would usually have been able to. It was like having a virtual version of himself write down all the pertinent notes after going through the book thoroughly.
The next question was how to activate the bonus room and how to get it to drag Derivan, Sev, and Misa in as well.
If nothing else, he was rtively sure he knew where it was.
In the time he''d spent looking for the relevant books in the library, Irvis had melted a little more; the aspect was able to move his head around slightly, and if res could kill, Vex was pretty sure he''d already be dead. More importantly, though, that little bit of melting had introduced a lot of mana-rich water to the floor, and that water had soaked into the carpet. Vex almost hadn''t noticed how the water soaked into the floor in a very specific pattern, but he''d recognized one spike that was particrly familiar to him as the outer edge of a runic circle.
There was a circle cut into the ground beneath the carpet.
It took more work than he would have liked; if Irvis hadn''t been frozen next to the circle, Vex would have made use of a controlled burn to get rid of the carpet and preserve the books. Instead, he was forced to use a variety of cutting spells to rip up sections of the carpet, distantly aware that Irvis was watching him the whole time.
Ufortable. Vex was a little worried he''d be able to do something with the circle as well. Irvis was a living aspect Vex had no doubt that he knew more about magic than he did, both the true, glyph-based magic and the system-enforced mockery of it that was runes.
After a moment of consideration, he grabbed some of the pieces of carpet he''d already cut up and ced them over Irvis'' head as a makeshift blindfold.
Then he finished what he was doing, and took a second to survey his work.
There was a door built into the ground one that wasn''t dissimr to the one in the dungeon all the way back in Fendal, albeit muchrger, and also on the floor. At the center of the circle was something that Vex now recognized as a reality shard. Had that always been there? Or had the system adjusted now that it knew about reality shards?
He recognized some of the otherponents of the circle from the research he''d already done on spells, and from the work he did on runic circles in general; he understood them well enough to know how to modify a lot of them. This circle was, strangely, not unlike the runic circle that represented a [Fireball].
Funny how so many spells came back to that. Vex supposed there was a lot of use in the idea of packing mana into a ball andunching it, whatever aspect that mana happened to be. [Fireball] was just amon one.
The aspect of the circle was different, though. It was simr enough that Vex could recognize the pieces that represented position and momentum, but there was an extra variable baked into the vector that described direction. That was probably for the Shift element of it all.
The door was set to pull mana from the user as soon as it was opened. With a normal individual''s supply of mana, there would only have been enough to transport one person. Vex''s supply was enough to take their whole party, if only that party was here...
Vex tried to quell his rising panic, and thought.
The amount of mana he had was enough, essentially, to cover the room. If he wanted to get greater coverage something entirely unintended by the system, as far as he knew he needed a bigger supply of mana. Misa''s reality anchor would have been a source, but she wasn''t here; he couldn''t rely on that.
The only other source of mana he had here was...
Vex nced at Irvis, then looked at the runic circle again.
As far as he could tell, this circle didn''t do anything to the mana going through it except use it to power the spell; the aspect he used wouldn''t change the nature of the spell in any way. The possibility that Irvis'' hatred-aspect would corrupt the spell was no more likely than fire-aspect mana would end up creating a version of Teque that was literally on fire there wasn''t a way for that to happen within the circle.
But Vex had to be cautious, because Irvis was the hatred aspect. Even if the spell as-is wasn''t affected by the type of mana used to power it, there was every chance that Irvis would be able to change the nature of the spell somehow, either in the process of being used to fuel the circle of afterwards, when the spell was actually being cast.
Cautious or not, though, there was a more pertinent question.
Did he really have a choice?
He could have run back to try to fight with his friends; [Manaburn] could do damage to Irvis, he knew that much. But his father had died just to stop stop, not kill this version of Irvis. If the list of attacks he''d received from Derivan spell was any indication, then the version his friends were fighting was much, much stronger.
...There was a risk no matter what direction he took here. Derivan had given him information, which meant he trusted him to make the right decision, and to Vex, the answer was in.
As they were right now, they couldn''t beat Irvis. They had all the tools, but they hadn''t spent enough time exploring the full potential of that set of tools. They had plenty of reason for that; they''d been tossed into one situation after another, and had simply responded the best they could, but...
They needed time. The bonus room was their best bet at that. Vex had the ability to give them that time, and more importantly, he had a powerful version of [Mana Maniption] that he could use to stop Irvis from doing anything strange. Besides, the danger that Irvis potentially posed here was just a potential danger.
The danger his friends were in was very, very real.
Vex didn''t waste any more time. It took a small spell to buff his strength, but he dragged Irvis'' body over to the door, making sure the carpet was secure around his head; he didn''t want to give him any more of a glimpse at the circle, in case that helped himpromise it.
For a small moment, Vex hesitated. "...Sorry about this," he said, though he wasn''t sure why.
Then albeit awkwardly he pushed the frozen statue of Irvis forward so that one hand was wedged into the door handle, and pulled.
Part of him was worried Irvis'' arm would simply snap off.
But no. The circle red to life and began to work almost immediately; the small bit of mana that touched the handle activated the siphon, and Vex could almost feel the re of hatred from Irvis. It pulled more and more mana, unpacking the sheer density that was packed into just this iteration of Irvis.
It was here that Vex knew he''d made the right choice. There wasn''t a chance in any of the realms that he or his team would have been able to beat Irvis as they were. The amount of mana packed into him was beyond even that reality anchor they''d stolen.
It was too much mana, even. This wasn''t just enough to grab his party this would grab hold of the entire dungeon and snap it into the realm of his bonus room. Elyra would be missing its Prime Dungeon for the entire time that Vex and his team were gone, and all the infrastructure that relied on it would copse, for as long as they took toplete the objective in the bonus room.
...Hopefully the time dtion was significant.
Vex kept an eye on the spell as it was cast, but Irvis didn''t seem to be able to do anything to change it. He was, in this case, as helpless against the system as all the rest of them had been. A surge of mana followed, and the door began to open, all on its own. Vex saw a pulse reach out, grabbing on to as much in this reality as it could, packing it into a dense bubble of information and possibility
and then he saw nothing, as the whole world Shifted.
132 - Book 2: Chapter 69: Recovery
132 - Book 2: Chapter 69: Recovery
Derivan regained consciousness in the exact same room he''d passed out in.
He wasn''t exactly sure when he''d lost consciousness. That was not, as far as he had known, something that was even possible; the closest he''d gotten to passing out was the strange semi-meditative state he had ended up in all the way back when his link with the system had first been destroyed and then rebuilt so that he wasn''t recognized as a monster. The dreams he''d had back then were strange Derivan was almost certain now that he was thinking about them that they had mentioned the stars, and for the life of him he couldn''t remember if the stars had existed at that point in time, or if they had only been in his dream but he''d never been able to replicate the event.
It took a moment for him to gather his bearings. The others were still unconscious, and Irvis was nowhere to be seen; the floor itself had long stopped moving, having reached the top of the corridor it had been traveling up. Derivan didn''t know what to make of it all, but...
Vex had probably done something. Derivan checked the system, just to make sure Vex was still alive, and saw a whole host of messages that had been left in their party chat no doubt while they''d been caught up in the battle with Irvis.
[Hey, sorry, I lost ess to the system for a bit,] he had sent. [Are you guys okay? I''m in the Ashion tower. Irvis showed up here it was really messy. Some fucked up shit happened, and I don''t say that lightly.]
A small pause, and thenter, another message: [Respond if you get the chance, please? I''m worried.]
And then: [Shit, I can see Misa''s health going down. You''re in a fight. Do you need me toe find you?]
No messages after that; Vex had no doubt figured out what was going on once he''d used their joint Sign to stop Irvis from killing them all. And then he''d done... something?
[Vex?] Derivan sent, tentatively. He didn''t like using the party chat very much; it was all very unintuitive for him, and his fingers didn''t fit well on the keyboard. It was even worse now that he had only one hand to type with. Everything was a lot slower. [We are alive. In the central room. You did something?]
Derivan waited, but... no response, yet. Carefully, he dragged himself to his feet he was still very much hurt, he was aware, and missing half an arm threw off his bnce in ways he hadn''t anticipated. The circuitry linking all his armor together had perhaps been damaged, too, because he found moving to be... sluggish. Slower than he was used to.
Maybe he just wasn''t used to being this hurt, though.
He went up to Sev, first. The cleric would probably know what to do, and be able to heal any damage that Misa had sustained; very gently, Derivan turned him over so that he was facing the ceiling, and tried to examine him for injuries. He hadn''t spent a lot of time learning how to do first aid having a healer had made it sort of unnecessary but there had been some mandatory sses in the Guild. He was d for them now.
No major bleeding from environmental damage causing a status effect. Nothing was blocking his airways. Derivan saw Sev''s chest rise and fall. Moving him wasn''t too much of a concern, since Sev would almost certainly be able to heal his own maluses away, but Derivan didn''t want him to do more healing than he needed to, so he tapped Sev on the shoulder instead.
To his credit, Sev started awake almost immediately. "What happened?" he asked immediately, his eyes scanning the room. "Is Misa okay? Where''s Irvis?"
He didn''t even wait for Derivan to answer his questions Sev''s eyesnded quickly on Misa, and he almost leapt to his feet; it was only Derivan''s hand on his shoulder that stopped him. "Check your statuses, first," Derivan said gently.
Sev stared at Derivan instead. "Oh, gods, Deri," he said, letting out a breath. "Your arm..."
"It is fine," Derivan said. "It does not hurt."
Which was a slight lie it did hurt. But the pain was minor, and nothing like the kind of pain he suspected organic life could feel. It was an irritating sort of buzz on the edge of his perception, like something that should have been there... wasn''t.
"I can''t heal it," Sev said. "I tried. I''m sorry. Maybe if we find the Guildmaster"
"Sev," Derivan interrupted. "Check your status first, please. And then check on Misa."
Slowly, Sev nodded; Derivan saw the panic that had flooded into him ebb away as the cleric tried to center himself. There was all too much going on for him, and Derivan suspected that something else had changed, too; something deeper, that was rted to the way he''d previously been restricted by the system. Patch showed a small change there.
But there would be time for thatter.
Sev nced at the air, at his status, and then let out a small sigh of relief; nothing dangerous there, apparently. He got up with Derivan''s help and jogged over to Misa, popping a quick [Triage] to check on her condition.
"She''s fine," Sev said for his benefit. "Just unconscious and... very tired. I think her skill started to eat into her, somehow."
"That is not supposed to happen," Derivan said, somewhat unnecessarily.
"You''re telling me." Sev sighed. "We need to let her rest for a bit. System''s not built for us to strain our skills to that degree, I guess... I don''t see why it would eat into her."
"It was probably not doing that," Derivan said quietly. "It was likely eating into the reality anchor."
"...Which is a part of her right now." Sev cursed slightly under his breath. "Do you have any way of checking on that? Do you think her family''s... you know, okay?"
"I cannot observe the anchor directly," Derivan replied honestly. "But I do not think it is irreparably damaged. We simply need to find a way to repair it."
"And we know it can be repaired," Sev muttered to himself. He looked down at Misa, and Derivan saw something in him crack, just slightly; the cleric took one of her hands in his own and hugged it to himself. "You''re gonna be okay," he told her.
"Do you have reason to think she will not be?" Derivan asked, a note of worry entering his own voice.
"What? No, I just..." Sev looked down at her, and fell silent. He sighed. "...I think this reminded me of something," he said quietly. "Don''t know what. But it feels like it''s something sad. Like I lost someone important, just like this."
Derivan didn''t know what to say to that. He went up to Sev and put a hand on his shoulder, and Sev gave him a small, appreciative smile.
"I''m not Vex, you know," he said. "That doesn''t help me as much as it does him."
"But it does help," Derivan said.
"...Yeah." Sev leaned against Derivan, falling silent.
They sat like that for a while. Derivan didn''t move, not wanting to break the moment; Sev was clearly embroiled in his own thoughts, and Derivan had all kinds of worries of his own swimming about in him. More than anything right now, he wanted to go look for Vex but he didn''t know which of the sixteen passages represented the Ashion tower, and he wasn''t actually sure that Vex would be there besides. All he could do was wait and see if Vex would respond.
Fortunately, he did, about ten minutester; Misa still hadn''t stirred. [I got us into the bonus room,] Vex sent. [And, uh... I think the entire dungeon, too. Are you guys in the center tower?]
[We have ascended to the second tier,] Derivan confirmed. [We are waiting here for Misa to awaken. Would you like me toe find you?]
[No, I''ll, uh... I''lle to you guys.] Vex hesitated slightly, then sent a second message. [I''m d you''re all okay.]
Derivan didn''t respond to thatst message; he didn''t know how to. He wasn''t sure that they were all okay.
But they were alive, and that was what mattered.
The pitter-patter of Vex''s feet came down one of the sixteen corridors not more than twenty minutester, though Misa still hadn''t stirred in that time; Derivan was surprised it hadn''t taken longer.
"Most of the dungeon doesn''t seem to be active," Vex said with a slight frown as he emerged. "I guess that''s not particrly surprising"
He stopped, and his eyes widened. Vex ran forward, dropping the books he was carrying with him. "Deri Shit, what happened to you? Are you no, that''s a stupid question, but"
Vex stopped, seemingly unsure what to say, but the anxiety and worry and fear that filled his face was palpable; Derivan reached out with his arm, and the lizardkin practically flung himself into him, only pulling back at thest minute to avoidpletely bowling him over when he was already hurt. Derivan appreciated the sentiment.
"Irvis happened," Derivan said quietly. "We were unprepared."
"I... does it hurt?" Vex''s voice was soft and intive; one hand reached out to trace the ragged edges of the cut metal. He winced and pulled back when it threatened to cut him, and Derivan gently maneuvered him so that Vex wasn''t near the side of his lost arm.
"Only slightly," Derivan admitted. He leaned in close, nuzzling his forehead against Vex''s, and after a moment he felt Vex return the gesture; the lizardkin''s heart was still pulsing wildly, but it was slowly calming down. He grabbed on to one of Derivan''s hands, clutching at it like his life depended on it. "Sev tried to heal it, but he was unable to," he continued. "He did give me a new stat, though."
"You can''t distract me with your new stats," Vex mumbled, burying his face in Derivan''s chest. "We can... we can get you a new arm, right?"
"I believe so," Derivan said. "But I have never tried such a thing before."
"...I''m sorry I wasn''t here."
"It was hardly your fault."
"Then I''m sorry I couldn''t be here," Vex said. He pulled back, his eyes glistening. "If you''d gotten more hurt"
"I did not," Derivan said gently. "And that was because of you, was it not?"
"...I guess." Vex sighed, nting his face into Derivan''s chestte again; Derivan found the gestureforting, though Vex was probably doing it tofort himself. A win-win for both of them, really. "...What was the new stat?"
"Grace," Derivan said. "And Intensity."
"Intensity is from Irvis?" Vex asked, slightly warily, and Derivan managed a light shrug; he didn''t know. They''d both appeared at the same time, more or less.
"I believe it is," he said. "Though I cannot be sure."
"Right," Vex said.
"I''m d to see you too," Sev joked, smiling slightly to show he was joking; Vex paled anyway.
"Are you and Misa alright?" he asked. "I''m sorry, I got so focused on Derivan"
"It''s fine," Sevughed. He''d moved back slightly to give Derivan and Vex space, sitting next to Misa''s head instead. "You were worried about your boyfriend. Don''t worry about it."
"But are you guys okay?" Vex insisted. "All of you." He looked at Misa really looked at her, this time, and Derivan saw his demeanor shift even more to worry; he squeezed the lizardkin''s hand gently, but didn''t say anything. Vex needed to process this in his own time.
Next to Sev, the difference with Misa was even more stark like she''d lost something vital, with her sunken eyes and shrunken frame.
"I don''t know," Sev answered honestly.
"But we will be," Derivan added, and Sev nodded slightly. He nced over at Misa as he did.
And Misa, perhaps rather predictably, chose that moment to stir.
133 - Book 2: Chapter 70: Getting Ready
133 - Book 2: Chapter 70: Getting Ready
"I feel like ass," Misa grunted, pulling at her shoulder as she slowly sat up she protested when Sev went to help prop her up, which in and of itself was already rming, Derivan felt. "We still alive?"
"Barely." Sev took the initiative to answer, there. "But we''re safe for now."
Misa rxed just slightly. "Good," she said. "Now why the fuck does everything burn so much."
"You might want to check your status," Sev said gently. "You took a lot of damage in that fight."
"No fuckin'' kidding." Misa made a tiny, unnecessary flicking gesture to bring up the screen; she stared at it for just long enough to make Derivan start to worry. "...My status looks fine, but I can tell there''s somethin'' here you want me to find. Spill."
"Your anchor integrity," Sev said, and Misa cursed. It didn''t take her too long to bring up the screen, and she flinched visibly when she saw it.
"...We''ve got two weeks," she said after a slight pause, and then her voice went firm, and her eyes determined. "We''ll figure out how to fix this thing by then."
"We already know how, sort of," Vex said quietly. "We managed to make the integrity go up before."
"When you were doin'' magic, right?" Misa asked. Vex nodded.
"Which lines up with what we''re going to do here anyway," he said.
"Good." Misa stared out into the distance for a moment, keeping her expression as firmly neutral as possible. "I don''t know about you guys, but I really need a bed. And some time to myself."
"Are you doing alright?" Sev asked, worried.
"No," Misa replied shortly, and then softened a little bit when she saw the way the cleric was looking at her. "Look, I just need a little bit of time. I''ll be okay, I promise."
Derivan didn''t say anything. Her words didn''t express quite the depth of emotions she was feeling she was holding so much back he didn''t have any doubt that both Vex and Sev could see straight through the transparent lie. But they didn''t call her out on it.
She''d talk about it when she was ready.
"What happened to Irvis?" Misa asked, after no one said anything. Sev blinked.
"Um. I don''t know." Sev nced around. "Vex?"
"I have theories," Vex said. "But nothing concrete. Our best bet is to get out of here before hees back, though, if he cane back."
"So he''s not dead." Misa''s expression darkened a bit.
"...No, he''s not," Vex said softly. "We we wouldn''t have been able to beat him. So I brought us here, where everything is a little bit different, and in theory... in theory he should be a little bit different here, too."
"Okay." Misa nodded sharply, not giving away anything else about her thoughts. "Let''s get out of here, then."
The trek out of the dungeon was... surprisingly eerie.
There was a small mechanism in the wall of the elevator room that would activate it and bring them back down. Once there, all they needed to do was head back to the start of any of the four routes; they opted to head down the path Derivan and Sev had already taken, on ount of the fact that that route wasrgely cleared of potential enemies.
What was strange about it was how silent it was. Derivan hadn''t really noticed the noise in the background when he''d been through the dungeon the first time; the sound of metal being forged, of fires being stoked, of cauldrons bubbling to life. It was only now that those workshops were inactive that he noticed the of it. And what a strange phenomenon that was. There was no word to put to it except one: the ce sounded... dead.
Which he did not, he decided, enjoy.
The sound of ringing metal did return after a moment, however, and all four of them tensed slightly at the sound. Misa crept forward first, followed by Sev, then Vex, then Derivan.
And they found a strange sight. A single suit of armor, molded in the fashion of Elyra''s standard guardsman set, sitting alone in one of the workshops. One of the fires had been stoked with clearly inexpert hands, given how it was sputtering and dying rather than roaring. The suit of armor sat there anyway, hammering away at a piece of vaguely hot metal with what seemed to Derivan to be frustration.
Misa paused. "Is it... a threat?" she asked, sounding hesitant.
"I do not believe so." Derivan eyed the other suit of armor for a moment, then decided to step forward. It paused and stared at him, but returned to its ineffectual hammering a momentter. It didn''t seem to mind his presence, but it didn''t seem to care to acknowledge him, either.
There was a moment where its gaze lingered on his arm; Derivan didn''t know how he felt about that. It was... ufortable? He''d noticed the nces his friends asionally gave him, too, but he gave no outward indication of his thoughts on the matter. He was still getting used to the idea that he was missing an arm at all.
He walked over to the fire, and then the suit of armor did pay attention; it stopped what it was doing and turned to stare at him intently. Derivan wasn''t sure if it was trying to get him to move away through the power of its gaze alone, or if it was simply curious about what he was doing. But what he wanted to do wasn''t anythingplicated he just wanted to help.
He drew the Fire glyph that they''d learned just above the fire, and channeled just the smallest amount of mana into it. He had to guide the magic as fire began to emerge, directing it down rather than letting it stream out in an ineffectual sphere, but it was a pretty good attempt for it being his first attempt at this, he thought.
And then the proof that they were in a different world came because the magic didn''t just end there.
Like Derivan had stirred up something that had just been lying dormant, the mana around them came to life and surged into the glyph; the fire that was simply being produced became something real in that moment more real than just the product of a spell. Like he''d informed the mana that this was supposed to be a forge, and it had responded, just like that.
"Whoa," Vex said. His eyes were a little wide. "Did you?"
"It was not me," Derivan said, shaking his head slightly and stepping back.
The armor was staring at the renewed fire in awe, and its hand was twitching slightly, like it was trying to remember the shape of the glyph Derivan had drawn. It still seemed a little hesitant to approach.
The moment Derivan stepped even further back, though, going all the way back to stand by Vex''s side, the armor scurried forward and ced its hunk of metal in the forge, and began watching it intently.
"Well," Vex said. "I''m d he''s got something to be happy about."
"Sometimes it''s the simple pleasures," Misa said with a small smile, though it seemed just a little bit forced. "C''mon. Let''s go."
Derivan spared the suit of armor a final nce. "You don''t have to stay here, you know."
It looked at him, but it didn''t quite seem to understand. It cocked its head, shrugged, and went back to staring at the hunk of metal in the fire.
Well... It was as Vex said, he supposed. If it was happy just doing this, then that was fine. Maybe it would get bored eventually, and look for the way out.
The original room Derivan and Sev had appeared in and indeed, the one they''d encountered the suit of armor in to begin with was just as they''d left it, save for a small mess made in one of the corners where a vase had been toppled over.
"Is the exit supposed to be here?" Misa asked with a frown.
"There shouldbe a portal..." Vex trailed off.
There was nothing there. Just an empty room.
"We might have to break out manually, if the dungeon is inactive," Vex said slowly. Misa snorted.
And then, before anyone could say anything, she punched the wall opposite to the door.
Sometimes, Derivan reflected, he forgot about the number of points Misa put into Strength. She began ripping the wall apart like it was made of paper and seemed to be getting in a good amount of stress relief, too, if the way she was baring her teeth was any indication.
In theory, the dungeon should have been protected against damage like that. Vex had given them many a lecture on why people couldn''t simply tear their way through the walls of a dungeon, and he''d even tried it once or twice, back in his own dungeon. When the system was present, dungeons were simply immune to this kind of damage.
Apparently, not anymore. But then this was Vex''s bonus room, rather aptly named a world without the system. He shouldn''t have been surprised. Now that he thought about it, though...
"I did not consider this before, but should we not have received a notification about this bonus room?" Derivan asked after the dust had settled from Misa''s... deconstruction efforts. The hole wasrge enough for them to get through now, and it seemed to lead outside, for a certain definition of ''outside''. It seemed more important to settle his final concerns about where they were before they went out there.
"...You''re right, we should have." Vex frowned. "System menus are still working, and I think I can still send and receive messages, although there''s a message about the time discrepancy. Is the notification system specifically not working?"
"It''s not like the notification system worked with any consistency before," Misa said, a little dryly.
"It''s going to be a problem if we don''t know what we''re supposed to do here," Vex pointed out.
"Add it to the list of problems we''ve already got," Sev said, though his words were hard to hear, partially whipped away from him by the wind as he nced outside the hole. "We''re kind of in the middle of nowhere."
The four of them gathered to look out of the hole. They were still suspended a good distance from the ground, though that distance wasn''t much of a problem; [Featherfall] was a simple spell that Vex had used many a time. What was a problem was where they were.
The actual area they had appeared was, surprisingly, above the ground Derivan had expected otherwise, considering what they''d seen of Teque. Noram had only briefly mentioned that there were reimed sections of the world that existed above the ground, and he had also mentioned that those reimed sections often had physical oddities and didn''t work quite right.
That seemed to be true here, too. The sky split into fractals that reflected the ground back at them, in a way that made it almost seem like they were underground; it was only the vaguely transparent appearance of the reflected image that told them they were outside. The sun shone at them through that reflected image, lighting up what seemed like miles of grassy ins around them.
There was nothing to even indicate that there might be civilization nearby even the reflections in the sky showed nothing but grass.
"It''s really not even going to give us a hint, huh?" Sev muttered. No one responded to him, and he sighed. "We might as well go down and look around; maybe there''s something down there that we can''t see from up here. Sky''s pretty weird, so who knows."
No one had a better n. Vex did his thing; [Featherfall] was a simple enough...
The rune sparked in the air and did nothing. Vex frowned at it, then tried again, only to get the same result.
"...System spells don''t work here," Vex said.
"Well," Misa said. "Guess we better jump, then."
134 - End of Book 2. Chapter 71: Fractals in the Sky
134 - End of Book 2. Chapter 71: Fractals in the Sky
Jumping was much easier said than done. Derivan peered out of the hole to see exactly how viable jumping would be it was not. Sev, on the other hand, just stared at Misa with one brow slightly raised.
"What?" she asked. She managed a small grin. "We''re a Gold-ranked team. We shouldn''t be afraid of a little fall."
"It''s not exactly a little fall," Vex said, peering out of the hole alongside Derivan and shuddering slightly. "Somehow that''s so much worse when I don''t have my magic."
"You have your magic," Misa pointed out. "You just don''t have ess to your system-granted spells."
"I haven''t figured out a Glyph of Featherfall yet," Vex grumbled. "Coming up with new spells isn''t that easy, you know."
"We''re not guaranteed the system''s protection from anything," Sev said. "Nevermind that the system doesn''t protect from falling we can''t take for granted that any system mechanic works the way we expect in a bonus room called ."
"What about your spells?" Derivan directed his question to Sev. "Divine spells are likely not under the same restriction."
"Huh," Sev said slowly. "No, you''re right. They''re a conceit of the system, as far as I know. They work like regr system skills, so if the rest of our skills are still working and I know they are, because [Triage] worked earlier then there''s no reason my ''spells'' won''t work."
He tested it by flicking out a hand; a gleaming, golden barrier appeared a second afterwards, floating in the air.
"...I guess we could use these as steps," Sev said. "Somehow this feels vaguely sphemous."
"I''m sure Onyx won''t mind," Misa said dryly.
"He''d probably find it hrious." Sev stared at the gleaming barrier for a moment, his brows furrowing slightly. "I hope Aurum''s okay. I still haven''t heard from the kid."
Misa nced at him and softened, just a bit. "I''m sure he''ll be fine," she said. She didn''t say anything further.
They made their way down the makeshift steps in silence, pausing every so often to let Sev recover his mana. The whole process was arduous and took far longer than a simple [Featherfall] would have, but they didn''t really have many other options.
The process did, at least, reveal to them that there was more to the world than had been immediately obvious from their perch in the dungeon.
The illusory mirrors in the sky weren''t just in the sky; those were just the most obvious ones, because the light shining through them from behind made it clear that they were merely reflections of the ground. There were, however, scattered mirror-like nes all over the ce, reflecting just a small fraction of the ground. The more they descended, the more it became clear that they had no idea what the ground looked like.
Or indeed how far down the ground even was. They passed the firstyer where they thought the ground had been soon enough, only to find it was another wall of reflected ground, catching on to some piece of grass who-knew-where.
"I''m starting to notice that a lot of these patches of grass look the same," Vex mumbled, reaching out to let his ws drift through one illusory patch; it drifted apart on contact with his scales, and came together again once he pulled away. He frowned slightly. "I can''t even tell if this is a mana-based phenomenon. I can''t control any of it..."
"Noram said something about the surface being strange," Sev said. He nced around, casting another barrier just a little bit below theirs. "I didn''t think it''d be this strange, though."
"I''d really like to find a fucking bed right around now," Misa grumbled. "Half tempted to actually just jump for it."
"Please don''t," Sev said dryly. "Even as a joke."
Misa nced at him, then stared critically around them. "Anyone else think the grass is changing slightly?"
"They all look kinda the same at this point." Vex peered more closely at one of the panes in the air. "I guess the grass might be a bit more yellow?"
"Not yellow." Misa shook her head and tugged on Vex''s arm, directing him to a different patch. "Rotting."
She had, in fact, discovered something that was best described as an illusory tunnel. The panes in the air formed a sort of circr path, but the further down that path the panes were, the drier and cker that grass was; very visibly rotting, maggots and all.
Vex paled. "Um. Let''s not go down there?"
Misa seemed slightly skeptical. "I don''t know that we have much of a choice."
They kept on going anyway. It wasn''t like the panes stopped them from choosing a different direction to go in they could just walk straight through them, and the collective decision to avoid the strange death hole in the sky seemed like a smart one.
It became clear rtively quickly that there were, in fact, other paths in the midst of them each one seeming to lead somewhere slightly different. It wasn''t always as obvious as what Misa had decided to officially deem the Death Hole; sometimes the grass just seemed a little brighter, or in other cases, there were flowers.
None of them, notably, seemed to have people.
At first.
The signs of civilization came slowly, but surely. Panes where the grass was ttened, like many people had trodden over it; panes where there was ss or some other manufactured material lying scattered about. The path they eventually opted to follow was one that, at the end of it, seemed to have a road.
"Better than anything else we''ve seen so far," Sevmented, staring down the path.
"Let''s not waste any more time." Misa gestured for Sev to start cing his barriers, and, after a brief pause to nce at her, Sev did so.
They didn''t speak much while they walked down that path. Everyone that wasn''t Misa exchanged slightly worried nces at one another, and Misa seemed content not to talk about whatever was on her mind.
So the time passed in silence, until they reached the end of the path, and finally found themselves on solid ground.
In the middle of a town, no less.
No one seemed to notice them, though or at least, no one seemed to be interested. A few people shadow-beings, it seemed, dressed in immacte suits nced up at them and then went back to their own business, seemingly uninterested in the ground of adventurers that had, for all intents and purposes, simply walked down out of the sky. The dungeon-chandelier wasn''t even visible from here, obfuscated by panes of light that each reflected a different part of the vige.
If they hadn''te down here from the dungeon, they wouldn''t have known that that was there, either.
"I''m beginning to feel like we should''ve left a tracker on that thing, just in case," Sev said, ncing back up at the sky in the rough direction of the dungeon.
"I believe I know where it is," Derivan offered. Sev blinked at him.
"You do? Using Shift or something?"
"It is not currently shifted any more than we are." Derivan paused to find the words to exin. "I lost... pieces of myself, in the fight with Irvis. Not my arm. It appears to be an intrinsic trait of Slime."
"You can sense where other pieces of you are?" Sev cocked his head. "Useful."
"To a degree," Derivan agreed, nodding. It was slightly ufortable, in fact but it was nothing he couldn''t get used to. Perhaps his connection to those pieces of himself would fade in time, even; it was still too early to say.
"Think we can get ourselves an inn here?" Misa said, ncing around. "Don''t know what currency they trade in."
"Reality shards, if Teque was any indication, but I guess it might be different here," Vex said. He hesitated. "But we don''t have any left."
"Let''s just explore," Sev suggested. "We''ll either find a ce or we''ll find someone we can ask about it."
The whole town itself was... unremarkable. Derivan was rather ufortably reminded of Fendal, in a way, though the architecture didn''t really resemble the other town all that much. Fendal was full of short, squat buildings, some of them divided into multiple storefronts, but most of them independent houses.
This ce had apartments, but the buildings were almost unsettlingly close to perfect cubes, without any real ir of life to them. What few stores there were were dim inside, with the ss so frosty that the products they were selling were only barely visible. One store was stocked with identical loaves of bread, and another was stocked with a variety of fruits that Derivan didn''t recognize, though ''variety'' was a poor word to use, perhaps. There were about five different fruits Derivan could see, and every copy of a single fruit seemed perfectly identical.
It didn''t help that as they progressed through the town, they saw not a single person that wasn''t what appeared to be a shadow elemental.
"I''m not going to lie," Vex whispered as they walked through the town he had one hand grasped on to Derivan''s as he peered through the stores and tried to avoid the gazes of the people around him, not that it was difficult. "This ce is kinda creepy. I was sort of expecting a lot more... life, here."
"Perhaps we simply picked a bad path," Derivan said, trying to beforting. He wasn''t sure it worked.
"We''ll probably have to find our way into Teque or somece simr soon," Sev spoke from his position in front of them. "Noram did tell us the surface is unstable. I didn''t think it''d be like this."
"He mentioned some areas had been reimed, too, right?" Vex looked around. "I just don''t know if this is one of them..."
"Just because we find it a little strange doesn''t mean this ce is bad," Misa said. She nced critically at yet another one of the perfect-cube buildings; this one had a window that disyed, of all things, a bed. "What''re the odds this is an inn and not just a ce that sells beds?"
"About even odds, I''d say," Sev said.
"Fuck it," Misa shrugged, and pushed the door open.
The inside was surprisingly bright so much so that Misa flinched slightly once she stepped in, having expected the interior to match the exterior. That wasn''t the case at all beyond the slightly shadowed disy where the bed was, there was a beautifully decorated lobby. Bright red drapes adorned a window that was positioned perfectly at what seemed to be one of the few grass-reflecting panes in the town, creating an illusion of a bright park outside. Bright, warm mes licked at the upper corners of the room, each in small, perfectly controlled spheres.
The innkeeper because this was very clearly an inn, there was even a wall of keys behind him smiled happily at them as they entered. He, too, was a shadow-being dressed in an immacte suit, but he seemed perfectly happy to see and address them, unlike everyone else they''d met.
"Well, hello there!" he greeted. "I''ve never had any visitors before. How exciting!"
"You''ve... never had any visitors?" Misa blinked and nced around. "This is an inn, right?"
"Well, yes, but we don''t exactly get any visitors here." The innkeeper let out a surprisingly warm chuckle and hopped up to sit on his desk. "It''s a pleasure to meet you all. What brings you to the fine town of Aldea?"
"...Dungeon shenanigans?" Sev said, at a loss for what else to say.
"I''ll mark that down in the guestbook." The innkeeper gave them a knowing grin. "The name''s Clyde, by the way. You guys doing okay? Need some rooms?"
"We''ll need four, if you have them," Misa said. "What types of payment do you take? We''re kinda new here."
"Payment?" Clyde looked puzzled for a moment, and then brightened. "Oh! No. No payment. Stories, maybe, if you''re wiling to share them. But we don''t work that way here."
"No?" Misa paused as Clyde swept up four keys from behind him and deposited them in her hand.
"Nah. Can''t say when we dropped it, but I''d say we''re all pretty happy here. I get that it looks kind of unfriendly from the outside, though." Clyde''s smile vanished for a moment. "It''splicated. But here, your rooms let me know if anything''s wrong with them, I haven''t checked in on them for ages. I''ll fix it right quick."
"Sure," Misa said slowly. She tossed three of the keys to Vex, Derivan, and Sev, and then held up her own. "I''m gonna go pass the fuck out first, if you guys don''t mind. Let''s figure stuff out in the morning."
She vanished up the stairs without giving any of them a chance to respond. Sev, Derivan, and Vex nced at each other.
"She''s having a rough time of it, your friend," Clyde said suddenly, ncing up the stairs. His face was little more than two glowing eyes hidden in shadow, but he was able to emote well through it not unlike Derivan, in fact. His face had softened somewhat. "Lemme know if you want me to talk to her, yeah? Or my daughter. She''s pretty good at this kind of stuff."
"You''re... very helpful, thank you," Sev said. Derivan nced at him the cleric was a little suspicious, and Derivan supposed he couldn''t fault him. Make sure Misa''s okay, Sev mouthed at him, using the ry charm tomunicate. Give her space, just check on her through the system or something. "Can you tell us a little more about this ce? We''re pretty new here."
"Of course!" Clyde smiled brightly. "Here, let me see; where do I start..."
Sev tensed slightly. Derivan watched as the system''s strings around him suddenly pulled taut, like something was about to finally reach a conclusion.
He remembered, somewhat btedly, that this bonus room wasn''t just a bonus room it was a recreation of the history of their own world, if it had taken a slightly different path. If the mana had tried to fix whatever had gone wrong, instead of the system. Teque hadn''t known what had gone wrong, but Teque was only a partial recreation.
Derivan realized with startling certainty that Clyde hadn''t interpreted "this ce" to mean their town at all; he''d interpreted it to mean their entire world. Clyde was old. This whole town was. It wasn''t obvious, but...
[Intermediate Mana Sight] has been upgraded to [Mana Understanding].
The mana here was old.
"Well," Clyde said thoughtfully, and Derivan''s attention refocused sharply on to the shadow elemental, waiting for the words that would change everything.
"I guess it all started when the universe ended, about... oh, 1400 years ago."
END OF BOOK 2
NOT A Chapter: Q&A, Announcements, & a Retrospective
NOT A Chapter: Q&A, Announcements, & a Retrospective
I suppose there''s really only one way to start an announcement at this time of the year: Happy holidays! I know this time of year isn''t really for everyone, but I hope it''s at least been kind to everyone; it''s been a hectic couple of years.
So! Let''s start with the main announcement. I''ve mentioned this before in an author''s note here or there, I think, but Edge Cases is getting published. It''s part of the reason I dropped Patreon prices, though I deeply appreciate everyone who''s given me support via Patreon, past or current. It''s part of what gave me the confidence to ept a publishing deal at all. I wasn''t making much on Patreon, so I''m hoping publication will be the push I need to go full-time into writing. There are a lot of stories I want to tell besides this one, and keeping to this writing schedule while doing my job essentially means I''m working two jobs full-time, which isn''t super sustainable long-term.
(This isn''t aint about my Patreon! I''ve said this before, but to reiterate: please prioritize your own financial health, and if you''re a past patron that needs a couple of bucks back because Things Happened, don''t be afraid to ask for a refund. I don''t write for money; I''d just like to open up the time to focus on writing.)
Publication does mean it''ll eventually go off the site, though I''ll try to bring it back eventually - just bear in mind this eventually is in the timescale of years, when I get the rights to the book back. RoyalRoad has all the fancy color formatting, though, which is Important. The first book is currently scheduled to hit Amazon in July next year, so if you''d like to show some support, that''s the date to mark. July 25, specifically!
Part of this deal is Edge Cases getting an audiobook, which is the part I''m actually excited about. This audiobook will be narrated by author Travis Baldree, who you might know from his work on Legends & Lattes - and if you don''t already know about it, I rmend it. It''s an incredibly wholesome story about a retired adventurer introducing the wonders of coffee to a city that''s never had it before. It''s probably one of my favorite reads of the year, and that''s saying a lot.
Assuming Books 3 and 4 are about the same length as Book 1 and Book 2, the series is a whole is set to beplete before the first book goes up on Amazon, so you''ll get to read the series as a whole on here. I''m thinking I''ll keep posting little post-epilogue scenes when the books release; those will be RR-exclusive. ;)
I am, on a more personal note, truly deeply appreciative of all the support thus far. I wasn''t actually expecting Edge Cases to gain the following that it did, and I certainly didn''t expect to go all the way to getting a publication deal. It started as a silly response to a Writing Prompts thread on Reddit!
And then became something much more than that, at least to me. A lot of things in the story are a reflection of my personal experiences in some way. To allow myself a moment of vulnerability - since that''s one of the themes of this series, anyway - writing this hasn''t entirely been smooth sailing for me, but it has be important to me, and I''m immensely grateful to have an audience that''s been this supportive so far. I was worried Derivan and Vex would be received poorly, and yet!
Which is to say, even if you''re not a fan of those two, thank you for sticking with the story. Having it on-screen and visible was something that was important to me, and I''m d I had that opportunity.
We''ve got two more books left in the series, and a lot of big answers areing in the first couple of chapters of Book 3 (with the exception of the first chapter; full disclosure, that one''s a Jerome interlude, and I was tempted to end Book 3 with that chapter instead).
I''ve had some difficulty with keeping up with thements ofte, but I''ll be present and answeringments at least on this chapter - so ask away! Feel free to rify anything that''se up so far, or ask broader questions about themes and inspirations; I have a lot I''d be happy to talk about. I might even edit the questions into this chapter itselfter!
135 - Book 3: Chapter 1: Interlude - Jerome - Self-Review
135 - Book 3: Chapter 1: Interlude - Jerome - Self-Review
Jerome sat next to Kestel.
He''d taken to visiting the head researcher of the dungeon team every few days, just to see if he was doing better. Ever since he''d learned about what happened to him at the dungeon His own men turning against him the moment he hesitated to report back, wanting to first ensure the safety of his men...
Harold and the others had left,st he''d heard. They were worried about Kestel, too, but none of them were really aligned to anything rted to healing and recovery. Like Derivan''s team, they''d left to investigate something, and were hoping to acquire the crystals needed to heal Kestel while they were away.
They had their own problems, he understood. He noticed it out of the corners of his eyes, when they thought no one else was looking. The way they''d reach out to scratch an imaginary itch and then flinch. The way they''d fold their arms, and then wince slightly when the weight of it was different when their bones didn''t catch in quite the same way their arms once did.
"The Guild still keeps making me take those stupid sses," Jerome said to Kestel. The scientist, of course, didn''t respond; he was either asleep or pretending to be asleep, but he still wasn''t quite there. He wasn''t even sure why he was talking to Kestel about his problems, but he continued anyway. He''d found a certainfort in being able to speak to someone without judgement. "And now I keep noticing things I didn''t notice before. It sucks. I wanna go back to not noticing."
Kestel still didn''t respond, and Jerome took this as encouragement to continue. "You know what I would''ve done before? I would''ve just told them to suck it up. Or I would''ve said that being a skeleton is fuckin'' cool, and I wish I could be a skeleton, and why don''t they appreciate having status immunities and elemental immunities and not needing to sleep..."
"And you know, the more time I spend with people that aren''t in my own fucking bubble, the more I realize this isn''t just a fucking game?" Jerome looked down at Kestel, and he felt frustration burn in his voice for a moment. He''d had his moment with Kestel. He''d met the guy, back when he was negotiating for ess to the dungeon himself, going behind the Guildmaster''s back to do so.
He''d been kind of a dick to him then, too. He''d said something about how he''d find everything they needed in the dungeon, and they wouldn''t need other delvers, and how trying to study a dungeon was stupid, anyway; they should just delve it for the loot and be done with it.
It was weird how different that version of himself felt, even though it had been only a few months ago. Spending more time with people had a way of doing that to you, maybe.
"I thought of this as just a game, because it looks like games back on Earth, and you people fuck, not ''you people'', just the people that are here, whatever you don''t act like the people back on Earth. And I never thought to visit the fucking hospital, or look at any of the fucking orphanages back in Anderstahl, and I didn''t even fucking talk to people except when I wanted something from them."
"And now I have, and it sucks! And a part of me wants to go back to that, because I didn''t fucking feel like shit all the time back then, and that makes me feel even more like a piece of shit. And the worst part is that I know I''m taking all the wrong lessons from this. Everyone around me is so goddamn fucking understanding all the time, and I just want someone to be angry at me."
Maybe it wasn''t fair to dump on Kestel like this. It wasn''t like the lizardkin had any choice in the matter, but... it wasn''t like he could hear him, either.
"Why?"
Nevermind. Kestel had woken up, at some point, and could hear him. The lizardkin was just staring at him with a cidly interested sort of look on his face, and somehow that made Jerome even more angry.
Not at Kestel. Just at himself. He''d never invested any effort into skills needed to heal, or else he might have been able to do something about this. Everything had gone exactly as he wanted. He''d gotten rich. He''d gotten rare skills. Granted, the ''rich'' part hadn''t gone exactly the way he''d envisioned somehow he hadn''t considered that gold might not be intrinsically valuable, when he''d pledged himself to the God of Gold but he''d still gotten there eventually.
And the whole time, he''d still been pissed at everyone around him. He''d still wanted more. The few shes of pleasure he ever got was from gain, whatever form that gain took, and that vanished in a matter of moments. Reced by a desire for more still.
More strength, more wealth, more prestige.
Some of that, he was aware, came from the nature of the geas ced upon him a feedback loop in his mind, telling him he was deserving of more. A feedback loop ced upon him in an effort to help him be more confident.
...So many things had gone wrong.
He didn''t really want to go back. He hated being like this, and he spouted off about it sometimes, but he wouldn''t go back. He couldn''t. Knowing what he did now, going back would be a betrayal of all the progress he''d made
"Why?" Kestel repeated again, and Jerome flinched slightly. He''d almost forgotten the lizardkin was there.
"...I don''t know," Jerome answered after the moment it took him to even remember the context of the question. Why did he want someone to be angry at him? "I guess I feel like I deserve it."
"Why?" Kestel asked him again.
"I hurt a lot of people," Jerome said. "I didn''t mean to, but I did. And it feels like I''m not getting punished for it, and I feel like I should be."
"Why?"
Jerome was beginning to sense a trend, here. But he answered anyway. "It''s just how I''ve thought about things for a long time," he said quietly. "You do something bad, you get punished. Actions have consequences, and all that. You shouldn''t be able to just get away with it."
"Why?"
It was like talking to a broken no. Jerome stopped himself before the thought finished, almost snarling at himself before he saw the way Kestel began to flinch back. Don''t dehumanize, he thought to himself, and then he managed a wry smile at the irony of the statement, which coaxed Kestel into rxing again.
''Dehumanize'' wasn''t a very applicable word, here. But it was the closest one he had.
"We punish people so they don''t repeat their actions, I guess," Jerome said. He''d never really thought this deeply on the matter before; he''d long since learned to stop asking ''why''.
Kestel seemed to consider this for a long moment. Jerome almost thought the lizardkin had fallen back asleep, but then he spoke again, his voice contemtive. "Are you going to?"
"Am I going to what?" Jerome blinked a few times. "Like... repeat my actions? No. Heck no. I Oh. I see your point."
Kestel cocked his head slightly; Jerome wasn''t even sure if that was the point Kestel was trying to make, or if he was just asking questions. He had been getting better, or so the priests said, but there was no change in his status; he still had difficulty moving and speaking...
But that wasn''t fair, he thought. Difficulty with those things didn''t make Kestel any lesser. Taking longer to express his thoughts might be frustrating for him, and sad for the people that knew him, but it didn''t make him not a person. He couldn''t just assume Kestel was a child and asking questions for the sake of it.
Kestel just stared at him. "If I''m not going to repeat what I do anyway, then there''s no purpose to the punishment, is that what you''re saying?" Jerome asked, and Kestel nodded slightly at him. Jerome sighed.
"I guess that makes sense," he said, though he said it reluctantly. "I dunno. It doesn''t feel right. I still feel like people should get punished."
"Why" Kestel started, and Jerome held up a hand.
"No, I get it," he said, and to Jerome''s surprise, Kestel managed a small grin at him. Maybe he was getting better. "I get what you''re saying, and it makes sense. It just doesn''t change how I feel about it. I want toe up with other reasons that it matters like, if we punish people, it''s going to deter other people from doing the same thing, right? Not everyone is going to be convinced by words."
"But no one''s going to be repeating what I did." Jerome looked down and away for a moment. "And fuck, I''m sure there''s other ways to deter people. I dunno. I''ve never really thought about it. Do we even want to deter people? Maybe deterring people isn''t the best way to get people to not do things! There''s too much stuff to think about." He threw his hands up in frustration. "I feel like this is for people smarter than me to think about."
Kestel took a moment to reply again, and Jerome just waited. "You''re... thinking about it," he said eventually. "That is... more than most."
"Yeah, I guess," Jerome grumbled. "I don''t like thinking about it. I''d like to go back to not thinking about it. I want a refund and to get off this thought train."
Another beat, and then Kestel chuckled. "Sorry," the lizardkin told him. "No... no refunds."
"Bah!" Jerome said.
But he found he was smiling.
They talked for a few more minutes before Kestel got too tired and had to go back to sleep but before he did, he made Jerome promise to visit again. He liked having a young mind to guide, he said, and even though part of Jerome hated being called a ''young mind'', much less the implication that he needed guidance, he''d agreed. He''d genuinely enjoyed spending time with the guy, after all.
He wasn''t a ''young mind'', though. That was patently ridiculous. Kestel couldn''t have been, what, more than six years older than him? Maybe eight?
Bah.
Jerome got up from his seat and spared one more nce before he left the lizardkin''s ''ward'' it was still just a set of curtains in the temple, although the curtains had been magically augmented and enchanted to give Kestel privacy andfort. It was a service the other Elyran researchers had provided to all the wards once it became clear that the temple wasn''t really equipped to hold anyone long-term, and it was something the priests all appreciated.
"All done?" Typhea asked him, and Jerome jumped.
"God," he said. "Don''t scare me like that."
He wasn''t sure how to feel about his elfpanions, now. They were still the only elves he''d seen here elves were moremon around Anderstahl than they were here, apparently, though that didn''t exin thepleteck of them and he wasn''t sure if they were actuallyfortable here?
There was a lot of things he was questioning now that he hadn''t questioned before. Like why they kept following him around after he had rescued them. At the time, he''d thought it made sense, but...
"My apologies," Typhea said, bowing her head slightly.
"Don''t do that, either," Jerome said, feeling slightly ufortable. "Were you waiting on me for something?"
"No," Typhea said. "I was waiting in case I was needed."
"...Don''t take this the wrong way, but don''t you have your own things to do?" Jerome asked. "Ja too, wherever she is."
"She is resting," Typhea said. "It is my shift."
Jerome felt a headacheing on. "You''ve been keeping shifts this entire time and I haven''t noticed?"
"Do not take this the wrong way," Typhea said, this time with a faint smirk gracing her lips. "But you are not very observant."
"Please tell me this isn''t a stupid life debt thing."
"Were that an actual part of our culture, we would be offended," Typhea informed him. "But it is not. You simply needed our protection, so we adopted you."
"I what?" Jerome asked nkly. "How have we never talked about this Nevermind. I know the answer to that question. More importantly, what?"
"You attempted to save us and were poisoned in the process," Typhea exined to him. "Elven couples have a tradition. We will care for a person, if we choose to, and the person epts. It is like parenting."
"You guys are a couple?" Jerome said nkly, and then the rest of his brain caught up. "Wait, did you guys adopt me? I feel like I should get some choice in that! I''m an adult!"
"Yes, you are," Typhea said to him, very patiently, like an adult would to a child. "And we did. You epted. We exined it more than once, in fact, though I am unsure you listened..."
Jerome buried his face in his hands. "Oh my god."
"We can leave, if you wish," Typhea told him.
"No, I just... okay, please exin it to me again. I''m sorry I didn''t pay attention the first time, I was a fucking idiot."
"I will look for Ja, and we will exin it together. For the... twelfth time."
"Somehow the fact that you''ve been keeping track of that both doesn''t surprise me and deeply horrifies me."
136 - Book 3: Chapter 2: A Thousand(ish) Years Ago
136 - Book 3: Chapter 2: A Thousand(ish) Years Ago
"Wait, no, hang on," Sev said. "Back up. The universe did what now?"
"It ended." Clyde cocked his head towards Sev, a flicker of shadow dancing across his eyes; his equivalent of a blink. "Do you not know about that?"
"No?" Sev said, the lilt at the end of his words turning it into a question. Unspoken was the thought that came with it: what the fuck?
Clyde frowned at him slightly, then leaned back against the counter, apparently debating what to say next. "You''re visitors, I know that much," he said, his eyes shing briefly. Derivan recognized the glow of an active [Mana Sight] or something close to it, anyway. This ce didn''t have the system. "But you''re not visitors from... Ah, I see. This is an echo?" He frowned. "That''s unfortunate."
"I feel like Misa should be here for this conversation," Vex ventured, looking a little nervously up the stairs.
There was a small pause, and then Sev sighed softly.
"If she said she needs time, then she needs time," Sev said gently. "If she keeps avoiding us then we''ll try to talk to her, sure, but anything we learn here we can just tell herter. It''ll be okay."
"...If you say so." Vex looked a little unconvinced. Derivan gave him a little nudge in the shoulder and smiled at him.
"It will be fine," Derivan said.
"Yeah." Vex blew a breath out through his mouth, looking a little less tense.
"Oh, so you listen when Derivan tells you," Sev teased, trying to lighten the mood; he at Vex to show he was kidding when the lizardkin nced over at him.
Clyde watched the three of them with interested eyes, and then gave a polite cough when they nced back at him. "I think I''m gonna need my wife for this conversation," he said. "She''s a little more versed in nar echoes than I am."
"Is that what this is?" Vex asked, looking around.
"It''s the best word you have for it," Clyde said, waving vaguely. "ounts for all the weird stuff, like me speaking the samenguage you guys do. But it''s not a great word, probably? Look, my wife will be able to exin this better than I can. I''ll go get her. Give me ten minutes."
Clyde disappeared behind a door behind the counter.
"...You don''t think he''s running away, do you?" Sev said, after a minute had passed.
"What? No, why would he?" Vex blinked.
"Honestly, entirely because I think the idea of him just booking it is kind of funny."
Vex snorted, but didn''t say anything further. The three of them sat in afortable silence, with Derivan watching Vex silently look around. He could practically see the lizardkin making little notes in his head, details he was noticing that he wanted to ask about...
Clyde returned after the requested ten minutes, though, and Derivan watched in mild amusement as Vex promptly forgot about thest ten minutes of careful observation. Clyde was back with not one but two other shadow elementals trailing behind him. Neither of them were dressed in the immacte suit that everyone else they saw was wearing. One was wearing a light-purple dress that flowed over her shoulders and shimmered at the edges with vibrant violet me, and the other wore... a shirt.
Just a really long, garishly bright yellow shirt. If he was wearing shorts, they weren''t visible. He looked like he''d just woken up. He didn''t have hair, exactly, but the shadows did drape themselves over his head in a very messy, tousled sort of way.
"My husband wanted to join in," Clyde said by way of exnation. The elemental in the shirt yawned and waved.
"I hear it''s time for a lesson about echoes," the elemental in the dress said. She gave them a gentle smile, and opened her mouth to begin and then Clyde poked her in the shoulder.
"Introductions first."
"Oh, right." She blinked once, then bowed gracefully. "My name is Belle. This doofus over here is Elliot."
The elemental in the shirt yawned. "Yeah, I''m the historian," he said. "Clyde said we had visitors, and I thought that sounded cool, so now I''m here. He would''ve given you the short version of the end of the universe talk. I''ll give you the long one. After Belle is done with her whole thing, though."
"Let''s all take a seat," Belle said. "It''s not... a long exnation, exactly, but it is a discussion better had sitting down."
They all sat down at one of therger tables in the inn.
"Your names are interesting," Sev remarked as they sat. "They sound like they''re from Earth."
"They are," Belle said with a smile. "Good observation. Our real names are words encoded in mana; not particrly practical for conversation. Since we''re in an echo tuned to English, we ended up with namesmon to thenguage. This isn''t always going to be true in an echo, but I''m getting a bit ahead of myself.
"A nar echo is a bit of a misnomer. It implies that the echo is something lesser, and that''s just patently false. An echo is every bit as real as the original piece of reality ites from. What it isn''t, however, is stable."
Belle sat up straight, staring them each in the eyes as she spoke her words, like she wanted to impress upon them what she was saying. "Echoes are fragments of reality thate with a built-in deadline. They end. Sometimes very, very quickly. Frankly, being here isn''t safe for you."
"But it''s better for us," Clyde added.
"An echo willst longer when part of the original piece of reality exists in it," Belle confirmed.
Derivan wasn''t too worried, despite the warning, and it seemed like neither of his twopanions were either. Belle''s exnation did a remarkable job of describing what bonus rooms were, which meant they were likely safe as long as the dungeon kept the bonus room running.
"This makes so much more sense than the exnation I got," Vex muttered. "My book talked about infinite sets."
"The academic overview is technically urate and unnecesarilyplicated." Belle rxed a bit, smiling. "A much easier metaphor I like to use is something like eddies in an ocean. If you think of ''reality'' as any part of the water that moves, then imagine mainline reality like a river of currents, permanently in ce for a given definition of permanence but there are plenty of disturbances in the water, and just because those are smaller doesn''t mean they are not currents. They just don''tst nearly as long."
Belle''s smile faded. "If you hadn''te along, though, I don''t think I would have noticed. Clyde only noticed because he had you three as a reference point."
"Is that... bad?" Vex ventured. He hesitated. "I''m not sure how I would feel if I found out I was an echo."
"For us? No, not really." Belle exchanged nces with Clyde and Elliot, who still seemed half-asleep. "But we are... something of an exception." Belle tapped her fingers on the table briefly, her own version of hesitation. She shook her head. "Perhaps this will be a longer exnation than I anticipated. The important thing to understand is that you''re in an echo of reality this ce will eventually crumble, but it looks like the rate of decay will be slow. The energy fueling this echo is not insignificant."
"How does this tie into the end of the universe?" Derivan asked, bringing the topic back to the first revtion that had been thrown at them. He understood the exnation sort of, some of the metaphor was going over his head but he didn''t know that he understood the point.
"It doesn''t in any direct way," Belle said. "But Clyde thought it was important for you to understand that despite this being an echo, the history of this ce is still very real. Echoes are based off of mainline reality. There''s always a divergence point, but you can figure out where that divergence point is, and the divergence point herees after the end of the universe."
"It''s also useful to know about," Vex said. "I think it''s how most of our skills work. Maybe the system creates an echo, and then manifests it, or something..."
"Shift," Derivan supplied. "It must use Shift to do this."
"Moving something from an echo into your reality?" Belle thought about it. "Clever. Much cheaper than making those things from scratch, if you know what you''re doing. Making an echo isn''t even that expensive, with the right tools. It''s maintaining an echo that costs energy."
"But what about the end of the universe?" Sev persisted. Belle shrugged, and gestured to Elliot, who startled slightly from his half-asleep position on the table.
"Oh. Uh, Clyde, could you get me some coffee? I could really use some coffee," he said, and Clyde chuckled and nodded, disappearing behind the counter. Elliot yawned and shook his head slightly. "Okay. End of the universe. Uh, Belle used the currents analogy, right?" He nced at Belle, who nodded at him.
"Right, okay. So even that main current won''tst forever. Everything ends eventually, right? Most realities, most universes they don''t ever get far enough to do anything about it. Sometimes no life develops in them at all. But in this reality this echo we have magic."
Clyde paused, as if for effect, and when no one reacted, he sighed. "Magic doesn''t like endings. It is fundamentally opposed to the end of anything. When you get down to it, that''s what mana is a record, a memory, an idea that .
"It''s not like a universe ends all at once. It happens slowly. The fabric of reality begins to unravel. Things disappear. There are gaps where there weren''t before. There''s no warning; you don''t get to know that the universe is ending. If something disappears, it''s wiped from reality as a whole. You can''t observe it like you can observe universal heat death which is pretty easy to stave off with magic, by the way." Elliot epted the mug from Clyde, gratefully giving it a few sips.
Derivan didn''t know how to respond. He knew Vex and Sev were more shell-shocked than he was. He was starting to realize that a lot of his emotional reactions were muted in this way.
He was worried, obviously. But that was about it. He was more focused on finding a solution.
"So, infolocks..." Sev muttered.
"I don''t think they''re the same thing," Vex said. "Or... maybe not? The fact that some people can remember implies that it''s not the same thing, right?"
"Or perhaps the name is simply incorrect," Derivan supplied. "Perhaps an infolock is not a lock on information at all."
Vex narrowed his eyes slightly, thinking, and then they widened. "You''re saying that it''s not information that''s locked away from people," he said. "It''s information that''s actively being protected from beingpletely erased? By keying in a few people that are allowed to remember the way things were?"
"I don''t know how your branch of reality survived the end," Belle said. "Or what you''re talking about, exactly. But if you''re talking about some people remembering things and not others, that hypothesis i''s a lot more usible than some magic somehow locking away information from the entire world."
Sev, Vex, and Derivan all went silent. It recontextualized a lot. If it was expensive to preserve information, and the system wanted to limit the people that were allowed to know...
"So you''re saying there''s no big force that''s trying to end the world?" Sev said quietly. "It''s just... the end. No big bad, no evil lord, just... the natural conclusion of reality."
"It would have been," Elliot said. He was looking a little brighter now that he''d had his coffee the ''hair'' on his head had returned to being shadowy mes, at least until Clyde reached up and messed with it. Elliot fended him off with a yelp. "Hey!"
"Sorry," Clyde said, not looking sorry at all. "Couldn''t resist."
Sev nced at him, and Derivan noticed the slight spike of irritation Clyde wasn''t taking all this very seriously at all. But Sev kept his irritation to himself, and a secondter it bled out of him. It wasn''t Clyde''s fault at all.
This was just the reality they had been living with, presumably for a long, long time.
"As I was saying," Elliot said. "It would have been, but this reality has mana. Magic. It''s alive, and it didn''t like the idea that the universe was ending; it decided it could fix it. So it tried."
"You have to understand," Clyde added. He was lounging back with his own ss of what looked like definitely wine, though he didn''t bring any attention to it. Somehow his demeanor was a little sad, now. "Mana is not alive in the traditional sense of the word. It is alive, after a fashion, but only because of what it is a record of everything we are and everything we know. Something like that can''t help but be alive. But it''s not something you can speak to, nor is it really something that knows how to respond."
"So," Elliot continued, ncing at his husband and picking up on his train of thought. "The mana tried to fix things. It drove people underground to try to protect them from what was happening, because mana itself is somewhat resistant to being erased, and it could flood smaller caverns with thick mana more effectively."
"That exins Teque," Sev muttered.
"And while people were underground," Elliot said, "it tried to figure out how to restore things as they were being erased. Like we''ve said, mana is a record; in theory, anything in that record can be restored. But it''s just a record of life. It doesn''t really understand physics, or particles, or any of thews the world runs on. That''s how you get stuff like... well, that."
Elliot gestured at the window at the pane in the air that reflected grass and greenery, even though there was nothing there.
"...That''s kind of messed up," Sev said.
The implications wererge. The implications about what the system had been doing this whole time those wererge, too.
"I have a question," Vex finally said. Derivan nced at him. The lizardkin had managed to center himself a bit, though he still looked a bit shaken. "This is... I mean, this is a lot. But... how do you know all this? Don''t take this the wrong way, but what are you?"
"Full of hard questions, aren''t you?" Clyde chuckled slightly, and then he turned a little bit more serious. "Your friend over there might know something," he said, and he nodded at Sev.
137 - Book 3: Chapter 3: A Role to Play
137 - Book 3: Chapter 3: A Role to y
"Me?" Sev asked, a little incredulously. "I''ve never met you guys in my life."
"No, but you''re under the same effect we are. Or you were. It''s mostly faded now." Clyde nced at him, his eyes glowing that faint off-yellow again before changing back to white.
Sev stared at him, then into the air, presumably at a system window; he tore his eyes away after a moment. "I didn''t know what it was," he said softly. "I just knew I couldn''t talk about it. I still don''t know why it was there."
"You''ll probably find out soon, if the effect is starting to wear off," Clyde said. "Though ''soon'' is rtive here. The point is, that''s what we are elementals bound in much the same way you were."
"It''s the reason it doesn''t matter much to us that we''re in an echo," Belle said with a slight shrug. "We are created to y a role, it can be said. We''re allowed to have our own lives, as long as we also y that role. Clyde has to be an innkeeper. I have to be a scientist. Elliot has to be a historian."
"I''m one of the lucky ones," Clyde said. "Innkeeper is vague. I can do whatever I want, as long as I''m being hospitable to my guests, and luckily for me I enjoy being hospitable."
"We represent roles," Belle exined. She stirred her own ss of what looked like tea Derivan didn''t remember when she''d even found a cup of tea, but it was there, right in front of her. "Sometimes more than one role. It''s... a conceptual temte for the mana, you could say. Helps it know how to recreate things, especially people. It has a hard time with people. Knowing what they do isn''t the same thing as knowing who they are. So we help by ying our little roles in this makeshift little society, cooking food we don''t need to eat and keeping an inn without any guests, because it helps the mana keep things together overall."
"And if this echo ends, we don''t really die," Clyde said. "That''s true for all elementals, really. We''re different in different echoes, but we''re also all the same creature. If you meet me again in your reality, I''ll be different, but if you y the right sort of trick, I might be able to remember you."
"Like Irvis," Vex muttered underr his breath.
"What was that?" Clyde nced at Vex.
"Nothing," Vex said quickly.
"Is it working?" Sev asked, changing the subject. "Putting all this aside everything the mana is doing to keep the universe alive. Is it a lot of the paths we saw up there were... worrying. The mana''s trying to keep the universe alive, but is it seeding?"
"No," Clyde said bluntly. "Maybe for a given definition of sess, but... ultimately, no. It''s slowing down an inevitable doom. Maybe your reality is having better luck; that would exin why it''s the ''main'' one."
"I don''t think it is," Vex said quietly.
They were silent for a moment. It did answer some questions it made it clear what the system was for, at least, even if it wasn''t clear what the purpose of each part was. Stats and levels still didn''t make sense, nor did the existence of monsters, although the picture for dungeons and reality anchors were beginning to be clear.
"What am I?" Derivan asked after a moment.
Clyde nced at him, surprised. "What do you mean?"
"I was told I was the same sort of creature as... an enemy of ours. Someone from the mana." Vex tensed a little beside him, and Derivan tried not to react to that. "I do not know what that means."
"...I''m afraid I can''t answer that." Clyde frowned, ncing him over. "You''re not bound the same way we are, or the same way your friend is. But the nature of your existence is different. I don''t really have any answers for you there. Sorry."
He would just have to continue that search on his own, then. Vex reached out for him, this time, squeezing his hand perhaps in apology; Derivan squeezed it in turn. There was a lot they needed to talk about, but this wasn''t the ce for that.
Perhapster, when they had more privacy. Misa had gotten each of them separate rooms, after all.
"Are you okay?" Sev asked after a minute. "Do we need to free you, or something?"
"Not at all," Clydeughed. "And I''m not just saying that because I''m being made to. We have our lives; this isn''t very. It''s just that being an innkeeper is a part of me, and even then, if I wanted to stop, I could. I suppose in your case it''s a little different... but it looks like it''s something you chose, too."
"I saw that part of it," Sev admitted. "I didn''t know what it meant."
"You probably aren''t allowed to remember," Clyde said with a gentle smile. "It''s happened before to some of us; the ones that have to y important enough roles. They can''t know what they''re supposed to do ahead of time. If they did, it wouldn''t be real."
"That''s..." Sev hesitated. "Maybe?"
He''d also lost a lot of memories just because of his skills. He wasn''t sure that was the answer; Derivan saw it in the way his shoulders hunched in slightly. He was worried, and maybe a little bit scared...
...and maybe they all just needed a break, after everything that had happened.
Knowing the universe had ended was ending? was a terrifying revtion. But they weren''t yet in a position to stop it. So first, they had to figure out how to get there.
"I believe mypanions are exhausted," Derivan said softly. "We require some rest. But it was a pleasure to meet you three truly. You have all been kinder than you needed to be."
"We treat you the way you treat others," Clyde said with a small smile. "Would you look at that. Turns out you''re good people. I hope you knew that already."
Elliotughed at that. "You''re a cheesy dork."
"But a good one." Belle smiled a serene smile. "Don''t let us keep you. Do what you have to do. We often have our breakfasts together here, so this likely won''t be thest time you see us. Say hi every now and then, won''t you? You''re free to stay as long as you need."
"Hey, I''m supposed to say that," Clydeined, and Belle just smiled mischievously.
Derivan chuckled softly, then took Vex by the hand and
He paused before he could grab Sev by the shoulder, looking at his stump of an arm. Sev noticed, but didn''t say anything; Vex hadn''t been watching him at the time. Instead, he was bouncing anxiously on his feet. Derivan decided not to bring it up. Instead, he guided the two of them up the stairs, gesturing for Sev to follow.
The keys werebeled, so it took him not long at all to find their rooms.
"I think I need some time to myself, too," Sev said awkwardly when they arrived at his door. "This is a lot. Let''s figure out a n tomorrow?"
"Of course," Derivan said. Sev closed the door behind him, and Vex let out a sigh, crumpling slightly into Derivan.
"I actually don''t want to sleep alone tonight," Vex mumbled. "Can I hang out in your room? Let''s just... talk. Not about this, or fighting, or what happened in the dungeon. I want to talk about literally anything else."
"You are always wee in my room, my friend," Derivan said, and then paused. "Boyfriend? Though the word does not fit as well into the sentence."
"Oh my gods," Vex said, and he managed augh, although it was happy and sad all at once. It was the first realugh he''d had in a while, and Derivan found that he had missed the sound. "Let''s just go in, you big goof."
"As far as affectionate nicknames go, I feel you could do better," Derivan mused, and chuckled when Vex made an indignant, huffing noise in the back of his throat.
Things had gone badly, and what they had learned had been forck of a better word awful.
But they were alive, and as long as they were alive, things would not be over. Now was the time to make sure they stayed alive, and that... probably meant a great deal of training.
Before all that, though, it was time for a great deal of talking.
"Can you tell me more about Elyra?" Derivan asked.
The bed in their rooms were, it turned out, enormous and made of some magically enchanted material that didn''t rip apart when Derivan tried lying down on it, too. Vex had been the one to notice the enchantment, or Derivan wouldn''t even have tried. This way, they could both lie on the bed, although that durability enchantment didn''t exactly trante into a weight distribution enchantment.
Which was to say that there had been a lot of rolling around before Derivan had eventually discovered that he could forcibly reinforce the bed somewhat with the Slime stat by infusing it into the bed, which was not , but it was workable, and Vex seemed happier when they could share the bed. He''d looked terribly guilty when Derivan had tried to sit on the floor, even though Derivan insisted he couldn''t actually take advantage of thefort the bed offered.
"What do you want to know?" Vex asked, ncing over at him. "You''ve been there now."
"We did not get a chance to explore the aspects of Elyra that you seemed most proud of," Derivan said. "We only saw the worst of it."
"I don''t know if there are any parts of Elyra I could say that I''m proud of," Vex muttered, staring up at the ceiling, and then he sighed. "No, that''s a lie. I mean, I don''t know if pride is the right word; I''m not the one that made any of those things. But... I loved the libraries. Not even for the books on magic, although I loved those. They had so many books, and all of them were interesting."
"I have not had the chance to read much," Derivanmented. "Also, it is remarkably easy to tear the pages of a book."
"Yeah, well," Vexughed. "That''s one of the reasons I refused to put any points into Strength, actually. I''ve been told that you get all the fine control you need as part of the stat when you put points into it, but I don''t actually want to risk it."
"I feel like I should apologize for the book that I identally tore..."
"It was an empty notebook," Vex said dismissively. "And the pages were easy enough to put back together. If anything, I''m sorry I enchanted it to explode."
"Why did you enchant it to explode?"
"I didn''t want anyone to touch my stuff, and then I sort of forgot about it after I joined your team." Vex sounded vaguely embarrassed, and Derivan chuckled. "But the libraries were great. It''s where I felt most at home, even, which I guess might be weird. I made friends with all the librarians I met... You met one of them."
"She seemed like a good person," Derivan agreed. "Did you have any favorite books?"
"Mystery books," Vex said, his eyes gleaming a bit. Derivan nced over at him in surprise. "I mean, the magic books were my favorite, but you already knew that. So my second favorite was mystery books well written ones, the kind where you can put the puzzle together yourself, if you notice all the right details. I could lose myself for hours" heughed. "I told the librarians to mark the page where they solved the mystery for me, did you know that? I did that so I could read and reread before they found the answer, and see if I could figure it out myself."
"Did you?" Derivan asked. He enjoyed listening to Vex seeing the lizardkin smile as he lost himself in his memories. How long had it been since he''dst read a book like this, even?
"I did," Vex smiled. "Well, most of the time. Not all of the time. I wish I had more time to read now, but I spend so much time adventuring, and there''s so much to discover..."
Vex went silent for a moment, and Derivan sensed there was more he wanted to say. The armor waited patiently.
"I guess I can read faster now," Vex said. "I found out my Sign lets me do that. I don''t know how I feel about that, though. I want to experience a book for myself, not have all the knowledge just... poured into my head. I''m not just a bucket to be filled."
"Indeed not," Derivan agreed. Vex nced at him, his gaze surprisingly unreadable, even with Physical Empathy.
"...I know I said I don''t want to talk about it," Vex said after the moment passed. "But I think maybe I do want to tell you about what happened back there. I don''t know if I''m ready to tell the others yet... but I want you to know."
"Irvis made me fight my dad. Or... an echo of him, I suppose. We know what those are now."
"Oh," Derivan said. He didn''t know what else to say but he held his only arm out, and Vex rolled over into him, burying his face into the crook of his neck. There was more he wanted to say, Derivan could tell.
But Vex couldn''t find the words. He hugged him tight instead, trying and failing to find all the words he needed to say.
Words couldeter. Derivan wished he had both of his hands, but he did not; all he could do was use his remaining hand to rub gentle circles on Vex''s back, and wish he could do more.
134 - Book 2: Chapter 71: Fractals in the Sky
134 - Book 2: Chapter 71: Fractals in the Sky
Jumping was much easier said than done. Derivan peered out of the hole to see exactly how viable jumping would be it was not. Sev, on the other hand, just stared at Misa with one brow slightly raised.
"What?" she asked. She managed a small grin. "We''re a Gold-ranked team. We shouldn''t be afraid of a little fall."
"It''s not exactly a little fall," Vex said, peering out of the hole alongside Derivan and shuddering slightly. "Somehow that''s so much worse when I don''t have my magic."
"You have your magic," Misa pointed out. "You just don''t have ess to your system-granted spells."
"I haven''t figured out a Glyph of Featherfall yet," Vex grumbled. "Coming up with new spells isn''t that easy, you know."
"We''re not guaranteed the system''s protection from anything," Sev said. "Nevermind that the system doesn''t protect from falling we can''t take for granted that any system mechanic works the way we expect in a bonus room called ."
"What about your spells?" Derivan directed his question to Sev. "Divine spells are likely not under the same restriction."
"Huh," Sev said slowly. "No, you''re right. They''re a conceit of the system, as far as I know. They work like regr system skills, so if the rest of our skills are still working and I know they are, because [Triage] worked earlier then there''s no reason my ''spells'' won''t work."
He tested it by flicking out a hand; a gleaming, golden barrier appeared a second afterwards, floating in the air.
"...I guess we could use these as steps," Sev said. "Somehow this feels vaguely sphemous."
"I''m sure Onyx won''t mind," Misa said dryly.
"He''d probably find it hrious." Sev stared at the gleaming barrier for a moment, his brows furrowing slightly. "I hope Aurum''s okay. I still haven''t heard from the kid."
Misa nced at him and softened, just a bit. "I''m sure he''ll be fine," she said. She didn''t say anything further.
They made their way down the makeshift steps in silence, pausing every so often to let Sev recover his mana. The whole process was arduous and took far longer than a simple [Featherfall] would have, but they didn''t really have many other options.
The process did, at least, reveal to them that there was more to the world than had been immediately obvious from their perch in the dungeon.
The illusory mirrors in the sky weren''t just in the sky; those were just the most obvious ones, because the light shining through them from behind made it clear that they were merely reflections of the ground. There were, however, scattered mirror-like nes all over the ce, reflecting just a small fraction of the ground. The more they descended, the more it became clear that they had no idea what the ground looked like.
Or indeed how far down the ground even was. They passed the firstyer where they thought the ground had been soon enough, only to find it was another wall of reflected ground, catching on to some piece of grass who-knew-where.
"I''m starting to notice that a lot of these patches of grass look the same," Vex mumbled, reaching out to let his ws drift through one illusory patch; it drifted apart on contact with his scales, and came together again once he pulled away. He frowned slightly. "I can''t even tell if this is a mana-based phenomenon. I can''t control any of it..."
"Noram said something about the surface being strange," Sev said. He nced around, casting another barrier just a little bit below theirs. "I didn''t think it''d be this strange, though."
"I''d really like to find a fucking bed right around now," Misa grumbled. "Half tempted to actually just jump for it."
"Please don''t," Sev said dryly. "Even as a joke."
Misa nced at him, then stared critically around them. "Anyone else think the grass is changing slightly?"
"They all look kinda the same at this point." Vex peered more closely at one of the panes in the air. "I guess the grass might be a bit more yellow?"
"Not yellow." Misa shook her head and tugged on Vex''s arm, directing him to a different patch. "Rotting."
She had, in fact, discovered something that was best described as an illusory tunnel. The panes in the air formed a sort of circr path, but the further down that path the panes were, the drier and cker that grass was; very visibly rotting, maggots and all.
Vex paled. "Um. Let''s not go down there?"
Misa seemed slightly skeptical. "I don''t know that we have much of a choice."
They kept on going anyway. It wasn''t like the panes stopped them from choosing a different direction to go in they could just walk straight through them, and the collective decision to avoid the strange death hole in the sky seemed like a smart one.
It became clear rtively quickly that there were, in fact, other paths in the midst of them each one seeming to lead somewhere slightly different. It wasn''t always as obvious as what Misa had decided to officially deem the Death Hole; sometimes the grass just seemed a little brighter, or in other cases, there were flowers.
None of them, notably, seemed to have people.
At first.
The signs of civilization came slowly, but surely. Panes where the grass was ttened, like many people had trodden over it; panes where there was ss or some other manufactured material lying scattered about. The path they eventually opted to follow was one that, at the end of it, seemed to have a road.
"Better than anything else we''ve seen so far," Sevmented, staring down the path.
"Let''s not waste any more time." Misa gestured for Sev to start cing his barriers, and, after a brief pause to nce at her, Sev did so.
They didn''t speak much while they walked down that path. Everyone that wasn''t Misa exchanged slightly worried nces at one another, and Misa seemed content not to talk about whatever was on her mind.
So the time passed in silence, until they reached the end of the path, and finally found themselves on solid ground.
In the middle of a town, no less.
No one seemed to notice them, though or at least, no one seemed to be interested. A few people shadow-beings, it seemed, dressed in immacte suits nced up at them and then went back to their own business, seemingly uninterested in the group of adventurers that had, for all intents and purposes, simply walked down out of the sky. The dungeon-chandelier wasn''t even visible from here, obfuscated by panes of light that each reflected a different part of the vige.
If they hadn''te down here from the dungeon, they wouldn''t have known that that was there, either.
"I''m beginning to feel like we should''ve left a tracker on that thing, just in case," Sev said, ncing back up at the sky in the rough direction of the dungeon.
"I believe I know where it is," Derivan offered. Sev blinked at him.
"You do? Using Shift or something?"
"It is not currently shifted any more than we are." Derivan paused to find the words to exin. "I lost... pieces of myself, in the fight with Irvis. Not my arm. It appears to be an intrinsic trait of Slime."
"You can sense where other pieces of you are?" Sev cocked his head. "Useful."
"To a degree," Derivan agreed, nodding. It was slightly ufortable, in fact but it was nothing he couldn''t get used to. Perhaps his connection to those pieces of himself would fade in time, even; it was still too early to say.
"Think we can get ourselves an inn here?" Misa said, ncing around. "Don''t know what currency they trade in."
"Reality shards, if Teque was any indication, but I guess it might be different here," Vex said. He hesitated. "But we don''t have any left."
"Let''s just explore," Sev suggested. "We''ll either find a ce or we''ll find someone we can ask about it."
The whole town itself was... unremarkable. Derivan was rather ufortably reminded of Fendal, in a way, though the architecture didn''t really resemble the other town all that much. Fendal was full of short, squat buildings, some of them divided into multiple storefronts, but most of them independent houses.
This ce had apartments, but the buildings were almost unsettlingly close to perfect cubes, without any real ir of life to them. What few stores there were were dim inside, with the ss so frosty that the products they were selling were only barely visible. One store was stocked with identical loaves of bread, and another was stocked with a variety of fruits that Derivan didn''t recognize, though ''variety'' was a poor word to use, perhaps. There were about five different fruits Derivan could see, and every copy of a single fruit seemed perfectly identical.
It didn''t help that as they progressed through the town, they saw not a single person that wasn''t what appeared to be a shadow elemental.
"I''m not going to lie," Vex whispered as they walked through the town he had one hand grasped on to Derivan''s as he peered through the stores and tried to avoid the gazes of the people around him, not that it was difficult. "This ce is kinda creepy. I was sort of expecting a lot more... life, here."
"Perhaps we simply picked a bad path," Derivan said, trying to beforting. He wasn''t sure it worked.
"We''ll probably have to find our way into Teque or somece simr soon," Sev spoke from his position in front of them. "Noram did tell us the surface is unstable. I didn''t think it''d be like this."
"He mentioned some areas had been reimed, too, right?" Vex looked around. "I just don''t know if this is one of them..."
"Just because we find it a little strange doesn''t mean this ce is bad," Misa said. She nced critically at yet another one of the perfect-cube buildings; this one had a window that disyed, of all things, a bed. "What''re the odds this is an inn and not just a ce that sells beds?"
"About even odds, I''d say," Sev said.
"Fuck it," Misa shrugged, and pushed the door open.
The inside was surprisingly bright so much so that Misa flinched slightly once she stepped in, having expected the interior to match the exterior. That wasn''t the case at all beyond the slightly shadowed disy where the bed was, there was a beautifully decorated lobby. Bright red drapes adorned a window that was positioned perfectly at what seemed to be one of the few grass-reflecting panes in the town, creating an illusion of a bright park outside. Bright, warm mes licked at the upper corners of the room, each in small, perfectly controlled spheres.
The innkeeper because this was very clearly an inn, there was even a wall of keys behind him smiled happily at them as they entered. He, too, was a shadow-being dressed in an immacte suit, but he seemed perfectly happy to see and address them, unlike everyone else they''d met.
"Well, hello there!" he greeted. "I''ve never had any visitors before. How exciting!"
"You''ve... never had any visitors?" Misa blinked and nced around. "This is an inn, right?"
"Well, yes, but we don''t exactly get any visitors here." The innkeeper let out a surprisingly warm chuckle and hopped up to sit on his desk. "It''s a pleasure to meet you all. What brings you to the fine town of Aldea?"
"...Dungeon shenanigans?" Sev said, at a loss for what else to say.
"I''ll mark that down in the guestbook." The innkeeper gave them a knowing grin. "The name''s Clyde, by the way. You guys doing okay? Need some rooms?"
"We''ll need four, if you have them," Misa said. "What types of payment do you take? We''re kinda new here."
"Payment?" Clyde looked puzzled for a moment, and then brightened. "Oh! No. No payment. Stories, maybe, if you''re wiling to share them. But we don''t work that way here."
"No?" Misa paused as Clyde swept up four keys from behind him and deposited them in her hand.
"Nah. Can''t say when we dropped it, but I''d say we''re all pretty happy here. I get that it looks kind of unfriendly from the outside, though." Clyde''s smile vanished for a moment. "It''splicated. But here, your rooms let me know if anything''s wrong with them, I haven''t checked in on them for ages. I''ll fix it right quick."
"Sure," Misa said slowly. She tossed three of the keys to Vex, Derivan, and Sev, and then held up her own. "I''m gonna go pass the fuck out first, if you guys don''t mind. Let''s figure stuff out in the morning."
She vanished up the stairs without giving any of them a chance to respond. Sev, Derivan, and Vex nced at each other.
"She''s having a rough time of it, your friend," Clyde said suddenly, ncing up the stairs. His face was little more than two glowing eyes hidden in shadow, but he was able to emote well through it not unlike Derivan, in fact. His face had softened somewhat. "Lemme know if you want me to talk to her, yeah? Or my daughter. She''s pretty good at this kind of stuff."
"You''re... very helpful, thank you," Sev said. Derivan nced at him the cleric was a little suspicious, and Derivan supposed he couldn''t fault him. Make sure Misa''s okay, Sev mouthed at him, using the ry charm tomunicate. Give her space, just check on her through the system or something. "Can you tell us a little more about this ce? We''re pretty new here."
"Of course!" Clyde smiled brightly. "Here, let me see; where do I start..."
Sev tensed slightly. Derivan watched as the system''s strings around him suddenly pulled taut, like something was about to finally reach a conclusion.
He remembered, somewhat btedly, that this bonus room wasn''t just a bonus room it was a recreation of the history of their own world, if it had taken a slightly different path. If the mana had tried to fix whatever had gone wrong, instead of the system. Teque hadn''t known what had gone wrong, but Teque was only a partial recreation.
Derivan realized with startling certainty that Clyde hadn''t interpreted "this ce" to mean their town at all; he''d interpreted it to mean their entire world. Clyde was old. This whole town was. It wasn''t obvious, but...
[Intermediate Mana Sight] has been upgraded to [Mana Understanding].
The mana here was old.
"Well," Clyde said thoughtfully, and Derivan''s attention refocused sharply on to the shadow elemental, waiting for the words that would change everything.
"I guess it all started when the universe ended, about... oh, 1400 years ago."
END OF BOOK 2
135 - End of Book 2. Chapter 72: Interlude - Jerome - Self-Review
135 - End of Book 2. Chapter 72: Interlude - Jerome - Self-Review
Jerome sat next to Kestel.
He''d taken to visiting the head researcher of the dungeon team every few days, just to see if he was doing better. Ever since he''d learned about what happened to him at the dungeon His own men turning against him the moment he hesitated to report back, wanting to first ensure the safety of his men...
Harold and the others had left,st he''d heard. They were worried about Kestel, too, but none of them were really aligned to anything rted to healing and recovery. Like Derivan''s team, they''d left to investigate something, and were hoping to acquire the crystals needed to heal Kestel while they were away.
They had their own problems, he understood. He noticed it out of the corners of his eyes, when they thought no one else was looking. The way they''d reach out to scratch an imaginary itch and then flinch. The way they''d fold their arms, and then wince slightly when the weight of it was different when their bones didn''t catch in quite the same way their arms once did.
"The Guild still keeps making me take those stupid sses," Jerome said to Kestel. The scientist, of course, didn''t respond; he was either asleep or pretending to be asleep, but he still wasn''t quite there. He wasn''t even sure why he was talking to Kestel about his problems, but he continued anyway. He''d found a certainfort in being able to speak to someone without judgement. "And now I keep noticing things I didn''t notice before. It sucks. I wanna go back to not noticing."
Kestel still didn''t respond, and Jerome took this as encouragement to continue. "You know what I would''ve done before? I would''ve just told them to suck it up. Or I would''ve said that being a skeleton is fuckin'' cool, and I wish I could be a skeleton, and why don''t they appreciate having status immunities and elemental immunities and not needing to sleep..."
"And you know, the more time I spend with people that aren''t in my own fucking bubble, the more I realize this isn''t just a fucking game?" Jerome looked down at Kestel, and he felt frustration burn in his voice for a moment. He''d had his moment with Kestel. He''d met the guy, back when he was negotiating for ess to the dungeon himself, going behind the Guildmaster''s back to do so.
He''d been kind of a dick to him then, too. He''d said something about how he''d find everything they needed in the dungeon, and they wouldn''t need other delvers, and how trying to study a dungeon was stupid, anyway; they should just delve it for the loot and be done with it.
It was weird how different that version of himself felt, even though it had been only a few months ago. Spending more time with people had a way of doing that to you, maybe.
"I thought of this as just a game, because it looks like games back on Earth, and you people fuck, not ''you people'', just the people that are here, whatever you don''t act like the people back on Earth. And I never thought to visit the fucking hospital, or look at any of the fucking orphanages back in Anderstahl, and I didn''t even fucking talk to people except when I wanted something from them."
"And now I have, and it sucks! And a part of me wants to go back to that, because I didn''t fucking feel like shit all the time back then, and that makes me feel even more like a piece of shit. And the worst part is that I know I''m taking all the wrong lessons from this. Everyone around me is so goddamn fucking understanding all the time, and I just want someone to be angry at me."
Maybe it wasn''t fair to dump on Kestel like this. It wasn''t like the lizardkin had any choice in the matter, but... it wasn''t like he could hear him, either.
"Why?"
Nevermind. Kestel had woken up, at some point, and could hear him. The lizardkin was just staring at him with a cidly interested sort of look on his face, and somehow that made Jerome even more angry.
Not at Kestel. Just at himself. He''d never invested any effort into skills needed to heal, or else he might have been able to do something about this. Everything had gone exactly as he wanted. He''d gotten rich. He''d gotten rare skills. Granted, the ''rich'' part hadn''t gone exactly the way he''d envisioned somehow he hadn''t considered that gold might not be intrinsically valuable, when he''d pledged himself to the God of Gold but he''d still gotten there eventually.
And the whole time, he''d still been pissed at everyone around him. He''d still wanted more. The few shes of pleasure he ever got was from gain, whatever form that gain took, and that vanished in a matter of moments. Reced by a desire for more still.
More strength, more wealth, more prestige.
Some of that, he was aware, came from the nature of the geas ced upon him a feedback loop in his mind, telling him he was deserving of more. A feedback loop ced upon him in an effort to help him be more confident.
...So many things had gone wrong.
He didn''t really want to go back. He hated being like this, and he spouted off about it sometimes, but he wouldn''t go back. He couldn''t. Knowing what he did now, going back would be a betrayal of all the progress he''d made
"Why?" Kestel repeated again, and Jerome flinched slightly. He''d almost forgotten the lizardkin was there.
"...I don''t know," Jerome answered after the moment it took him to even remember the context of the question. Why did he want someone to be angry at him? "I guess I feel like I deserve it."
"Why?" Kestel asked him again.
"I hurt a lot of people," Jerome said. "I didn''t mean to, but I did. And it feels like I''m not getting punished for it, and I feel like I should be."
"Why?"
Jerome was beginning to sense a trend, here. But he answered anyway. "It''s just how I''ve thought about things for a long time," he said quietly. "You do something bad, you get punished. Actions have consequences, and all that. You shouldn''t be able to just get away with it."
"Why?"
It was like talking to a broken no. Jerome stopped himself before the thought finished, almost snarling at himself before he saw the way Kestel began to flinch back. Don''t dehumanize, he thought to himself, and then he managed a wry smile at the irony of the statement, which coaxed Kestel into rxing again.
''Dehumanize'' wasn''t a very applicable word, here. But it was the closest one he had.
"We punish people so they don''t repeat their actions, I guess," Jerome said. He''d never really thought this deeply on the matter before; he''d long since learned to stop asking ''why''.
Kestel seemed to consider this for a long moment. Jerome almost thought the lizardkin had fallen back asleep, but then he spoke again, his voice contemtive. "Are you going to?"
"Am I going to what?" Jerome blinked a few times. "Like... repeat my actions? No. Heck no. I Oh. I see your point."
Kestel cocked his head slightly; Jerome wasn''t even sure if that was the point Kestel was trying to make, or if he was just asking questions. He had been getting better, or so the priests said, but there was no change in his status; he still had difficulty moving and speaking...
But that wasn''t fair, he thought. Difficulty with those things didn''t make Kestel any lesser. Taking longer to express his thoughts might be frustrating for him, and sad for the people that knew him, but it didn''t make him not a person. He couldn''t just assume Kestel was a child and asking questions for the sake of it.
Kestel just stared at him. "If I''m not going to repeat what I do anyway, then there''s no purpose to the punishment, is that what you''re saying?" Jerome asked, and Kestel nodded slightly at him. Jerome sighed.
"I guess that makes sense," he said, though he said it reluctantly. "I dunno. It doesn''t feel right. I still feel like people should get punished."
"Why" Kestel started, and Jerome held up a hand.
"No, I get it," he said, and to Jerome''s surprise, Kestel managed a small grin at him. Maybe he was getting better. "I get what you''re saying, and it makes sense. It just doesn''t change how I feel about it. I want toe up with other reasons that it matters like, if we punish people, it''s going to deter other people from doing the same thing, right? Not everyone is going to be convinced by words."
"But no one''s going to be repeating what I did." Jerome looked down and away for a moment. "And fuck, I''m sure there''s other ways to deter people. I dunno. I''ve never really thought about it. Do we even want to deter people? Maybe deterring people isn''t the best way to get people to not do things! There''s too much stuff to think about." He threw his hands up in frustration. "I feel like this is for people smarter than me to think about."
Kestel took a moment to reply again, and Jerome just waited. "You''re... thinking about it," he said eventually. "That is... more than most."
"Yeah, I guess," Jerome grumbled. "I don''t like thinking about it. I''d like to go back to not thinking about it. I want a refund and to get off this thought train."
Another beat, and then Kestel chuckled. "Sorry," the lizardkin told him. "No... no refunds."
"Bah!" Jerome said.
But he found he was smiling.
They talked for a few more minutes before Kestel got too tired and had to go back to sleep but before he did, he made Jerome promise to visit again. He liked having a young mind to guide, he said, and even though part of Jerome hated being called a ''young mind'', much less the implication that he needed guidance, he''d agreed. He''d genuinely enjoyed spending time with the guy, after all.
He wasn''t a ''young mind'', though. That was patently ridiculous. Kestel couldn''t have been, what, more than six years older than him? Maybe eight?
Bah.
Jerome got up from his seat and spared one more nce before he left the lizardkin''s ''ward'' it was still just a set of curtains in the temple, although the curtains had been magically augmented and enchanted to give Kestel privacy andfort. It was a service the other Elyran researchers had provided to all the wards once it became clear that the temple wasn''t really equipped to hold anyone long-term, and it was something the priests all appreciated.
"All done?" Typhea asked him, and Jerome jumped.
"God," he said. "Don''t scare me like that."
He wasn''t sure how to feel about his elfpanions, now. They were still the only elves he''d seen here elves were moremon around Anderstahl than they were here, apparently, though that didn''t exin thepleteck of them and he wasn''t sure if they were actuallyfortable here?
There was a lot of things he was questioning now that he hadn''t questioned before. Like why they kept following him around after he had rescued them. At the time, he''d thought it made sense, but...
"My apologies," Typhea said, bowing her head slightly.
"Don''t do that, either," Jerome said, feeling slightly ufortable. "Were you waiting on me for something?"
"No," Typhea said. "I was waiting in case I was needed."
"...Don''t take this the wrong way, but don''t you have your own things to do?" Jerome asked. "Ja too, wherever she is."
"She is resting," Typhea said. "It is my shift."
Jerome felt a headacheing on. "You''ve been keeping shifts this entire time and I haven''t noticed?"
"Do not take this the wrong way," Typhea said, this time with a faint smirk gracing her lips. "But you are not very observant."
"Please tell me this isn''t a stupid life debt thing."
"Were that an actual part of our culture, we would be offended," Typhea informed him. "But it is not. You simply needed our protection, so we adopted you."
"I what?" Jerome asked nkly. "How have we never talked about this Nevermind. I know the answer to that question. More importantly, what?"
"You attempted to save us and were poisoned in the process," Typhea exined to him. "Elven couples have a tradition. We will care for a person, if we choose to, and the person epts. It is like parenting."
"You guys are a couple?" Jerome said nkly, and then the rest of his brain caught up. "Wait, did you guys adopt me? I feel like I should get some choice in that! I''m an adult!"
"Yes, you are," Typhea said to him, very patiently, like an adult would to a child. "And we did. You epted. We exined it more than once, in fact, though I am unsure you listened..."
Jerome buried his face in his hands. "Oh my god."
"We can leave, if you wish," Typhea told him.
"No, I just... okay, please exin it to me again. I''m sorry I didn''t pay attention the first time, I was a fucking idiot."
"I will look for Ja, and we will exin it together. For the... twelfth time."
"Somehow the fact that you''ve been keeping track of that both doesn''t surprise me and deeply horrifies me."
136 - Book 3: Chapter 1: A Thousand(ish) Years Ago
136 - Book 3: Chapter 1: A Thousand(ish) Years Ago
"Wait, no, hang on," Sev said. "Back up. The universe did what now?"
"It ended." Clyde cocked his head towards Sev, a flicker of shadow dancing across his eyes; his equivalent of a blink. "Do you not know about that?"
"No?" Sev said, the lilt at the end of his words turning it into a question. Unspoken was the thought that came with it: what the fuck?
Clyde frowned at him slightly, then leaned back against the counter, apparently debating what to say next. "You''re visitors, I know that much," he said, his eyes shing briefly. Derivan recognized the glow of an active [Mana Sight] or something close to it, anyway. This ce didn''t have the system. "But you''re not visitors from... Ah, I see. This is an echo?" He frowned. "That''s unfortunate."
"I feel like Misa should be here for this conversation," Vex ventured, looking a little nervously up the stairs.
There was a small pause, and then Sev sighed softly.
"If she said she needs time, then she needs time," Sev said gently. "If she keeps avoiding us then we''ll try to talk to her, sure, but anything we learn here we can just tell herter. It''ll be okay."
"...If you say so." Vex looked a little unconvinced. Derivan gave him a little nudge in the shoulder and smiled at him.
"It will be fine," Derivan said.
"Yeah." Vex blew a breath out through his mouth, looking a little less tense.
"Oh, so you listen when Derivan tells you," Sev teased, trying to lighten the mood; he at Vex to show he was kidding when the lizardkin nced over at him.
Clyde watched the three of them with interested eyes, and then gave a polite cough when they nced back at him. "I think I''m gonna need my wife for this conversation," he said. "She''s a little more versed in nar echoes than I am."
"Is that what this is?" Vex asked, looking around.
"It''s the best word you have for it," Clyde said, waving vaguely. "ounts for all the weird stuff, like me speaking the samenguage you guys do. But it''s not a great word, probably? Look, my wife will be able to exin this better than I can. I''ll go get her. Give me ten minutes."
Clyde disappeared behind a door behind the counter.
"...You don''t think he''s running away, do you?" Sev said, after a minute had passed.
"What? No, why would he?" Vex blinked.
"Honestly, entirely because I think the idea of him just booking it is kind of funny."
Vex snorted, but didn''t say anything further. The three of them sat in afortable silence, with Derivan watching Vex silently look around. He could practically see the lizardkin making little notes in his head, details he was noticing that he wanted to ask about...
Clyde returned after the requested ten minutes, though, and Derivan watched in mild amusement as Vex promptly forgot about thest ten minutes of careful observation. Clyde was back with not one but two other shadow elementals trailing behind him. Neither of them were dressed in the immacte suit that everyone else they saw was wearing. One was wearing a light-purple dress that flowed over her shoulders and shimmered at the edges with vibrant violet me, and the other wore... a shirt.
Just a really long, garishly bright yellow shirt. If he was wearing shorts, they weren''t visible. He looked like he''d just woken up. He didn''t have hair, exactly, but the shadows did drape themselves over his head in a very messy, tousled sort of way.
"My husband wanted to join in," Clyde said by way of exnation. The elemental in the shirt yawned and waved.
"I hear it''s time for a lesson about echoes," the elemental in the dress said. She gave them a gentle smile, and opened her mouth to begin and then Clyde poked her in the shoulder.
"Introductions first."
"Oh, right." She blinked once, then bowed gracefully. "My name is Belle. This doofus over here is Elliot."
The elemental in the shirt yawned. "Yeah, I''m the historian," he said. "Clyde said we had visitors, and I thought that sounded cool, so now I''m here. He would''ve given you the short version of the end of the universe talk. I''ll give you the long one. After Belle is done with her whole thing, though."
"Let''s all take a seat," Belle said. "It''s not... a long exnation, exactly, but it is a discussion better had sitting down."
They all sat down at one of therger tables in the inn.
"Your names are interesting," Sev remarked as they sat. "They sound like they''re from Earth."
"They are," Belle said with a smile. "Good observation. Our real names are words encoded in mana; not particrly practical for conversation. Since we''re in an echo tuned to English, we ended up with namesmon to thenguage. This isn''t always going to be true in an echo, but I''m getting a bit ahead of myself.
"A nar echo is a bit of a misnomer. It implies that the echo is something lesser, and that''s just patently false. An echo is every bit as real as the original piece of reality ites from. What it isn''t, however, is stable."
Belle sat up straight, staring them each in the eyes as she spoke her words, like she wanted to impress upon them what she was saying. "Echoes are fragments of reality thate with a built-in deadline. They end. Sometimes very, very quickly. Frankly, being here isn''t safe for you."
"But it''s better for us," Clyde added.
"An echo willst longer when part of the original piece of reality exists in it," Belle confirmed.
Derivan wasn''t too worried, despite the warning, and it seemed like neither of his twopanions were either. Belle''s exnation did a remarkable job of describing what bonus rooms were, which meant they were likely safe as long as the dungeon kept the bonus room running.
"This makes so much more sense than the exnation I got," Vex muttered. "My book talked about infinite sets."
"The academic overview is technically urate and unnecesarilyplicated." Belle rxed a bit, smiling. "A much easier metaphor I like to use is something like eddies in an ocean. If you think of ''reality'' as any part of the water that moves, then imagine mainline reality like a river of currents, permanently in ce for a given definition of permanence but there are plenty of disturbances in the water, and just because those are smaller doesn''t mean they are not currents. They just don''tst nearly as long."
Belle''s smile faded. "If you hadn''te along, though, I don''t think I would have noticed. Clyde only noticed because he had you three as a reference point."
"Is that... bad?" Vex ventured. He hesitated. "I''m not sure how I would feel if I found out I was an echo."
"For us? No, not really." Belle exchanged nces with Clyde and Elliot, who still seemed half-asleep. "But we are... something of an exception." Belle tapped her fingers on the table briefly, her own version of hesitation. She shook her head. "Perhaps this will be a longer exnation than I anticipated. The important thing to understand is that you''re in an echo of reality this ce will eventually crumble, but it looks like the rate of decay will be slow. The energy fueling this echo is not insignificant."
"How does this tie into the end of the universe?" Derivan asked, bringing the topic back to the first revtion that had been thrown at them. He understood the exnation sort of, some of the metaphor was going over his head but he didn''t know that he understood the point.
"It doesn''t in any direct way," Belle said. "But Clyde thought it was important for you to understand that despite this being an echo, the history of this ce is still very real. Echoes are based off of mainline reality. There''s always a divergence point, but you can figure out where that divergence point is, and the divergence point herees after the end of the universe."
"It''s also useful to know about," Vex said. "I think it''s how most of our skills work. Maybe the system creates an echo, and then manifests it, or something..."
"Shift," Derivan supplied. "It must use Shift to do this."
"Moving something from an echo into your reality?" Belle thought about it. "Clever. Much cheaper than making those things from scratch, if you know what you''re doing. Making an echo isn''t even that expensive, with the right tools. It''s maintaining an echo that costs energy."
"But what about the end of the universe?" Sev persisted. Belle shrugged, and gestured to Elliot, who startled slightly from his half-asleep position on the table.
"Oh. Uh, Clyde, could you get me some coffee? I could really use some coffee," he said, and Clyde chuckled and nodded, disappearing behind the counter. Elliot yawned and shook his head slightly. "Okay. End of the universe. Uh, Belle used the currents analogy, right?" He nced at Belle, who nodded at him.
"Right, okay. So even that main current won''tst forever. Everything ends eventually, right? Most realities, most universes they don''t ever get far enough to do anything about it. Sometimes no life develops in them at all. But in this reality this echo we have magic."
Clyde paused, as if for effect, and when no one reacted, he sighed. "Magic doesn''t like endings. It is fundamentally opposed to the end of anything. When you get down to it, that''s what mana is a record, a memory, an idea that .
"It''s not like a universe ends all at once. It happens slowly. The fabric of reality begins to unravel. Things disappear. There are gaps where there weren''t before. There''s no warning; you don''t get to know that the universe is ending. If something disappears, it''s wiped from reality as a whole. You can''t observe it like you can observe universal heat death which is pretty easy to stave off with magic, by the way." Elliot epted the mug from Clyde, gratefully giving it a few sips.
Derivan didn''t know how to respond. He knew Vex and Sev were more shell-shocked than he was. He was starting to realize that a lot of his emotional reactions were muted in this way.
He was worried, obviously. But that was about it. He was more focused on finding a solution.
"So, infolocks..." Sev muttered.
"I don''t think they''re the same thing," Vex said. "Or... maybe not? The fact that some people can remember implies that it''s not the same thing, right?"
"Or perhaps the name is simply incorrect," Derivan supplied. "Perhaps an infolock is not a lock on information at all."
Vex narrowed his eyes slightly, thinking, and then they widened. "You''re saying that it''s not information that''s locked away from people," he said. "It''s information that''s actively being protected from beingpletely erased? By keying in a few people that are allowed to remember the way things were?"
"I don''t know how your branch of reality survived the end," Belle said. "Or what you''re talking about, exactly. But if you''re talking about some people remembering things and not others, that hypothesis i''s a lot more usible than some magic somehow locking away information from the entire world."
Sev, Vex, and Derivan all went silent. It recontextualized a lot. If it was expensive to preserve information, and the system wanted to limit the people that were allowed to know...
"So you''re saying there''s no big force that''s trying to end the world?" Sev said quietly. "It''s just... the end. No big bad, no evil lord, just... the natural conclusion of reality."
"It would have been," Elliot said. He was looking a little brighter now that he''d had his coffee the ''hair'' on his head had returned to being shadowy mes, at least until Clyde reached up and messed with it. Elliot fended him off with a yelp. "Hey!"
"Sorry," Clyde said, not looking sorry at all. "Couldn''t resist."
Sev nced at him, and Derivan noticed the slight spike of irritation Clyde wasn''t taking all this very seriously at all. But Sev kept his irritation to himself, and a secondter it bled out of him. It wasn''t Clyde''s fault at all.
This was just the reality they had been living with, presumably for a long, long time.
"As I was saying," Elliot said. "It would have been, but this reality has mana. Magic. It''s alive, and it didn''t like the idea that the universe was ending; it decided it could fix it. So it tried."
"You have to understand," Clyde added. He was lounging back with his own ss of what looked like definitely wine, though he didn''t bring any attention to it. Somehow his demeanor was a little sad, now. "Mana is not alive in the traditional sense of the word. It is alive, after a fashion, but only because of what it is a record of everything we are and everything we know. Something like that can''t help but be alive. But it''s not something you can speak to, nor is it really something that knows how to respond."
"So," Elliot continued, ncing at his husband and picking up on his train of thought. "The mana tried to fix things. It drove people underground to try to protect them from what was happening, because mana itself is somewhat resistant to being erased, and it could flood smaller caverns with thick mana more effectively."
"That exins Teque," Sev muttered.
"And while people were underground," Elliot said, "it tried to figure out how to restore things as they were being erased. Like we''ve said, mana is a record; in theory, anything in that record can be restored. But it''s just a record of life. It doesn''t really understand physics, or particles, or any of thews the world runs on. That''s how you get stuff like... well, that."
Elliot gestured at the window at the pane in the air that reflected grass and greenery, even though there was nothing there.
"...That''s kind of messed up," Sev said.
The implications wererge. The implications about what the system had been doing this whole time those wererge, too.
"I have a question," Vex finally said. Derivan nced at him. The lizardkin had managed to center himself a bit, though he still looked a bit shaken. "This is... I mean, this is a lot. But... how do you know all this? Don''t take this the wrong way, but what are you?"
"Full of hard questions, aren''t you?" Clyde chuckled slightly, and then he turned a little bit more serious. "Your friend over there might know something," he said, and he nodded at Sev.
137 - Book 3: Chapter 2: A Role to Play
137 - Book 3: Chapter 2: A Role to y
"Me?" Sev asked, a little incredulously. "I''ve never met you guys in my life."
"No, but you''re under the same effect we are. Or you were. It''s mostly faded now." Clyde nced at him, his eyes glowing that faint off-yellow again before changing back to white.
Sev stared at him, then into the air, presumably at a system window; he tore his eyes away after a moment. "I didn''t know what it was," he said softly. "I just knew I couldn''t talk about it. I still don''t know why it was there."
"You''ll probably find out soon, if the effect is starting to wear off," Clyde said. "Though ''soon'' is rtive here. The point is, that''s what we are elementals bound in much the same way you were."
"It''s the reason it doesn''t matter much to us that we''re in an echo," Belle said with a slight shrug. "We are created to y a role, it can be said. We''re allowed to have our own lives, as long as we also y that role. Clyde has to be an innkeeper. I have to be a scientist. Elliot has to be a historian."
"I''m one of the lucky ones," Clyde said. "Innkeeper is vague. I can do whatever I want, as long as I''m being hospitable to my guests, and luckily for me I enjoy being hospitable."
"We represent roles," Belle exined. She stirred her own ss of what looked like tea Derivan didn''t remember when she''d even found a cup of tea, but it was there, right in front of her. "Sometimes more than one role. It''s... a conceptual temte for the mana, you could say. Helps it know how to recreate things, especially people. It has a hard time with people. Knowing what they do isn''t the same thing as knowing who they are. So we help by ying our little roles in this makeshift little society, cooking food we don''t need to eat and keeping an inn without any guests, because it helps the mana keep things together overall."
"And if this echo ends, we don''t really die," Clyde said. "That''s true for all elementals, really. We''re different in different echoes, but we''re also all the same creature. If you meet me again in your reality, I''ll be different, but if you y the right sort of trick, I might be able to remember you."
"Like Irvis," Vex muttered underr his breath.
"What was that?" Clyde nced at Vex.
"Nothing," Vex said quickly.
"Is it working?" Sev asked, changing the subject. "Putting all this aside everything the mana is doing to keep the universe alive. Is it a lot of the paths we saw up there were... worrying. The mana''s trying to keep the universe alive, but is it seeding?"
"No," Clyde said bluntly. "Maybe for a given definition of sess, but... ultimately, no. It''s slowing down an inevitable doom. Maybe your reality is having better luck; that would exin why it''s the ''main'' one."
"I don''t think it is," Vex said quietly.
They were silent for a moment. It did answer some questions it made it clear what the system was for, at least, even if it wasn''t clear what the purpose of each part was. Stats and levels still didn''t make sense, nor did the existence of monsters, although the picture for dungeons and reality anchors were beginning to be clear.
"What am I?" Derivan asked after a moment.
Clyde nced at him, surprised. "What do you mean?"
"I was told I was the same sort of creature as... an enemy of ours. Someone from the mana." Vex tensed a little beside him, and Derivan tried not to react to that. "I do not know what that means."
"...I''m afraid I can''t answer that." Clyde frowned, ncing him over. "You''re not bound the same way we are, or the same way your friend is. But the nature of your existence is different. I don''t really have any answers for you there. Sorry."
He would just have to continue that search on his own, then. Vex reached out for him, this time, squeezing his hand perhaps in apology; Derivan squeezed it in turn. There was a lot they needed to talk about, but this wasn''t the ce for that.
Perhapster, when they had more privacy. Misa had gotten each of them separate rooms, after all.
"Are you okay?" Sev asked after a minute. "Do we need to free you, or something?"
"Not at all," Clydeughed. "And I''m not just saying that because I''m being made to. We have our lives; this isn''t very. It''s just that being an innkeeper is a part of me, and even then, if I wanted to stop, I could. I suppose in your case it''s a little different... but it looks like it''s something you chose, too."
"I saw that part of it," Sev admitted. "I didn''t know what it meant."
"You probably aren''t allowed to remember," Clyde said with a gentle smile. "It''s happened before to some of us; the ones that have to y important enough roles. They can''t know what they''re supposed to do ahead of time. If they did, it wouldn''t be real."
"That''s..." Sev hesitated. "Maybe?"
He''d also lost a lot of memories just because of his skills. He wasn''t sure that was the answer; Derivan saw it in the way his shoulders hunched in slightly. He was worried, and maybe a little bit scared...
...and maybe they all just needed a break, after everything that had happened.
Knowing the universe had ended was ending? was a terrifying revtion. But they weren''t yet in a position to stop it. So first, they had to figure out how to get there.
"I believe mypanions are exhausted," Derivan said softly. "We require some rest. But it was a pleasure to meet you three truly. You have all been kinder than you needed to be."
"We treat you the way you treat others," Clyde said with a small smile. "Would you look at that. Turns out you''re good people. I hope you knew that already."
Elliotughed at that. "You''re a cheesy dork."
"But a good one." Belle smiled a serene smile. "Don''t let us keep you. Do what you have to do. We often have our breakfasts together here, so this likely won''t be thest time you see us. Say hi every now and then, won''t you? You''re free to stay as long as you need."
"Hey, I''m supposed to say that," Clydeined, and Belle just smiled mischievously.
Derivan chuckled softly, then took Vex by the hand and
He paused before he could grab Sev by the shoulder, looking at his stump of an arm. Sev noticed, but didn''t say anything; Vex hadn''t been watching him at the time. Instead, he was bouncing anxiously on his feet. Derivan decided not to bring it up. Instead, he guided the two of them up the stairs, gesturing for Sev to follow.
The keys werebeled, so it took him not long at all to find their rooms.
"I think I need some time to myself, too," Sev said awkwardly when they arrived at his door. "This is a lot. Let''s figure out a n tomorrow?"
"Of course," Derivan said. Sev closed the door behind him, and Vex let out a sigh, crumpling slightly into Derivan.
"I actually don''t want to sleep alone tonight," Vex mumbled. "Can I hang out in your room? Let''s just... talk. Not about this, or fighting, or what happened in the dungeon. I want to talk about literally anything else."
"You are always wee in my room, my friend," Derivan said, and then paused. "Boyfriend? Though the word does not fit as well into the sentence."
"Oh my gods," Vex said, and he managed augh, although it was happy and sad all at once. It was the first realugh he''d had in a while, and Derivan found that he had missed the sound. "Let''s just go in, you big goof."
"As far as affectionate nicknames go, I feel you could do better," Derivan mused, and chuckled when Vex made an indignant, huffing noise in the back of his throat.
Things had gone badly, and what they had learned had been forck of a better word awful.
But they were alive, and as long as they were alive, things would not be over. Now was the time to make sure they stayed alive, and that... probably meant a great deal of training.
Before all that, though, it was time for a great deal of talking.
"Can you tell me more about Elyra?" Derivan asked.
The bed in their rooms were, it turned out, enormous and made of some magically enchanted material that didn''t rip apart when Derivan tried lying down on it, too. Vex had been the one to notice the enchantment, or Derivan wouldn''t even have tried. This way, they could both lie on the bed, although that durability enchantment didn''t exactly trante into a weight distribution enchantment.
Which was to say that there had been a lot of rolling around before Derivan had eventually discovered that he could forcibly reinforce the bed somewhat with the Slime stat by infusing it into the bed, which was not , but it was workable, and Vex seemed happier when they could share the bed. He''d looked terribly guilty when Derivan had tried to sit on the floor, even though Derivan insisted he couldn''t actually take advantage of thefort the bed offered.
"What do you want to know?" Vex asked, ncing over at him. "You''ve been there now."
"We did not get a chance to explore the aspects of Elyra that you seemed most proud of," Derivan said. "We only saw the worst of it."
"I don''t know if there are any parts of Elyra I could say that I''m proud of," Vex muttered, staring up at the ceiling, and then he sighed. "No, that''s a lie. I mean, I don''t know if pride is the right word; I''m not the one that made any of those things. But... I loved the libraries. Not even for the books on magic, although I loved those. They had so many books, and all of them were interesting."
"I have not had the chance to read much," Derivanmented. "Also, it is remarkably easy to tear the pages of a book."
"Yeah, well," Vexughed. "That''s one of the reasons I refused to put any points into Strength, actually. I''ve been told that you get all the fine control you need as part of the stat when you put points into it, but I don''t actually want to risk it."
"I feel like I should apologize for the book that I identally tore..."
"It was an empty notebook," Vex said dismissively. "And the pages were easy enough to put back together. If anything, I''m sorry I enchanted it to explode."
"Why did you enchant it to explode?"
"I didn''t want anyone to touch my stuff, and then I sort of forgot about it after I joined your team." Vex sounded vaguely embarrassed, and Derivan chuckled. "But the libraries were great. It''s where I felt most at home, even, which I guess might be weird. I made friends with all the librarians I met... You met one of them."
"She seemed like a good person," Derivan agreed. "Did you have any favorite books?"
"Mystery books," Vex said, his eyes gleaming a bit. Derivan nced over at him in surprise. "I mean, the magic books were my favorite, but you already knew that. So my second favorite was mystery books well written ones, the kind where you can put the puzzle together yourself, if you notice all the right details. I could lose myself for hours" heughed. "I told the librarians to mark the page where they solved the mystery for me, did you know that? I did that so I could read and reread before they found the answer, and see if I could figure it out myself."
"Did you?" Derivan asked. He enjoyed listening to Vex seeing the lizardkin smile as he lost himself in his memories. How long had it been since he''dst read a book like this, even?
"I did," Vex smiled. "Well, most of the time. Not all of the time. I wish I had more time to read now, but I spend so much time adventuring, and there''s so much to discover..."
Vex went silent for a moment, and Derivan sensed there was more he wanted to say. The armor waited patiently.
"I guess I can read faster now," Vex said. "I found out my Sign lets me do that. I don''t know how I feel about that, though. I want to experience a book for myself, not have all the knowledge just... poured into my head. I''m not just a bucket to be filled."
"Indeed not," Derivan agreed. Vex nced at him, his gaze surprisingly unreadable, even with Physical Empathy.
"...I know I said I don''t want to talk about it," Vex said after the moment passed. "But I think maybe I do want to tell you about what happened back there. I don''t know if I''m ready to tell the others yet... but I want you to know."
"Irvis made me fight my dad. Or... an echo of him, I suppose. We know what those are now."
"Oh," Derivan said. He didn''t know what else to say but he held his only arm out, and Vex rolled over into him, burying his face into the crook of his neck. There was more he wanted to say, Derivan could tell.
But Vex couldn''t find the words. He hugged him tight instead, trying and failing to find all the words he needed to say.
Words couldeter. Derivan wished he had both of his hands, but he did not; all he could do was use his remaining hand to rub gentle circles on Vex''s back, and wish he could do more.
138 - Book 3: Chapter 3: Making Plans
138 - Book 3: Chapter 3: Making ns
"Sorry aboutst night," Misa said. She didn''t look like she''d managed to sleep much Derivan suspected that they''d all had a rough night, really. Vex hadn''t slept untilte into the night, after he''d finished exining everything that had happened with Irvis and the echo of Karix. Derivan hadn''t known what to say, but he hadn''t needed to. Vex hadn''t wanted anything more than a chance to talk about it without having to worry about what it meant for them in terms of strategy, or what it implied about what Irvis was and what he could do.
Sev... had his own troubles, no doubt. The system-strings that hung around him were in tatters, now, and while pieces of them still clung on, they had mostly gone. With a bit of help, he could wipe away whatever hold they still held over him. He just didn''t know if that was a good idea, yet.
Not if Sev had chosen that path whatever that meant.
"Are you okay?" Sev asked. He watched Misa intently, worry furrowed in his brows. Misa swallowed once, then sighed, throwing her arms back almost explosively and nearly punching through the wall of the room.
"I fuckin'' hate doubt," she muttered. "It''s... when I was fighting Irvis, I could tell I was straining something. Every single time I used [An Anchor of Heart and Home], it was like I could feel the skill screaming at me. Fuckin'' thing was about to break. Did you know skills could break? I didn''t."
Sev opened his mouth to say something, but Misa held up a hand, and he stopped, hesitating. "If it was just that?" she said. "That''s fine. I don''t care. I don''t need to be strong well, no, that''s a lie but I''d give up that strength in a heartbeat if it meant I could protect you guys. That''s the whole point.
"But it was hurting my family." Misa''s eyes darkened a bit, then. "Mom and dad... spent a lot of time building up that vige to be stronger. I can''t imagine that fight didn''t wreck half the vige. It''s probably the only reason I survived some of the hits I didn''t block, because let me tell you, that guy is fucking fast.
"I think I knew, on some level, that the fight was damaging the anchor. That if I pushed it too far, I was gonna lose them again. Every time I blocked an attack, it was a choice. You guys or maybe, potentially, all of them." Misa took a slightly shaky breath, then clenched her fists. Even as exhausted and drained as she looked even with slightly sallow skin, and sunken cheeks there was a look in her eyes that burned. If she''d been holding anything, even metal, Derivan was fairly certain it would have bent or snapped. "I don''t... I fucking hated that. Half the point of my ss is that I shouldn''t have to make that fucking choice.
"I needed some time alone to sit with that choice," she said. "That''s all that is. I''d say that I''m sorry I didn''t exin sooner, but I needed that time, and I needed to figure it out on my own. I''ll say this I''m not going to be put in that position again. We''re going to make use of every second of this time, and we''re going to get strong enough that Irvis can''t do shit to us, even if he tried."
Thest of her words were said with an air of finality; she didn''t expect anyone to disagree, and no one did. All around the table, there were slow nods.
None of them had expected to be put so far on the back foot. Misa''s story was just more fuel to a me that had already begun to ignite.
"We''ll need a n for that," Sev finally said; he looked like he''d been about to say something else, but he''d changed his mind at thest moment. "Some kind of training we can do, at least. We can grind levels here, but I don''t think raw levels are going to cut it for something like Irvis."
"The more we understand magic and the system, the more we can turn those things to our advantage," Vex said quietly. "I''ve been studying those things all my life, and I think I''m finally starting to grasp how they''re rted. Derivan has Patch, and I think I can create my own backdoor into the system, if I have a little bit of time. And, um..."
Vex hesitated slightly, and his gaze went to Derivan, and then rested on his missing arm. All of the other three paused and looked at their friend, and Derivan shifted ufortably under theirbined gaze.
"...I''m sorry I couldn''t stop that from happening," Misa said, suddenly sounding guilty.
"It was not your fault."
"If I''d been better"
"Misa," Derivan emphasized, and then nced around the room. To Vex, who looked just as guilty and couldn''t meet his gaze; he med himself for not being there. To Sev, who seemed to me himself for not being able to heal this problem away.
There was a certain irony to the fact that he badly wanted to reach out with his missing arm andfort all of them. "Vex," he continued. "Sev. We did what we could. We were unprepared. We will be prepared in the future. The loss of my arm does not pain me, and I believe a new one will attach, if we can only have one forged."
"Then we''ll make forging you a new arm a priority, too," Sev said with a sigh. "It''s the least we can do."
"The least you could do is nothing," Derivan said, and this time he offered a ghost of a smile, bowing his head towards his friends. "So I thank you."
And then, swiftly, before anyone could say anything more on it because he did not like thinking about his missing arm, for all that he was okay with it he moved on. "I believe we are missing only a few more keys to understand everything that is happening," Derivan offered. "The system called me and my kind a monster, and Irvis likened me to him. I wish to know why. And thest piece"
"is me," Sev finished, shifting a little bit ufortably as Derivan''s gaze fell on him. "I don''t have much more than before to tell you. I can tell you that my status tells me that I made a choice, to have some aspect of my future stripped away from me. Or maybe some aspect of free will. I mostly try not to think about it, to be honest."
"There is nothing else you can tell us?" Derivan asked.
"I assumed it was because of what I gave up to heal Onyx," Sev said quietly. "But Onyx acts like I''m supposed to do something, or realize something, and maybe this is what the gods have been aiming us at all along. But that feels... cheap. Iplete. I don''t believe we''re just a part of some divine n. If it was that easy to fix things, they would''ve done it, and they wouldn''t need me to not know what''s going on."
A hint of frustration touched his voice at thosest few words, and Derivan realized Sev was every bit as upset as the rest of them, if not a little more so. He was very, very good at hiding it.
Maybe because he''d been living with that knowledge that frustration this whole time.
"I need to figure out what''s going on to my bond with Aurum," Sev said finally. He unclenched his fists Derivan wondered if he''d even noticed that he''d clenched them, or the raw, red marks from his fingers digging into his skin. "I think that''s my avenue of training. Whatever I''ve got with the gods is stronger than what other clerics have, and I''ve never worked on anything more than defensive and healing skills. I need more options. I don''t think healing is going to be enough anymore."
"We all need more options," Misa said. "I''m going to try to... jailbreak my skills, forck of a better word. I''ll need your help for that, Derivan."
"You have it."
"Okay." Misa sighed. "Now that that''s out of the way. We still need to figure out... Fuck. Everything that''s happening back in the real world? Doesn''t feel right to call it that."
"The rebellion in Elyra," Vex supplied. "The suppression of growth magic there, as well. The situation in Teque and Fendal."
"Can we do anything about those things from here?" Misa asked. Vex hesitated.
"I think we can," he said. "I was thinking about it before we even got in, and I''m more sure than ever, now. We can train, but more than that... we can coordinate. If we can reach outside the dungeon, using Shift or whatever kinds of reality magic exist here, then we can use the time dtion to our advantage."
Misa''s eyes sharpened. "Meaning a problemes up, and we solve it using all the extra time we have here."
Vex nodded slowly. "Assuming our system ess doesn''t decay while we''re here," he said. "And we still have the crystals we need to stay connected. There''s a few problems we need to work out, and the first thing we need to do is find a way to reach out, without relying on the system for messages. I think we can do a little more than just pass messages with ideas back and forth. You saw Derivan opening portals with Shift when you used your skill before, Misa."
"I may be able to push the skill to that level," Derivan said thoughtfully. "It is certainly an avenue of research."
"But before all of that," Vex said, and he grimaced slightly; he wasn''t looking forward to talking about this. But Derivan gave him a reassuring nce, and he straightened slightly.
He''d gotten through the worst of itst night, anyway. "We need to catch Misa up on what Clyde told us," Vex said. "And I need to tell you guys about what I know about Irvis."
Misa''s reaction to Clyde''s news was... surprisingly subdued. She was surprised, but only in an abstract sort of way. "It fits with everything we know," she said. "It''s scary shit. But I''m kind of oversaturated on scary shit. Just means yet another thing we gotta fix."
It was a very optimistic take, and all of them knew it. In one world, the system had been born, presumably to try to fix the end of the universe; it had only managed to slow it down. In the other, the source of all magic had done the same thing, and had been about as sessful.
They''d have to devise something better than the sum of both parts to be able toe close, and they weren''t anywhere near having that kind of knowledge or power.
Not yet, anyway.
Her reaction to Vex''s exnation of Irvis was a lot more pronounced. Her eyes tightened with anger, and the tankard she held in a hand cracked and splintered; she put it down on the table before she could do any more damage, and took a breath before she spoke.
"I''m sorry he did that to you," she said; Sev nodded in agreement. "That''s fucked."
"It is." Vex hesitated. "I... need some time with that one. I''m sort of d we''re here, and have time to figure things out. If you don''t mind, I''d like to just talk about what Irvis is, and what we can do about him."
"I''ve been thinking about that," Sev said. "Clyde mentioned the elementals of this town having to y Roles. Do you think that''s rted, at all? Irvis is an Aspect, but that doesn''t sound too different from having a Role. Just pointed in a different direction."
"They might be simr," Vex agreed. "I don''t think they''re exactly the same thing, but they might share some strengths and weaknesses, being made of mana and all that. It''s not like we can march down and ask them what their weaknesses are, though."
"Can''t we?" Misa raised an eyebrow. "Seems like we might just need to find someone with the right Role, to me."
"That''s..." Vex paused. "That''s a good point?"
"We may be able to simply ask if they are aware of living Aspects, as well," Derivan said. "We did not offer that context before. They may have more information."
"We should figure out if we can pay them back, too." Misa frowned slightly. "Doesn''t feel right gettin'' so much from them for free."
"We''ll ask about that," Sev said. "I''m worried about Irvis. You were basically just working off theory when you brought us here, right?"
"I figured the nature of Hatred here would be different," Vex said, nodding. "That he wouldn''t be able to exist the same way here that he does in our... section of reality, I guess. We need a better word for that. He hasn''t reappeared, so I might be right, or something else might be going on."
"Sounds like the next step is to talk to Clyde," Sev decided. "Find a cksmith to forge you an arm. Figure out where and how we can train from there. Connect with the rebels in Elyra so we can provide support, check the progress of things in Teque... and figure out a way to fix the decay of reality. I''m sure it''ll be a piece of cake." Seeing everyone stare at him, Sev sighed. "I''m joking."
Misa snorted and gave him a friendly punch in the shoulder.
But having it allid out like that helped now, at least, they knew what they were going to do next.
139 - Book 3: Chapter 4: Reconnecting
139 - Book 3: Chapter 4: Reconnecting
"Can''t help you with the Aspect thing, I''m afraid," Clyde said. He''d joined them at their breakfast table after serving up their breakfast a surprisingly hearty andforting meal, though Derivan couldn''t taste it himself. From the sounds Vex was making, though, he assumed the food was good. It was some assortment of egg and fried meats; the oil was still crackling by the time it reached their table, no doubt assisted by the fire-aspect mana circling around the tes. "I know what mana aspects are, but I''ve never heard of them being alive. It''s not the same thing as elementals. I can theorize, if you want, but you''re better off finding someone with a Role more specialized in that kind of thing."
"Give us your best theory anyway," Sev suggested.
"Mana''s alive," Clyde said immediately, making Derivan wonder if he''d just been waiting for someone to ask anyway; he seemed eager to share his ideas. Clyde caught his gaze and winked. "Maybe not in any traditional sense of the word, but it''s certainly capable of feeling. Get that feeling extreme enough, and who knows, maybe something happens."
"That''s kinda vague," Sev frowned, but Vex was nodding.
"If what the system is doing is hurting it," Vex said quietly. "Then I wouldn''t be surprised."
With the way he''d slowed down and started poking at his food, Derivan suspected the lizardkin was remembering what his family had done to him. Even in the name of the greater good...
"The mana here hasn''t had any reason to be nearly so angry," Clyde added. "I don''t think you''ll have to worry here. The young mage''s instincts were right. If an Aspect cane to life, I suspect it would be simr to us: existing across all realities with mana, but different in each one."
"Well... thanks. That''s a relief, at least," Sev said. "Is there anything we can do for you? I feel like we''re imposing on you a lot."
"Nonsense," Clyde said dismissively. "I might be happy with my job, but do you know how boring it is to be an innkeeper without any guests? This is the most fun I''ve had in centuries."
"I forget how old all of this is," Sev muttered. "We only have, what, 200 years of history to go off of? But the world here ended 1400 years ago, and that was the most probable divergence point."
"I hadn''t quite considered exactly how much of our history is missing," Vex said with a small frown. "If we knew what happened in those interim years"
"We might be able to understand what the system''s been trying to do," Sev finished. "I wonder..."
He trailed off, but there was a look in his eyes that Derivan recognized; he''d hit upon an idea, and didn''t want to share it just yet, in case it was a false lead. "Do you know anywhere we can train, Clyde?" he asked, changing the subject. "We don''t want to identally destroy your inn or anything."
"Oh, you wouldn''t," Clyde said cheerfully. "But if you''re looking for an actual training grounds, there are plenty all around. If you try to head out of this town you''ll find a lot of the adjacent sections ofnd are from different eras of our world. I''d say you''re pretty lucky to have ended up here, of all ces, but if this is a manufactured echo, then it''s not really luck."
"We''ve been lucky in a lot of other ways," Sev muttered, almost to himself; there was a furrow in his brow, and a look of slight worry in his eyes. "And I know Onyx was nning something..."
"Onyx?" Clyde asked, curiously. Sev shook his head.
"It''s nothing," he said. "Just a thought. I need a little more time to think about it. In the meantime, uh, do you know anyone else with Roles that might help us? Maybe a trainer, or someone well-versed in magic?"
"Our resident scientist and historian not good enough for you?" Clyde joked, and chuckled when he saw the look of consternation on Sev''s face. "No, no, I''m kidding. Most of us serve pretty mundane Roles; if you want magic, you''ll have to find another elemental town. Same thing withbat. But I''d caution against doing that. It''s considerably more dangerous than this ce."
"What do we call the town?" Vex asked, and Clydeughed. The shadows of his form bubbled along with hisughter, casting a strange light on the wall.
None of them flinched. They''d seen stranger.
"Now that''s a matter of contention," he said. "We''ve got a couple of names for it, but a lot of us just call it the Mundane. We y all the mundane Roles; hospitality, research, sanitation. Some of us want to give it a more creative name, but we''re afraid it''ll mess with the mana too much if we try to be anything more than a temte."
"Is that why everything outside is so..." Sev gestured a bit. Clyde chuckled.
"Yeah, pretty much," he said. "We''ve got a lot more leeway inside. I don''t think any of us really think of the Mundane as our own, because of that. There''s a lot of emphasis on personalizing your homes." He leaned in close to whisper. "Belle decorates her ce in skulls and bones. Scared the shadow out of me the first time I went over to her ce, let me tell you."
"Really?" Misa leaned forward, sounding interested. She''d spent most of the conversation only half-listening, ncing through her system-screens; she''d long-since finished her food. The mention of bones seemed to call to her, though. "Sounds badass. I wanna see."
Clyde snorted. "You''ll have to take it up with her. She''s very protective of her bone collection," he said.
"Maybeter, then," Misa said, managing a ghost of a smile. "We need to head out and look for a good training ground. And look for a cksmith. You happen to know of one, or know about anything nearby we need to watch out for?"
"There''s not a cksmith here, I''m afraid. You''d have to find one of the morebat-oriented temtes." Clyde''s gaze wandered down to Derivan''s missing arm, though he didn''t say anything about it. Derivan was surprised he hadn''t remarked on it before then. Vex sagged a little bit at Clyde''s words, and the shadow elemental''s gaze turned sympathetic, but he said nothing further.
"As for the rest... don''t wander too far, or you''ll have a hard time finding your way back. Other than that, not that I know of, but most of us don''t wander very far from here. So be careful."
"We will," Misa nodded. "You guys ready?"
Derivan and Sev stood from the table. Vex quickly shoveled the rest of his food into his mouth and nodded. "Mhm," he said, trying not to let any food fall from his mouth.
Misa chuckled and ruffled her fingers through the frills on his head, despite his protests.
Misa spoke to the others, and they chose not to wander too far for their first day. With no cksmith to be found, Derivan would have to wait on getting a new armmissioned; in the worst case, they couldmission back in Elyra, though Vex and Sev and Misa all seemed loath to wait that long.
For now, though, they would explore in greater sweeping circles around Mundane over time, as the days passed. The time dtion was strong, almost a hundred times that of base reality, so they had time. The anchor''s degradation being based on undted time was helpful, too. It stretched the anchor''s remaining two weeks out to several years.
Not that they were nning on waiting nearly that long, of course, especially since they suspected that Misa using her skills would push that degradation faster than the timer indicated.
As such as much as she hated it Misa''s training was to take a back seat for now. Derivan and Vex had to push their skills first, to learn more about the system and about the nature of magic. Sev would meditate on his bond with Aurum. None of his skills allowed him direct contact with any of the gods, but his skills didn''t cover whatever it was he had with Aurum.
It was an avenue to grow in, in any case.
"...so there has to be an aspect that represents the system," Vex was saying. "If I can just figure out how that aspect works, how to ess it"
"But this whole world is based on not having a system," Misa pointed out. "And we just discussed how Irvis probably isn''t a threat here, because aspects are local to the particr echo we''re in."
"Right." Vex deted a bit. "We still have ess to our systems, though. It''s not like the system doesn''t exist here entirely. It might just be harder."
"Perhaps it would be best to leave system-maniption to me, for now," Derivan suggested gently. "It is something I must train regardless. If you work on glyphbinations, and I work on the system, we will be a difficult pair to beat."
Vex brightened a bit; mostly, it seemed, at the prospect of testing glyphbinations. "You have a point," he said. "And I can try to figure out how to ess the glyphic records, too. You heard what Clyde said mana is a record of things, right? That''s got to be how they discover new glyphs. I bet that''s how my Sign works, too, by essing that record. Maybe if I try to turn my Sign on itself again, but this time while it''s casting or maybe if you cast something, and I try to target the spell in the process of being cast"
Vex rambled, and Derivan smiled. Misa watched them both and let herself smile a small smile before she walked away to sit on a small rock that was rtively close. The idea was that if any of Vex and Derivan''s experimentation generated something that could help repair the anchor nestled in her soul, she''d benefit from it.
In the meantime, someone had tomunicate with the outside world. Even with a hundred-times dtion, there had been enough time for everyone to get her messages.
Sure enough, there were a number of responses waiting for her through the system.
[I love you, and I hope you''re okay,] Charise had sent. [Don''t worry about us the vige is fine. We just have to rebuild a bit. I won''t say no one was hurt, but no one is dead, and that''s what''s important.]
Misa winced a bit at that. She wasn''t sure her mother was even telling the truth about no one being dead, but she had to imagine Charise wouldn''t lie about something like that. She still trusted her mother.
[As for the situation in Fendal,] the message continued, [It''s going better than we hoped. Don''t have enough time for all the details, but there''s a whole rebellion against Helg, now. We might not need your help. I''ll keep you updated. Stay safe, stay alive, ande back to us.]
A small pause, and then an additional message, left as an afterthought. [We''ll have fish stew waiting.]
Misa managed a small smile, there; it pushed back some of the fog of emotion that had begun to umte in her head. She moved on to the next message from the Guildmaster.
[Velykos and the delve team you four helped have gone out to investigate the gods,] the Guildmaster had reported; Misa snorted at the absurd thought that the Guildmaster was reporting to her. It was nice to get updates, though. [The bandits you caught Xothok and his team are adjusting well. They seem to have uncovered something rted to your most recent discovery, but I do not have the details. I suggest getting into direct contact with him at the earliest avable opportunity.]
[The Guild is currently handling the aftermath of one idiot''s experimentation with the system, but fortunately that''s going rtively well. Thank you for handling it as promptly as you did. I see I was right to trust you. Please keep me updated as much as you are able, and otherwise, feel free to act as you believe is best. The Guild remains behind you. We will deal with Elyran... negotiations. It appears there is some turmoil within the kingdom at present.]
Misa winced a bit at that, but it wasn''t surprising. She nced over to Vex, who was happily chattering away at Derivan while the armor listened intently; he was drawing diagrams in the ground, and his tail was practically wagging.
...She wouldn''t bring up what was happening in Elyra. Not yet.
There was no update from the rebels, but she wasn''t surprised; they were likely busy. It was surprising that the Guildmaster had even found the time to respond as quickly as she had. She''d really only been expecting a response from her mother.
She fired off a quick message to Xothok, then sighed, and stared at her skill list.
She needed practice they all did. She needed to understand more about the nature of the reality anchor, and what it meant to have one attached to her. She was beginning to understand that it was responsible for a lot more than just the survival of her vige.
It was the reason the food in Fendal still fed them, even though it didn''t fill the other residents of Teque. It was the reason they could remember the stars. It was the reason their system had operated mostly independently of Fendal, and they''d retained ess even when Noram and others had lost their ess.
The anchor she held protected all of them. If it broke, a lot more was at stake than just her vige. They couldn''t save the world if no one could remember that the world needed saving.
That, more than anything, made her feel a pressure she hadn''t felt before.
140 - Book 3: Chapter 5: Interlude - Noram - Awakening
140 - Book 3: Chapter 5: Interlude - Noram - Awakening
It wasn''t all that long ago that Noram had begun to notice.
There wasn''t really a better word for it. The nicedy had exined everything to him more than once, and he just hadn''t... noticed. For some reason, every time she looked at him, she seemed sad. She looked vaguely familiar, too. But he could never really ce where he knew her, and so he smiled at her happily. She surely just wanted to join him on his adventures!
That was all she talked about, after all. She would tell him about how Fendal was supposed to be a border territory for the kingdom of Elyra, but something strange had happened with their dungeon; how the ''reality'' of the residents of Fendal had been taken as fuel for a ce called Teque; how they were doing it out of fear, with Helg at the lead of that fear, but there were people that were fighting to free Fendal.
All he really heard was that there were adventures involved. That was exciting! He''d asked about visiting this Teque, but all the nicedy had done was give him a sad smile and hug him.
The hug was nice, at least.
Besides, he would have wanted to join himself on his adventures, too. He was certain they would be great. He had so much he wanted to do. He wanted to explore the ruins, and find out more about magic, and...
Noram''s fingers brushed across what he''d begun to think of as The Notebook. Not just A Notebook, but The Notebook. Something flickered within him every time his scales brushed up against the bound leather. There was a flicker of want there, of true desire. For a fraction of a second he would once again understand what it meant to have a passion for something, to want to learn more about magic with every fiber of his being.
For a fraction of a second, he remembered himself. It wasn''t the first time it had happened. It wasn''t the first time his fingers would graze The Notebook, and he would remember.
And then his scales would leave the notebook, and he would forget again. He would smile happily at the next person that came along, sometimes someone he recognized from Fendal, and sometimes someone he didn''t recognize. Sometimes they were weird cockroach-like creatures, or smaller lizardkinlike non-lizardkin things, or little butterfly creatures that would flutter about and giggle at him.
One time there was an otter! And that had been...
That had been different, actually.
The otter made him feel the same way the book did. The same way those pretty little stones that nice lizardkin had given him made him feel sometimes, when he found them in his pocket.
They reminded him of a fullness of being that had been lost to him.
Slowly too slow for him to notice, but fast enough for Charise to take note, and pass on the message he began to remember.
Noram couldn''t pin down exactly when he''d begun toe into himself again, exactly. He spent more and more time holed up in his room instead of going out and ''adventuring''. The word still had meaning to him, but what he actually did outside seemed empty,pared to what adventuring was supposed to mean. All he did was go around and talk to people about adventuring. And surely that was strange?
Besides, there was so much to explore in the book! Noram didn''t know who had given him the book. He remembered very little about the circumstances that had led up to all of this. His days consisted of meeting the nicedy, and sometimes her two friends, and then wandering around town and meeting all the new people there.
The book was far more interesting. There were sketches in there pictures of those exact ancient magic ruins that he always told himself he would explore, the ones he always told everyone about wanting to explore, but never did, for...
...for some reason.
Why didn''t he go out and explore, if he wanted it so badly? Why did he just wander his town, talking about wanting to adventure?
Why did reading this book make something inside him ache?
Noram sat in his room, his vision blurring. The paper in the book was wet, and he hurriedly pushed it away, so that the water rolling down his snout would stop messing up the sketches. He looked around to see if anyone could see him, but his room was empty.
Achingly empty. There were there were people he spent his time with, people that joined him on his little excursions to the local dungeon, in his quest to get strong enough to really explore
All his equipment was covered in dust.
Noram slowly got up from his seat, walking over to where he kept his backpack. The steps were familiar, but slow; each step he took kicked up dust that had started to cake on the floor. Noram remembered that sometimes the nicedy woulde in and sweep the floor, but she''d spent less and less time doing that,tely. Mostly because she hadn''t been around as much...
Charise. Her name was Charise.
Noram''s eyes cleared a little. He stared down at his backpack, and saw his hands trembling slightly. Carefully, he utched the p, reaching in to find what he kept inside.
His own little journal. His own little wand, the first thing he''d carved for himself. He never used it. It was something he kept with him as a sentimental little item, along with something he couldn''t quite remember. Something he''d... given away? But why had he...
He''d given it away to Vex. He remembered the other lizardkin in a sh of insight. Noram scrambled to his feet, and hurried over to his desk there on the desk sat The Notebook, half-flopped over in his previous hurry. The pages were slightly crumpled, but it took him very little effort to smooth them out.
These were Vex''s notes. Notes on all the ruins he''d been to, all the runes he''d seen and recorded, and little sketches of himself and the various members of his party. There was the human, Sev, smiling on a page. There was Charise''s daughter, Misa, drinking a tankard of beer.
There were... altogether too many sketches of Derivan, the tall fellow in armor. A small smile ghosted across his face, and yet a small pit of something yawned open in him, because this was
This had been something precious to Vex. Why had he given it to him?
"You''re awake," someone said, and Noram started, jumping out of his seat. His brain scrambled to catch up as he tried to put sense to the ridiculous sight of an otter, standing in his room, juxtaposed against everything he''d been trying to remember; against the slow realization of the situation he was in.
Noram narrowed his eyes. "What do you mean, awake?" he said. His voice still didn''t sound his own; it was entirely too chipper. "What happened? Who are you?"
"That... is going to take some exining." The otter sighed, a strange guilt shing across his features. "Hello, Noram. I am... you. In a manner of speaking."
Noram stared nkly at the otter. "You''re going to have to exin that one to me," he said after a moment.
"I would have expected nothing different," the otter said with a small, self-deprecating smile. "Where to begin... I suppose we can start with as much as we understand."
The otter closed his eyes for a moment. "Fendal and Teque are linked by the system," he began, and then he paused. "Do you... know about Teque? I''m not sure how much you remember."
"I know about Teque," Noram said. His voice was colder, now. "I know what you''ve been doing."
The otter winced, then seemed to dete; his shoulders slumped, and he looked for all the world like a tiny, sad otter. Noram did his best not to sympathize with the little guy.
...It was a little difficult.
"Not of our choosing, and yet, perhaps it is our fault regardless..." Otter-Noram said softly. "If I had only fought against Helg''s actions, instead of bending to her whim..."
"Exin what you meant when you said that you''re me."
"The system cannot sustain the people of both Fendal and Teque," the otter said simply. "There is only room for a limited number of people within this region, as far as we have been able to determine; we might get a greater cap outside this region, but... Helg has locked us in with her barrier."
Right. The barrier. Noram nced outside the window; it was still there, a shimmering beacon of magic thatyered itself over the sky, so thick he doubted even the strongest spells could break through. He wondered how this Helg person had managed a spell this powerful.
"For someone in Teque toe into themselves," Otter-Noram said, "they have to drain someone in Fendal of an equivalent amount of... I don''t know. You have to understand, a lot of how your system works is entirely new to us."
It''s not like I know anything about the system acting like this, Noram thought to himself. This is new to us, too.
But he said nothing. He waited for the otter he refused to think of him as just ''Noram'' to continue.
"It''s a bit of an oversimplification, of course," the otter continued, oblivious to Noram''s internal thoughts. "No one in Teque is doing it on purpose; everything happens sort of behind the scenes and chosen by the system, as far as we can tell, and Helg isn''t doing anything to elerate it."
"But there are implications," Noram said. The otter winced and nodded.
"The process isn''t perfectly clean," he said. "Other things get swept up in the process. The transfer doesn''t make the person in Teque their own person; it makes the person in Teque more like whoever their reflection is in Fendal. Little things carry over. Favorite foods, hobbies, sometimes a song..."
"Or a name," Noram said.
"Or a name," the otter said, looking away. "I don''t know what my original name was. I don''t know if I ever had one."
Dammit, he wasn''t supposed to be feeling bad for this guy. If what he was saying was true, then the whole reason he''d lost so much of himself and he was trying not to think too hard about it was the otter in front of him.
Or, you know, it''s because of the system, a traitorous little voice whispered in his head, and Noram almost growled to himself. He couldn''t even let himself be angry, about something he had every right to be angry over.
"...So," Noram said. "What does all this mean? For me. Or for you. Or for our respective towns."
"We''re working on it," Noram said softly. "Or... they''re working on it. They have to work around Helg. I... have been hiding."
"...You''ve been hiding." Noram repeated the words, half in disbelief, and the otter winced again. It took effort to control the anger that was rising in his voice. "Why were you hiding?"
"I was scared," the otter version of him said, the words emerging in a small whisper, and those words his tone of voice it struck him like a hammer.
He''d said those words himself. It was years ago. He''d long since grown past it. But he''d said it in the exact same tone of voice, the exact same way, the one time he''d been with his best friend, ying in the forest.
The one time a monster had appeared, ws and teeth and terrifying size, and he had run.
Beza hadn''t. His best friend had leapt ahead, expecting him to be by her side
She hadn''t died. But he''d been wracked with guilt for so long afterwards, and she''d never spoken to him again. She''d asked him, once, that very same question.
Why?
I was scared.
The answer hadn''t been good enough for her, back then.
Maybe it could be good enough for him. Noram was here, after all.
"Okay," Noram said softly. "That''s okay. We all get scared."
He felt a little absurd, saying those words. He was pretty sure the otter was older than he was. But he saw the way those shoulders sagged, this time in relief; he saw the way the whiskers twitched and the otter leaning forward
and suddenly they were hugging?
They were hugging.
This was fine. Other-Noram was soft and fuzzy and cute. And, he had to admit, he could use a hug.
Something within him seemed to tug and unravel; in front of him, the otter-Noram jerked slightly, and stared into the air. Noram pulled back, bemused, as the otter stared at what was clearly a system screen...
...that was slowly fading into sight for him.
It was a system screen they could both see. The otter version of him seemed to realize he could see it at the same time, and his eyes widened; he stared at Noram, and then back to the newly-opened box.
[Soul-Link] avable.
Feature in beta.
Feature developed by automated process.
Feature is permanent once epted. Both parties must consent to the link to use it. Both parties must consent to ept the link.
ACCEPT / REJECT
141 - Book 3: Chapter 6: Interlude - Noram - Soul-Link
141 - Book 3: Chapter 6: Interlude - Noram - Soul-Link
Both Norams stared at the system window. Neither of them knew how to react neither of them knew what a soul link was. Just from the name it seemed too intimate a thing to share with a stranger they''d only just met.
But the system is capable of great things, one Noram''s mind whispered to him. You''ve only seen it in action for a short amount of time, and already you''ve seen how much it changes the people that have ess to it. They grow so much more quickly than any of the old methods. They be stronger, faster, more durable. They can take hits that would kill, even without gaining many levels.
The system is terrifying, the other Noram''s mind said. It''s taken away so much from you. But maybe this is a way for you to take control back the soul link requires consent, right? Depending on what it does, having the link might actually protect you.
"I think we should ept," they both said at the same time.
Then there was a bit of awkward pause, and a slight suspicion that reverberated between them; surprisingly, they could both feel it like a physical sensation crawling across their backs. The otter winced first, breaking eye contact and looking away.
"...I will admit that I want the link because it might give me power," he said after a moment. "I know how that sounds. But I''m not I want it because I don''t want to be scared."
"Me too," lizardkin-Noram said. "I mean. I don''t care about the power part. I just don''t want the system to take away who I am again. The link might stop that from happening."
"We''re being impulsive," the otter said.
"Very irresponsible," the lizardkin agreed.
But on some level, they had pieces of the same person within them.
They both reached out and touched ''ept''.
Noram awoke almost an hourter, his head throbbing with pain. There was a small, furry form curled up on his chest he almost flinched and swiped it away before he realized it was just Noram, curled up and sleeping.
Despite himself, he rxed.
There was a bond between them. It was a small, humming thing nowhere near as invasive as he had feared, and yet... it could be, he sensed. If they both opened up to it, they could share anything. Thoughts, feelings.
The underlying ''reality'' that gave them life.
He snapped the valve shut as soon as he could, feeling his heart suddenly race, but he could tell that the otter hadn''t tried to take anything more away from him. There wasn''t a point, anyway they both had roughly equal amounts of the stuff, courtesy of those strange stones that Vex had given him.
And his notebook. Something about that notebook, too, was filled with life.
"That was... kinda dangerous," Noram muttered to himself. The noise seemed to be enough to startle otter-Noram into awakening; the otter''s ears ttened against his head and he leapt to his feet, thankfully light enough that he didn''t stomp the breath out of Noram in the process. He still let out an indignant ''oof'', letting a bit of his pain and irritation filter through their link, and after a moment a moment where otter-him had to ept, and then cringed, making a face Noram had never expected to see an otter make carefully stepped off the lizardkin.
"Sorry," otter-him mumbled, and Noram just inclined his head.
"It''s weird," Noram said. "The system doesn''t just... knock people out. It''d be dangerous if it did."
"It did say it was a beta feature."
"I guess you have a point." Noram had no idea what a beta feature was, and from the look on otter-him''s face, he hadn''t either. He was just guessing from the context.
Oh well. He was less worried than he should have been, he suspected, but Noram was more focused on the issue at hand.
"Um." Noram paused, trying to find the right words. There were a lot of things on his mind, the least of them being the bond they now shared, but there was one main thing on his mind. "We should find something else to call you. Besides my name, I mean."
The otter stared at him, and briefly looked a bit stricken. Noram didn''t get it, but the bond between them opened, and he epted it with hesitation
a flood of emotions poured into him. Noram had lived his entire life as Noram; he remembered all his friends calling him by that name, remembered receiving his first des with his name printed on it. He knew the name wasn''t his own, but he still felt like it was his
and maybe it was. Did it matter whose name the name ''originally'' was, if it felt every bit as real as it did to him?
"...I shouldn''t have phrased it like that," Noram said after a moment, feeling vaguely guilty. "Sorry."
"You''re right, though." Noram sighed, looking a little small and defeated, in that moment; the otter curled up and leaned against the wall. "It''s not like my name ever really felt like my own."
Maybe more of him had filtered over into the otter''s personality than he thought.
"You felt defensive, huh?" Noram said.
"Yeah," the otter answered.
"How about this," Noram suggested. "We both pick new names. Mine doesn''t... it doesn''t matter to me all that much, anyway. I didn''t earn anything with it. I didn''t achieve anything.
The otter softened, looking at him. "Maybe not yet," he said. "But you''re young yet. You''ve got plenty of time ahead of you. I don''t think I achieved anything when I was your age."
"...How old are you?"
"...Anyway, I like your idea," the otter said, instantly changing the subject. "I always wanted to be named Raltis, after a mighty wizard in a story I read as a young otter. Think that''s too egotistical?"
"I mean, who cares?" Noram asked, shrugging and offering a small grin. "It''s your name, right? No one here''s even gonna get that reference."
"Raltis it is." The otter brightened. "What are you picking?"
"I don''t really know yet." Noram stared into the distance a bit, thinking. He didn''t have a good idea of who he was yet not really. He wanted to pick a name with meaning, but... "How about Novice?"
"Novice?" ''Raltis'' blinked at him. "Really?"
"I''ve got a lot to learn." Novice smiled a bit. He didn''t hate the name as much as he thought he would have. He still felt like Noram, of course the name was still his own, and this was only a temporary affair, for however long the two of them had to work together but it felt appropriate. "Felt like I might need a reminder of that every now and then."
"...Now I feel guilty," Raltis muttered.
The next step, they decided in short order, was to find Charise. Noram-now-Raltis wasn''t actually caught up on the events in Teque and Fendal; he''d started living life as a sort of refugee between the two towns. He med himself for what had happened between Fendal and Teque, thinking that things would never have gotten so bad if he''d resisted Helg''s insistence in the first ce, and so he''d sort of voluntarily exiled himself from Teque.
Staying in Fendal was a sort of self-imposed punishment. A reminder of what he''d done to otherwise perfectly innocent people.
He was still aware of what was happening in Fendal and Teque, though. For one thing, he''d never been de-keyed from themunication glyphs that Teque used, and he made it a point to keep himself up-to-date with everything the Teque mages discovered about the system.
"There''s a sort of underground group of people that are sympathetic to Fendal," Raltis exined. The two of them made for an odd pair as they walked through the town, made all the more odd by the fact that no one gave them a second nce. Noram-now-Novice couldn''t help but wonder how he''d ever missed all of this at all. "They''re trying to see if there''s a way they can restore the people here without... you know, letting Teque die."
"Do you think Charise works with them?" Novice asked. It''d exin why she''d been around less and lesstely; why she sometimes seemed to vanish into thin air.
"I know they work with some people in Fendal," Raltis said. The otter''s tail waved about nervously behind him. "I don''t see many better options here."
Novice grimaced. "Fair point."
Walking through his home town while being fully aware of everything was... eerie. It was more clear than ever now how artificial everything was, from the smiles his neighbours gave to one another to the conversations they had. Some conversations were the same thing over and over again, held in a loop. Others were simply stilted, like the people involved were going through the motions.
Not for the first time, Notice reached for Vex''s notebook and rubbed the corner of it. He''d taken to using it to reassure himself every once in a while
"There," Raltis said, nudging him, and Novice looked up.
Charise sat in the patio outside the Juniper Express, which was a small cafe that served little cakes and snacks. There was a tall beetle-looking man sitting across from her, his expression deep and severe. Novice paused for a moment to consider whether or not he should interrupt.
Which was, of course, the exact moment Charise chose to look up and meet his eyes.
She didn''t seem surprised to see him, disconcertingly. She simply waved at him and gestured to not one but two seats that had been prepared for them at the table. There were even tesid out and everything.
Feeling suddenly nervous and Novice knew that Raltis felt the same way, given the bond they now shared Novice and Raltis both sat. Charise looked at them both and let the silence stretch on for a little bit longer than necessary.
Then she smiled a small smile. "It''s good to see you back to yourself, Noram," she said. "Or are you going by something else for now?"
"It is always uncanny when you do that," the beetle-man sitting across from hermented. He folded his arms across his chest, and she chuckled.
"Allow an olddy some fun, will you?" she said. "It''s hard enough to split my attention between two ces at once..."
Charise''s eyes seemed to lose focus for a second, and then she regained herself and smiled at the three of them as though nothing had happened. "So! My question?"
"Oh, uh," Novice said. "I''m going by Novice for now."
"Humble," Charise said. She nced at their resident otter. "And you?"
"Raltis," the otter said, looking suddenly embarrassed.
"It has been a while since I''ve seen you," the beetle-man said, inclining his head at Raltis. He didn''t say anything else, but he did incline his head slightly, in an implied sort of question. Novice saw Raltis hesitate, like he was preparing to give a response...
...and then he shook his head. "I''m not ready to talk about it yet, Anton," he said softly.
"That''s fine," Charise said, interrupting before Anton could actually get in a response. The beetle gave her an affronted sort of look that she promptly ignored. "You two have discovered something important, haven''t you?"
Novice blinked. What was she talking about
She''s talking about the [Soul-Link], Raltis sent him, pushing on the link between them slightly. Novice tried not to twitch in response, but he didn''tpletely hide the movement; he saw the way Charise''s gaze flickered over to him.
She knew. She definitely knew.
To her credit, instead of saying anything about it, she gave the two of them an encouraging smile.
Do we tell her? Novice asked.
My instincts say no, Raltis answered. But just between you and me, my instincts haven''t been doing a great job of leading me the right way so far. What do you think?
I think I trust her, Novice said, and then nodded to himself. "Yeah," he said out loud. "I trust her."
"...And me by proxy, I suppose," Anton grumbled.
Raltis and Novice nced at each other, and then told her about [Soul-Link]s.
142 - Book 3: Chapter 7: The Nature of Magic
142 - Book 3: Chapter 7: The Nature of Magic
Derivan stared at the field ahead of them. Vex had absolutely scattered the ce with glyphs some of them from the basic set, others theoretical, and still othersbinations that he had already tried, that embodied new and distinct concepts. He''d even shown off some of the ones he''d used against
Well. Against the echo of his father.
Derivan noticed the shadow that fell across Vex''s face whenever he looked at one of those glyphs. He almost told Vex he didn''t need to draw them, but he held his metaphorical tongue; the lizardkin was trying to be strong, and Derivan got the distinct impression that Vex didn''t want to be told he didn''t need to be. That he would fold if he was told it was okay, and that he wasn''t ready for that yet.
"Alright," Vex said atst. "Now what do all of these glyphs have inmon?"
Derivan stared at the glyphs. They were all inert, he supposed. That had taken some doing; magic here was far, far easier to work than it had been with the system in ce. Eventually Vex had figured out that a little bit of his [Manaburn] effect kept the glyphs inert and prevented them from activating, though they''d have to remember to clear the field before they wore off.
They were all based on art in some way, too; on something significant that had been created in the past. But these were all things they already knew, and not the answer Vex was looking for.
"Nothing?" he offered.
"Yeah." Vex deted. "I was hoping you would see something I didn''t."
Derivan chuckled, opening his arms in invitation, and the lizardkin fell into them with an exhausted sigh. The armor patted him on the back with a gentle hand, examining the glyphs as he did so.
It was strange how fewmonalities they had. The shapes were so basic he would have expected two of them to be simr by sheer coincidence, if nothing else; he wondered, then, if it was possible that he was being prevented from noticing a simrity. It wasn''t like the system hadn''t already done that to them, time and time again...
But if it was, he didn''t have any way of detecting it. Even knowing what they now knew about infolocks, they had no way tobat the literal dissipitation of information from the fabric of reality.
"Mnrgh," Vex grumbled into his shoulder, and Derivan smiled a faint smile, his eyes lighting up just a little bit more.
For all that this was them in defeat, there was something about being able to do this about being able sit down and explore, and let his thoughts wander, and to do so with his closest friends there was something about that that felt warm. They had no impending disaster to fend off, and even the pressure of time was stretched out into almost nothing, and though the truth of what was happening hung over their heads...
It hadn''t quite sunk in yet. The sun was bright above them, lighting up the vibrant blue of the of the sky; the strange fractal-images were almost transparent at this time of the day. All they really did was give the sky an odd, velvety texture. The field in front of them was bright and green and alive, buzzing with insects and even tiny animals that wandered about, here and there. Derivan caught a sh of a small, furry thing, leaning over to sniff at one of the glyphs.
The armor paused. The glyph was a mixture of Fire and Air...
Very gently, he reached out to shoo the little thing away before it could get hurt. Vex shifted at the movement, looking over at what he was doing, and his eyes went wide.
"Look at that little thing!" he said, fascinated. "I don''t think any of these exist back on our... uh, slice of reality."
Whatever it was had stopped investigating the glyph at their movement; it had turned towards them instead, sniffing inquisitively at the air, tiny nose wriggling. It was a slender little thing, with slicked-back pseudofur that almost looked like shadow. Derivan wondered if it wasn''t made of the same stuff the elementals were.
It was cute, though. It came up to them slowly, flinched when Vex extended a hand, and then took a cautious sniff.
Then it licked him and darted away, disappearing quickly into the grass. Derivan stared after it, faintly amused, while Vex just stared in wonder at his hand.
"I am never washing my hand again," he dered.
"That is... not a good idea, I think."
"You can''t make me." Vex wasn''t serious, of course, but Derivan found he loved the yful light in the lizardkin''s eyes. It had been too long.
"I suppose I can only ask nicely."
"Please don''t. It''s my one weakness."
Derivanughed, then, and pulled Vex close; he pressed a forehead against the lizardkin''s own, feeling Vex first stiffen and then reluctantly rx against him, and waited a moment before uttering his next words
"I suppose I can wait a moment," he said. Vex slumped the rest of the way back into his arms, huffing.
Derivan saw the small smile that stole across his face, though. He could feel, through his armor, that Vex was a little warmer than usual; embarrassed and yet happy all at once.
And then Vex sat up straight, bonking his head against Derivan''s chin, and winced.
"Ow," he said.
"Are you alright?" Derivan asked.
"Yeah, I''m fine," Vex said, shaking his head; he nced out over the field of glyphs again, and his expression turned contemtive. "I thought I saw something like a pattern... Like all the smaller glyphs are pieces of a bigger one." He frowned across the field. "I''m not sure I can see it anymore, though."
"Perhaps it is something you can only see if you are in the right moment," Derivan said with a small chuckle.
"Maybe," Vex said. He didn''t look convinced, but he leaned back anyway, letting his mind rx slightly. "I guess I don''t think I''d be able to do anything with it, anyway."
"There were still some pieces missing," Derivan agreed.
"You saw it too?" Vex almost looked up at Derivan, but his positioning made it awkward; he eventually settled for tilting his head backward, and Derivan stared back down at him, amused.
"I believe I saw something," he mused. "Perhaps it was the same thing. I cannot say; I do not know what you saw."
"Pieces of a puzzle?"
"Something like that," Derivan agreed.
"I suppose there''s no use trying to force it." Vex smiled a bit of a wry smile, and then leaned back into Derivan, closing his eyes. "Do you mind if we take a small break? I just want to think."
Derivan saw the small sadness beginning to swim in Vex''s eyes again; he saw the way the lizardkin''s gaze lingered on some of the glyphs. He shook his head. "I do not mind," he said.
"We can stay like this as long as you wish."
As long as he wished, it turned out, wasn''t all that long. Vex''s mind was active at the best of times, and it worked best when he had a problem he wanted to solve, and he did.
"I want to try spellcasting next," he announced.
"Oh?" Derivan hummed. He didn''t let go of Vex until the lizardkin began to wriggle then he let go, pulling his arms back and chuckling. Vex barely seemed to notice; the wizard sprang to his feet and bounced on his heels, looking authoritatively over the field of glyphs. Derivan spared a small nce towards Sev and Misa as he waited.
Sev was still meditating. Something was happening there something visible in the system and in reality. Derivan could almost see it, using abination of Patch and Shift, but it was nothing he could interpret. He left it well enough alone, not wanting to disrupt whatever Sev was doing.
As for Misa... she was scanning through her system screens with intensity. He hoped she was alright.
"Okay," Vex said, calling his attention back. "I need you to cast a spell. I''m going to try to attach to it with my Sign, and see if I can figure out how the spell is transformed from glyph to effect. If I can figure out that aspect of magic, I think I can start unlocking other glyphs."
"You n to reverse engineer a glyph from an effect?" Derivan asked.
"Kind of," Vex said, waving a hand about. He watched the air intently as Derivan''s gauntlet began to glow; the glyph he drew was Fire, a series of simple, swooping lines like a rising current of air. "There are simrities between the system''s runes and glyphs, but it''s not a one-to-one transformation I can apply to a rune and get a glyph. Stuff goes missing. I''m hoping I can pull out what I need from the effect."
"That makes sense." Thest line of mana glowed in the air; here, there was no need to explicitly activate the glyph. Intent seemed to be sufficient. Derivan admired the sight as fire-aspect mana began to flow towards the glyph automatically.
In no time at all, the glyph had ignited into a glittering array of fire, blowing gently in a nonexistent wind.
Vex was silent, his eyes shut and his brows drew together in concentration. His own Sign was wavering in the air, apparently strangely harder to use in this new world they were in. Derivan wondered if that had something to do with how aspects were slightly different, here, each viewed through a different lens.
A tendril stretched out from Vex''s sign, but it didn''t reach the glyph Derivan had drawn. Derivan sensed it trying to go elsewhere, and not quite seeding; not quite knowing what he was doing, he gave it a small helping hand with a Shift
Vex let out a soft gasp, and Derivan quickly caught him as he began to tip over. The lizardkin blinked a few times, shaking his head and rubbing at his eyes like he''d just stared directly into the sun.
"Ow," he said inly.
"Are you all right?" Derivan asked. "I am sorry, I thought I could help"
"No, you did, don''t worry. I''m fine. That was just... bright." Vex winced slightly as he got back onto his feet, blinking a few more times. "I think I saw a library? It''s kind of seared into my eyes."
"Hmm," Derivan hummed. "I do not think we should try again, for now."
"Yeah, no." Vex shuddered slightly. "Don''t get me wrong, I really want to know what that was, but something tells me I''m going to need a little more protection than what I have now. The problem is that the sight isn''t physical, so I can''t just enchant my eyes... It''s more like it burns the memory of staring into the sun into my brain."
"That sounds unpleasant." Derivan winced. "Did we learn nothing from this?"
"Not nothing." Here Vex managed to grin. "I have a really good memory. It might''ve been bright, but I still caught a glimpse of some of those books. Each one of them has a glyph on the cover. I guess it''s some sort of archive? And if we can visit that archive..."
"We could discover any spell on record?" Derivan guessed.
"Maybe even make our own!" Vex waved a notebook around triumphantly. "Uh, maybe. That might be a bit much. We probably can''t just insert a new spell into the mana."
"But you are going to try."
"Of course I''m going to try." Vex practically scoffed, but he was grinning. "I just need to figure out how."
143 - Book 3: Chapter 8: Enchanted
143 - Book 3: Chapter 8: Enchanted
As bold a statement as Vex had started with, there wasn''t yet much for him to go on the idea that magic drew from a physical ce, even, was something that was new to him. Vex had told Derivan he wanted a bit of time to mull on it, which seemed like a better n than Derivan''s own thought of "push as hard as possible in Shift and try to take them to this new ce".
They needed to stay here, and they needed to avoid breaking things in the bonus room for as long as possible. Derivan did need to experiment with Shift, but the goal with that was to give them a means to ess and interact with their own world while keeping the benefit of stretched time.
For now, Vex was back at the array of glyphs he''d scattered across the field, and isting a set he thought would be useful.
"I mean, don''t get me wrong, I think all of them are useful," the lizardkin rambled as he worked, waving a hand about animatedly; Derivan watched in fond amusement as mana followed his movement, and a few of the glyphs he''d drawn crumbled to dust. "But we need a smaller set to focus on first, or we''re going to end up with a broad set of spells that don''t work very well together."
"You sound as if you may have had experience with such a thing," Derivan observed.
Vexughed, a touch of embarrassment coloring his tone. "In my early days I just wanted to learn every spell I could get my hands on," he said. "And don''t get me wrong; having a lot of options is a strength all on its own. But that''s more Misa''s wheelhouse, you know? I just want to understand."
He stared out at the glyphs he''d picked for a moment, and then his voice acquired a touch of ruefulness. "Narrowing your area of study helps you understand it more," he said. "Magic as a whole is broad enough as it is. I''d almost say it''s too broad for any one person to understand, except that would invalidate my life goal, and I''m going to be stubborn about that for a little while longer, I think."
"Hardly one person," Derivan said, his tone just a touch chastizing. Vex nced over at him and seemed to hesitate for a second beforeing to a conclusion.
"Are you sure you actually want to help me with this, though?" he asked. "I mean, is all this what you actually want to do?"
Derivan paused to consider the question, though the immediate response was on the tip of his metaphorical tongue; Vex was looking at him in earnest, and the answer to this seemed important to him. So he measured his words before he spoke, and made sure they were clear.
"It is both," he said. "You taught me about the beauty of magic, and so I have a vested interest in understanding it. But it would be a lie to say that your happiness does not factor into it. Both things bring me joy."
"Oh," Vex said softly, and then he looked away, but not before Derivan caught the shy smile that stole over his face. "Um. Thanks."
"You are wee."
"But you know if you were interested in anything, I''d happily help you with it." Vex acquired an oddly fierce look.
"Of course," Derivan chuckled. The answer seemed important to Vex, though; the lizardkin visibly rxed, and that same smile stole across his face again.
"Good," he said. Satisfied with that line of conversation, Vex turned his attention back to the glyphs he''did out in front of him. "I''m going to see if we can''te up with a magical solution for your hand."
"I feel as though I could generate a recement, with enough training in Slime," Derivan offered. His generative abilities weren''t quite so advanced just yet he''d already tried, some time the night before. He could generate a small tendril that in no way matched the proportions of the rest of his body.
"Would that work?" Vex asked. "Is it the same?"
"It is not the same, exactly," Derivan admitted. "It is a part of me, but it feels... different. I do not have the words for it. I do not think the difference is bad, but it is slower, and I suspect I would not be as effective inbat."
"So we still need another solution," Vex said, nodding to himself. Derivan stole a nce at the glyphs he''d chosen for this experiment.
There was the glyph for Earth, which he supposed made sense; something to represent metal, as a product that came from the earth. There was Derivan''s own Sign in there, which he hadn''t tried casting on its own just yet. Then there were the glyphs for Communication, Ry, and Research...
"Why is your own Sign there?" Derivan asked. Vex was staring at the array of glyphs he''d chosen, deeply contemtive. He jumped when Derivan spoke.
"Uh," he said, and then stared at the glyphs again. "I''ming at it from a more organic perspective, I guess. Normally you have to do a certain amount of rehabilitation to be able to use a limb effectively again. I don''t have a glyph of Learning, or I would''ve used that instead; Research is tied a lot more closely to me..."
Vex paused, looking embarrassed. "I can take it out, if you prefer. In case it gives me a link to your arm or something."
"I do not mind," Derivan said, chuckling. "I was only curious."
The lizardkin nodded, but still seemed a little red, at least under the light of the sun; Derivan watched him fondly. Vex stuck a tongue out of his mouth and began to scribbling down small sketches of theretical glyphbinations in his notebook. With each sketch he paused and stared intently, waiting to see if it drew the attention of the surrounding mana. If it did, he erased it with a small pulse of magic, and if it didn''t, he kept the sketch there, presumably as a reminder of what didn''t work.
There were a half-dozen failed sketches in there that didn''t seem to pull in mana at all. Derivan didn''t quite understand why they seemed like they should have been perfectly valid glyphbinations but he did see a pattern beginning to emerge as Vex worked on his sketches.
The glyphs that worked were always glyphs that contained a message and meaning of their own. Derivan felt a distinct impression when looking at them. There was Earth and Communication, for example, intertwined with one another as not-letters circling a globe; it felt like Connection. Other sketches where the looping letters were made of stone gave no such impression, nor was the mana drawn to it.
Derivan wondered if this was in some way a result of the Magic stat. He''d neglected it for some time, but now it was singing to him as he stared at Vex''s sketches, at the various glyphs that were still scattered about.
His own Sign called to him. He still hadn''t tested it.
"I am going to attempt a spell as well," he said out loud, though his own voice felt a little distant to him. He felt his mind sinking further into the Magic stat; now that he was thinking about it, he could do it with deliberation, letting the strange other-sense suffuse his being.
The world seemed a little different like this. He no longer saw the transparent panes in the sky, each reflecting a small section of thend. Instead, the sky was an impressionistic painting that gave him impressions of openness, freedom; of possibility and travel. The grass was a ssh of life on the dirt-brown soil, which itself gave him thoughts of solidity and of being grounded.
Each of Vex''s glyphs shone with a brilliant light, though none of them were blinding. They just shone with purpose, singing a clear signal that corrted directly with the impressions he''d gotten before. Connection, a glyph that represented a means of staying linked, no matter the distance. Earth, a glyph that embodied everything he saw when he stared at the soil beneath his sabatons.
And Vex himself was, in a word, beautiful.
The lights in Derivan''s helmet blinked off as he shut off that new sense of sight, giving himself a moment to process everything he was seeing. It was different maybe something closer to how the mana itself saw the world. He''d caught glimpses of Sev and Misa, too. The former was painted in gentle streaks of kindness and hope and just a little too much self-sacrifice; thetter was anger bound by restraint, determination, and a clever mind.
Both striking in their own right, and yet neither of them gave him quite the same feeling. Vex was rendered in the bright yellow colors of curiosity streaked through with his fierce intellect. The edges of his form were more uncertain, tempered by his own anxieties and fears and self-doubt, but the core was nevertheless firm. There was a fire in him that was both his passion for learning and his own brand of kindness, and it lit him up from within, lending a sort of vibrancy to him that he hadn''t seen before...
...Derivan realized with some embarrassment that for the short time he''d possessed this variant of mana-sight, he''d spent most of it focused on Vex.
"Weren''t you going to cast a spell?" Vex asked. He peered at him Derivan felt it more than he saw it. "Are you okay?"
"I am fine," Derivan said, though to him his voice perhaps sounded a little dazed. He opened his eyes and gave the lizardkin the best smile he could, and wondered perhaps for the first time what it was that Vex saw in him.
He let that idle curiosity go for now, though. Instead, he turned his gaze inward. Vex had managed to figure out what his Sign was, extrapting backward from his understanding of Derivan and from thebined Sign he had created. Now he aimed to do the same, in his own style.
His gauntlet moved, tracing a shape in the air.
A Sign was an individual''s signature. It was an answer to a question, a representation of who a person was. Vex had had an answer for that before Derivan himself had truly figured it out his understanding of himself had always rtive to others. It seemed only natural to him. His base self was a suit of armor; he existed to protect.
And yet he''d grown to be more than that, in no small part thanks to the friends he''d made.
It didn''t change who he was in some fundamental way; it made no difference to who he wanted to be. But there was an ache where his arm had once been that reminded him that now there was context where there had been none before the answer might not have changed, but now there was another question.
Who did he want to protect?
The answer wasn''t just ''his friends'', because they were more than just bodies to protect. They had their own beliefs that he, too, felt was worth fighting for. The loss of his arm was a good reminder of that; that being who he needed to be to protect them wasn''t enough.
The people at the top of the Guild had built an organization aimed at protecting not only themselves, but anyone weak, anywhere they needed help. Sometimes people needed a little bit of help to be truly strong. Sometimes protecting others involved being something more than a shield.
Sometimes Signs changed.
Derivan stared at the Sign he''d drawn. Mana was already flowing towards it, aspected towards a type he''d never seen before; he couldn''t put a name to it if he tried.
The Sign in the air was still very obviously a piece of armor a cuirass shaped not unlike his own, though it differed wildly in detail. It was a series of interlocking tes, weak individually but built to lock together when sustaining an impact, bing something stronger as a whole. A small detail etched into the design was the names of his friends, inscribed along the shoulders, and Vex''s name right over the center of the te, where his heart would have been if he had one.
Behind the armor, etched as silhouettes in the light, was his best rendition of life every race he had met in his journey so far, designated as a monster by the system or not, and even a few ceholders for the people he hadn''t met.
It was altogether tooplicated for a Sign. It had gone somewhere beyond that, he realized; Derivan looked at the sky and saw that it was dark, now, and realized he''d spent something like hours lost in the process of creating this. This was no Sign. It was a creation of his own.
And as he watched, the mana seemed to take it like it was an offering. His painting for that was what it was, really simplified, turning into abstract, representative shapes of others behind a piece of armor. But he felt the original piece still within it, sitting within the mana.
"I think you just created a new glyph," Vex said quietly. He''d stopped his own experimentation long ago, apparently, abandoning it to watch as Derivan worked. Derivan noticed, for the first time, that they were surrounded by shadows.
They had an audience. The town had gathered to watch.
"Oh," Derivan said.
144 - Book 3: Chapter 9: Repairs
144 - Book 3: Chapter 9: Repairs
"You have to understand, it''s been getting harder and harder to make new glyphs," Clyde exined.
It had taken a while to get everyone calmed down. Clyde himself had to start herding people back to town, though many of them insisted on staying and seeing what the effect of the new glyph was. There his wife Belle had taken charge, insisting that testing a new glyph surrounded by civilians was a terrible idea.
In fairness, Derivan''s Sign was unlikely to cause harm to anyone but he was grateful to Belle nheless. The stares and whispers were challenging for him to deal with; he found he much preferred the smaller, intimatepany of just his party. Fame and attention was not for him.
Now they found themselves back inside Clyde''s inn, gathered around a huge table that Clyde had taken out of storage just for this asion; the standard ones did not fit all seven of them.
"Harder my ass," Elliot snorted. Clyde nced at him, and Elliot ignored the grin that stole across his husband''s face. "It''s been impossible for a few generations now. At least five."
"No one created any new glyphs how long is a generation?" Vex asked.
"I just use it to mean a hundred years." Elliot shrugged. "So we haven''t had any new spells for something like five hundred years. We haven''t needed any new spells, since you can create just about any effect working with what we already have, but..."
Here Elliot smiled a small, rueful smile. "We used to have these festivals every time a new glyph was created," he said. "An expansion to the Great Record, we called it. A new piece of art acknowledged, a new addition to the history of the world."
"The Expansion festivals... I almost forgot about those." A wistful look stole across Belle''s face.
"It was one of the few things that got you out of yourb back then," Clyde said, his voice teasing. "It was where you met us, remember?"
"I do, in fact," Belle said, patting her hands primly on her dress, brushing off some imaginary dust. "My memory isn''t that bad."
"Do you think you''ll hold another one?" Vex piped up again.
"Maybe." Clyde nced around. "There''s a lot of preparation we''d need to make to be able to hold a festival like that. Can''t have our town looking so dreary."
"Isn''t your town supposed to be a temte?" Sev raised an eyebrow.
"We can make changes sometimes," Clyde said, waving a hand. He sighed. "Honestly, it might be good for us. We''ve been living a routine for five hundred years. It hasn''t always been like this; there used to be a lot more life..."
His voice trailed off, and he nced meaningfully at the door. "We used to be a lot more than just this," he said, ncing at Belle and Elliot both. Derivan saw the small sadness that hid within their eyes, though it was banished just as quickly. He said nothing, but he wondered how different the town would really have looked, if things had not deteriorated quickly.
Perhaps the story of their town was not the whole truth. But if that was the case, then they did not seem ready to speak of it yet, and he did not see the need to press them on it.
"Who decides whether or not you have a festival?" Misa asked. It was the first time she''d spoken in a while; Derivan noticed that she was spending more time deep in thought, and would check the system every so often, as though afraid she would lose contact with the outside world.
...she was the only one amongst them with a family, now that he thought about it. Vex had his, but except for his little brother, they werergely estranged. Misa had only just gotten her family back, and she''d had to head out again almost immediately. For all that her skill gave her the ability to spend time with her family at any time, anywhere, if they were to lose ess to the system while in here...
He couldn''t me her for her worry.
"The mayor," Clyde said, gesturing vaguely. "He''ll probably want to talk to Derivan sometime tomorrow, once he''s figured out what he wants to do."
"Ah," Derivan said. "Perhaps I should prepare for his visit?"
"Nah, he''s pretty chill," Elliot said. "Doesn''t really do his job, even, but there''s not much mayoring to do here, so... he does his best."
"Does he know?" Vex asked. "That this ce is an echo."
"You can tell him." Belle looked closely at Vex. "But he''ll be as ambivalent about it as the rest of us."
"It doesn''t feel right not to," Vex admitted.
"Fair enough." She smiled at him. "I think he''ll probably want to hold a festival. It''d be an opportunity to gather the temte towns again."
"Oh gods," Clyde groaned. "Do we have to?"
"We can''t not invite them to an Expansion Festival, Clyde," Belle said, turning an amused gaze onto her husband. He red back at her and folded his arms, looking for all the world like a petnt child.
For all of five seconds, anyway. He nced back at them, and any trace of that yfulness vanished; he turned serious once more.
"Will you four be okay if we host one?" he asked. He nced at Derivan''s missing arm, though he didn''tment on it. "I might be prying a bit too much, here, but you seem like you might need time to yourselves to recover. A festival might be just what you need, but only if you''re in the right ce for it."
There was a bit of a prolonged silence, at that; no one seemed ready to answer. Misa was, surprisingly, first.
"You said it''d take some time to prepare, right?" she said.
"A week at least," Clyde nodded. "If Oliver decides it''s a good idea to hold a festival at all."
"I think I can be in the right ce in a week," Misa said, breathing out. "Gives me somethin'' to work towards."
"You are taking the loss hard," Derivan observed, though he felt a bit useless for pointing out something so obvious. His tone was sympathetic, though, and Misa didn''t seem to take offense.
"I talked a bit about it already, but it''s not easy to just ept until I can fuckin'' do something about it." Misa, too, nced at his missing arm, and Derivan shifted ufortably; he wasn''t sure he liked all the looks, as much as he understood them. As soon as she saw him move, Misa nced back at him, her gaze faintly apologetic.
He didn''t know if she was apologizing for staring at it, or if she was apologizing for not protecting him in the first ce. A little bit of both, he suspected.
"You still want to train?" Sev asked.
"A few hours ago I would''ve said ''not until we have a way to repair the anchor''," Misa said. She nced at a system screen and sighed; a tension seemed to bleed out of her shoulders, and she seemed to finally allow herself a small smile. "But whatever you did, Derivan, it repaired the shit out of the anchor. So I think I''m good to train at least a little bit."
She paused. "It''d be nice if we had a way to repair it consistently, though," she added.
"What?" Vex bounced up on his feet. "Why didn''t you say anything earlier! That''s amazing. That means acts of creation wait, shouldn''t you have gotten reality shards for that? Did you get any reality shards for that, Deri?"
"Not that I am aware of," Derivan said, patting his armor. There was nothing there, and he didn''t remember seeing anything where he''d drawn the glyph.
"Are you talking about mana slivers?" Clyde asked curiously. Belle was leaning forward, interested.
"The system calls them reality shards," Vex said.
"You haven''t really exined this system thing to us," Belle said, chuckling. "I can make some guesses based on what you''ve already said, but it''d help if you told us a little bit more."
Vex blinked, embarrassed. "Right," he said. "Um. It''s a bitplicated. It''s... we think it''s how reality is maintained, I guess."
Very quickly, the lizardkin gave or attempted to give the three shadow elementals a crash course on the nature of the system as it impacted their world; Clyde and Elliot were both interested, and Belle mostly seemed incredulous.
"It''s efficient, I guess?" she muttered. "But it just seems so arbitrary. Why the dungeons and the monsters? Why stats and skills and levels?"
"We think the dungeons have something to do with maintaining reality anchors," Vex said, and then he took a breath as he seemed to realize something. "Looking at the name of the anchor, and the fact that Fendal and Teque had a very simr designation... every dungeon seems to stabilize a zone around it. That''s probably what thebel is. So X-51 stands for the area around the Guild town we were in. And the Prime Kingdoms each have arge dungeon that stabilizes or connects the entire region..."
Vex paused. "Thatst part is a guess, though," he added. "We don''t really know much about the difference between a regr dungeon and a Prime Kingdom dungeon."
"Fair enough," Belle said again, though this time her tone was a bit doubtful. She shook her head. "Reality shards, though. If your system calls our mana slivers reality shards, that would exin a lot about what they do. It gels with echo theory."
"The shards allow magic to create echoes like the system does?" Vex guessed, and Belle nodded.
"Make a big enough change in reality," she said, "and that''s what magic is and you create waves. Lots of tiny echoes that ebb out from that single change. The mana coalesces and solidifies that echo as a crystal, and you get a little crystal of pure potential. A pocket universe, almost."
"...And Teque was using that as a currency?" Sev said, scandalized.
"Most towns do," Clyde said dryly. "In fairness, we might know echo theory, but we never figured out what the slivers are. They''re opaque to us. We know they allow magic to do things it shouldn''t be able to do, and that''s about it."
"Your friend is right, though," Belle said, frowning. "Your act of creation should have created a small fortune in slivers. I don''t think I saw a single one at the field you were practicing in."
"Maybe it went towards repairing the anchor," Misa said without thinking, and then when everyone stopped and stared at her, she paused. "What?"
"I think you got it," Vex said. A sudden energy leapt into his eyes and he bounced on his feet, thinking. "That''s probably exactly what happened, and if you''re right, then we just need to figure out how to do it, um... on purpose." He nced at Clyde. "You wouldn''t happen to have any slivers you''d be willing to share, would you?"
Clydeughed. "I normally don''t have any customers asking me for money," he said, teasing, and Vex ducked his head in embarrassment. "But yeah, I''ve got some. I don''t mind helping you guys out. Just give me a second."
He disappeared into the back. Belle stared after him.
"He has got to stop just giving our stuff away," Belle said, though she didn''t seem all that bothered by it, judging by the amusement in her eyes.
"Eh," Elliot said. "You know him. We couldn''t stop him if we tried."
145 - Book 3: Chapter 10: Goodnight
145 - Book 3: Chapter 10: Goodnight
Clyde returned in short order with a small fistful of reality shards clutched awkwardly in his fingers. He was holding them gingerly, almost, like he was afraid they were going to explode. Belle stared at him.
"Why are you holding them like that?" she asked.
"You said they''re pocket universes," Clyde said. "I didn''t think it was safe to toss them around."
"I said almost!" The scientist rolled her eyes and grabbed the shards from a grinning Clyde, turning to deposit them in Misa''s arms. "Here. You were going to try to do something with this, right?"
"The problem is that I don''t know what," Misa said, cradling the bundle of shards awkwardly. Her gaze flicked up toward a system screen and she scanned it briefly, looking for an option to repair, but there was nothing there; just the same information about anchor integrity.
"You could try pushing it into the window," Sev suggested. Misa blinked at him.
"The system has literally never worked that way," she said, but she grabbed a shard and pushed it into the screen anyway
And stopped, staring, when the shard abruptly disappeared from her fingers, and the anchor integrity ticked up.
"You were saying?" Sev grinned at her, one eyebrow slightly raised. Misa scowled at him.
"I''m almost offended that it''s so fucking simple," she muttered, staring at the window. "This whole time..."
"We didn''t have that many shards to mess with, and no reason to guess that would work," Vex said, trying to beforting. "And nothing bad happened! Everyone''s okay."
"Right," Misa said, her tone slightly distracted. She turned her gaze to Sev, who smiled back at her. "Everyone''s okay," she repeated, almost to herself.
She sighed.
"Well, that''s one problem solved, right?" Clyde said. He stood with his elbows resting on the bar counter and his hands propping up his chin. "Whatcha got next?"
"Nothing, I guess," Misa said. "It''s a bitte, we should probably..."
Her voice trailed off. She stared at the window. She''d nced at it to check on the time, to see if there was any left in the day for her to do the training she wanted to do; the sky was dark, though, and so she had been about to suggest they retire for the night.
And then she noticed something none of them had noticed before. It was difficult to spot, really. The air here was strange, and the sky wasposed ofyer uponyer of translucent reflections, each disying a different part of the world.
It was no wonder she hadn''t noticed the glimmering light behind them before.
The stars.
"The stars still exist here," she breathed.
"What?" Clyde looked at her strangely. Belle and Elliot did the same, but Vex, Sev, and Derivan all turned towards the window as one, eyes growing wide.
"Oh," Sev breathed.
"Whoa," Vex said. He pressed his snout against the ss, trying to peer up through the panes.
Derivan remained silent, and stayed where he was. He stared out the window, though, as though trying tomit the sight to memory.
"You guys wanna tell us what''s going on, here?" Elliot asked, and Belle elbowed him with a hiss.
"They''re obviously having a moment," she said. "Give them a bit."
There was a small pause, there, as the four stared out of the window. There was a magic to the sight, the same way there was a magic to the moment every time Derivan cast [Starry Night]; a small moment of appreciation for something that feltrger than all of them.
Derivan responded first, finally turning to Clyde, his gaze apologetic. "Our branch of reality no longer has the stars," he said. "We did not even know they were missing until... very recently. The real thing is quite the sight to see."
Clyde just stared at the four of them. He leaned back against the bar, thinking for a moment, and then nodded to himself; he nced at Belle. "We could take them to the observatory," he said.
Belle sighed, but she was smiling. "Somehow, I knew you were going to say that," she said. "There''s an observatory near the edge of town if you''d like to visit. It''s enchanted to cut through all of the sky-weirdness we call them Fractals so you''ll get a better view of the night sky, if that''s what you''re looking for."
"It''s technically only open to scientists," Clyde said. "But Belle''s awesome and can get you in."
Belle grinned. "Why, thank you," she said, dipping into a small curtsy.
"We''d like that, I think," Sev said quietly. He nced at the others, but found no disagreement. Misa nodded, staring out the window with a wistful look in her eyes; Vex stood near the base of the window, his snout nearly pressed up against the ss; Derivan tilted his head in agreement.
"This way, then," Belle said. She gave Clyde and Elliot both a wave. "You two hold down the fort here, okay?"
"You know we will," Clyde said, waving her away. "Go on, have fun."
"You''re noting?" Vex tore his gaze away from the window to look at the innkeeper. Clydeughed at the look on Vex''s face, though his reply was apologetic.
"No," he said. "I''m afraid even with Belle the observatory only allows a few visitors at a time. Plus, I shouldn''t actually keep leaving my post like this."
"And I''m staying to keep himpany," Elliot said cheerfully. "We''ll be fine here, don''t worry. Go look at the stars! I''m sure they''re waiting."
"Oh," Vex said. That made sense to him. He trotted out of the inn along with the others, ncing back at the pure-ck, box-like building, so very different from the warm inside.
Then he paused and nced at the others. "Wait, the stars are doing what now?"
"I''m sure it''s just a turn of phrase," Sev said again. Belle seemed deeply amused, and was refusing to rify; Vex, of course, was trying to puzzle out exactly what Elliot had meant by ''they''re waiting''.
"But it might not be," Vex argued. "Just because we think we know what the stars are like doesn''t mean that we actually know"
"We''re here," Belle interrupted, casting her still-amused gaze onto Vex. "You can find out for yourselves."
The party stopped and stared at the building in question. It looked... it looked identical to every other building, actually.
"I''m not sure what I expected," Sev muttered. He nced at the darkened window at the front; he could almost see what looked like star charts,id out on a shelf.
"I expected something taller," Misa said critically. She stared at the distinctly box-shaped building. "It''s just another cube."
Belleughed. "We have magic," she said. She removed a small rectangle from her dress and pressed it against an almost invisible seam in the wall; there was a click, and a sh of mana that signalled the door unlocking. "The buildings just need to be functional. Everything else happens on the inside."
She threw open the door and stepped in. For all that they''d already known that the inside would be different, none of them were quite prepared.
It was like stepping into a field of stars.
The floor vanished beneath their feet almost as soon as they stepped into the room, giving them a distinct sense of vertigo; Vex wobbled slightly until Misa, closest to him, grabbed him by the arm and steadied him. Sev''s expression was aplicated mixture of both wonder and nausea, and Derivan simply looked around, taking everything in.
"Are you alright?" Belle asked, amused. She was looking at Sev, who waved her off.
"I don''t like heights," he said. "I''ll be fine. Probably."
"You can''t be high up if there''s no down to speak of," Vex said, trying to reassure Sev.
It did not work. He looked even more green, if anything.
Still, the ''room'' they were in was beautiful. There was no one else present everyone else had gone home for the day, Belle exined but this was a magic that put them in the middle of the stars. The enchantment on the walls let them see a depth of color that wouldn''t normally have been apparent in space. All the errant gases were awash in vibrant reds and greens. Every star shone with startling rity, for all that they were exceedingly far away and it was astonishing how well the room conveyed a sense of distance.
In short, it was easy to feel exceedingly small, standing in this room. Belle smiled slightly at the stunned looks on all their faces. "You never get used to it," she said softly. "Ie here every so often, even though it''s not really my area of expertise. It''s a nice way to get perspective."
"Why keep it closed to the public at all?" Vex asked softly. "I feel like everyone should get to see... this."
"We actually tried to make it open, once," Belle said with a smallugh. "The problem is that the ce looks big, but it''s only about two or three times the size of the actual building. We can''t fit everyone in that wants to visit, and... a lot of people want to visit."
For a moment, Belle looked as though she wanted to say something else but she stopped before she did, and shook her head as though admonishing herself.
"I''m surprised all of this is still... here," Sev said quietly. He took a few steps forward, his feet slightly more sure now, although he still stumbled slightly as he misjudged the distance to the ''ground''. "If the universe is getting erased..."
"Truth be told, it''s surprising to us, too," Belle said. She sighed, conjuring a chair of shadow from the ground and leaning back; it creaked along with her movement, the back of the chair folding back to let her recline. A wave of her hand and she conjured a matching set of four seats for the rest of the party, and they all settled in, staring silently up at the sky.
Belle broke the silence after a minute. "We''re not sure exactly why. Our models all suggest thats with life on them should be thest ones to be erased; the stars should have disappeared long ago, except for the ones still supporting life."
Vex stared up at the sky, and was struck by a horrible thought. "What if that''s why?" he asked. "What if all the stars up there support a different..."
"No," Belle said, culling the train of thought before it could go too far; Vex rxed slightly at her assertion, though he still looked up with concern. She smiled wryly. "Trust me, it was one of the first things we thought of. We checked. Obreve is the only with any life on it."
"Obreve," Sev said, snapping his fingers. "Right! That was the name. Shit, I thought it got erased or something. I was going to ask you guys about it, but I forgot."
Misa rotated her chair to face Sev. "You... forgot the name of the?" she asked.
"You know I have problems with my memory," Sev said, waving her away. She frowned at him. "I was going to bring it up!" he said defensively. "I just forgot."
"You''re forgetting things an awful lot," she said, crossing her arms.
"Because I have memory problems!" Sev gestured vaguely. "You know how my skills work. It''s not... it''s not great. But you can trust me, I promise."
Misa sighed. "I know I can," she said, her voice gentler. "And I do. It''s not trust that''s the problem. I''m just worried about you."
"Oh," Sev said, and then in a softer, smaller voice: "Sometimes I worry about me, too."
He tried to smile, but there was a vulnerability there; a brittleness in his eyes that he didn''t usually let show.
Misa didn''t know what to say to that.
The conversation petered off, there, into a rough sort of silence. Belle spoke after several minutes, a note of wistful mncholy in her voice. "It''s something about being here," she said. "Makes you feel smaller. A little bit more vulnerable. A little bit more open, too."
"It''s beautiful, though." Sev stared up at the sky, his eyes tracing the patterns of the stars. A few of them were moving, even, twirling and dancing around one another. He couldn''t imagine the phenomenal speed at which they must have been moving for it to be so clearly visible in real time.
"You can hear them, if you know how to listen," Bellemented. She reached into the air, fiddling with something invisible. A secondter, a rolling, wispy tune began to y from all around them, echoing in the room. The tune was sad, mncholic. A final ode to a dying universe. "They''ve been ying the same song ever since the universe ended..."
Belle fell silent as a ringing tone entered the melody; a sound not unlike a sword striking armor. It should have been harsh, but the note that was produced was pure.
A small, uplifting tone entered the music, and the tone of the song changed. Not a lot just slightly. A shift from minor to major for a single chord, and yet...
Belle closed her eyes and smiled. "I was hoping I''d hear that," she said. "We haven''t had that in a while. Change. Doesn''t matter if it''s magic in our reality, or the system in yours when the universe dies, it stops being able to make new things. But there''s something different with you four, isn''t there?"
"We''re just normal people, as far as I know," Vex said cautiously. Belleughed.
"You''re as far from normal as it gets," she said, the words yful. "But I''m not saying you were born special. I''m saying that maybe you chose to be. By making yourselves the axis upon which the world can turn...
"But I''m just an olddy making guesses." Belle leaned back in her chair, staring up at the sky. "Watch the stars with me, will you? We''ve got at least an hour here."
And they did.
146 - Book 3: Chapter 11: Interlude - Xothok - Dissent
146 - Book 3: Chapter 11: Interlude - Xothok - Dissent
"We did what."
Talking to himself was still... ufortable. Xothok saw in this other version of him all the things he could have been, and something about that was deeply ufortable. It didn''t help that Kothos as they had decided to call him, since it was slightly easier than saying ''other-Xothok'' every single time was so much moreposed.
He didn''t flinch, even when Xothok got angry at him, swore at him. He watched him with kind, understanding eyes.
Eyes that made Xothok want to punch him into a wall.
"We used catapults," Kothos supplied calmly, though there was a cheeky sort of grin hiding behind his serene smile; Xothok had hated that, too, the joy Kothos seemed to be able to take in life though he was slowly starting to recognize that hatred as envy. "And an umon skill, [Improved Target Selection]. Turns out there''s no distance limitations on the skill, and the improved version protects the ammunition until it reaches the target."
"I can''t decide if I should be angry about that," Xothok muttered.
His bandits his men were all standing in one of the fields outside the Guild, a pile of raw wood piled up beside them. That was what Kothos had told him they would need, though he hadn''t known why they would need it until now. There wasn''t much of a point for Kothos to tell him everything. He couldn''t retain information between their chats, besides the vaguest possible memory of what he needed to do.
Which made it all the more difficult to exin to his men why they needed to gather all this wood. Fortunately, most of them trusted him.
Most of them.
Byrrhon... continued to be a problem. He was starting fights more and more frequently, to the point where even his own men had started to distance themselves from him, afraid of what he would try to do to them; he would snap at the smallest things, ranting about how ''weak'' they had be. How they weren''t fighting monsters like they should have been, how they weren''t growing in experience and levels like they had when they were out there by themselves.
One or two of his men had even listened to that ranting and sided with him, up until Xothok pointed out that experience and levels had never been the point. The amount they got from banditry was minimal, and the monsters they actually fought were few and far between. If anything, they earned more experience whenever they picked up andpleted a Guild quest.
That fact did nothing to quell Byrrhon''s anger. He seemed convinced that fighting monsters in the wild was the only real way to progress, and no amount of reasoning got through to him. When all other arguments were exhausted, he would simply im that they would eventually have gotten more experience out of the old ways, which was... patently false.
Xothok didn''t know how to deal with him. He''d asked the Guild to leave dealing with Byrrhon up to him, but he was starting to regret that decision. Kothos was no help he mostly seemed sad whenever he looked at Byrrhon, and had no suggestions.
By now, they had done a few of those; mostly the low-level Nucleus quests, since those were the ones the Guild needed done most. The Guildmaster seemed grateful every time they returned with a new haul of shards, though it seemed strange that she was the one to personally handle processing their quest rewards. Each time they would sit down with one of the Guild''s clerks to discuss their strategies and what had eventually forced them to retreat from the Nucleus ways to optimise their builds, their skills.
They were growing stronger. All except for Byrrhon, who insisted on doing it all by himself. He told no one what his build was, and threatened to kill anyone that asked.
Xothok knew this wasing to a head. He knew if he didn''t find a solution for Byrrhon, the man would do something that would get some or all of them killed. He just hadn''t found any other solutions, and all of the Guild''s normal strategies didn''t seem to work with him.
"Uh, boss?" Morkar gestured to the pile of wood, pulling Xothok abruptly out of his thoughts. "What''re we s''pposed to do with those?"
"We have to build a catapult," Xothok replied without thinking, and red at his men when they all stared at him in confusion. "Don''t just look at me. Get building!"
"There a chance I can ask why?" Morkar stared at him skeptically.
"No," Xothok answered shortly.
It was something they''d alle to ept from him he couldn''t always exin what he asked them to do. In the time leading up to this he''d asked a number of his men to pick up new sses, losing their skills and several levels in the process; the Guild had a high-quality Fountain, but even it couldn''t make status changes free.
It was leading up to something, he promised, and the Guildmaster backed him up. It was... surprising, to him, they all trusted him.
He wasn''t nning on letting them down.
"Oh,e the fuck on." There was Byrrhon again, almost right on cue. Xothok nced at him with disinterest at first but a second look told him Byrrhon had acquired a new scar on his face from who knows where, and something about it felt strange. A feeling of deep difort that started to grow in his stomach. "Are you guys really going to follow him? He''s obviously gone nuts. He''s building a fucking catapult. What the fuck are we going to do with a catapult?"
"It''s hard to exin," Xothok said.
"Because you can''t fuckin'' exin it." Byrrhon got right up into his face, here, foul-smelling breath only inches away; Xothok didn''t flinch. He blinked once, slowly.
"Step back, Byrrhon."
"Maybe I don''t fuckin'' want to."
Xothok wasn''t blind. He saw both Two and Morkar moving in the back, his second- and third-inmand respectively. Byrrhon''s hand was hidden from him, angled cleverly so he wouldn''t be able to see if the man was reaching for anything which meant that he was, obviously.
"You''re a shit leader and we''re getting weak under you," Byrrhon growled.
To his credit, he didn''t mince any more words. Xothok was half-expecting him to continue to say some half-baked line about how it was time for new leadership, or something like that. Instead, one hand shed forward, blindingly fast.
Several thoughts went through Xothok''s head all at once.
One was that Byrrhon''s level was not what he said it was. The man was moving with the sort of speed he expected from a Silver ranked adventurer, or a Bronze ranker that had invested every point into dexterity. There was every chance that he was employing a Skill, but if he was, then it wasn''t anything he''d known Byrrhon had.
The second thought was that he had prepared himself for this exact situation, but he hadn''t quite prepared for Byrrhon to have grown. The man refused to participate in any of the quests they''d done; his assumption was that Byrrhon hadn''t grown at all, and that had clearly been a false assumption. The better question was perhaps how Byrrhon had been able to grow without participating in a single battle.
The third thought was about Byrrhon''s eyes. The man''s gaze held absolute hatred in them; there was not an ounce of empathy, or of the Byrrhon he''d known before all of this had started. He wondered, in an abstract sort of way, exactly when he''d lost the man he''d once thought of as a brother.
[Martial Navigation] kicked in.
He didn''t have enough speed topletey dodge Byrrhon''s stab; the best he could do was twist out of the way, and though the de only grazed him, Xothok was stunned at the amount of pain that shed through his body. He felt his health drain out of him almostpletely from that single grazed hit, and knew with certainty that if he hadn''t reacted that quickly if he hadn''t led so many missions himself, if he hadn''t had [Martial Navigation], if he hadn''t listened to Kothos whenever the other him taught him something new about his skills he would have died.
Xothok caught a glimpse of the de, and the pulse of his heart quickened; the feeling of difort expanded, and became a dread. The dagger was like nothing he''d seen before. The metal looked like hunger, given form. It was a bitter red that moved and shifted in his gaze, almost painful to look at.
A memory came to mind, unbidden.
There are dark secrets hidden in the stars, too. History does not discriminate; it contains everything, good and bad. Terrible dangers hide within the beauty of the past. Do not be blinded by the light.
But if Byrrhon had uncovered one of those secrets
He didn''t have time to think.
Byrrhon twisted powerfully as both Two and Morkar reached him, trying to restrain him; his strength alone was enough to fling both of them in opposite directions. Xothok didn''t need to look at the system to know that that move alone had cut down most of their health.
Shit.
"Archer team!" he called out. "Formation two! Fire at will!"
He didn''t check to see if they obeyed. He dove backwards, reaching into his Skills; he hadn''t yet changed his own ss, and thank the fucking gods for that.
[Steal], hemanded. If he could grab the dagger from Byrrhon
The skill failed. Xothok didn''t have time to look at the plethora of system windows that spilled out. Byrrhon closed in, and Xothok barely dodged; the dagger was a blur of red in his vision. [Martial Navigation] helped him here.
He just needed to calm down.
"Just like navigating the stars," Kothos muttered next to him. Something about his other self''s voice was soothing, calming; it helped him focus his mind. "You know how he''s going to move. You don''t need to react. You know where he''s going to be."
He did.
He calmed himself, and let the skill take over. He let it plot the future like it was a course in the sky, marking moments in time instead of space.
Step to the left to dodge a fist. Duck low next, to avoid the swing of a de. Two arrows will distract him, here. Step backward, and draw him forward. One arrow will strike him in the shoulder, the other in his neck.
He will survive. He will be angry.
Two more blows. One straight to your face, bottom left to top right; lean backward, and feint to the left, before he can recover. Step him into the path of another arrow. The pain will distract him.
He will try to hook you across the face, right to left. Transfer your dagger to your right hand. Grab a hold of his wrist with your left as it swings past.
Let his own strength carry your de into his heart. Twist. It will not do enough damage if you do not.
Xothok could have stopped himself. He realized what was about to happen before he did it, despite the state the skill lulled him into; he could have pulled out. He could have stopped himself from twisting the de.
He didn''t.
"Sorry, old friend," he said. "I tried."
He had. He''d given Byrrhon more chances than he should have, perhaps. It shouldn''t havee to this at all; he should have done something different. Tried to talk to him more, maybe. Locked him up somewhere until he came to his senses.
Xothok was vaguely aware that his de was sticky with blood, of the life fading from Byrrhon''s eyes. Part of him wanted to look away, but he forced himself to watch.
The hatred didn''t fade from Byrrhon''s eyes until his veryst breath.
147 - Book 3: Chapter 12: Interlude - Xothok - Inward Spiral
147 - Book 3: Chapter 12: Interlude - Xothok - Inward Spiral
Mercy was something that could only be afforded by the powerful.
That was the lesson Xothok had taken away from the fight between his team and the four adventurers that had utterly overwhelmed them. Derivan, Vex, Misa, Sev the names were practically burned into his head. They could have killed all of them, and as far as Xothok was concerned, they would have been justified in doing so.
They hadn''t. But they could afford not to; they were never in any danger. His team had never had that option. He''d thought that they''d moved beyond that, with all the progress they''d made, but...
It was clear that it wasn''t enough. The same logic he''d once used on the caravans they preyed upon overwhelming force, because they couldn''t guarantee that they would win if they showed one iota of mercy now reflected back on him in the death of his oldest friend.
He wondered when Byrrhon had changed so much, and he wondered when he''d made himself stop looking.
"We should hold a funeral," he said absently. It felt cold, the way he said it, like there was no real emotion behind his words; the truth was that Xothok didn''t really know how he felt. His other self stared at him with something like sympathy in his eyes, and didn''t say a word.
Xothok normally hated it when Kothos spoke, but now he found he missed having his input.
"Fer that scumbag?" Morkar snarled. "No offense, boss, but he was tryin'' to kill you. Almost did, too."
"Not just for him," Xothok said. He didn''t finish the thought. Instead, he walked over to the pile of wood still lying in the field. Byrrhon''s body could wait; they had a catapult to build.
Though he did send a quick message off to the Guildmaster first, just so she knew what had happened.
His men followed his lead, though they gave each other strange looks. The quests and working with the Guild they were fine with; though many of them bore a grudge against the Guild for rejecting them in the first ce, they were starting to understand that those were the actions of rogue members, rather than a general principle of the Guild in the first ce. In their time here, a few of them had managed to make friends, both with other adventuring teams and with the staff at the Guild.
They were, in other words, starting to fit in.
But this other project Xothok had? None of them could make heads nor tails of it. They knew, intellectually, that Xothok had exined what he was trying to do a number of times. They''d all seen the piece of paper onto which he''d drawn a picture of the night sky, and they all felt the same strange sense of odd familiarity.
That more than anything, perhaps, was the reason they all followed him despite not knowing exactly what all of this was for.
The work took hours, even with the help of a skill; in that time the Guildmaster had responded and sent someone to collect Byrrhon''s body, so Xothok didn''t have to look at it. Didn''t have to think about it. He kept himself focused on the work instead, until the final nail had been hammered into ce, and he stared at what they had constructed.
It was a piece of shit. It was clear everyone else felt that way, too, considering the dubious looks they were all giving the thing. But it didn''t need to be good. So long as it had a bare minimum of functionality...
"You will need to remember how to navigate," Kothos murmured, standing beside him. "Targeting is not enough. Space isplex, and reaching a star safely even moreso, even when the star is dead. Perhaps especially then."
"The fuck is supposed to mean?" Xothok asked. "It''s space. The whole thing''s empty."
"You''d think that." Kothos chuckled. "The neshifted thought that. Turns out space here is a little different. You''ll find out when you get there."
"Or you could fuckin'' tell me."
"Now where would the fun in that be?" Kothos smiled.
Infuriating ass. It was made all the worse by the reminder that Kothos was just another iteration of him, and he could absolutely picture himself acting that way in another life.
"You know what to do?" Xothok turned to Two. He was the only one that Xothok actually trusted to aim and fire the thing. He''d been surprisingly amenable to changing his ss, too.
Two nodded, but stayed silent, as he always did. Morkar folded his arms, staring skeptically at the catapult.
"Hate to say it, but this feels like a stupid idea, boss," the orc told him. "Ain''t gonna stop ya, but I am gonna say I told you so."
"Trust me, I know how stupid this looks," Xothok muttered, staring at the catapult. "But I don''t really have any other ideas."
Before he actually triedunching, though, he needed to reply to a message. He''d been putting it off for a few days he didn''t know how he felt about being sent a message by the very same adventurers that had captured them, and he couldn''t even phrase his response correctly if Kothos wasn''t around to remind him of what he had forgotten but now that he was about to embark on whatever this was...
Well, he needed a backup n, and as far as he was concerned, those adventurers owed him one.
The n was predicated on a lot of things they weren''t sure about, really.
One of them was whether or not theunch would even work. The system had been far from stable ofte, especially with the new failure of growth spells in Elyra; there was every chance thatunching Xothok out of a catapult would result in an impact that erased most of his health and did little else.
The second was whether or not the stars were dead, or gone entirely. The sky was dark, certainly; they had, at the very least, gone out. If his understanding of what Kothos had told him was correct, then their corpses should still be there in the sky, open to being explored... but maybe that was wrong, and even their corpses had been erased. If that were the case, then this would be a non-starter entirely.
The third was whether or not he could get back.
Fortunately, thest one was the one Xothok was most certain about; he''d enlisted the Guildmaster''s help for this one, asking for one of their mages to mark him with a [Return] rune. Short of something absurd like magic not functioning properly in space which Kothos had reassured him was not the case he was set to be able to return safely, just in front of the catapult. Two would be there to greet him, and Morkar would be leading the rest into other missions in the meantime. He didn''t exactly know how long this trip was supposed to take, after all.
All of this left him sitting in the catapult. Kothos was bnced on the edge beside him, defying the concepts of thews of physics; Xothok had never really thought about it, but he supposed as a mental construct, his other self didn''t really need to be concerned about things like bnce and weight andfort.
"This is nostalgic," Kothosmented. "Same setup as one of our firstunches... We got better after that, of course. At our prime we had a full observatory, with these metal structures within them that wouldunch our ships into the stars."
"I''m just wondering what idiot discovered this," Xothok grumbled. Kothos gave him a surprisingly sad smile.
"That''s a story for another time."
"Are you ready, sir?" Two asked him. His voice was soft-spoken and quiet, and almost didn''t carry all the way up to Xothok''s perch.
Xothok sighed.
"Yeah, go for it," he said.
He felt [Improved Target Selection] activating; there was a thrum that raced across his scales, and he shivered involuntarily. He didn''t see Two reach for the rope, or the dagger that cut across it but he imagined those things happening. Kothos just watched him, amused.
There was a beat. A pause.
Then he felt the protective cloak of a Skill wrapping around him more firmly, and a tremendous force as his seatunched him into the air at an angle that did not at all match where they had aimed the catapult. He felt himself elerating, which shouldn''t have been possible. He saw the ground receding away in the blink of an eye.
And then he was in space.
Kothos hadn''t followed him, and with the loss of his other self, his memories of what he was supposed to do or that there was an other self to summon at all were rapidly fading; he couldn''t reach for the ink drawing in his pocket that he knew would remind him, either, because at the speeds he was traveling at the paper would simply be ripped away from him.
He was protected to some degree. [Improved Target Selection] selected a target and guaranteed its arrival without the projectile being harmed, and in this case harm included things like ''death from not breathing'' and the like. But protection meant nothing if he couldn''t remember what he was supposed to do.
To stave off panic, Xothok closed his eyes. It wasn''t like there was anything ahead of him to see, anyway. There was just an infinite dark expanse that felt cold and wrong, and he didn''t want to look at it for longer than necessary.
The moment he did, a brilliant array lit up in his mind. Xothok opened his eyes again, startled, and it vanished just as quickly; once again in front of him was that endless void.
He frowned. He closed his eyes again
Once more, a small field of brilliant points of light appeared behind his eyelids, in his mind''s eye.
"Oh," he said, though the word was lost quickly to the wind.
But it was strange, wasn''t it, that there was wind at all?
That realization made the wind around him die down. He''d already arrived, he realized; the idea that he was still traveling was just anotheryered illusion, built by the expectations of his mind.
He recalled the response Misa had sent him, startlingly fast. [Be careful,] she had said. [You''re going to go out of range of the anchors that way. We''re not sure exactly what''s there, but it''s probably not going to be what you expect. If we''re right about where you are, then you might be in a liminal space don''t ask me what that means, Vex used the term, not me where direction of thought influences direction of movement. That might not make sense until you''re there.]
He had, of course, replied with [I have no idea what the fuck you''re talking about.] and left it at that.
Now, though, the meaning of her words were a little more clear. Whenever he focused on one of those points of light, he found himself drifting closer toward it
[Are you okay?]
The message pinged, unexpected, from Two. Xothok blinked at it, surprised, then answered [For now.]
It was the first time any of his men had checked up on him, even Two. How strange.
Xothok dismissed it for now and reached for the drawing he kept in his pocket, and let the image mentally drag him in; allowed the aching familiarity to suffuse his being. It served as a reminder that he''d once been someone else
"They''re waypoints," Kothos said, appearing as a strangely well-lit phenomenon in the void. He sounded wistful. "Not stars. Just markers we left for each other, exploring... whatever this ce is. Every one of them should be near a star."
And yet it all looked so empty. Kothos hadn''t needed to say the words; Xothok could see could feel it for himself, how achingly empty the space felt, even filled with light like this.
"Might as well give it a try," he muttered, mostly to himself; Kothos nodded beside him, but he ignored him. He had his own storm of emotions to deal with without having to deal with the infuriatingly calm other version of himself. Something like fear, anger, some guilt he was certain he wouldn''t have felt if it wasn''t for the damn Guild
He was moving, he realized. One of the waypoints was darker than the others, and unlike most of the others, there was something next to it. Not a star nothing like a star should have been.
The corpse of a star, perhaps. Except even that descriptor was insufficient. He saw burnt and desated ruins made of crimson flesh, and as he directed his mind towards the thought of it, he felt himself drift closer.
"I don''t think you should go there," his other self told him. Kothos sounded, for once, nervous.
"Fuck you," Xothok answered.
Part of him knew it wasn''t the best response. Kothos had a point. There was something about this ce that repulsed him. But he couldn''t have pulled himself away if he wanted to. Even when he tried to cast his mind to other waypoints that seemed like they might have something next to them, Byrrhon''s hate-filled expression jumped back into his mind. The way he''d stared at him as he died stuck in his mind.
And those thoughts, too, drew him ever closer to those ruins.
"Navigators need rity of mind," Kothos said. "You can''t dwell on your emotions"
"I said fuck you," Xothok repeated. He wasn''t exining shit to his copy. What right did he have to say anything? Kothos had experienced none of the hardship he had; he''d lived a cushy life as a fucking noble.
Some small part of Xothok recognized the spiral his mind was in, maybe.
But not enough to break out of it.
148 - Book 3: Chapter 13: Interlude - Xothok - Intervention
148 - Book 3: Chapter 13: Interlude - Xothok - Intervention
The ground squelched under Xothok''s feet, and he barely suppressed the disgusted grimace that crawled through his frame. He was distantly aware that everything here was a product of his mind, or so Kothos imed, but it didn''t make any of this feel any less real.
Stepping over viscera was not how he had pictured the day going.
"It''s not real," Kothos said, for perhaps the third time, and Xothok leveled a re at him.
"So you''ve said," he said, his voiceing out as a half-growl. Kothos chuckled nervously.
"Sorry," he said. "I''m reminding myself more than anything."
Kothos couldn''t dismiss himself here nor could Xothok dismiss him. Whatever odd confluence of skills had created him to begin with, it seemed at odds with the nature of this ce; he''d attempted to dismiss himself once or twice, and Xothok had certainly tried to banish him a few times, and nothing had happened.
Xothok had to admit he felt a grim sort of satisfaction at his other self''s clear difort, but that didn''t do much to distract him from the pull this ce had. He walked past row after row of burned shelves. Even ignoring the fact that the shelves were made of flesh, he couldn''t do much to ignore the acrid smell that pervaded his nostrils, or the clouds of ash kicked up from the ground from what looked like the burned remains of books.
It was ironic, really, that surrounded by such horror all he could think about was Byrrhon''s face in the moment of his death.
"What did you mean?" Xothok asked, trying his best to distract himself. "When you said this ce is ''a product of the mind'', or whatever."
"Oh," Kothos said. He seemed grateful to have a topic totch on to. "From what we know about the Libraries, they all respond to who you are as a person. Some people just see it as a regr library, the kind you''d find in Elyra."
Xothok didn''t bother telling his other self that he''d never been to a library in Elyra.
"Some people see the Libraries as these beautiful shelves built into massive oak trees. Others see tall shelves of gleaming metal, stocked high with books. It''s unique to every person, and we could share our vision of the Libraries with one another..." Kothos'' voice trailed off.
"It''s never looked like this, though," he said quietly.
Xothok didn''t respond for a moment. When he did, it was with a biting sort of sarcasm. "Maybe this is just what the Libraries look like to me. They respond to ''who you are as a person'', right?"
"I-I didn''t mean it like that," Kothos said, sounding off-kilter for perhaps the first time since they''d started speaking. "I''m sure it isn''t just you. The stars are dead there''s no reason the rules are going to stay the same. Besides! If the effect was still active, I''d see something different from you, right? I used to see the shelves as these wonderful abstractions of light and music, where a different note would bring forward a different book"
"I don''t know if you''ve noticed," Xothok interrupted, sick of hearing how wonderful his other self had it. "But you''re in my head. You''re not exactly another person."
At that, Kothos fell silent. A sh of hurt flickered across his expression, smoothed away a split secondter; he fell into step beside Xothok, and said nothing else.
Good, Xothok told himself. He ignored the small thread of guilt that speared him, and focused on finding... whatever he was supposed to find, here.
Truth be told, he didn''t know what he was doing.
He knew he was trying to find out what happened to the stars. It felt like a part of his life had been ripped away from him it was true that a part of his life had been ripped away from him, even. This was a way for him to explore his heritage, but what was the point, really? It wasn''t like he could fix the damn stars.
Even if he knew what happened to them, what would that aplish?
Xothok did his best to dismiss these darker thoughts as they crowded into his mind, but there was only so much he could do; the corpse of the star served only as a reminder of his murder of Byrrhon, and the silence crowded out the whisper of rationality. Kothos had helped, before, as loath as he was to admit it but now his other self was silent, too, just trailing quietly behind him.
Xothok didn''t even know where he was going. He was letting his feet lead him in the direction of that pull he felt, though he would be hard-pressed to describe the nature of that pull. He walked past a half-dozen books that had actually survived the burning in the process, and ignored every one of them, though a small part of his mind whispered they should be significant.
Over here, the pull whispered.
When Xothok stopped, it was in front of a man. Someone else. He stared at the figure in front of him briefly, entirely nonplussed; this was thest thing he had expected to find. The man stood in front of what looked like a shard of bitter red, pulsing and rotating in the air just behind him. Even a second of looking at the thing filled him with a deep... resentment.
"Hello," the man said, smiling at him. There was nothing pleasant about that smile. rm bells rang in Xothok''s head, but he continued to stare impassively. He couldn''t make himself move. "You must be Byrrhon''s friend."
"Friend?" Xothok let out a bitterugh. "Fucker tried to kill me. He wasn''t my friend."
Except he had been.
Kothos was yelling at him, but his other self''s words filtered past him, somehow prevented from reaching him. That felt wrong, too.
The rm bells rang louder.
But he''d already known something was wrong when walking into all this, hadn''t he? Maybe he''d chosen this. The red glow of the crystal made it difficult for him to think; it filled him with a bitter hatred...
It looked remarkably like Byrrhon''s dagger, in fact. Something deep inside him something ugly twisted, and he took a slow step forward; the man stepped aside easily, almost encouraging him forward. Kothos tried to pull him back, but the man''s hands were immaterial to him. He wasn''t physical.
What was he going to do, even if he figured out what happened to the stars? What was he going to do now? It looked like his men were in a better ce, sure, but now that he''d killed Byrrhon, the Guildmaster would surely decide he was a danger. If he took power into his own hands now, if he just reached out
A small box popped up in front of him.
[Just let us know if you need anything,] Two sent.
[What you did there ain''t easy,] Morkar said. He could imagine the look on the orc''s face gruff, but respectful. [But we''re behind you every step of the way. I dunno what happened to him, but that was fucked up.]
"What are you waiting for?" the man behind him asked. He sounded... strangely concerned. Xothok looked back at him, and saw the dagger reflected in his eyes.
rity cut through to Xothok''s mind, like someone had ripped away the cobwebs hanging over his thoughts.
He scowled.
"You''re the fucker that got to him, aren''t you?" he said.
The man narrowed his eyes at Xothok. "Clever," he said. "I had a lock on your system. You shouldn''t have"
He paused, seeming to gaze past Xothok and into the distance. He frowned. "Ah," he said.
Xothok looked behind him, but there was nothing there. And when he looked back, the man was gone, too; the crystal, the blood and flesh and viscera. All that was left were shelves of in steel, and a few books that had survived a terrible fire.
"Xothok?" Kothos said, his voice wide and frantic; he seemed relieved when Xothok turned his gaze over to him. "Oh, good, you can hear me again. Are you okay? I don''t know what happened, but you just..."
Kothos gestured vaguely, unable to find the words. Xothok sighed.
"I''m okay," he said. "I''m, uh. I''m fucking sorry. About just now."
Kothos paused and stared at him. "Did something happen?"
"Are you going to ept the apology or not?" Xothok snapped.
"...Sure," Kothos said, his voice uncertain. "Are you sure you''re okay?"
"Absolutely fucking not," Xothok said. Strangely, Kothos looked relieved, and Xothok thought he understood why.
Better than hiding that fact from himself, he supposed.
He looked around at the charred remains of the library. He still didn''t know what he was going to do here. He still didn''t think he was going to be able to fix the stars. But getting some answers was at least a start.
Especially if it told him who the fuck messed with his family.
[Thanks,] he sent in reply, before he could forget. If Two and Morkar hadn''t sent him those messages... he didn''t want to think about what could have happened.
"Okay," he said out loud. He nced around himself in some distaste, and forced the next words out of his mouth. "Let''s... read some books."
"Finally," Kothos said, rubbing his hands together in glee. Xothok just stared at him.
Sometimes he really couldn''t believe they were the same person.
"Misa, the connection''s cut." Vex was patting the half-orc in question on the shoulder.
"Yeah, but it feels fuckin'' good to do this," Misa replied. She kept both her middle fingers up for another second more before finally crossing her arms. "You sure we got it?"
"We did." Derivan nodded, sitting himself down.
Reaching outside the bonus room was... exhausting. It involved abination of Shift and Patch, operated at a level ofplexity that he''d never had to deal with before; on top of that, undoing someone else''s modifications to the system, across entire echoes of reality? It was the farthest he''d ever stretched those skills.
The fact that Misa had wanted a visual projection just to give Irvis the finger hadn''t helped, of course, but he had to admit that it was satisfying to watch.
He was d that they''d trained this in time, though, and that they''d prepared before Xothok hadunched. It had taken about a week in total to get his understanding of both Shift and Patch to that extent, and they hadn''t known exactly what wasing: only that something wasing.
And that warning hade from Sev, of all people.
The cleric was sitting by the side, his head in his hands. He had a headache, he imed. His own training to connect with the gods hade much further, but he''d refused to say anything about it, repeating again and again that it wasn''t time yet.
Which was only something that Derivan and the others were willing to ept for so long, especially when Sev looked more and more haggard every time he said it. It had been weeks ago that whatever bound him had started to snap, and yet even now it hadn''tpletely broken. There was the possibility that the bond was snapping in real time, and was taking ten times longer now that they were in dted time...
But Derivan was tired of waiting, and so were Vex and Misa. They hated seeing Sev like this.
"Sev," Derivan said. He kept his voice gentle. "I believe it is time. If you will not break it yourself"
"No," Sev said, shaking his head. Derivan was prepared to argue, but he saw the look in Sev''s eyes he looked tired. "No, you''re right," he repeated. "It''s time. Let''s just... go somewhere nice to talk about this. Maybe that cafe in the town."
"Sure," Misa said, looking at him suspiciously. Sev gave her a tired smile, and she seemed to rx, epting him at face value. "Yeah, okay," she said with a sigh. "You look like you need some coffee, anyway."
"Believe me," Sev said with a snort. "I need so much coffee."
149 - Book 3: Chapter 14: Myths and Mochas
149 - Book 3: Chapter 14: Myths and Mochas
Clyde''s inn was nice andfortable, but the Horizon cafe had be a second haunt for them in the past few weeks. There was something about the aroma and ambience of the ce that kept it wonderfullyforting, and thatfort was something they needed, after the training.
They didn''t stick together anymore notpletely. Each of them had different things to work on, and couldn''t always work on those things in close vicinity with the others; eventually, they had agreed it would be best if they sought out training on their own, especially if there were others in the town that would help them.
In Mundane, there weren''t. But Combat, it turned out, wasn''t very far away, and that was a true adventurer''s town.
All of which was beside the point. They sat in a private booth in Horizon, enhanced by various protection magics that both the cafe owner and Belle had independently confirmed were very foolproof, and Sev sat on one side, nervously sipping his cup of coffee.
Misa sat next to him, mostly so she wouldn''t intimidate him by sitting across from him. Derivan and Vex sat together, and projected a concerted effort of looking very worried about Sev.
Sev, in turn, sighed.
"I still don''t remember much," he started. "But I''ve made a breakthrough in that I''m able to talk to Aurum again. He''s... a lot more scared and uncertain than he was before. It was pretty easy to distract him at first, but now it''s like he can''t think about anything but the end of the gods."
"He is just a kid," Misa said softly.
"Yup," Sev said with a sigh. "Someone like that shouldn''t have the responsibility he does, but... here we go. Apparently he''s been figuring out how to get in contact with the gods that have been erased."
"So they''re notpletely gone?" Vex perked up.
"It''s hard to erase a godpletely," Sev said. "Apparently."
"What does all this have to do with you?" Misa asked. "I''m worried about him, too, but..."
Sevughed. "Can''t get anything past you guys, huh?"
"Sev." Misa''s voice was serious.
"I know." Sev''s gaze dropped, and he looked at the table for a long moment; he held his mug of coffee in both of his hands, closed his eyes, and took a slow sip. He let himself marinate in the aroma for a second before he said anything more. "As far as I can tell, Onyx and I came up with some kind of n... a really long time ago. The locks you see on my soul, my system, my future whatever those are all locks I signed myself up for."
"Didn''t you say that happened when you tried to save Onyx?" Vex asked hesitantly.
"I did say that," Sev said. He smiled a sardonic sort of smile, though it seemed more self-deprecating than anything else. "It''s what I remember. And I''m pretty sure it happened. But even before that, apparently, I sealed my own fate... somehow."
"Still not clear on the details?" Misa asked.
"Nope." Sev let out a frustrated sigh, and let his head sink into his hands. "I''m not trying to hide this from you guys, I swear. But I just... I have to trust myself, right? This is a n I came up with. Apparently."
"Well," Misa said. "I''d agree with you, but your sense of self-preservation kinda sucks, no offense."
"If you built in some sort of grand self-sacrifice in there, we''re going to fight you," Vex added.
"I''m not that bad," Sev muttered. He nced around at both Misa and Vex who said nothing to this pronouncement and gave him a slightly skeptical look instead before turning a slightly desperate look to thest member of their party. "Derivan?"
"You are better now," the armor allowed. "But you wandered into the dungeon I was in, alone and underleveled. I am not certain I trust the decisions you made prior to that to bear in consideration your true value."
Sev scowled a bit, folding his arms obstinately. He knew Derivan was right, it was just...
It was funny. Derivan talked about his true value like it was a simple fact; he allowed for no contention, no argument in his tone of voice.
Sev looked down and then away. Something in him responded to that assurance what felt like an old memory and yet...
"Is there anything else you know?" Misa asked. "Everything''sing to a head. Derivan says he sees something happening with your system, and even Clyde mentioned something about your time being almost up. There''s gotta be something."
"I think..." Sev began. He hesitated but he saw Misa staring at him, worried; he saw Vex watching him with trepidation, and he saw the concern in Derivan''s eyes. He sighed. "I think it''s been like that for a long time," he said softly. "I think I''ve been around for a long time, maybe. A lot longer than twenty-five years. I don''t... remember any of it. But it''s what makes the most sense."
Misa frowned. "Are you sure?" she asked. "Immortality isn''t exactly..."
"I know, I know," Sev said. "I age normally, as far as I know. That answer''s notplete. But it feels right. I''ve been around for twenty-five-ish years, I don''t think that''s wrong, I just... also think I''ve maybe been around for much longer than that."
There was a long silence.
"Sorry," Sev said awkwardly. "I know that doesn''t actually tell us much."
"Don''t apologize," Misa snorted. She flicked the air in front of him, creating a small gust of wind that blew his hair out of his eyes; Sev blinked rapidly at the sudden onught of air into his eyeballs.
"Ow," heined.
"Don''t apologize for dumb things and I won''t have to do that," Misa said unrepentantly. She looked, if anything, entirely delighted that she''d discovered a new little trick she could do.
"It''s a start," Vex said thoughtfully, on his side of the table; his ws tapped briefly on the table, and he took a sip from his (overly sweetened, as far as Sev was concerned he''d seen the mound of sugar that Vex had practically poured into the thing) coffee, and his tail wagged back and forth slowly. "What you told us, I mean. It doesn''t leave a lot of options on the table for what could be happening."
"You have an idea?" Sev asked. "Because I''d kill for an idea right now."
He paused. "Uh, not actually. You know what I mean."
Vex snorted. "Not any good ones," he said. "There''s only a few ways for you to be older than you are." He counted them off his ws. "Reincarnation is one, but as far as we know that''s just a tale from the neshifted. You could be getting your age and memory reset, but I can''t see a reason for that. It might not be you that''s old maybe it''s just the system attached to you but we don''t have any evidence that individual parts of the system would stay coherent like that."
"With the exception of what I can sense with Patch," Derivan said. "Which does suggest a personal system that attaches to a person''s soul andmunicates with a greater system, forck of better terminology."
"There is that," Vex allowed.
"There is a more important question, I feel." Derivan''s gaze fixed itself on Sev; he wasn''t just looking at him, he was almost looking through him. Sev shifted ufortably underneath the armor''s piercing gaze. "All these questions answer what you could be, but we still do not know what ising. Your bonds are falling away. Every sense I have tells me something ising to a head with you. Even Clyde and the rest of the shadows here have the same feeling. Yet you have remained on this precipice...
"If you have any idea of what ising, Sev, I believe we deserve to know." Derivan''s gaze stayed steady.
Sev didn''t answer for a long moment. It wasn''t that he was hesitating, far from it he was searching his mind for an answer. Derivan was right, but...
"I don''t," Sev said with a sigh. "I wish I did. I have some ideas from my training, from what I''ve heard from Aurum and from the other gods I''ve been in contact with through him but none of the answers are anything concrete. But I can talk about that; I''ve been meaning to, anyway, and it might give us another point of data."
He nced around, and no one protested. Misa nodded at him to continue. Sev took a breath.
"One thing that''s clear is that the majority of the gods don''t know about this. They know the gods are disappearing; they don''t know why. They don''t know what the system is for. They don''t know that it''s cannibalizing them. They can''t know, even. Aurum knows because of his connection with me, but anytime he''s tried to tell anyone else..."
"Infolock?" Vex asked softly.
"Infolock," Sev agreed with a soft, bitterugh. "Or, well, we know what it is, now. Imagine an apocalypse you can''t know about, because the very nature of it is that it''s self-censoring; the only tool we have to know about it gets to pick and choose who''s allowed to remember, and no one''s in charge of that tool anymore, as far as we know."
"Not the Administrators?" Derivan prompted. "We have seen mention of them in the system."
Sev shook his head.
"That''s one of the things Aurum was trying to investigate," he said. "As far as we can tell, there aren''t any Administrators left. There are automated programs in the system that can fulfill the role of an Administrator, but they''re locked into responding to situations in very specific ways. The only time they can do anything different is when the gods do something about it."
"Except the gods don''t know that anything''s wrong," Misa said.
"Most of them don''t." Sev frowned. "The ones that do... This is where it gets a littleplicated. It''s the reason Aurum was gone for so long. You guys remember where we first got the reality anchor that Misa has, right?"
"How could I forget?" Misa snorted.
"That ce was weird," Vexmented. "It didn''t feel... real."
"You can''t anchor reality from inside reality," Sev said. "So when we were there, we were on the outside, looking in. Any gods that get erased are kind of sitting there, too, outside reality slowly disintegrating, and being fed into the anchors."
Vex blinked, feeling a small chill run down his spine. "Then the voices we heard"
"Onyx and another forgotten god," Sev confirmed. "Onyx has some protection, because of what I did when I healed him. Aurum can visit that space because he''s got a link with me. The other gods are just... kept there, away from the divine ne."
"Do we know what the Overseers are, then?" Derivan asked this question with a small frown in his eyes.
"Best guess is that it''s a system defense powered by the gods," Sev said. "But that''s one of the things we haven''t really managed to figure out. Aurum''s... in recovery. He spent too much time out there let''s just call it the Void, for ease of reference and his angels tried to get him toe back, but apparently he was very insistent about finding some of the forgotten gods."
Sev sighed. "He shouldn''t have to do all this," he said quietly. "I''ve tried to get him not to, but once he''s gotten an idea in his head it''s hard to get him not to do it. It doesn''t help that our bond drains me to protect him when he''s out in the Void, and I don''t think he fully understands the cost of exploring out there."
"Shit." Misa winced a bit. "Do you need help talking to him?"
"I might." Sev smiled a small smile. "I did manage to convince him toe back, but mostly by telling him about the Glyph Festival that''sing up. He''s excited to be able to experience his first. So you might have to deal with an overexcited god for a little bit tomorrow."
"Oh! The Festival is tomorrow." Vex bounced up in his seat. "I almost forgot. Clyde asked if I wanted to do a show."
"Are you going to?" Sev raised an eyebrow at his friend.
"I''m going to try." Vex looked suddenly worried. "We don''t have anything scheduled tomorrow, right? Anything we need to interfere with?"
"Nope," Misa said, eyeing a system window and then shaking her head. "Nah, you''re good. Looking forward to your show, Vex."
Vex grinned, and then waved a hand to order another cup of coffee. Sev paused.
"Isn''t that your third cup today...?"
"Don''t worry about it."
150 - Book 3: Chapter 15: Festival
150 - Book 3: Chapter 15: Festival
It was remarkable, the degree to which the town of Mundane changed.
For one day and one day only, the shadows didn''t have to worry about keeping the town as in and simple as possible; they could decorate and rearrange as much as they wished, and they seemed to take the opportunity to really let loose with their creativity. It almost made Sev a little sad to look at it. He wondered if this was the town they would build, if they had the opportunity. Maybe if they fixed whatever was wrong with reality...
Except you don''t know how to do that, a small voice whispered to him. And this entire reality is just an echo, isn''t it? They''re going to be gone once the bonus room ends.
Sev tried to ignore that voice. His past self had a n. That much had to be true. Why else would his instincts be nudging him in all these distinct directions?
Instead, he tried to focus on what the citizens of Mundane had done to spruce up their town.
The observatory was, quite literally, inside-out. The expanse of stars floated in a projected dome around the building, a little less majestic than being within the building, but nevertheless a sight to behold. Constetions danced in the air, and Sev saw no small number of shadow elementals gathering near the observatory just to watch; he remembered what Belle had said before, about how it would be entirely crowded if they left it open to the public.
She hadn''t been lying the throng of people gathered outside the observatory, both from Mundane and otherwise, was immense. But it was far from the only ce people gathered.
The only festival Sev had been to in recent memory, if it could be called a festival at all, was the celebration that Misa''s parents had held in J''rokksur what felt like a year ago, though in practice it had only been a few months. That had been a small celebration, full of good food and good music and awkward dancing.
This was... different. There was an undertone of familiarity to it that Sev hade to associate with his own lost memories; he could only assume that he''d been to simr festivals back on Earth, though he could hardly remember what they were.
It wasn''t just the observatory that was decorated like this. The clothing store had a fantastical disy just outside, where enchanted mannequins wore extravagant dresses and tailored suits and danced with impossible fluidity.
The bakery had its doors wide open, and the rich smell of freshly baked bread wafted out of it; just outside the door was an immense shelf that looked like it had been baked from bread, a baffling ode to the structural integrity of bread that Sev wasn''t entirely sure was actually urate.
...Now that he looked more closely, he was fairly certain that that particr shadow had transformed her entire building into bread.
Which made Sev mildly ufortable for reasons he didn''t entirely understand. But it was cool.
Their chosen haunt the Horizon cafe had simrly thrown its doors wide open, allowing the rich smell of coffee to pervade the air just around it; unlike the bakery, there was no real disy of their goods. Instead, the staff there had put out a number of tables and chairs for people to sit in and enjoy the atmosphere whenever they needed a break. It wasn''t the busiest ce in the festival, but there were always people there, either stopping by to chat, to grab a snack, or to sit and watch the festival for a while.
It wasn''t just Mundane that had shows and disys up, either. Combat was here, too, and they had their own disys set up all over town though the vors of their shows were certainly very different. There were at least three wizards showing off feats of destructive magic, cast at a small scale so as to not destroy the entire town. One part of town flickered with forked lightning every few minutes, sting apart the reflective panes in the sky; another had a heatless whirlwind of fire twirling through the crowd in a remarkable disy of control and efficiency; still another was using earth magic to buildplicated structures, in a rare example ofbat magic turned to art.
Thatst one was the one that captured Vex''s attention the most, and the whole party had to stop for a few minutes while the lizard stood and gawked. Basalt the wizard''s name, rather appropriately had a series of small buildings set up next to one another. He would use his magic to fire a shot of earth at thergest one, and it would copse in a way that built on the building just next to it, adding on to the detail and finesse rather than causing it to copse as well.
Somehow the gargoyles, hanging off the sides in the first building, wouldnd perfectly intact on the second, bnced all around the roof so that it looks like they were watching over it. By the third, they were crushed, but the stone cracked and broke in a distinct pattern, held in ce by minute gaps and holes in the structure of the building...
And so on. That was just one detail out of a dozen, and Sev didn''t manage to catch most of them; even Vex, rapidly taking notes in his notebook, didn''t seem to capture them all. Basalt seemed to notice the little lizard, though, and grinned all the wider. The next couple of demolitions were just a little bit shier, too, with sparks and shes of light incorporated into the whole thing.
Sev thought Basalt was probably cheating, but Vex didn''t seem to think so, and he didn''t want to ruin it for his friend, anyway.
They did have to leave the demonstration eventually; they had to be present for the Glyph unveiling, and Vex had his own little demonstration of magic that he''d prepared. He''d asked a couple of times why they wanted him to give a presentation, and the answer each time was simple he was from outside their culture, partaking in it, and they wanted to learn about how his interpretation of magic changed how it behaved. It was what they did with every neer they taught magic, even if Vex hadn''t been personally taught by them.
He''d very nervously agreed, and then shut himself in his room to practice, not allowing any of them to see what he''d prepared.
Sev was kind of excited, really. He was excited for the Glyph unveiling, too Derivan hadn''t really exined much about what the Glyph did, even though he''d had the time to experiment and understand it fully by now.
It''d be a nice distraction from his own troubles.
"Okay. Um," Vex said. He stood on his toes, wringing his hands together and looking nervous; he took a trembling breath, and Sev saw the way he nced at Derivan, at the look that passed between them. Just that look and Vex''s trembling seemed to settle, and his breathing steadied. He gave them all a small smile. "I gotta go get ready for my presentation."
"You''re gonna be fuckin'' great," Misa said, giving him a thumbs up. "Give ''em hell."
"I mean, that''s not exactly what I''m going for," Vex said,ughing.
"Not literally, obviously." Misa rolled her eyes at Vex''s bright grin, but couldn''t help smiling back. "You know what I meant."
"Break a leg!" Sev said, and then when Vex looked at him, hurriedly added, "It''s a neshifted saying!"
Vex snickered, then sobered up a bit. "Thanks, guys," he said. "It feels... kinda weird to be doing all this? When the stakes are so high?"
"We''re going to need a break sometime, and a time-dted bonus room is basically the best time to do it," Sev said with a shrug. Misa nodded in agreement.
"Good luck," Derivan said to Vex. His tone of voice was softer, more personal than when he spoke to the other two. Sev had seen the way he''d changed now whenever he spoke to Vex, even if it was a minor, barely noticeable thing. It still made him smile. "I look forward to your show."
"I look forward to yours!" Vex grinned up at him and bounced up to peck him on the helmet, then disappeared behind the ''stage'' that had been set up. Sev blinked a few times.
His friends had changed a lot, hadn''t they?
Vex wasn''t nearly as nervous as he had been a few months ago, when every little thing made him jump. It wasn''t his rtionship with Derivan that had changed him, either, though it certainly seemed to help that they had each other. It was the confidence he had gained in his magic, the few messages he''d sent back and forth with members of his family.
Sev looked at him and saw a spark that wasn''t fear about what would happen to his brother, but determination to protect him. It made his heart glow it made him feel like a great wrong had been righted.
Misa was alive. She''d been depressed for a few days after their defeat, but she''d bounced back with more attitude than ever. Sev was pretty sure she''d actually started putting on more muscle.
"Like what you see?" Misa grinned at him, flexing an arm, and Sev rolled his eyes.
"You''re very pretty, but no thank you," he said politely.
Misa smirked at him. "Belle and her husbands are pretty into it."
"...What?"
"I''ll see youter! Looking forward to Vex''s show!" Misa was, somehow, already leaving, heading straight towards one of the other Combat disys she seemed eager to participate in a duel, against an arrogant-looking man that was looking for challengers. Sev stared after her, and Derivan just tilted his head at him in turn.
"Are you surprised?"
"I No?" Sev managed. "Yes, but also, somehow no."
Derivan chuckled. "Vex''s show will start in the evening, and mine will be at the Glyph revtion in the evening," he said. "Would you like to explore on your own, or would you like to perhaps explore together? We do not speak alone often I would like a moment with you, if you do not mind."
"Oh," Sev said, surprised. He didn''t know why he hadn''t expected that from Derivan he''d somehow gotten used to fading into the background, for all that he was ostensibly their leader.
Derivan had changed a lot, too, though his changes weren''t nearly as obvious as Misa''s or Vex''s. He seemed to understand himself more, forck of a better word and he understood them more in turn. Always kind, always open; he knew exactly what to say most of the time to calm a person, or to get through to them.
Sev wondered, though, if the armor had found what he wanted for himself yet.
Derivan was still waiting for a response. Sev blinked a few times, then nodded, managing an awkward smile. "I''d like that," he said.
They walked in silence for a while. The noise of the festival faded around them, and for a moment, Sev felt like he was left alone with his thoughts, for all that Derivan was walking next to him.
It was a quiet peace he hadn''t known he needed. It waspanionable silence between him and a close friend, undisturbed by the world.
Eventually, though, he broke the silence. "Was there something you wanted to talk about?" he asked. "It sounded like you had something in mind."
"Not in particr." Derivan chuckled, the sound resonant in his armor. He slowed down slightly as he spoke, taking a moment to absorb the sights they had just so happened to stop near the observatory, where the stars still flickered in the sky.
He watched in silence for a moment, and Sev feltpelled to join him.
The stars spun. One burst into fragments of color, likely an exaggeration for the disy; it still brought forth gasps of shock and awe and joy from the crowd around them, muted though the sound was.
"Are you the one doing that?" Sev feltpelled to ask.
Derivan inclined his head. "The sound dampening?"
"Yeah."
"It is an application of Shift," Derivan said.
"Pretty useful, that."
"Quite." Derivan hummed. "I acquired Shift from Histre, when they neshifted back to the divine ne, after that battle with Jerome... Do you suppose he is doing well?"
"Jerome?" Sev tilted his head. "I hope so. Last I saw him, he was trying. Maybe it''s worth checking in on him sometime, just to see how he''s doing."
"I can aplish that, now," Derivan said.
"Can''t do that again unless necessary," Sev said, shaking his head. "It''s going to be necessary again soon. We have a huge advantage helping with everything that''s happening out there as long as we''re in here, but..."
"But the use of Shift to ess the world outside destabilizes this echo of reality," Derivanpleted the thought. "The more we learn, the more limited our options seem."
"Do you feel like there isn''t hope?" Sev asked.
He felt that way sometimes, in the privacy of his own mind. He didn''t know if any of the others felt the same way. The universe had ended, and neither the gods nor the system nor the embodiment of all magic could fix it.
What hope did they have? They were just four people. A few more, perhaps, with their allies and the Guild, but...
"No," Derivan answered, surprisingly easily. Sev looked at him, raising an eyebrow.
"Why not?" he asked, and Derivan paused for a moment to consider the question.
Another silence stretched, long. This time, the silence seemed oppressive; Sev felt his thoughts crowding in.
"I suppose I hope because I must," Derivan mused. "If I did not, I would not bepelled to act; it would be self-fulfilling. And so I must believe that the world can be brighter than it is, that every spark I contribute to the me of civilization helps. Because the good oue the oue in which the world is fair and kind can never exist if no one believes in it."
"But the world isn''t going to be fair and kind," Sev said. He felt once again almost familiar with this, like this was a conversation he''d had before. The sensation of floating underwater and a strange, sick feeling of ustrophobia clung to him. "By sheer stochastic probability."
"That is true." Derivan inclined his head, smiling slightly; Sev couldn''t understand why he was smiling. "But it will be kinder than it would be otherwise.
"That, I think, is sufficient."
151 - Book 3: Chapter 16: An Act of Kindness
151 - Book 3: Chapter 16: An Act of Kindness
Sev didn''t answer for a while. He watched the stars spin above them, felt the anxiety rise and fall; eventually, it left him, and he let out a slow breath.
The emotion wasn''t his own. Not exactly. He didn''t know where it hade from, but Derivan''s words had struck a chord within him, calling forth a memory. The dissonance he felt wasn''t even from the memory itself it was from the way it rubbed up against the rest of his thoughts, jarring and not quite his own.
He let it go. He''d been having more of these episodestely, shes of memory that didn''t seem toe from Earth; echoes of conversations he''d never had. Maybe it had something to do with his link to the gods. Maybe it was nothing at all.
More important were Derivan''s words.
"I think you''re right," Sev eventually said. He let the silence stretch again after that statement, searching for the words. "Or... I think you put into words how I feel about it, anyway. I try to think that way. It doesn''t always work out."
"Sometimes it is difficult," Derivan agreed. "But I have never found it not worthwhile."
"You haven''t been out here for very long."
"That is true," Derivan acknowledged. "Perhaps my mind will change. But I hope it does not. And if it does... I will have you still, I hope, to rekindle my hope."
Sev chuckled. "Very poetic."
"I have been reading quite a lot."
"Anything good?"
"Most of them," Derivan said, considering the question. "It may be worth your time to take a look at some of the books. I have been informed that they do not necessarily reflect the history of this world, or the books that were written here; perhaps the nature of this ce as a temte, drawing on any avable information..."
"Are you saying they might have books from Earth?" Sev sat up suddenly.
"No," Derivan said, dashing his hopes. "Or perhaps they do. I do not know, and there are none here I can ask. But you would know better than I."
"No neshifted here, huh," Sev murmured. The thought felt strange to him, and he let it linger in his mind for a while, considering it. Derivan had said something earlier about how he''d acquired Shift. Histre had shifted back to the divine ne in front of him, and something in that interaction had granted him the stat.
That was a neshift, wasn''t it?
The difference between the divine ne and Earth wasn''t exactly clear to him. They were both results of something simr, no doubt; perhaps a neshift from a ce like Earth was just significantly more expensive. Farther away.
If that was the case...
"Do you suppose the neshifted made the system?" Sev asked out loud, feeling a little foolish as he did so. "It''s a form of Shifting, right? And the system makes extensive use of it for... just about everything."
"I have thought about it," Derivan said, surprising him. "Perhaps a neshiftednded here by ident, and began studying the phenomenon of Shifting in an attempt to get back. It would exin many details."
"But there''s no way for us to know for sure, huh?"
"Perhaps not immediately." Derivan shrugged, the movement looking a little ridiculous on his enormous frame. Sev still felt dwarfed by him. "But I would not discount the possibility that we will know eventually."
It felt like there was something there. It felt like it was something he should know, even; the information teased at the edge of his mind, endlessly frustrating, until he eventually decided to let it go.
It didn''t matter who made the system, really. It only mattered what they did now.
Sev hummed, and his mind drifted again, back to Derivan''s words on hope.
"I think," he said. "That I want to do something kind."
"Oh?" Derivan tilted his head. "You are plenty kind, I believe."
"I try, but I want to be intentional about it, at least for today. You talked about hope being a choice, and I think that''s what I need." Sev hesitated. "I need... I just need a reminder. Of who I am."
It felt good to get the words out, to see theck of judgment in Derivan''s eyes. The armor simply nodded in eptance. "Would you like somepany for this?" he asked. "Or would you like to do it alone?"
"Alone," Sev answered before he could think about it; if he gave himself more than a second, he knew he''d ask for Derivan to apany him, even though part of his mind was telling him he needed to do this alone. "But thank you."
At the best of times, it was hard for Sev to articte exactly how he felt, with so much of his past just a nk nothing in his head. There was a certain level of detachment from the world, a certain level of disassociation that he often told himself he''d gotten used to.
The truth of it was that he thought about it all the time. Not when he was around his friends, but in his quiet moments in the moments he sat alone, and allowed his thoughts to run their course he wondered. He wondered what his parents were like, what his culture was like, if he''d had any friends back on Earth that cared about or missed him.
He wondered what he''d been like.
He was blisteringly aware of the possibility that he hadn''t been this. That he''d been someone else, once upon a time; that he''d had different hopes, different dreams, different ideals. Sometimes he wondered if he wasn''t just an imposter upying the same body, if everything about his original self had been wiped away.
Except it hadn''t, really. There were small pieces that remained floating pieces of memory that weren''t quite connected to anything else, but still served as reminders that he''de from Earth. There were things that felt morefortable to him, more natural.
Being kind was one of them.
Derivan''s words had triggered a vague memory, and he recognized the source of the dissonance, now that he was walking by himself. It felt like he''d been on the opposite end of that conversation, once upon a time like he''d once been the one to say those words, to speak of hope as a choice.
What are you doing?Aurum''s voice popped up near him, like a child speaking over his shoulder. Sev had gotten used enough to it now that he didn''t immediately jump and spin around. Instead, he let a second pass, watching a leaf drift to the ground.
Looking for an opportunity to be kind,he answered after a moment passed.
What does that mean? Aren''t you kind already?
Sev chuckled. Kindness is like... a reaction to circumstance, he exined. You will have opportunities to be kind no matter what. But you can seek those opportunities out, or you can wait for them toe to you.
But why''re you looking for them? Aurum practically bounced in his ear, a kid impatient to hear the answer. Sev chuckled again.
It makes me feel a little more like myself, Sev said. I think this is the sort of thing I used to do...
Sevpsed into silence. Aurum seemed satisfied enough with the answer, and didn''t say anything further, but Sev''s thoughts were distracted by the shadow he caught on to just at the edge of the festival, far away from any of the noise and attractions.
He hadn''t even realized he''d walked this far. His feet had just carried him forward, away from all the noise and celebration, and now he stood nearly at the edge of Mundane. Grasnds stretched in front of him, obscured by the illusory panes that stood scattered in the air. A single tree stood, the trunk as wide as three orcs put together, the branches so high they disappeared behind that same false-air phenomenon.
And standing almostpletely hidden by the shade, except from Sev''s angle of approach, was a single shadow elemental. He''d only caught sight of them because of the flicker of darkness at the very edge of the trunk.
Sev found himself speeding up. [Triage] was pinging.
Just behind the tree, someone was dying.
He wasn''t hurt, as far as Sev could tell. He was perfectly intact. He sat at the roots of the tree, staring up at the sky, at the stray sparks of magic that flew into sight, and he seemed... at peace.
"Are you alright?" Sev asked, even though he knew the elemental wasn''t.
It took a moment for him to get a response. The elemental barely seemed to realize that Sev was there, at first; when he did, he blinked a slow blink, the dim light of his eyes fading behind shadow. For a moment, Sev worried he was toote, and that that was the man''sst breath.
But his eyes opened again, and focused on Sev. The elemental managed a small smile. "Didn''t think anyone would find me out here."
"I almost didn''t," Sev admitted. He reached forward, then hesitated. "Can I heal you?"
A small, knowing smile. "You can try."
A part of Sev knew before he even tried that healing him would do nothing. [Triage] told him as much. He wasn''t out of options, but healing whatever this was... the passive sense afforded to him by his skills told him it would strip away everything from him.
You need to care about yourself, too. Misa''s voice echoed in his head, a small reminder.
He wouldn''t die. Losing all his memories was even something he''d done before. But... it would be a type of death, he knew, and he''d lost enough that he wasn''t certain it was something he coulde back from.
"Healing''s a bit out of the question these days." The shadow elemental didn''t seem to be aware of the thoughts running through Sev''s head. "Don''t kill yourself trying to help me."
"I wasn''t going to," Sev said, though he didn''t sound convincing, even to himself. The shadow elemental cracked an eye open at him and stared, and Sev somehow felt vaguely embarrassed.
"Name''s Aneryn," the elemental said after a moment. "What''s yours?"
"Sev," Sev said. "Aneryn''s a strange name, no offense. You guys usually have names that are very... Earthlike."
"Don''t know what that means." Aneryn raised an eyebrow at him. "I assume it''s got to do with thisnguage we''re speaking. But I reckon your name isn''t much Earthlike, either."
...He had a point, there.
"What happened to you?" Sev asked. "If you don''t mind me asking."
"Magical ident." Aneryn shrugged. "Splicated. I''m from Combat. It''s very, very hard to off one of us, but it ain''t impossible."
"I''m sorry." An awkward beat, as Sev searched for something to say. "Why are you... why are you here?"
"Wanted to be by the Festival." Aneryn shifted ufortably, and Sev automatically reached out to help him adjust. "Thanks. Hard to move right now. Think I''ve got an hour left, maybe two."
"Is there anything I can do?"
"Not unless you''ve got a god in your back pocket." Aneryn grinned at him, and Sev shifted ufortably, mostly because he technically did... though he doubted Aurum would be able to do anything about this. Or maybe he would?
Either way, the link was silent.
"Honestly didn''t think I''d have anypany." Aneryn didn''t look at him as he said this; a bit of his swagger faded away. "Chose this spot so no one would have to see. Don''t want to ruin the big day for anyone. But... it''d be nice not to die alone."
"Is that why you aren''t facing the festival?" Sev asked softly. "I can hide us. If you want to watch."
Aneryn seemed surprised, then grateful. "...I''d like that. If you could help me move. Can''t really move myself, y''see."
"Of course." Sev leaned down to help the surprisingly heavy man maneuver into ce, carefully activating the bracelet he still wore as he did so. To use it to hide them was... absolutely an abuse of its properties, and would no doubt break it sooner.
But Aneryn seemed grateful, and a small peace seemed to spread through him as he watched the dances, the duels, and the fights.
"Tell me about yourself?" Sev asked. "So I can remember you."
"What makes ya think I don''t have anyone to remember me already?" Aneryn grinned at him, but the grin quickly faded into something contemtive, then grateful.
"...It''d mean a lot, kid. But it''s a long story."
Sev hummed, and sat himself down next to the shadow elemental. "I''ve got time."
152 - Book 3: Chapter 17: Remembrance
152 - Book 3: Chapter 17: Remembrance
The sky above Mundane was a sight to remember.
It wasn''t just the fireworks, the streaks of magic that flew up into the air and shaped themselves into beautiful works of art. It wasn''t the stray sparks from the many duels happening all over the town, with elements crashing across the sky. It wasn''t even the gentle y of light across the clouds, though that sight was beautiful in and of itself.
It was the fact that those panes of reflective air were falling.
Sev was startled, at first, almost worried but Aneryn had merelyughed. "It''s just skyfall," he said. "You haven''t been around that long, have you?"
"Not as such," Sev said.
The view was dizzying, with the view in each pane shifting and spinning as it fell. Every time one hit the ground it shattered like it was made of ss, though it did no damage to anything it struck. Sev eventually had to look away, feeling slightly sick, but Aneryn himself seemed enchanted by the sight.
Sev could imagine why. Follow closely enough and the phenomenon allowed you to see everything that was happening in the town of Mundane some of the panes even showed shes of those duels and battles in the town happening close-up. Others showed the various sights and disys that had been constructed, from a small table disy where dozens of toys had been enchanted to sing and dance to a massive enchanted painting that seemed to double as a hedge maze. People would step into the painting, and the enchanter would paint the maze in as they attempted to navigate it, rapid strokes creating a dead end or a beautiful grove each time they turned a corner.
It was fascinating, and Sev resolved to find that second disyter to try it for himself, but he couldn''t keep watching. The sight was making him very distinctly motion sick, and he hadn''t had a feeling like that for years.
"Having trouble?" Aneryn''s voice was a low rumble of distinct amusement, and Sev grumbled. "Newbies tend to have trouble. Haven''t had newbies for a while, though. Aren''t you a healer?"
...He was. He just hadn''t felt like this for a while, and it hadn''t urred to him that he could just... heal it away.
Magic was convenient. He wondered how he would''ve dealt with this, once upon a time.
A gentle glow of divine magicter, and he went back to watching what Aneryn had called the skyfall.
"Sky will be clear once this is all said and done," Aneryn said. "Wish I could be around to see it. They usuallyst for a day or two, though."
"I''m sorry," Sev said, because there didn''t seem to be anything better to say. He hadn''t trained in this.
Aneryn snorted. "Ain''t your fault," he said. "Lets me see more of the festival. Pretty well-timed, if anything."
"I suppose," Sev said. "You''ve been to one of these before?"
"A long time ago." Aneryn cleared his throat, and Sev nced over at him he noticed the way the elemental''s hands appeared to be fading, sinking into the shadow of the tree they were sitting under, and he felt his heart sink a little with it. "Suppose that might be a good ce to start, even, if you want to know what I was all about."
"What were you all about?"
"Magic," Aneryn said, but he injected the word with a certain amount of ir and pomp; he even tried to gesticte, though his arms just sort of failed him. He red at his limb like it was offending him, but didn''t try again. "Destruction magic in particr. Not for the sake of killin'' or the like, but understanding it was my passion. Still is, really."
"I''d bring my friend here if I could," Sev said wryly. "He''s better at talking about this kind of stuff than I am. I don''t think I really get magic, even after all this time."
"Nothing much to get, really," Aneryn shrugged. "Magic''s a whole load of concepts wrapped together, and glyphs tap into that conceptual sphere. Skilled mages know how to navigate it, and lesser ones just pluck out surface concepts."
"Huh." Sev paused. "That''s a lot simpler than I imagined."
"It''s a little moreplicated than that, but that''s the base of it." Aneryn shifted, then grunted ufortably. "Mind helping me sit up a bit?"
Sev reached over to help prop him up, notmenting on the fact that Aneryn looked a little frailer than he had a moment ago; his body blended in more with the shadows they sat in. He wondered if it was a good idea to create a source of light, so the harsher shadows would help him stay together...
...Probably not. If it were that simple to fix, Aneryn would have done it long ago.
"Loved duels," Aneryn said. The words came out like they were a sigh. "Haven''t had a good duel in a damn long time. Pretty much everyone refused after what happened to me."
Sev almost asked him what happened, but stopped himself. "What makes you like them?"
"S''like a dance." Aneryn''s eyes brightened a little, even in the state he was in. "A story you tell, but in the form of a fight. A swordfight is fun, but limited; there are only so many physical possibilities. But with magic..."
The shadow elemental lifted up a palm, though not without difficulty; a faint image of a glyph floated above it, spinning gently. "This is the glyph for Entropy," Aneryn said. "I know of at least five hundredbinations with other glyphs. For every one of them, the way you cast matters. Intent, interpretation, state of mind. In a duel you learn not just new magics, but how your opponent thinks how they feel the way they look at the world."
"It''s how youmunicate," Sev said.
"Yes," Aneryn said emphatically. He let his hand flop back against the ground and the image of the glyph fade from existence, then looked up towards the sky, sighing. "Talking doesn''te as easily to me as fighting."
"I don''t think talkinges easily to anyone," Sev said with a chuckle. "Some people are better at it than others, but... it''s , right? You can be good at entertaining a crowd, you can be good at making peopleugh or smile, but that doesn''t mean you''re good atmunicating."
"Too many nuances." Aneryn grunted in agreement. "Can''t know what someone''s experiences are. Can''t know who they know, how they use words, if the ng they use means somethin'' else."
"But you bypass that when you see people cast."
"d you get it." Aneryn sighed. "Came back to bite me, though. One of the spells I developed did me in like this. Didn''t consider the bacsh."
"Are your spells usually so..." Sev gestured, searching for the word. "Lethal?"
"It''s reversible, usually," Aneryn said. "But Entropy''s a beast of a glyph. Ain''t so easy to reverse. Was trying to fix the problem."
"Ah." Sev didn''t know what to say, but Aneryn seemed happy to continue; he just wanted someone to talk to.
"Honestly would''ve preferred going out in a duel," Aneryn said. "But... Didn''t want to put anyone through that. Friends''re good people. They don''t need this on their conscience."
"I''d offer," Sev said. "But I don''t think I can fight on the level you''re looking for."
"You''d die," Aneryn snorted. He didn''t even question the possibility Sev was almost offended.
"You don''t know that. I''m a damn good healer."
"You''d lose, anyway," Aneryn said, this time with a slight grin and a bite of fire in his voice. Sev grinned back, drawn in by the charisma.
"...I can see how you got people to duel with you," he said. Aneryn smirked.
"Too weak to duel properly now, anyway," he said. "Nice enough to have someone around. Didn''t... wanna die alone. But didn''t wanna make my friends watch. Which is a problem, ''cause I think I''m starting to consider you a friend."
Sev chuckled, letting the friendment pass him by. He liked Aneryn, and what wasing weighed on him; he was doing his best to take his mind off it, and simply providepanionship. "You don''t think they might have wanted to?"
"Doesn''t matter," Aneryn said. "S''toote now. Made my choice."
"I could get them."
"Don''t want them to see me like this," Aneryn said. "Bit selfish, I know. Want them to remember me as a lean, mean, fightin'' machine. And... Might be gone by the time you get back."
Sev hummed. "Well," he said. "I''ll try to remember you as a fighting machine."
"Could get a painter to paint a portrait of me." Aneryn grinned. "Make it all badass. Have me stopping time or some shit. That''s what the spell was supposed to do."
"I might just do that," Sev said, smiling a faint smile. "I''ve got a mage friend that''s pretty good with that kind of thing. Even if he keeps making himself look a lot more badass than he is. Don''t tell him I said that, though."
Anerynughed. "He one of those that try to look tough and mostlye off cute?"
"I will neither confirm nor deny that," Sev joked, and Aneryn snickered again.
"Got one of those as well," he said. "She''s... like a daughter to me. I regret her not being here the most, I guess. I''m gonna miss her."
"Do you want me to pass on a message?" Sev asked. "I can try to find her..."
"Nah," Aneryn shook his head. "Ain''t gonna be that easy to find her, and I left her a message of my own. Though if you do get that paintingmissioned, you should send her a copy. The look on her face..."
The small amount of mirth in Aneryn''s voice suddenly fell away, leaving behind an awkward silence. Sev didn''t say anything, but he felt the air turn heavy, and nced towards Aneryn.
The shadow elemental''s eyes were clouded with their version of tears. Sev cast his gaze away as a quiet sob suddenly wracked the elemental''s frame, the burst of emotion sudden but powerful. He didn''t need Aneryn to speak to know the thought that was going through his mind that he''d never get to see the look on her face when she saw that painting. That he''d never see their smiles again, hear theirughs again; that he wouldn''t be around to see how they grew and changed.
It was almost strange how sure he was about Aneryn''s exact frame of mind. A flicker of familiarity ran through him, like Aneryn was someone he knew. Should have known?
What
Sev was pulled from his thoughts, rather abruptly, by a vehement curse.
"Shit."
Aneryn nearly snarled out the word, and a patch of grass by the elemental''s wrist caught ame. It was a vehement, sudden turn in emotion, and Sev winced just slightly, though he didn''t say anything. "Forget you saw that."
"It''s forgotten," Sev said quietly.
A partial lie. He couldn''t get the sudden familiarity out of his mind, but that familiarity did help him forget; he saw, in his mind''s eye, a perfect image of someone that looked very much like Aneryn, fighting off a creature that looked not unlike the Mana Abomination they''d fought at the very beginning of this journey, when the dungeon had formed wrong.
Before he could say anything about it, Aneryn started talking.
He didn''t speak with any purpose in particr. Sev sensed that there was a part of the elemental that regretted not having his friends around, or that simply wanted his friends around, despite his desire for them to remember him as he was. He just talked about who he was and what he''d done.
In the span of an hour, Sev learned that Aneryn loved spider-meat spiced with fireseed, abination that made every one of his other friends turn green whenever he ate it; he had a fascination for pottery, though he was terrible at it himself, and had broken nearly every pot he''d ever made, except for a particrly deformed one he kept on a pedestal in his home; he loved his friends and took them out often to ''adventure'', exploring newly opened regions as the mana restored them.
He learned that Aneryn hated fish was terrified of them, really. They were wet, slimy, and disgusting creatures that wiggled around far too much, and they were no better in food. He learned that when he wasn''t fighting, Aneryn was clumsy, and needed his friends to stop him from tripping over his own two feet.
He learned all the ins and outs of Aneryn as a person.
Sev contributed his own stories, of course, whenever the elemental wanted to hear them and he did want to hear them from time to time. He talked about how he was scared of heights, at which point Aneryn hadughed and told him about the mana-region that was just clouds and nothing else, an infinite expanse of sky. He shared his love for tea, which he hadn''t even thought about for months tea was rtively rare, and while he kept a few magically preserved satchels of his favorites, he didn''t let himself enjoy them all that often.
Aneryn hadughed at him for liking leaf water. Sev had responded by brewing a cup right then and there, asking only for his help with fire magic and small conjurations to hold the liquid, which the elemental had dly provided.
And then they''d had tea, and Aneryn had grudgingly admitted that it was good.
Even if he''d needed a small mountain of sugar poured into his tea.
Yet that entire time, the context of what was soon to happen hung over them and eventually, Aneryn drifted into silence, out of conversation and out of energy.
"...Thank you," he said, his voice soft. Tired. Sev knew without looking that the elemental''s time was soon, and a part of him cried out for him to save him to use his magic and heal him, to fix this.
Sev could have said so many things. He could have asked Aneryn if he wanted that heal, even at the cost to himself. He could have asked Aneryn if it was okay if he didn''t heal him, because he this version of him, his mind, his ideas, his values would die in the process.
But he knew what Aneryn would say. He would refuse, and hisst moments would be used to reassure someone else.
Sev swallowed back those words, and said the words that hurt to say. "It was nice meeting you."
Aneryn smiled. He was nearly entirely faded, now, but the smile was genuine.
"If I''d met you sooner," he said. "I think we could''ve been great friends."
153 - Book 3: Chapter 18: Performance
153 - Book 3: Chapter 18: Performance
Kindness, Sev reflected, could be painful.
Aneryn hadn''t wanted to die alone. It was a small thing for Sev to be there for him in thosest moments, and yet thosest moments had been more than enough to make him care that much more. Aneryn would have been a friend, he was sure.
Maybe he had been.
Sev didn''t know what to make of those strange shes of memory he had received, and he was too tired to think hard on it; his heart still ached. Very slowly, he gathered his things the small, conjured cup that Aneryn had made for the tea, the little ceramic pot.
They were both absolutely terrible, and looked like they were on the verge of breaking. Sev handled them like they were the most precious things in the world. They sat near the bottom of his satchel, protected by as many soft things as he could find. He even grabbed some grass to stuff into his bag, just to absorb the impact as much as possible.
He''d ask Vex to enchant it when he got the chance.
Sev got to his feet too much time had passed, he realized, and Vex''s presentation would be soon and groaned at the way his body ached; he''d been sitting in the same position for too long. A quick burst of divine magic smoothed away the aches into just a memory of that pain, and he started back into town.
The festival seemed strangely quieter. Or maybe it was just his state of mind he found himself tuning out the sound, his mind drifting back to Aneryn, to that strange familiarity. He couldn''t focus on that either, because a pulse of grief would quickly follow.
He was... not in a good state, he realized, somewhat distantly. But he still wanted to be there for Vex''s presentation.
Clyde had been the one to help set it up, and he''d apparently spared no expense for it, not that Mundane bothered with currency. He''d certainly called in favors, though. Vex''s presentation would happen on the same stage as the one the glyph would eventually be revealed at, along with what Derivan had learned of its properties.
It was a grand thing, standing several feet tall and on intricately carved supports made of an ivory-white metal and pure elemental me; the carvings glowed from within, casting a dim light across the ground. The skyfall phenomenon was beginning to clear a precious few minutes toote, Sev thought, with a small hint of bitter regret but it left the skies clear with only a few of those strange panes left hanging in the air.
An uncharacteristically beautiful night. Perfect for the show.
"Are you alright?" Derivan''s voice spoke behind him. Sev started a little, and then, seeing who it was, calmed himself down.
"I''ll be fine," he said.
"Hm." Derivan left it at that, apparently sensing that he didn''t want to talk about it yet, though he clearly knew something was up. "The skies are clear today."
"Didn''t even know it was possible." Sev nced up at the faint glimmer of stars, almost visible now that the sun was beginning to set. It was strange how different and yet familiar this ce. "Vex is going to be out soon. What do you think he has for us?"
"I do not know." Derivan shrugged broad shoulders, then sat himself down on the grass. Even with that, he towered over some of the people that were still standing. "But I look forward to finding out."
"Yeah," Sev agreed.
He couldn''tpletely shake off the somber mood that hung over him, but he wanted to be here for his friend, at least. Now they just needed Misa to join them.
Misa appeared just as a row of lights flickered into existence over the stage. The half-orc was panting with exertion, and Sev looked over at her with amusement. "Lost track of time?"
"Shut up," she grumbled. "Fuckers were good. Nearly got me a couple times."
Sure enough, there was a fresh scar or two along her shoulder and arm nothing that couldn''t be healed away, though Sev knew Misa had probably just chosen to keep them. "Had fun?" he asked.
"Fuck yeah." Misa grinned, showing her teeth. "I gotta go to Combat more often. They''re really..."
She trailed off as she spoke, taking in Sev''s expression. "You alright?" she asked, frowning. "You don''t look it."
"I''ll be fine," Sev insisted with a sigh. "I''ll talk about itter, but it''s not important for now. Besides, the show''s starting."
Misa peered at him with no small amount of suspicion but a swell of music from behind the stage distracted her, and she turned her gaze to the stage. "Dang," she muttered. "They really went all out for this."
"They really did," Sev agreed. "You think Vex will be okay? He usually doesn''t like this kinda thing."
"I believe Clyde offered him a great many notes on glyphs as rpense," Derivanmented dryly. "Though it seems a poor deal, considering Clyde shares whatever he knows on request."
"Couldn''t keep a secret to save his life." Misa chuckled.
"He also offered a number of reality shards, which is the true reason Vex epted the deal, I believe," Derivan said. "Though perhaps he simply saw that Clyde truly did want to see a Festival as grand as all the Festivals of old, and felt that a minor difort was worth bringing that memory to life..."
Derivan''s voice trailed off as Vex walked onto the stage, and all eyes focused on him.
The lizardkin was, for once, fully outfitted as a wizard. He didn''t wear the traditional robes of an Elyran wizard, though. Those were all long, flowy sleeves and reams of enchanted fabric, mostly to fit as many runes on the enchantment as possible.
What Vex wore was closer to thebat gear that Sev had seen some of the mages from Combat wear closely-fitted cloth wrapped around his shoulders and down to his waist, leaving his arms bare, and baggy trousers secured just above his ankles, higher than normal due to his digitigrade feet.
He''d painted his arms, Sev realized. No wonder he''d taken so long to prepare he couldn''t imagine the amount of time that must have gone into the intricate glyphs that were painted over his scales, especially if he''d had to paint them on by himself. Even his tail had a scattering of glyphs, every one of them carefully painted with directionality, pointing from the base to the tip of his tail.
The paints looked to beposed of the liquid mana Vex was able to call forth with [Ssh of Mana], along with a metallic additive Sev thought might have been crushed reality shards.
Hopefully they weren''t those. Sev winced at the idea of crushing reality shards down. Vex... probably knew what he was doing, though. He''d only blown things up a couple of times.
And Clyde or Belle would probably stop him if he was going to blow something up.
Probably.
The music swelled to a crescendo, and Vex shut his eyes, letting out a long, steadying breath, as though to center himself. The lights that lit up the stage suddenly inverted, covering the stage and the audience with darkness; small gasps filled the arena.
In that artificial darkness, the glyphs painted on Vex''s arms began to glow.
It lit up Vex''s scales, casting him in a contrast of light and shadow. Everyone watching fell silent, their breaths falling still. A single point of light lit up the darkness the tip of Vex''s de, Sev realized, the dagger he often used to carve his spells with and then, slowly but surely, he began carving an image into the air.
Not a glyph. A fully-formed image. A stylized disy of his own life story.
Sev saw the image of Vex''s own parents, artfully disyed as a menacing presence around him and his siblings. He saw those smaller figures slowly bing powers in their own right, gainingrger presences, and yet turning away from them in the process, until he was thest one left, a protective presence curling around a smaller, younger figure.
He saw Vex leave, the small figure that represented him drooping with no small amount of regret. He saw Vex fighting alone for a time, until he was joined by three others, and then it was all the tiny details in every scene Vex drew the way his shoulders slowly drew back, the way he held his head a little higher.
That in itself would have been an incredible disy, but Vex was doing more than that. Every glyph painted on his body had a function and with every image he drew, a glyph would activate, casting the glow of a spell over the entirety of his audience.
Ice on his left shoulder, spreading a deepening chill as Vex and his siblings cowered away from their parents. Gravity on his right, a physical weight pressing down on them as those siblings, too, grew and left. The glow of that glyph was a dirty yellow, a bitter sort of pallor cast over the watchful eyes of his audience.
Lightning was a flicker that ran down his tail, a mesmerizing disy of electricity every time he moved. Vex used that one to symbolize the determination it had taken to leave his brother there while he searched for another way, the way he''d fought on his own, striking out in a desperate attempt to find something.
And then... warmth. Not fire, but the simple, cozy warmth that came with sitting by a hearth in the winter. The glow of those glyphs lit up his arms and carried with them a sense offort, of quiet joy. A wave rippled through them, and Sev was surprised to find aches and pains he hadn''t realized he''d had suddenly smoothing away.
Vex was healing something that was outside the domain of even his own magic.
If the lizardkin realized what he''d done, he didn''t show it. His eyes were still closed, like he was lost in his own little world, even as the not-lights slowly faded back into light, bringing the stage back.
Sev had almost forgotten the thing was there. He''d been focused entirely on Vex''s performance, on the dance, on the intricate y of emotion and storytelling.
The apuse was thunderous. Vex barely seemed to notice he seemed exhausted, the whole exercise having apparently taken more out of him than just physical strength. Sev almost hurried up on stage to help heal him, but... no.
He didn''t seem to want the help. Vex opened his eyes, offering a small smile and a bow to the crowd, yet searching the sea of people to find his friends. Sev saw the way his eyes lit up with both relief and slight embarrassment when he caught sight of them.
And then, slightly spoiling the magic of the moment but in perfect keeping with Vex''s character, he gave his friends a little wave. Sev justughed and waved back
And that would have been that, but he probably shouldn''t have been surprised when mana began to gather.
Just like it had when Derivan had formed a new glyph a few short weeks ago.
154 - Book 3: Chapter 19: Reveal
154 - Book 3: Chapter 19: Reveal
"Two new glyphs!" Clyde''s voice was incredulous. He hissed out the words as if speaking softly would somehow protect them from the enormous crowd of people just outside his inn. It was essentially just very powerful inn magic that kept all of them out, though he''d refused to exin what exactly ''inn magic'' was.
The crowd had gone silent the moment mana began to gather; at most, there were quiet whispers slowly spreading through them, as if they weren''t quite sure what they were looking at. It wasn''t until the air rippled faintly and a series of images formed in the air each one depicting a different moment from Vex''s show that those whispers erupted into excited murmurs, and then a roar of thunderous apuse as fragments of a new glyph began to form from those images.
Vex had looked utterly overwhelmed. It was Clyde that reacted first, surprisingly he darted in and physically shielded the lizardkin from the crowd, practically dragging him back to his inn. Belle and Elliot both acted as impromptu bodyguards while Misa and Sev both struggled to make their way through the crowd to rejoin their friend.
Derivan, on the other hand, had somehow managed to slip away in the chaos and find Vex before either of the two of them. They managed to meet up just before slipping into Clyde''s inn, at least, and a full ten minutes before the crowd managed to find them once again.
"Do you have any idea how incredible this is." It wasn''t even a question. Clyde buried his face in his hands and groaned, gesturing at the door; a flicker of magic shut off the cacophony of noise from the crowd outside, presumably yet another application of his inn magic. "It''s not supposed to be this easy to make glyphs. Especially now, when magic is dedicating itself to keeping this universe alive. It doesn''t recognize people like that. Not anymore."
"And yet," Belle said. She seemed significantly more calm than her husband only the brightly-glowing eyes indicated that she was experiencing any amount of stress.
"Can''t say I didn''t expect something like this to happen, honestly." Elliot spoke mildly. He was the most rxed of the three, except for the way his eyes kept asionally darting to the door, like he was worried that someone would break through. "I tried to tell ''em."
"Shut up," Clyde grumbled. "Are you sure you''re not hiding anything else? Seriously, what you''re doing is I don''t think you understand how big it is."
"We''re not?" Sev looked around, as if questioning his own answer. No one contradicted him. "I mean, as far as we know, we''re not."
"Right." Clyde buried his face in his hands. "The worst part is I believe you.
"You need to understand you might be in an echo, but you still have to y by our rules," he said. "The rules of the echo universe you''re in. Magic isn''t exactly dead here, but everything it can do is focused on keeping this universe alive. It''s essentially life support. The fact that you''ve created something new not once but twice..."
Clyde sighed.
"What do we do now?" Vex asked, finally speaking up. He seemed a little nervous, but not nearly as much as he would have a month or two ago he nced at the door in a way that was almost contemtive, rather than afraid. "We still need to do the Glyph presentation, right?"
"It''s a little dyed because of all this, but yes." Clyde frowned. "I spoke to the mayor for a bit. He''s more excited than anything, and he''s hoping you''ll do a joint presentation on the effects of the new glyphs."
"We don''t even know what the new glyphs do yet," Misa pointed out.
"Well, you''ve got about an hour to find out," Clyde said dryly. "That''s about as long as we can dy. Think you can do it?"
Vex nced at Derivan, who nodded at him. "We can try," he said.
It took, all in all, an hour and a half. The extra half hour was wrung from the mayor by a very apologetic Clyde, much to the ever-increasing restlessness of the crowd, which had by andrge retreated back to the Festival grounds. They''d epted they weren''t all going to get a one-on-one with the two new glyphmakers, and so decided to celebrate instead that yet another glyph had been created.
Now Vex and Derivan stood side by side on stage. This presentation would be nothing like Vex''s earlier one it wasn''t a performance. It was a celebration of an achievement, of a growth in magic.
It was a celebration of change.
...Maybe a little bit of a performance.
Derivan started first. He drew the new glyph in the air, taking full advantage of his height to weave a sigil that was taller than even he was; it stood at nearly twice of Vex''s height, towering over the lizardkin and making him look small inparison not that standing next to Derivan didn''t do the same. Mana began to gather even before the symbol wasplete as if it was eager and excited. It danced around the edges of the glyph, and it took coaxing to prevent it from just pouring in and activating the spell.
All that mana dove into the glyph the moment thest stroke was drawn, and the entire thing pulsed.
The glyph was a little moreplex than it needed to be Derivan had added a number of embellishments to bring it closer to the original piece he''d drawn. It didn''t need to be exact in order to trigger a reaction from the mana, and as the creator of the glyph, the closer he got to the original, the more powerful the effect was.
The final glyph was the bold image of a cuirass, glowing softly in the night; it was the image of several of the other species that Derivan had seen and met in his journey, abstracted into silhouettes, and arranged in such a way that they were not unlike wings. They were the draconic sort, even, with two points at the very tips that were not unlike the points on Derivan''s armor; the wings were drawn like they were mid-flight, supporting the cuirass and being supported in turn.
The spell held for a moment, the etheral image washing over them; even without being cast, the crowd could feel the power embedded in it, and a soft murmur rippled through them.
Derivan didn''t cast it, not yet; he allowed the mana to gather, and then knelt, holding a hand out to Vex.
Vex used the outstretched hand and Derivan''s knee as support to climb up onto the armor''s shoulders. He wobbled a little as Derivan stood, but stayed steady, using his tail to bnce himself and then their n became clear. At this height, Vex had ess to the very top of the glyph, though he had to stretch to reach it; there, he used his dagger to cut his own glyph into the air.
The image he drew looked vaguely like a clock dressed in a traveler''s cloak, the impression of travel and of time running past of a journey taken. This wasn''t a change to his Sign, unlike what had happened with Derivan. It was just a new glyph, a new meaning imprinted onto the mana.
The new glyph was drawn smaller, but it certainly wasn''t any less powerful for it. Once again, mana gathered; this time, there was almost a battle between the two glyphs, as magical energy traveled between them. They grappled for a moment for dominance before equalizing suddenly, both symbols pulsing with radiant strength.
Vex cast his mind one more time over the notes his Sign had given him about their two glyphs.
Glyph of Change
Life has a funny way of making you look back. Vex Ashion''s realization of how much has changed since the beginning, his understanding of the journey he has taken, embeds itself into the ritual that spawned this glyph.
Mark a desired change, and then elerate time to achieve this change. The mana cost required grows depending on the degree of change.
And then there was Derivan''s.
Glyph of Solidity
As Derivan''s understanding of the world grew, so did his desire to protect it, and to experience everything it had to offer. Though the core of that desire exists because of his friends, it has grown into something greater and has room to grow still.
Solidify in a range that increases as more mana is ced into the glyph.
There was a reason it had taken so much longer to understand what Derivan''s glyph didpared to Vex''s the effect was much more subtle, and the amount of mana required was enormous, though it seemed to go down with practice; the first time they had needed to spend a reality shard on the casting to understand what the glyph did at all.
Solidify. It was almost the opposite of Vex''s glyph, though that would be too much of a simplification. The glyph anchored things, making it harder for reality to change, for things to be lost; something under the effect was nearly impossible to Shift, Derivan imed.
Applied strongly enough, with the assistance of a reality shard, the glyph could even stop system skills in their tracks an effect entirely new to them, and one that spawned no small amount of errors. They''d hurriedly stopped that experiment when it began to drain Misa''s reality anchor, but the fact of the matter was that they now had a tool that no one else had.
What they wanted to do in this demonstration was different, though.
The spell they cast came in two stages.
First was Vex''s glyph. Magic rippled out across the stage and over their audience, marking the ground with change. At first, nothing happened but as time went by, the magic elerated, and the first shoots of green appeared from the ground, breaking through the stone.
The flowers that sprung up from the ground hadplicated, interwoven petals, shimmering with two-toned colors and each with a drop of precious mana held within the center. Appreciative murmurs turned to quiet gasps; this was far beyond a growth spell, if the nts it could create were magical.
But they weren''t done.
Next came Derivan''s magic.
What it did wasn''t nearly so visible nothing in the field seemed to change. But many of the shadow elementals that were native to Mundane suddenly froze, staring in disbelief at the field of flowers.
Mundane was a temte; it was static, boring, and unremarkable on the outside, as a means for magic to apply change. Vex''s spell was an application of change, but the Glyph of Solidity did something more fundamental.
It altered the temte, and changed the meaning of what ''baseline'' was.
Derivan had asked for permission first, of course. The mayor had snorted, not particrly believing that he could, but telling him to go ahead bringing some color and life into the town would do wonders for the people there. It was just something they''d never been able to do.
And yet here was the evidence in full the Glyph of Stability would let them change Mundane to be as expressive as they wanted without harming magic''s ability to sustain reality.
There was a small, collective loosening of tension the realization that they had just a little bit more freedom in their lives, now. The glyph could be used by any one of them, after all; Derivan was the most effective caster, but anyone had ess to the spell.
Derivan and Vex saw it as a small kindness. They saw it as a way of returning to the town of Mundane some of the help that had been given to them.
It was only when the apuse started ringing when a man near the front of the crowd wept openly, and others ran off to start painting the glyph on all their Festival decorations that they understood that they''d done something much greater, at least to the people here.
"Damn." Clyde''s words were soft, somewhere behind them; Vex hopped off of Derivan''s shoulders, and they both nced back. "You guys actually did it."
"It''s not bad, is it?" Vex asked, looking just a little worried. Clydeughed.
"I know I said it doesn''t really bother us," he said. "But that doesn''t mean this doesn''t mean a hell of a lot to us. So... thank you."
155 - Book 3: Chapter 20: Moving On
155 - Book 3: Chapter 20: Moving On
The ending to that Festival was probably the quickest there had ever been. Not because there was no wonder or celebration to be had but because the celebration that was left was for themselves, for all the things they had wanted to make permanent but could not. The glyphs of Change and Solidity, despite the associated mana costs, were some of the most flexible glyphs that had ever been created, and the elementals wasted no time in customizing their homes and stores to breathe all the life into it that they couldn''t have before.
Clyde was particrly enthusiastic.
"No more living in a ck box!" he dered. The sheer amount of mana that rushed out of him made even Sev flinch, and the cleric didn''t have the mana sight that Derivan and Vex did. Both of them had to shield their eyes against the light that poured out of the elemental.
When it was done, Clyde''s old inn was no more. In its ce was a fully decorated exterior,plete with cream-painted walls with the odd brick intentionally left out of ce. Every window was tinted a shade of blue, an image straight out of a children''s book; they featured slightly aged wooden overhangs that held a plethora of flowers.
And above the oak door and stone archway was a sign.
Guiding Star Inn.
A small shooting star was etched into the side of the sign, oddly out of cepared to the rest of the decor and yet, with how picturesque everything looked, it felt oddly fitting. Clyde seemed immensely proud of his creation, and beamed at it for a moment.
Then he burst into tears.
"Oh my gods," Belle muttered. Vex and Derivan looked on in rm, but the shadow elemental just ushered them away, conjuring a small seat for Clyde to sit on and curl into while she held him. Elliot gave them their distance, opting instead to speak to the adventurers so they wouldn''t be too rmed.
"He doesn''t really let it on much," Elliot said, "but you''ve basically given him something he''s dreamed of for centuries, and he can be very emotional when something like that happens. You should''ve seen him when I got him a little model inn. It looks pretty much exactly like this."
There was a soft smile on Elliot''s face as he nced at his husband. He shook his head after a moment, though, and gestured for the adventurers to follow him inside. "Come on in," he said. "He wouldn''t want you standing around watching him. He''s going to pretend none of this happenedter."
"Honestly," Misa said, ncing back as she walked in with the rest. "I think it''s kinda sweet."
It waste in the night a time Mundane would normally have been quiet. Most people adhered to a strict curfew, which was yet another thing required of them. A single night wouldn''t harm that, though, and this was a rare opportunity for them; in the morning, they would have to once more return to the jobs they had chosen, albeit in a vastly changed town.
Word of the two new glyphs would spread. There were a great many problems, smaller and greater, that could be solved with the use of Change and Solidity; in particr, many of the areas in the world that were inhabitable because magic had gotten it wrong could finally be fixed. The strange not-panes that hung in the air could be banished, even, and finally clear up the skies.
That was a longer-term project, though. The mayor had already assigned a team to it, a small group of people from Combat that had agreed to help. The rest had rushed back to their homes, wanting to make changes to their own living spaces.
It was a joyful night.
"I honestly didn''t think it was going to be such a big deal," Vex admitted, looking down. Misa snorted out augh, though it wasn''t mocking; she just wore a grin.
"Change the world and you think it''s not a big deal," she said. "That''s just like you, Vex."
"Is not." Vex flushed a bit.
"Do you actually disagree, or are you just disagreeing to be stubborn?" Misa grinned at him.
"...Thetter." Vex huffed, folding his arms, and Derivan chuckled behind him, ruffling his hand through the frills on the lizardkin''s head.
"Do you think you could fix Derivan''s hand with this?" Sev asked, gesturing to the armor. Vex hesitated, then shook his head.
"Not unless Cyde or someone else does it, and I don''t think we want to do it that way, anyway," Vex said. "The amount of mana it cost when I tried was... way beyond anything I could give, and I have a lot of mana. I think there''s a better path to it."
"What makes you say that?" Sev asked curiously.
Vex shrugged. "Just a feeling," he said. "The new glyph is... weird. Change tells you how that change would be aplished, more or less, when you''re casting the spell. Sometimes it''s pretty mundane Clyde probably saw workersing in to fix up the inn and sometimes it''s more esoteric; to remove the atmospheric effect here, we have to change what''s written in the mana''s archive, and that''s much more expensive.
"Derivan will get a new arm before we go back to Elyra. We can rush it with Change, but we''d lose out on the process. There''s something else I think we can gain if we wait. So... Derivan decided to wait."
"It is important to me," Derivan said, nodding gravely. "Though I do not know the specifics."
"Huh," Sev said. "Mild precognitive effect in the glyph?"
"That could be abused." Misa''s eyes gleamed. Vexughed.
"With the amount of mana it costs? No, not easily," he said. "And it''s mostly intuition instead of anything direct, so it''s less useful forbat. But... yes, I can imagine a few ways we could abuse this. Pre-drawn glyphs and mana crystals... The only thing is that we have no guarantee that this will work the same way outside the echo."
"Right." Sev winced a bit. "Mana is different here, right?"
"All the glyphs we have ess to seem the same," Vex said. "But Clyde''s told us that magic hasn''t really changed or evolved since the universe ended, so that''s not a surprise, really."
"I believe that we may be able to use Solidity to keep the glyphs and their effects with us when we return," Derivan said. "But that hypothesis requires further testing."
Vex absolutely beamed when Derivan said those words; Sev couldn''t help butugh at the delighted look on the lizardkin''s face.
"I''ve been teaching him the art of research," Vex proimed, and Sev nodded, still grinning.
"I can see that," he said. Misa snorted beside him, but the affectionate grin on her face was no less wide.
After that, Sev fell silent; he didn''t know how to bring up the next subject on his mind. Derivan and Vex had done a good thing for the people in Mundane, there was no doubt about that, except...
Except he was thinking it was time to leave, and he wasn''t sure he had any real justification for that, except that the impulse to leave was slowly growing stronger.
There were other ces here to explore. They had all grown, to a certain extent, in their time in Mundane but they had all hit some kind of cap as well. Sev hadn''t made any more progress in connecting with Onyx, though his connection with Aurum was further solidifying, and he was now better able to channel some of the God of Gold''s powers. Misa had managed to train her array of skills into something that was more fine-tuned and instinctive, working the precognitive abilities of Endless Echoes into her regr style. Vex and Derivan were both more in tune with magic, had a greater number of glyphs avable to them, and had now created two of their own.
But they were stuck. There were more things they had to do, and what they had to do with it was not here, could not be here. There was more of this world to see, and Mundane had be a ce that was almost toofortable to them.
Besides. They still had the items they had received and never identified, the ones they had received at the end of Misa''s bonus room. They still needed to find out a way to help Elyra and whatever was happening with growth spells around it, to aid with the brewing rebellion. Thest time they had checked in on Fendal, Noram and Anton and the others appeared to be mounting a growing resistance that seemed like it would soone to a head, and they didn''t have a n. Not like when they''d seen Xothokunching himself out into the stars, preparing to Navigate, and Aurum had warned them that Irvis was out there.
Then there was what was happening with Velykos, too. Last time Sev had checked in, Velykos had found the grave of the man he had once considered his father, or what looked like it; that had been early in their experiments with Shift, and the viewing had failed shortly afterwards. Derivan hadn''t been able to reestablish the connection since, nor had Velykos or any of hispanions responded to their messages over the system.
Sev hoped they were alright. The dtion of time meant that it hadn''t been that long, and they had their suspicions that it was divine intervention that had caused the Shift screening to fail; Aurum''s refusal to speak on the matter was further proof, as far as Sev was concerned.
The problem was that they had no way of knowing for sure, and the more time passed, the more antsy Sev felt about it all.
"I think we need to move on," he said suddenly. Misa, Derivan, and Vex all of whom had been chatting quietly with one another, giving him a concerned nce every now and then, but mostly waiting for him toe to a conclusion on whatever it was he wanted to say all stared at him.
"What do you mean?" Misa asked after a moment had passed.
"We''ve been here too long," Sev said ufortably. "We need to explore more of this world, I think. I''m sure it has some secrets for us whatever we came here to do, we should do it. I like Mundane as much as you do, but..."
"We have done what we needed to do here." Derivan was, strangely enough, staring at the air above Sev''s head as he spoke, like he was watching some invisible mechanism grind and move; Sev winced a little and nodded, not fully understanding the significance of that nce.
"Yeah," he said. "I''m not sure where we should go, exactly, but I think we can ask Clyde for directions. And it''s not like we can''te back here."
"Right," Misa said. She sounded unconvinced at best. "Look, I want to explore as much as you do, but are you sure you''re alright?"
"Of course!" Sev said. He forced a cheery smile. "Why wouldn''t I be?"
156 - Book 3: Chapter 21: Interlude - Velykos - Graveyard
156 - Book 3: Chapter 21: Interlude - Velykos - Graveyard
Velykos stared.
It was rare, really, that he experienced anything he found difficult to exin. He had been alive for a long, long time, and had experienced almost everything that could be experienced.
The chill he felt now, though? That was new to him.
The fact that none of Harold''s crew had anything to say was equally strange, and left him feeling even more unsettled. Ixiss and Iliss in particr almost always had a witty rejoinder, and yet even they
"What the fuck," Iliss said inly.
Oh. Well, there it was.
Honestly, that made him feel a little better.
Velykos stood in the remains of the quarry he''d gained his First Form in. The memories of that were fuzzy, as it was for all elementals; he remembered the moment he first understood that he was seeing, the moment he first realized he could interact with the world around him.
By far the memory that stood out the most was of the old daemon that had appeared one day, looking for small rocks to carve.
He''d watched in curiosity, at first, and then ever-increasing fascination as the quarry he lived in was transformed into a thing of beauty. The daemon never took his carvings with him he left them there like an offering to the quarry itself.
That was around when he''d learned he could speak, and he''d reached out to learn. That was around when their rtionship had gone from artist and curious watcher to father and child. The daemon had taught him... almost everything he now knew about the world.
And yet he couldn''t remember his name. That should have been the first sign, he supposed.
"This is the guy you were talking about, right?" Ixiss asked him, his voice hesitant. "Your father."
"Yes," Velykos said. He stared at the gravestone in front of him.
At the gravestones in front of him.
It had seemed strange enough at a distance, that there was a monument rising up into the air above the quarry Velykos remembered no such monument when he left, though that was centuries ago (centuries? centuries didn''t seem quite right; this world was only two hundred years old, and he was not as old as this world).
He remembered leaving and taking only a few souvenirs with him, things that the daemon had carved and left behind (but where had he kept them? he had no such keepsakes with him, not anymore).
Velykos remembered mourning, wandering (had he not left a monument for his father when he left? that seemed strange, now. surely he would have created something to dedicate to him, as meaningful as the daemon had been to him).
"Vel?" Harold''s voice was sharp, concerned. Velykos shook his head, stumbling forward; a heavy hand pressed against the obelisk in front of him, brushing away some of the dirt and dust obscuring the name.
Onyx.
He''d never heard the name. (the name seemed familiar, though; it pressed into his mind like an imprint left on dirt and scuffed away, smoothed over but not quite gone).
He''d never heard the name. He''d never heard the name
"Vel!" Harold''s voice pulled him back like an anchor. Velykos stepped back quickly, nearly tripping over his allies in the process. g and Nathan, bless them, acted quickly enough to steady him before he outright fell.
This was familiar (it was too familiar, in fact. it had happened before, hadn''t it? except thest time something fundamental to his elemental magic had been disrupted, and he''d ced protections in ce, since then).
(it was so hard to think)
"Vel, look at me." Harold''s voice was steady. The skeleton stood in front of him suddenly. Velykos didn''t remember when he moved, or when he''d been propped up against the obelisk that acted as a gravestone. He couldn''t help but stare out at the sea of other gravestones,id out in front of him.
The sight was deeply unsettling.
Partly because he recognized the handwriting.
It was his own,id out over and over in a grid. The gravestones themselves were always different made from a different stone, perhaps, or shaped differently from the others.
The one he was lying against was thergest. There was something morbid in that thought, in the idea of using his own father''s grave to support his body. Augh almost bubbled up from within, beginning with the rolling of pebbles down over his torso, the skip-hop of them almost distracting him from the roiling thoughts inside
"Vel, look at me," Harold repeated, and Velykos briefly flickered his attention to the skeleton.
A golden thread appeared.
Velykos didn''t see where Harold had gotten it, but his attention suddenly fixated on that gold, unable and unwilling to look away. It calmed his thoughts, reducing the simmering chaos back down into a single thread of reality, of memory.
"Would you look at that," Harold murmured. "Kid was right. This did work. And I thought he was just shittin'' me."
"Kid?" Velykos asked, clueless.
"Y''know," Harold said, waving a hand dismissively. "That god kid. Aurum? Fe showed up, told me I''d need this. Didn''t know what the fuck it was for. He coulda told me more, that lil shit. I almost didn''t think of this."
"Don''t call him a little shit," Nathan objected. He still didn''t talk much, but he seemed morefortable now when he did; he spent less time staring at his bones and wincing or shivering. "He''s just a kid. He was trying his best."
"Yeah, yeah, I know," Harold said with a sigh, and when Nathan gave him an obstinate look, he capitted. "Force of habit. ''M sorry."
"Good," Nathan huffed.
"Really, this is the one situation you talk back to our captain for?" Iliss teased him, and Nathan looked away.
"Come on, guys. Focus," Ixiss said. He gestured to Velykos. "Are you doing alright?"
"I do not know," Velykos answered honestly. "But... I think I am now. What is that?"
"Wish I had a fuckin'' clue," Harold snorted. He kept the thread held out like it was the only thing keeping Velykos steady. It probably was. Velykos could feel the weight of the thread pressing down around him, even if he didn''t have the words to describe exactly what it was doing.
"May I?" Velykos said, reaching out.
"Sure." Harold dropped the thread onto his outstretched hand.
There was a pulse of light, and it vanished. Velykos felt his mind clear a bit more, steadying into something that was once more his own. Apulsion effect of some sort, but... purely beneficial.
Hm.
"So, big guy," Iliss said. "Any idea what''s going on here?"
Velykos paused, looking around. He could feel the thread of gold keeping his thoughts steady, even if it didn''t give him answers. He could think about the disparity between his age and the remembered history of the world without feeling concurrent thoughts jamming up his head, half-remembered truths hitting him all at once.
He didn''t know how long ago this had happened. It felt like a long time, but there were enough recognizable gaps in his memory that he understood he couldn''t possibly define the chronology. He didn''t even know how old he was.
But this?
"I can try to find out," he said.
There was a very obvious first question. His memories told him that Onyx had simply left; if that was the case, then the gravestones here meant nothing, and were mere monuments to someone he had lost. It wouldn''t exin why there were so many of them, but it would be better than the alternative.
The alternative, of course, being the possibility that Onyx was buried here.
Except he couldn''t be. Onyx was Sev''s god he could remember that much clearly, now. God didn''t have bodies, as far as he knew.
There was really only one way to find out.
[Earth Sense] was a passive skill he could toggle on and off; he kept it mostly off,rgely because the amount of information he gained from it tended to be distracting and unnecessary. The skill was far stronger than it had to be, and he had no way to adjust the strength of it.
He toggled it on and reeled.
"Something wrong?" Harold called up to him, and Velykos shook his head, holding up a hand to tell the captain to give him a moment. He needed a second to parse what he was seeing. To verify.
He needed to be sure.
Because what [Earth Sense] was telling him was that there were dozens of identical bodies in the graveyard, one under each gravestone. Each one in the exact same stage of decay. Each one undeniably the man that had helped raise him.
Except that didn''t make sense.
"The graves are all full," he said softly.
"What?" Iliss asked. She looked around, her bones rattling slightly with the seed at which she whipped her head towards the nearest gravestone; she nudged a toe towards the dirt before hesitating and stopping. "That... can''t be right."
"Forty-nine bodies in total," Velykos said. His words felt almost distant. "They are exactly the same, every one of them. I... I do not understand."
"Shit," Harold breathed.
The six of them stared at the quarry-graveyard in a new light, a chill settling over all of them. Nathan shivered a little, and hugged himself closer to g, who put an arm around his shoulder to steady him.
The wind blew over them.
"I did not want to do this," Velykos muttered. His voice was the low rumble of earth and stone once more the most alien it had been for months. It was easy to emte mortals when his emotions were calm or positive, as they usually were around this group that he hade to consider close friends.
But when he felt like this, the thought of it just fell away. "It feels... disrespectful. But it may be necessary to dig up one of the bodies, to see if there is something to be observed that my [Earth Sense] cannot spot."
"Are ye sure?" Harold asked. "We''re with you all the way, don''t get me wrong, but..."
"I am not," Velykos said. "But it is the only idea I have."
It was easy, even. A simple application of [Earth Maniption] and Onyx''s body could be brought to the surface without disturbing it; another one, and he could be buried once more, with not a single trace left for anyone to see except perhaps another elemental like himself. Yet it felt wrong, almost disgraceful to have to do something like this...
...perhaps a small prayer to Nillea first, so he would know he was doing the right thing. A small prayer to Aurum, for his assistance in dealing with whatever strange influence hade over him when he first encountered this graveyard.
And a small prayer to Onyx, to ask for permission.
He felt a ghost of a whisper from Nillea; approval, kindness, sympathy. He felt a brightness from Aurum; excitement and pride, along with a small inkling of sorrow.
From Onyx, he felt nothing.
He hadn''t expected a response, but something inside him ached, nheless.
157 - Book 3: Chapter 22: Interlude - Velykos - Unearthed
157 - Book 3: Chapter 22: Interlude - Velykos - Unearthed
Velykos stood in front of the body, staring silently. The golden thread within him hummed, working full force to keep him from falling apart.
The body was wrong, but he didn''t know why.
"This the man that adopted ya?" Harold asked quietly.
"I believe so," Velykos answered, but the truth was that he wasn''t sure.
"He''s supposed to be a demon, ain''t he?" Harold asked. "He don''t look much like one to me."
"Daemon," Velykos corrected. He stared again at the body.
It didn''t look like a daemon. Or a demon, for that matter.
The curious thing was that [Earth Sense] was still pinging, telling him something that was very different from what he could see. It was almost like all of this was intentionally set up to trick someone with his senses.
Or anyone whose domain was earth.
"Wanna let us in on your thoughts, big guy?" Iliss asked. "I can hear you thinking, but I have no idea what you''re thinking."
"You cannot hear me thinking," Velykos said automatically, exasperated and when Iliss smirked at him in her usual impossible way, he sighed.
He did feel a little better.
Velykos knelt beside the corpse of his father, allowing himself one more prayer. This one wasn''t to any god in particr; it was a prayer he made for himself.
Let me understand.
Onyx''s body was stone sculpted in the vague shape of a daemon''s body, just close enough that it could pass for one at a distance. Up close, it clearly wasn''t the defining features were all unfinished, like a sculpture that had never beenpleted. Part of him felt a mncholic sadness at the sight.
The rest of him wondered why.
He didn''t know exactly what he could find out from just examining the body it sat still and silent in front of him, without so much of a hint of changing. Yet there were small details he could see, surely. He was a stone elemental, and Onyx this version of Onyx, not the true, daemon version was made out of stone.
There had to be something only he could notice. There had to be a reason that the bodies seemed identical under [Earth Sense], a reason they didn''t register as unusual until he brought them up.
There had to be a reason there were forty-nine separate instances of the bodies.
He just couldn''t think of what it was.
He barely realized it when he began to reach out with [Earth Maniption], digging into the features that were barely formed. If this was meant to represent his father, it did a poor job; his eyes were more almond-shaped, his nose was a little higher on his face. His hair was wild and free and long, reaching down to the small of his back. He had a tail that curled up and around his hand, a nervous habit he''d clearly picked up at some point.
Velykos didn''t know how long he kept at it. His friends stayed quiet by his side, watching; he was grateful for theirpany, and grateful that they stayed silent for something that felt so...
Ceremonial.
Velykos didn''t know how much time passed before he was done. The sun was low in the sky by the time the sculpture wasplete, and he reached down with arge, gentle hand to slowly prop up the statue of Onyx that he''dpleted.
[Earth Sense] had been a guide, he was realizing. He had to use [Earth Maniption] until it matched what he sensed with [Earth Sense], down to the...
Down to the injuries.
When had Onyx gained injures? His entire right ribcage was missing, like a hole had been torn through his body except instead of ragged flesh there was a smooth circle of nothing. He hadn''t noticed it before, too preupied with the sheer number of corpses and the fact that they all pinged as identical, but
The body moved.
"Velykos," Onyx said.
Velykos flinched backward hard, all the stacks of stone that made up his body cracking against one another and threatening to fall apart. Harold made an rmed yell, holding out his spear like it would do anything against a god made out of stone, and the rest of the skeletons arrayed themselves protectively, prepared both to catch Velykos if he fell and to fight Onyx if needed.
Onyx justughed. "You found yourself some good friends, huh?"
"You... are alive?" Velykos'' gaze flickered to the wound in Onyx''s chest, at the missing half-circle carved into his torso. "I do not understand."
"You don''t have to. We don''t have a lot of time..." Onyx nced over head at the sun, and then tilted his head. "Huh. Actually, no, we have a bunch of time. You did that way faster than I expected. Well done."
"You do not speak the same way the Onyx I knew did," Velykos said cautiously.
"It''s been centuries since that version of me existed," Onyx said, smiling softly. Velykos remembered that smile. His heart ached at the familiarity of it. "But I never forgot you."
"I''m gonna cry," Ixiss muttered from somewhere beside him. He would''ve assumed the lizardkin was joking, except he actually did sound vaguely choked up. "Dammit, I miss having eyeballs."
Onyx''s eyes twinkled. "You''ve found yourself some interesting friends," he amended. "But to answer your question... I am alive, and I am not. You remember Sev, yes?"
"He imed to be one of your worshippers," Velykos said. "You ascended, then? I did not know mortals could be gods."
"That''s a topic I actually can''t discuss," Onyx said, looking apologetic. "But there is one that I can. Sev knows about this, and so does Aurum, but most of the gods don''t."
"This is important," Velykos said carefully.
"Very," Onyx said. "The other gods need to know this. I can''t tell them, Aurum can''t tell them. No one who''s been touched by the Void can, and Aurum was, even if it was only for a little bit. And he''s been spending more and more time in it with me, to try to help us..."
At this, Onyx grimaced a little bit. "We need to stop him from doing that," he said. "He''s too eager to help."
"I do not understand," Velykos said. "What is the Void?"
"It is the end," Onyx told him.
And then he told him everything.
Velykos listened in growing horror as Onyx told him about the slow erasure of the gods about how they were being sacrificed to keep the system running, to keep the universe atrge running. He listened as he was told about countless gods that had already been erased without anyone knowing about it, the world just modified again and again to operate without the god in question.
Harold looked sick. Nathan couldn''t meet Onyx''s eyes. Iliss and Ixiss stood close to one another, hands clenched tight, and g simply watched with a certain anger set into his shoulders and simmering in his posture.
Velykos could read them all like a book, by now.
"There must be a way to fix this," Velykos said. The low rumble of his voice felt almost like static to him.
"I don''t know if there is." Something in Onyx''s voice changed; his tone was usually friendly, casual, but now there was something of the man he''d considered his father in there some of that age-old wisdom, and some of that age-old weariness. "Sev is working on it. I cannot... We cannot interact. He is one of my closest friends, but he also made one of the greatest sacrifices he could have for the cause of fixing all of this.
"His rtionship with the system is... unstable. If I interact with him, the system may notice; it is dangerous enough that he has acquired an ally that can directly patch the system, though I trust that he will be careful with that power.
"It makes me frustratingly limited in what I can do. I can guide him a bit. I can make changes to the system those few times it lets me through some back door or the other. But it closes them after, and I have to make sure that when I do it, it counts.
"He''s making good progress, though. I wouldn''t be able to talk to you about all this if he and his friends didn''t discover it first. We''re piggybacking on their anchor, linking more people to it when it can handle it; the problem is it still can''t handle everyone..."
Onyx trailed off, shaking his head. "But that''s getting into a lot of the technicalities behind it all. The long and short of it is that Sev can''t see me again, or the system''s going to realize what he did to keep me alive. It was bad enough thest time we interacted."
Half of that was his father just needing to talk, Velykos realized. Onyx hadn''t really been able to speak to anyone about all of this, and this was the first time he''d been able to talk freely and openly.
He had so many questions. Not even about this. He wanted to know more about what had happened, about the years Onyx had spent as a god. Now that he''d gained more context for what life was like, he wanted to know more about what the man he had considered his father was like.
What his favorite food was. What daemon culture was like if it was difficult, being so closely associated with demons. If he''d made anything new that he wanted to share.
Onyx had spent centuries on this problem; it had consumed a lot of who he was. Velykos understood why. The problems Onyx spoke of were problems on a cosmic scale, to the point where everything else must have seemed insignificant...
...but it still made him sad.
He understood a little better, perhaps, why Sev''s approach with the gods was what it was. Perhaps that wasparable for all gods if they were all ascended from mortals, then perhaps they all went through the same thing, their mundane, mortal problems reced with something grander and greater in scale, dwarfing their previous lives and the things they once cared about.
And even if they weren''t all ascended from mortals...
It was too bad he didn''t still have the tea he normally carried with him. None of the skeletons he traveled with needed food of any kind, or he would have had some on hand.
He did, however, have something else.
"Here," Velykos said. It wasn''t a perfect response to everything Onyx had just told him really, it wasn''t a response at all. It was a small offering from the carvings he kept in the bag he wore at his side, one of those precious pieces of art he had created with his new friends. "I would like you to have this."
"I can''t take anything with me," Onyx started to deny but then he saw what Velykos was actually offering him, and fell silent.
In his hand much smaller than the actual size of his palm, and perhaps all the more vulnerable-looking for that fact sat a small sculpture of the very quarry they stood in. It was devoid of all the gravestones, of course; instead, the original set of statues that Onyx had created stood surrounding the quarry like guardians.
"...This I can keep," Onyx said. "Because it falls under my domain. My power is limited, but... thank you."
"I missed you greatly," Velykos said. "I understand this matter is urgent, and I do not wish to take away from it. But I do not want this moment to be this an exnation, a hurried goodbye. You are more than just the god trying to save us."
"Haven''t heard that in a while," Onyx said. The words were yful, but his tone was not. The look he gave the sculpture was almost mncholic. "...I am sorry. You meant you mean a lot to me, too. Were it that we had more time..."
"I understand." Velykos said simply. "I just had a wish to express. You had a goal ining here, did you not?"
"I was going to ask for your help warning the other gods," Onyx said. "Tell them that the system may devour them, and that they must work against it. It will be difficult; many of them think the system is still something to be trusted... and it is doing something good. But it will hinder any further possible solution, and must be destroyed before we can try something else."
"We aren''t just gonna be able to waltz up to the gods and tell ''em their system is gonna eat them," Harold protested. He''d been silent up until now, but now he somehow wore a scowl on his skull. Onyx only nodded.
"You will have to gain their trust," he said. He nced at the small sculpture Velykos had given him, and very gently ced it against his chest; there was a ripple, and then it merged with his body. "But... I believe that you can. You and your friends."
"Sure." Iliss spoke up, but she folded her arms, staring at Onyx. "Do you have a lot of time left here, though?"
"Some," Onyx said cautiously.
"Then you''re going to stay and talk to Velykos, because he''s been missing you for years," she dered. "You don''t get to just show up, ask us to do something, and leave. Spend some time with the kid you raised, for crying out loud."
"Ah," Onyx said. He smiled, oddly happy, like he''d been hoping exactly this would happen. "I suppose you''re right."
Velykos decided that he''d been very lucky to make friends with this particr set of mortals.
158 - Book 3: Chapter 23: Roads to Nowhere
158 - Book 3: Chapter 23: Roads to Nowhere
"We''re going to be at the Roads soon," Belle said. "Are you sure you want to leave?"
"Sure?" Misa snorted. "No. But we have to."
She didn''t look Belle in the eyes. They''d all been traveling together for the past few days Clyde had taken time off specifically for this, though he didn''t borate on what the process of taking time off involved, exactly. The journey together had been the closest the seven of them had been, though of course they tended to split off into little groups. Clyde, it turned out, got along well with Sev; the man was fascinated by the idea of gods, for it turned out they were much less literal in this world than in the one with the system.
Belle spent the most time with Misa, the two sharing a simrly dark sense of humor. Elliot spent the most time with Derivan and Vex, curious about how their magic was different and how it interacted with the history of the world.
As time ticked by, though, and they got closer to their destination... the conversation fell gradually silent. Everyone was very much aware of what this meant.
There was a good chance that they''d never meet again. They would try toe back to say goodbye, of course, but this bonus room had given them no objectives; they didn''t know what they were supposed to do to get back. If they managed toplete it by ident, or if the energy required to keep the bonus room running ran out
this echo universe would pop like a bubble, and they wouldn''t meet again. Not in the same way, anyway.
"I guess this is goodbye, then," Clyde said eventually, looking around awkwardly. "I know I should be a good host and all, but... I''m going to miss you guys a lot, actually."
"We all will," Belle said. She managed a small smile, though there was just a bit of sadness in the glow of her eyes.
"You better write," Elliot said with just the barest hint of a forced grin. "I''m expecting letters."
"Oh,e on," Clyde said. "They''re not going to send us letters."
"Will too!" Vex said. "I mean, if we figure out how to send letters... Wait, no, we have the Communication glyph we left with you guys. That should work. Why did you tell me to write letters?"
Elliot just smirked.
"Don''t be surprised if we leave you a few messages," Belle said with a chuckle. She slowed to a stop as they finally came within a few feet of the entrance to the Roads.
This was very different from how it had been in Fendal and Teque, where the entrance had been hidden in the ground. An ancient stone archway towered over them, the edges crackling with dense magical energy; every so often a spark danced off between the cracks in the stone, almost sizzling with power.
And yet, were it not for those cracks, it wouldn''t have been clear that any magic was involved in this at all. The usual glow of densely-packed mana was nearly invisible, a product of sheer efficiency; every bit of that mana was being used to maintain the portal.
It was just a little anticlimactic that this feat of magical engineering was used to disy nothing more than a dark tunnel, but that was just the nature of the Roads.
"Is this just a portal?" Vex asked, gawping up at the archway. He hopped a little to the left and then walked around the archway; the back of it was perfectly clear, and he could see his friends through it, though it was clear none of them could see him. "What happens if I try to go through it from the back?"
"Don''t go through it from the back," Elliot called.
"...That just makes me want to go through it from the back even more." Vex narrowed his eyes slightly at the archway, as if contemting doing exactly that.
Then he picked up a rock, hefted it in his hand...
...and hesitated.
"It''s not going to break if I throw a rock through it, right?" he called out.
"Nope!" It was Clyde that responded this time. He sounded amused. "Go ahead."
Vex tossed the rock, and watched with both his physical and magical senses as the rock left his hand, soaring through the air. He paid special attention as it crossed the horizon of the portal
and abruptly vanished.
Vex blinked. He hadn''t sensed anything. He walked carefully back around the portal, looking down the tunnel.
The rock he''d thrown sat inside, sheared into paper-thin slices. He stared at it and paled.
"Would that have happened to me?" he asked.
"No," Elliot said with augh. "We wouldn''t leave something that dangerous around. There are wards in ce to protect living creatures. And magical ones." He gave Derivan a signficant look; Derivan just affected a shrug, like he didn''t know what Elliot was talking about. The shadow elemental shot him a bit of a knowing grin.
They all knew what they were doing here, though. They were dying the inevitable.
"Time to go," Misa said. She started walking towards the portal, then stopped, and sighed.
"Ah, fuck it," she said. She spread her arms out wide. "Group hug?"
Seven people made for a rather awkward group hug, it turned out. But there was a certain sense of vulnerability that came about with that awkwardness, a certain sense of sincerity; sometimes there were no words that could really adequately summarize a situation.
It was even harder when none of it felt real yet. The reality that they could very well never meet again was a hard one to ept, and for the most part all seven of them were refusing to acknowledge the thought.
They''d be umonly close, really, for all that they''d only known each other for a little over two months.
Neither group left without carrying an armful of gifts left by the other.
"I can''t believe they made so many cookies," Misa said. She was carrying what had to be an entire sack of them while they traipsed down the tunnel. "When did she even have time to make so many cookies?"
"Magic," Vex reminded her. "Probably the glyph of Change, actually, since it elerates time and all that."
"That''s so much mana spent on cookies," Misa said. She wasn''tining, though. They all saw the way one hand kept sneaking into the sack, pulling out a cookie to munch on.
Her seventh time doing this, she instead pulled out a note from Belle:
Cool it with the cookies. B
"Oh,e on," Misa grumbled. Sev snickered at her.
The tunnel they were traveling down was both oddly familiar and fundamentally different from the one in Fendal; the magic that thrummed in the air here was significant, to the point where it skittered about on Vex''s scales like an itch that wouldn''t go away. It affected all of them differently, even it manifested in Misa''s hunger, in a fluctuating divine connection that left Sev with something of a headache, and a slight loss of control of Derivan''s Slime stat.
It was vaguely rming the first time he started melting, actually.
Now they were just used to it.
Mostly.
It was still a little rming.
"What do you think they meant?" Sev asked, just to break the silence. His words echoed strangely in the tunnel. There was still nothing to be seen in the distance, nothing to break the monotony of dirt and stone. "When they said that the Roads take you where you need to go."
"No idea," Vex said. "I spent some time in the library, and there are books about Fate-aspect magic; apparently the Roads are an extension of that kind of magic. They link themunities that need to be linked, so that food and water goes between them as needed, and guide people out into the surface when a location is stable enough for a newmunity to be built..."
Vex paused. "Though there have been mistakes," he added with a slight grimace. "And that says very little about where we might end up."
The tunnel stretched in front of them, long and still eerily empty. The lighting was strange, even; there was no real source of light, and when Derivan checked, he saw that the area behind them was pitch-ck, too, fading into nothing after just a few dozen feet.
Yet the area around them was clear. It was strange, and when Derivan felt out with his senses, it was remarkably clear.
Even in Mundane, the system had been present. It was fueling the world they were in, and although it was a step removed in this bonus world, he could still feel its oppressive gaze. Here, the only source of the system was Misa''s reality anchor.
If he wanted to study it in detail, now would be the time to do it.
"Guys," Misa said. "I think I see something."
Sev, Vex, and Derivan all turned their attention to the tunnel ahead of them. Misa frowned at the path. "I thought the Roads were supposed to lead us somewhere," she said. "Why''s it got a choice to make?"
"...You see a choice?" Vex asked. "The tunnel goes... uh, straight up, for me."
"I see nothing," Derivan said. He wandered forward a few steps and stopped, hovering at the edge of what was, to him, an empty nothingness. With some hesitation, he stuck his hand out into that inky darkness, then withdrew it a momentter, thanfully intact. "I am uncertain if it is safe for me to step into that nothing."
Sev frowned. "The tunnel looks the same for me," he said. "Nothing''s changed. Are we all just seeing something different?"
"Maybe the Roads want us to split up," Vex suggested. He looked a little nervous about it, but not nearly as much as he normally would; if anything, there was a spark of curiosity in the way he kept ncing up towards his path.
"It''s... probably safe?" Sev hedged. "Based on everything that Clyde told us about the Roads. But it might be hard to coordinate anything to help anyone outside the bonus room for a while if we split up like this, so... we have to be ready."
Misa walked a few steps forward, mostly out of curiosity. "What do you guys see when I do this?" she called.
"You''re kinda starting to fade away," Vex said.
"There is a Shift as we progress deeper into the tunnel," Derivan said. "A very powerful one, and not one from the system. Powered by reality shards, I suspect."
"Okay." Sev rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Let''s split up our remaining mana crystals and hand the reality shards off to Misa before we check out these paths, just in case this takes longer than we expect. We can keep in contact using the system, and... please be careful, guys."
"It''s not the first time we''ve split up." Misa gave Sev a reassuring grin. "We can take care of ourselves."
"I know, I know," Sev grumbled.
It wasn''t the first time they''d split up. It wasn''t the first time Sev had expressed worry, either. The first time it had happened, he''d fussed over them and made sure everyone was carrying healing potions.
Each one of them grabbed a mana crystal for themselves, and Derivan once again prepared himself to watch keenly. This was his opportunity with the system mostly pulled back, this was the cleanest he''d ever be able to observe the process.
He''d made a few more observations thest few times they had done this, but had never been confident enough in his skills with Patch to remove their reliance on mana crystals with confidence.
This time, though...
He saw the way the mana crystals were funneled into the system, the way they were purified and stripped of something that went straight into the reality anchor Misa held.
He saw the way it responded. Something inside the anchor unfolded, absorbing whatever it was the mana crystals gave it.
Strange. It was different from what he''d seen the first time, when he''d observed it on their way to Elyra... But this was a better, truer representation of what the mana crystals and reality anchors were doing, he suspected.
It was almost like it was updating something.
Mana is memory.
Clyde had said that in the beginning, when they''d first arrived; that mana was a memory, a record. Dungeons were structures that kept reality anchors operating, but reality anchors needed something to anchor.
That was what a dungeon formation event was the gathering of all that initial memory to push into an anchor, to give it the record it needed to anchor. And then the crystals continued recording events as they changed, updating that internal database.
Derivan felt, for the first time, like he understood. And if that was true...
The Patch would have to be subtle. He wouldn''t remove the prompt for them to offer the system a crystal that was, apparently, necessary. But the killswitch that removed their ess if they didn''t offer a crystal was almost insultingly easy to excise.
"I think I understand," Derivan said, and everyone else nced at him. He took a moment to find the words, and then continued, "I believe that when a dungeon is formed, a recording a memory of everything the reality anchor has to stabilize is fed into it. But that memory is static and unchanging. Offering a mana crystals updates the reality anchor, keeping the memory in line with reality.
"I removed the part of the system that destroys our connection with the system if we do not offer a mana crystal," he continued, "but in light of this, we should keep giving it crystals, if we can, so that we stay in sync."
He didn''t say the other part of what he thought he might be able to do that it might be possible to force the anchor to restore from its backup, the way Misa''s own family had been restored.
No unnecessary risks.
With that, they said their goodbyes, and each faded into their own separate Road.
159 - Book 3: Chapter 24: S - The Trappings of Normalcy
159 - Book 3: Chapter 24: S - The Trappings of Normalcy
Sev hadn''t said it while the others were there with him, but he was worried.
It was strange that he was the only one the Roads hadn''t changed for. Misa had been given a choice. Vex''s road led up, whatever that meant. Derivan''s path ended in nothing, but presumably there was something for him even there and even if there wasn''t, he was the only one among them that could simply Shift himself out of that situation, especially with the mastery of the stat that he''d gained over the past month or two.
Sev wasn''t sure exactly what he was afraid of. There was the idea, he supposed, that there was just nothing for him; that the others all had some sort of destiny waiting for them, and he had none.
Because you''ve given up yours, a small voice in the back of his head whispered. He ignored it.
The more he walked, the smaller the tunnel seemed to get. He was pretty sure it was just his imagination. It was easy enough to ignore the mild feeling of ustrophobia when he was surrounded by his friends, when they couldugh and joke together. They didn''t even need to speak for him to feelforted by their presence.
Walking down a dark tunnel alone was a whole other ballgame. He''d never considered himself particrly ustrophobic, but there was something almost suffocating about this. There was a part of him that feared he would be left wandering the Roads forever, walking down a straight tunnel with no end in sight; realistically, he knew that even if that were the case, Derivan and the others woulde find him...
He sighed, and tried to force his mind to wander in a different direction, instead.
Misa, Vex, and Derivan had all made incredible strides in their fighting and magic. Sev had... certainly made some progress, but he didn''t have the easily exploitable skills that Misa did, or ess to the kind of magic Derivan and Vex could cast. He was a healer. He had his barriers, he had his divine spells half of which he''d been barred from using, for the most part and he had his connection to his Gods.
There didn''t seem to be much of a path ahead for just healing better. He''d been able to figure some things out with his skills, had even gained a skill for [Healer''s Intervention], which allowed him to attach to a target a small packet of divine magic that would burst and heal them when it was needed, effectively preventing death-by-health-loss, but it all seemed insufficient.
His connection with Aurum was stronger, too. He''d begun to meditate on that connection, allowing himself to draw more of Aurum''s divine energy when the god allowed him to which happened pretty much entirely on Aurum''s whim. He''d gained a new skill, even, from Aurum''s domain rather than Onyx''s. He didn''t particrly know how he felt about it.
[Buying Time] [Active] [Grade: Max]
The more gold you use, the more time slows down. Dte time by 10% for every 100 grams of gold per second contributed to the skill.
It was a weird name for the skill gold on Obreve wasn''t really associated with wealth, so Sev had to assume that this came from all the neshifted people from Earth that made that association. That was perhaps what had granted Aurum his minor Time attribute, even.
It was probably a good thing Jerome had apparently not had ess to that particr skill. One the other hand, he didn''t have Jerome''s ability to transmute random things into gold or produce gold at will.
Or the strength to carry literal kilograms of gold around.
It wasn''t that useful as a result, though it wasn''t useless, either. He''d asked Vex about getting a spatiallypressed bag of gold that was also enchanted to be light, but there had been a problem, in that the skill weighed the gold before it was removed from the bag.
Not an insurmountable problem, just an annoying one.
"You look like you''re thinking really hard!" A young voice spoke next to him, making him jump; Sev whirled around to find a gold-outline Aurum walking beside him, like there was nothing unusual about this at all. The golden orb that passed for Aurum''s head wobbled around slightly dangerously, and Sev was struck with the ridiculous thought that he should strap it on lest it fall off.
He didn''t voice that thought. That was probably rude.
"Uh, yeah," Sev said, faltering slightly in his response. "I''m just trying to figure out... where I''m supposed to go from here."
Aurum nodded seriously. "The angels tell me it''s hard for mortals to decide what to do with their lives," he said. "I''m sure you can do it!"
Sev snorted. "That feels a little bit condescending. Just a bit."
"I don''t know what that means." Aurum cocked his head, then patted Sev on the back. "What do you wanna do?"
"I need to get a little stronger, I guess." Sev looked off into the distance into the dark that stretched into the tunnel ahead of him. "Or a lot stronger. I felt pretty useless during that fight against Irvis. If I had more options..."
"I know how you feel," Aurum nodded. "I wanna help Mr. Onyx, and all the other ghosts, but it''s hard. I can''t spend too much time where they are."
"You shouldn''t be spending any time there at all, Aurum," Sev said softly. "I''m sure there are other ways you can help, but... you''re young. You shouldn''t have to."
Aurum was silent.
"Do you know how gods age, Sev?" he asked. "We normally don''t. But if I spend time in the Void... my head feels a little funny afterwards, but I feel a little better. Older. Like it''s erasing all the youngness I was supposed to have."
"That..." It exined some things, but not others. Aurum didn''t seem to have aged that much, but didn''t mean anything it was difficult to tell how old the god was to begin with. He was a little taller, maybe.
And it felt wrong, still. Risky. Too much to ask of a child.
Yet staying stuck as a child... that seemed like torture. He understood Aurum''s position, strangely enough.
"There has to be a better way to age than that," Sev finally said. "Look, just let me look into it, okay? I''ll look for someone that can help you."
There was no response. Sev looked around for the figure of Aurum that was apanying him and found that he was entirely gone, with not even the slightest trace of divine magic left. Bewildered, he took a few steps back, tripping over a rock that most certainly should not have been there on the rtively smooth flooring of the tunnel
"Woah there," a very familiar voice said as it caught him. Onyx steadied him back onto his feet and patted him on his shoulders. "Careful. Don''t want to hurt yourself in here."
"Onyx?" Sev stared. This Onyx didn''t even look anything like the divine projection of Aurum had there was no indication that it was a projection at all. It just looked like the Onyx he had known, fully-formed and in the flesh.
Stone. Whatever. Same difference.
"In the flesh," Onyx said, and then chuckled. "Or stone. You know, same difference."
...This was bizzare.
"Right," Sev said, sounding entirely unconvinced. "What''re you doing here? I thought you were stuck... you know, wherever you are."
"I am," Onyx said, inclining his head. "You''ve probably already figured out that I''m not really him."
"No kidding." Sev tried not to let his voice drip with sarcasm, he really did. It just... still came out anyway. Thankfully, this Onyx seemed mostly amused by the slight; he grinned at Sev, his eyes twinkling, and slung an arm around his shoulder.
"Let''s walk?" he suggested.
"Do I have a choice?"
"You gave that up long ago," Onyx said mildly simple words that sent a deep and sudden chill through Sev''s body, entirely unexined. Onyx turned to look at him, his expression as deadly serious as can be. "But if you choose to take it back... I will do everything in my power to help you."
Sev stared back at Onyx''s eyes pitch-ck, glittering stones that they were and felt strangelyforted. "You''re not even the real Onyx," he said.
"No," Onyx said with a shrug. "But that doesn''t mean I don''t know what he''d say."
They walked along the tunnel for a minute more; Sev''s mind was spinning, abuzz with questions, and yet he couldn''t settle on any of them. It took a further minute before he finally figured out what he wanted to ask first.
"What is all this?" he asked. "What''s the point?"
"Unlike your friends," Onyx said, "the guidance you need isn''t anything that the Roads can lead you to at least not directly. You already know everything you need to know, but most of it is buried deep inside you, hidden."
"Because I lost most of my memories." There was perhaps just the faintest trace of bitterness in his tone. "It doesn''t matter if I know it if I can''t remember it. I''m not sure that there''s a difference between the two."
"Oh, there is," Onyx said mildly. He hummed a low tune as he walked, one that felt achingly familiar to Sev.
Two stepster, and he was humming along to the same tune. He didn''t realize it until Onyx stopped and he continued, one note weaving into the other into the distinct melody of
"That''s an Earth luby," he said. "Isn''t it? I don''t know what the name is, but..."
"But a part of you remembers," Onyx agreed. "Your skill isn''t perfect. No system skill is, really; the system takes a lot of shortcuts to work the way it does. There''s a reason ites off as so poorly designed and so easily exploitable it''s not designed to be functional in that way."
"It''s designed to keep the world alive," Sev muttered.
"That is it exactly," Onyx said, "though even that is not the full picture. It was neverpleted, you know?"
"The system?" Sev blinked, staring at Onyx. "How would you know that?"
"How would I know that indeed," Onyx said with a shrug. "The point is that the guidance you need is within, not without; the Roads have nothing to offer you."
"Except this. Whatever this is."
"Exactly," Onyx said with augh. "You catch on fast, as usual."
Sev frowned.
Onyx was telling the truth, he was pretty sure. He was also certain that this wasn''t the full picture that there was something more to all of this. There was a purpose to Aurum showing up, and then Onyx showing up; there was a conclusion that he was being guided to.
And he didn''t really feel like being led there slowly.
"Can you just tell me whatever I''m supposed to figure out, then?" Sev asked, exasperated. "I don''t want to do a whole personal introspection arc."
Onyx really didugh, then. It was a deep-throated, from-the-belly kind ofugh; the man nearly doubled over, and Sev just stared at him, feeling vaguely disconcerted. It was familiar, at least he remembered now that the first thing he''d done that really endeared him to the god was make himugh, exactly like this but he didn''t think the joke was that funny.
"You know," Onyx told him. "I normally wouldn''t? The whole point of the Roads doing this is that I can''t; I''m just a specter projected from your own thoughts, with ess to a part of you you don''t have.
"But very conveniently for you the Onyx you knew would give exactly zero shits about rules like ''don''t just tell him what he''s supposed to do next''." Onyx grinned at him. "So the answer is this: You have a connection to Aurum, and that has granted you a skill. That connection by no means has to be restricted to only Aurum.
"The gods have been quiet for too long, Sev." Onyx''s voice settled down into something more serious. "If we''re going to stand a chance at this at all, we need to step up. And there are ns in motion to get them to do that. But all the divinity we''ve saved would be useless without an avatar to act through. Most divine connections with most clerics would just bleed divinity like water; it''s an absolute waste.
"You, though? Your connection with Aurum doesn''t leak a single bit. It''s why he has so much freedom to act. So: make more connections."
Sev opened his mouth to respond, but Onyx was already gone, and the tunnel was opening up in front of him into a small clearing a tiny room, set up right in the middle of nowhere, with a bed and a prayer mat and a steaming cup of coffee. Sev raised an eyebrow just slightly.
He knew just where to start.
If Aurum wanted to age... who better to start with than the God of Time himself?
160 - Book 3: Chapter 25: S - Timeless Connections
160 - Book 3: Chapter 25: S - Timeless Connections
The process of forging a connection was moreplicated than Onyx had implied. Sev strained at it for a moment, trying to feel out the connection he already had with Aurum his divine sense helped, allowing him to feel out that tiny thread in reality that signified his connection to a god.
One for Aurum, and another one for Onyx. The one for Onyx was stronger by far, and he tried to model the new connection he was forging based on that. A hint of divinity, guided by a whisper of prayer...
[You have regained a skill [Divinity Maniption]]
[Divinity Maniption] [Active] [Grade: 1]
Manipte divinity.
Regained?
Sev didn''t remember ever having a skill like this. He didn''t know it was possible to lose skills in the first ce.
Did you mean what you said? Aurum''s voice was small and timid in his head; much smaller than the Aurum he had spoken to in the tunnels. He didn''t know how he''d ever been fooled. About helping me... grow up. I want to grow up.
I meant what I said, Sev answered gently. But give me time.
First, a prayer.
The God of Time went by the name of Tempus. Sev knelt carefully on the prayer mat, paying attention to the soft crackle of the threaded bamboo beneath his knees, to the rough texture of the woven grass.
Any other priest might have taken the time to meditate on that feeling on the thought of the passage of time, the cycle that carried it from seed to grass to harvest.
Sev took his time to meditate on it just long enough to feel the first threads of a divine connection open up with the god. He seized upon it then, opening the connection just a little bit more, and sending a rather impossible-to-ignore prayer that consisted of just a few words.
Hey! Nice to meet you.
...No one said it had to be a good prayer. He had technically been a lot more wordy in his first message to Onyx, but different times called for different measures.
There was a long pause not because Tempus hadn''t heard him, and not because he had chosen not to respond to the indignity of the message; Sev would have felt either reaction through the divine connection they now shared. The feeling he got was one of surprise, curiosity, and cautious interest.
...You are a new priest of Time? Curiosity dominated, in the god of Time''s response. Tempus'' divine voice was slow and ponderous, like he took his time with every word and thought.
Not exactly. Sev let his embarrassment show through the connection. I am a priest of Onyx. God of, uh, sculptures.
I have not heard of him. There was a small pause before Tempus responded, but Sev got the impression that far more time had passed for the god of time than it had for him.
He is... forgotten. A hint of moroseness bled through the connection before Sev could stop it. He didn''t consider what he''d done a failure, exactly, but it said a lot that no one remembered Onyx, despite his attempts. The god was alive... and that was all he could say, really.
Time allows many things to be forgotten, Tempus allowed.
I didn''t mean it quite like that, Sev said, but he allowed the topic to flow past him. Tempus didn''t seem all that interested in discussing Onyx, and he couldn''t me the guy. I have a request. Uh, I don''t want it to seem like I''m contacting you just to get something out of you, though. Even though that''s technically what I''m doing?
Is that not the reason most mortals pray to a god? Tempus sounded amused, now, and in spite of himself, Sev chuckled.
I suppose, he answered. I don''t want to be like them, but it seems inevitable, to a certain degree.
Time heals all wounds, Tempus assured him at least, that was what Sev thought he was trying to do.
I need to forge more connections with the gods, Sev said. He let out a small sigh. In the pursuit of power, I suppose, which kinda means my motives are in question?
It seems to me that you have little choice, Tempus observed. If nothing else, he seemed to enjoy Sev''s philosophical meandering Sev could feel it through their connection. Tempus was engaged. This was the type of conversation he enjoyed, and a type of conversation he hadn''t had for a long, long time. If you are in need of power, and must contact others to gain that power, then you must do so but the manner in which you choose to do so matters, does it not?
Compromised motives, but if I do my best to act in good faith... Sev mused. And maybe it''s okay to ask for help, even from people I don''t know.
I would posit that is the foundational purpose of society.
Well, I don''t know about that, Sev responded with augh. I wish it were, though. Maybe we''ll get it there, step by step.
Sev paused, and felt a familiar ache take over a soul-deep exhaustion that seemed out of line with what he had experienced. He paused for a moment, his connection with Tempus allowing him to take a step back and examine that emotion.
It was his own, and yet it felt so strangely foreign.
We have greater troubles? Tempus asked, surprising him. He''d no doubt felt the sensation through their connection.
Yeah. Sev waited a long moment after responding, hoping the god would have something else to say; when Tempus simply waited in turn, he continued, a little hesitant. But before that... could I ask for a favor? A personal one.
Asking a favor of a god before doing him one in turn? Tempus chuckled. You are a bold one.
Do you happen to know the god of Gold? Aurum?
He is like a little brother to me, Tempus answered, sounding surprised perhaps even a touch defensive.
He wishes to grow older, Sev said.
The connection went dead. Sev feared for a moment that Tempus had cut it off entirely, but that wasn''t the case the god had simply mped down hard, preventing any of his emotions from leaking through the makeshift bond.
Sev waited.
He had time.
And this was the god of Time, after all.
He didn''t judge. He could think of a half-dozen reasons for Tempus to react like this, from suspicion to guilt to fear; it didn''t mean that any of those reasons were right.
After a long moment, the connection began to lift.
And you think I can help him, Tempus said. Why?
You''re the god of Time, Sev answered. I figured you would know why gods cannot age, at least.
...You do not suspect me.
No? What reason would you have to prevent other gods from aging? Sev couldn''t keep the perplexed tone out of his mental voice.
No reason I could think of, and yet, Tempus answered, just a hint of dryness in his voice.
I only thought you might be able to help, Sev said. But I''m guessing this is a bigger problem than I realized.
By leagues, Tempus said, and for the first time, the god''s voice came across as exhausted. Sev instinctively reached out, as if he could catch the poor guy as he slumped over though of course, they were nowhere near one another. Tempus sent a feeling of amused appreciation through their connection, nheless. The gods oftene to me for a solution, and I do not have one. I do not have one for Aurum, either. I am sorry.
Do you know why, at least? Sev asked.
I have my theories, Tempus said. The simplest among them being that gods age on a timescale far greater than that of mortals; that I am too weak, and cannot shift gods forward in time enough that they would age.
Or perhaps gods, creatures of divinity that we are, must represent an aspect: perhaps that aspect remains unchanging always, unable to grow or shift.
Or perhaps our aspect is represented in civilization, and that civilization must grow in order for us to grow in turn.
I cannot act to change any of these things. Tempus ended his little spiel with what felt like a godly sigh. Sev could practically feel the shrug in his words, a touch morose and stretched in time.
But you made it sound like this is a problem, Sev said. That Aurum is not the only god trapped like this.
He is not, Tempus confirmed. Of the one-hundred-fifteen gods I know of, thirty-four of them are children. It is not a majority... but it is too many. Often, their worshippers are few and far between, and their priests are rarely strong enough to connect with the divine realm to see them for who for what they are.
Their angels try to protect them, but their ability to do so is limited, and their understanding of mortals even moreso. Tempus hesitated. I saw what happened with Aurum. I am sorry I could not do more to prevent it. To reach out and interfere with another god... it costs us. And I did not do not have that power.
You saw what happened? Sev asked. There was an urgency in his voice that Tempus caught nearly immediately, though the only reaction from him was confusion. Did you see the whole thing?
...The angel was reprimanded and sent home, were they not? Tempus frowned. There is more to the story. But I did not see it, if that is the case.
Infolock. Sev practically hissed out the word, even projecting it through their connection. A distinct frustration imed him. I don''t know how they work with gods.
We know what our subjects know, for the most part, Tempus said. There are exceptions. It costs us divinity.
A lot of things cost you divinity, Sev said. What is divinity?
Ah, Tempus said, and now there was something of a smile in his voice. That is the question, isn''t it?
Sev waited. ...Are you going to answer it?
I do not know the answer. Tempus shrugged, and Sev almost groaned in frustration. It is a source of power. A currency. It replenishes naturally to us, whether we are ascended or everpresent. It was a lot more powerful, once, but... it costs divinity to reject your system. A small frown. A strange circumstance.
Strange indeed, Sev echoed, but his mind was racing.
The gods didn''t know about what was happening.
He''d known that on some level. Aurum hadn''t known, and the temple priests had been eager to find out about the dungeon when he had first returned from its formation; it made sense, too, that they were trying to convert him to their cause. If gods knew what their followers did...
That felt a little invasive, actually. He understood the math, but didn''t necessarily like it.
What could he tell Tempus, though?
Only one way to find out.
Tempus, Sev began, and he felt something in the divine connection begin to tense like the god knew that something wasing. Far away, he felt something mping down on the connection like a guillotine, and he could only guess that it was the grip of the system.
But he was here. In Vex''s bonus room, a world intentionally made as far away from the system as possible. On top of that, he was in the Roads, and the Roads seemed even more isted; the power it had here was weaker than it had ever been.
So Sev told Tempus everything.
The benefit of a divine connection was that there could be no room for doubt; he opened the connection fully, allowing the god to read directly from his soul. The universe is ended, he said, in so many thoughts and impressions, the images of his journey shing along the connection they shared. The gods are being sacrificed to preserve what remains. Aurum and Onyx are fighting to find another way. We cannot do it without help.
There was a long pause that wasn''t long at all. Sev had the impression that Tempus had spent a touch of divinity to manipte time to process, to verify, to do his needed research.
When the god returned, he went right down to business.
You are not as strong as you could be, Tempus said. Let me show you what you can be.
161 - Book 3: Chapter 26: S - Godly Intervention
161 - Book 3: Chapter 26: S - Godly Intervention
Time splintered.
In front of Sev stood an older man mid-forties or mid-fifties, perhaps. He wore the flowing robes of a priest of the God of the Sun with the full title capitalized in his head, even, because he couldn''t not. Power poured out of him in waves.
"In the light of the sun," the priest intoned. They were the words of an incantation, a prayer. "None may fall."
And it was the truth.
The man led an army. Tempus led Sev high up into the sky, so he could see the battle for himself; there was at least a thousand men, if not more, involved in an outright war. Sev didn''t recognize the equipment or the banners of any of the men involved, and even thendscape seemed unfamiliar, for all that it was clearly a part of Obreve.
What he did see was that none of them died no matter how hard they were struck, even with their limbs and heads cleaved off, they kept fighting. Ghostly trails of light filled in where heads or arms had once been and simply... kept fighting.
It was an awe-inspiring disy of power, but Sev felt a deep difort stirring in his stomach.
"When did this happen?" he asked quietly.
"In ages past," Tempus answered. The god stood next to him, a stately figure dressed in blue-silver robes; in ce of a head, he had a vortex of time. Sev could hear the steady tick-tock of a clock every time he nced too long at Tempus, and perhaps that was for the best time seemed to lose all meaning when he stared for a fraction of a second too long. He could almost feel the way causality sped up around him, grounded only by the sound that echoed in his mind.
"You can reach back beyond thest two hundred years?" Sev asked. He wondered if Tempus'' power could breach the End like that, pulling back things that had already been erased.
Tempus dashed his hopes when he shook his head. "No," he said. "Not without help. This is but a small piece of history, recovered when one of my priests alongside one of the tinum rankers of Anderstahl delved deep into their Prime Dungeon and retrieved a fragment of the past... though we have been finding fewer and fewer of those ofte."
A small nce to Sev, and the priest felt the weight of eternity pressing down on him. Just for an instant. "Now you know why," Sev said quietly.
"Indeed I do," Tempus answered, his voice grave. "I have tried to speak to the other gods about this, and I cannot; they do not recognize my words when I try. But the good news is that one of your allies appears to be reaching out to the gods to spread word, so you are not alone in this quest."
That was good to know, at least.
A moment passed. The army beneath them continued to fight, though half of the priest''s army was clearly dead, for all that they hadn''t fallen; all that was left of them were specters of glittering light, fighting for all they were worth. The priest didn''t seem at all perturbed by this, and that was perhaps the most disturbing part of it all for Sev that he seemed to feel nothing for the deaths of so many men.
Perhaps that was because he intended to bring them back, but... as far as Sev could tell, none of the divine magic here interacted with the souls of any of the people. They wicked away into the air as soon as their owners died, caught quickly by threads of divinity and drawn somewhere Sev couldn''t see.
Even more curiously, Sev sensed no interference from the system. He couldn''t know if any of the soldiers below were using system skills or not, of course, but it didn''t seem like they were. There was none of the strangeness that he hade to associate with the use of a system skill.
The soldiers were many times stronger than most, certainly, but that didn''t seem to be the result of system-given stats rather, he saw the distinct glow that he''de to associate with mana wrapped around their arms and legs as they fought, like they were reinforcing their bodies with mana.
The Priest of the Sun still stood impassive at the back of it all, watching his army fight tooth and nail against their enemy. Sev couldn''t tell what or who that enemy was, though he tried it was like whatever had been recorded in this fragment of history was simply missing one entire side of the conflict.
All he could see of them were twisted fragments of color, shes of wing and stone and fire.
Where they shed, light erupted. People died and rose again, golden-bright figures waging a fierce battle like they were fighting for their lives.
It would have been a beautiful sight if not for all the death and carnage involved.
The Priest of the Sun wielded a staff of sunstone and starlight. He wasn''t fast or strong, but he moved with precision. Sev saw the divine energy fluctuating around him with every step he took, and watched the contemptuous face the priest gave his enemies as they approached him.
Three in particr that snuck their way past his army. Three in particr that were represented byrger clouds of possibility; Sev could not see what they were, but he could see that they were strong. He could see the magic they wielded, the way dark-red fragments of crystalline mana trailed around behind them every time they made a move to attack.
A storm of magic erupted.
Three weapons inscribed with glyphs Sev saw those in remarkable detail thrust forward, each carrying with them the force of a spell that could devastate a mountain; the power of each spell was such that he could feel what they were, even without being their target.
Magic was an idea imprinted on the mana, and the mana sung with that collective ontological weight. Here was a spear that umted gravity mana, strong enough it could visibly bend light; here was a sword that rang with sound mana, loud enough to crack the earth around it; here was a chain that carried a freezing nothing, ice mana that had deepened so much it stole all the energy from anything it touched.
A barrier of sunlight shone around the priest. He looked unconcerned. Sev knew for a fact that his barriers would have shattered in an instant under just one of those attacks, let alone three. The divinity pressed into that barrier should have been far from enough, and yet
And yet.
"The light of the sun washes away all sin," the priest intoned. Time seemed to slow as he spoke. He should have been struck before he even opened his mouth, and yet the divine energy building did something strange, building in cadence with his words.
His words lent strength to his beliefs, and his beliefs lent strength to his magic.
All three attacks did nothing.
Sev could almost feel the stunned confusion in the air, though the Priest of the Sun''s expression remained as serene and slightly contemptuous as ever. Three weapons faltered, as if their owners didn''t know what to do now that their attacks had failed. They had not conceived of the possibility of failure.
The priest waved an arm, and smiled an almost chilling, distant smile. "We are all but stardust," he said.
Just like that, all three of his opponents vanished. It was so sudden and anticlimactic it seemed unreal, and yet Sev knew it wasn''t, because he''d seen something most others wouldn''t.
He''d seen how that magic worked.
A small piece of divine magic of Sun divinity, specifically broke past the natural barriers of the soul, of each person''s sense of self. In that moment of vulnerability imposed by their shock, the Sun divinity took over and imposed itself upon them.
What they were was written into reality as a concept, as an imposition of their souls. That small piece of divinity took it over like a parasite, flooding every aspect of them and turning it into little more than stardust and sunlight, killing not only their bodies but overwriting their souls.
Sev felt a little sick.
What anyone else would have seen, more likely than not, was three individuals being instantaneously incinerated by a brief sh of sunlight, but what Sev understood was that something far more horrifying had happened. And yet, in that horror, a small piece of understanding broke loose.
"Mana is memory," he said out loud, tasting the words. "And magic is the expression of a concept from the infinite record that is mana."
Tempus shot him a questioning look, and he ignored it.
"Divinity is the concept itself, imposed on reality." Sev muttered.
It exined why reality anchors tore gods apart to fix themselves. It shed new light on what reality shards were, even. He''d never sensed a hint of divine energy about them, but if it was encased in a shell and hidden from him...
Tempus gave him a strange look. "Are you alright?"
"I don''t want to see this." Sev felt the answer emerge before he could stop himself, and he winced slightly at how brusque his words were. Tempus didn''t react, waiting patiently for him to exin himself even as the battlefield froze around them, and Sev sighed as he tried to search for the words.
"He''s strong," Sev said, gesturing at the image of the Priest of the Sun. "But this is... wrong. He''s not a healer. He''s healing, but everyone around him is dying. This isn''t who I want to be."
"Ah." Tempus barely seemed to have considered the possibility; he looked around at the battlefield as if he was considering it for the first time, and winced just slightly. "The timescale of mortal lives often makes such conflicts seem... irrelevant to me. I went for the greatest disy of power I had in my collection. I apologize."
"It''s fine." Sev waved it off. "It taught me something valuable about divinity, and whatever''s happening here seems... I don''t know how long ago this happened."
"Eighteen hundred years," Tempus said.
Before the end of the universe, then. Before the system existed? Sev frowned, looking out over the battlefield again; somehow, the fact that he couldn''t see who the enemy if they could be called that here felt... significant.
"You would like something else, then?" Tempus asked.
"I learned what I needed to," Sev said finally. "And I know what is possible, even if this isn''t the direction I want to go in. I know that I can be more. I just need to choose my own direction one that isn''t this."
"Do you have an idea of what you wish to be?" Tempus'' voice was mild, curious. Sev thought about it for a moment, even as the scene around him faded, and he found himself once more kneeling on that prayer mat in the Roads.
Tempus was no longer next to him, but the divine connection between them remained steady and strong perhaps even stronger than before. Part of it almost seemed to be beginning to anchor itself to him the way Aurum''s connection was anchored to him.
Yes, Sev answered, this time in his mind. It took a moment of contemtion for the desire to solidify into something certain.
If there was anything that watching that war had taught him if there was any one thing he had to take away from it it was the simple understanding of how he felt about conflict on a scale such as this. He didn''t know if it was something he had understood before and lost, with all his memories drained into his healing, but it didn''t matter he knew himself now.
I want the power to prevent conflicts like that before they even begin, Sev said. To forge peace where it should be impossible. To search time and pluck out the threads of conflict before they happen.
But in the event that I cannot... and that will happen. Not every conflict can be prevented, and I cannot be useless if I have to fight. Sev''s mind briefly went back to the fight with Irvis, and the way he''d been relegated to the role of support; he didn''t mind, but he''d been powerless. His shields hadn''t done enough, and his true support skills werecking.
In the event that I cannot, Sev said. I need a better way to heal. A way to fight. And a way to support. A way to take the strengths of those around me and make them even greater.
Tempus hummed in response, and Sev felt the passage of time wrap around him. I may have some suggestions.
162 - Book 3: Chapter 27: M - Split Paths
162 - Book 3: Chapter 27: M - Split Paths
"Alright, now I just gotta choose a path..."
Misa stared at the five split paths in front of her. Each path seemed almost entirely identical, and even the small differences they did have were entirely cosmetic. It wasn''t like a scuff on the dirt of the tunnel was likely to be relevant, and even if it was, she had no way of knowing how it was relevant.
In theory, she had no way of knowing what was at the end of each path.
In theory.
She did still have Endless Echoes, after all. She could see gain information from her alternate selves, from decisions she might have made, a few minutes into the past. She''d trained it up enough now that she could go a full ten minutes back; that would have to be enough.
For ten minutes, she waited, standing on the precipice of the path in front of her. Then she triggered Endless Echoes five times, one after the other, an alternate version of her splitting off into each path all while her real self remained at the entrances, observing the memories fed into her.
It was a good thing she did, too.
Misa One she thought of herself as One, anyway, as she led herself down the leftmost path; she knew she was an echo, a product of a system skill, and wasn''t that a strange thought? She''d been contemting using Endless Echoes to make her way down each of the paths, and then decided that the leftmost path was as good a choice as any.
The strangest part was being consciously aware that that choice wasn''t entirely hers. In battle, the effect wasn''t nearly so obvious. Bnced on a razor''s edge of choices and split-second decisions, her echoes never really noticed that they were echoes, and so the memories that fed back into her were never aware in the way she was now.
No doubt Misa Prime would be deeply ufortable once the truth of this revealed itself to her. Misa chuckled at the thought; she wasn''t as bothered by the idea of being a temporary version of herself than she supposed she might have been. Whether that was an effect of the skill itself or whether she was justfortable with the idea of being temporarily split from and then reunited with herself, she didn''t know.
She didn''t spent too much time thinking on it, anyway. Time spent thinking about that was time she could spend investigating this tunnel, and One needed to make sure she found out everything she could, so that her ''real'' self could make the optimal choice when the time came.
One nced behind herself, and her eyebrows furrowed slightly. The entrance that led into this tunnel was gone; as far as she could see behind her was a straight, smooth tunnel. Once she made her choice, it seemed, she couldn''t go back to choose a different path.
Good to know.
The tunnel stretched ahead of her, too, as smooth and identical as the main path had been but as she walked deeper, she found the walls slowly changing. The light-brown stone darkneed into gray, and then into pitch-ck stone with glittering specks of light within them. Looking into the stone felt almost like looking into the stars.
Now that she thought about it, it reminded her of the material that that one dungeon was made of the dungeon that had kicked off this whole journey to begin with. She remembered the starlight stones and the way the trap had triggered, mes guttering out at her. She remembered the way she''d had to step in front of a group of skeletons to shield them from the me, and how she''d failed at even that.
She remembered how she''d nearly died.
She should have been dead, really. It was sheer luck that that bonus room had triggered, transporting her there instead; sheer luck that the conditions for it were her own death.
And yet... she still didn''t have another way to handle that situation. Block or die. Misa had learned to do a lot of little tricks with her skill, but it was still one skill. Perhaps she could have thrown a weapon back, used the block to teleport herself out of the way of the trap, but that would''ve left the others there to die.
She needed better options. She needed more skills.
For the first time in a long time, Misa felt dissatisfied. She''d found ways to use everything she had, certainly, and she''d gained a certain degree of versatility with the ability to draw upon her future to summon simcrums of her the members of her home vige; as they grew in strength, so would she.
She didn''t want to rely on them, though. They lived a small, peaceful life. They would agree to help her, as they always did, but what right did she really have to drag them into her fights?
Though she supposed that the fights she was a part of mattered to their own lives, too. It still left a foul taste in her mouth.
Lost in thought, One almost didn''t notice when she ran into an open cavern. It was the way the sound changed that alerted her to it, and even then it was just a subtle quality a change in the way her footsteps echoed against the floor, the way her breathing resonated in the chamber.
She looked up.
The tunnel expanded into an enormous, cylindrical clearing. The sky or something that looked like the sky was visible as a bright blue expanse above, though not a drop of that blue touched the walls or the floor of the cave she was in. It made the lighting look strange, like she was staring at a painting of a scene that wasn''t quite right.
What drew her attention more than the strangeness of light, though, was the pedestal at the center and the weapon that hovered above it, floating in the air.
One approached it with what could have been called a certain reverence. She knew, in the back of her mind, that the other paths would likely carry simr weapons. She knew that the ''real'' Misa choosing this path wasn''t set in stone. It wasn''t even particrly likely.
It didn''t change the fact that scythes were fucking cool, though.
Ten minutes had almost passed. If there was a trap, she needed to pick it up now, so her real self would see the results; she stepped forward, grabbing for the scythe
Notifications blistered past her vision. She tried to get a close look at them all, so she could make an informed choice. The text was hard to read; it didn''t even have the familiar blue boxes, like the notifications came from an older iteration of the system.
The text itself seemed to confirm that thought.
[ You have seen a new Path! ]
[ ERROR The Path system is locked and its features have been deprecated. Please see an Administrator for assistance. ]
[ ERROR Path locked. Disy anyway? Y/N ]
[ Disying Path... ]
[ Path of the Reaper Rare ]
A Reaper teleports around the battlefield, bringing death and chaos with them. Use that death to shield your allies call forth the specters of your foes to take attacks, and send those same specters to do your bidding.
Starting Skills:
[ Death Sight ]
[ Elsewhere, Elsewhen ]
[ Soul Shroud ]
[ 0 / 10 points to next advancement. ]
Requirements:
[ Teleport at least three times COMPLETE ]
[ Resurrect at least five undead COMPLETE ]
[ Kill at least 5,000 living things Computing... ]
[ ... ]
[ COMPLETE ]
[ Path requirements have been met. ]
Take the second path from the left, something inside Misa told her; she went that way without a second nce at the other four paths, feeling them dissolve behind her as she walked. She almost frowned, ncing back it was strange that she''d felt it at all, like a distant rumble in her soul, closing other paths...
It took her a moment more before she understood.
She was the second, then.
Second, as she decided to call herself it would make distinguishing the memories easierter on spared the tunnel she was in a quick nce before taking rapid, confident strides forward; she only had ten minutes to figure out what was at the end of this tunnel, after all. There was every chance that ten minutes would not be enough, even, and if that happened then she would simply have to gamble on a path with whatever information she could gather.
She tried to keep her eyes peeled, but there honestly wasn''t all that much to see.
The rock felt like it was getting denser beneath her feet, perhaps. The air felt like it was getting a little bit denser with mana, and the temperature felt like it was slowly going up. Second felt a bead of sweat dripping down the back of her neck, and she raised her mace cautiously.
She didn''t think she would be getting attacked, but it was better to be prepared.
Ultimately, though, she wasn''t attacked. She came upon an empty room that was lit only by the glow of a pool of magma; it surrounded a spire of rock that held a weapon that was, of all things, a shield that glowed with heat.
She, too, stepped forward to take up the shield, and found herself bombarded by notifications.
[ You have seen a new Path! ]
[ ERROR The Path system is locked and its features have been deprecated. Please see an Administrator for assistance. ]
[ ERROR Path locked. Disy anyway? Y/N ]
[ Disying Path... ]
[ Path of the Sunshield Rare ]
A Sunshield harnesses the power of heat and me to defend their allies. Melt any weapon with the strength of your shield, and imbue friend and foe alike with a blistering aura the power of the sun is yours tomand.
[ Calcting... ]
[ Path upgrade requirements met. ]
[ Path of the Phoenix tinum ]
The Phoenix harnesses the power of fire not only for defense, but for offense and healing. Incredibly versatile, the Phoenix''s path also grants one control over fire-aspect mana, greatly increasing the potential range of skills you may acquire.
Starting Skills:
[ Kic Conversion ]
[ Reborn in the Ashes ]
[ Fire Aspect Body ]
[ 0 / 10 points to next advancement. ]
Requirements:
[ Experience being on fire at least once COMPLETE ]
[ Die at least twice COMPLETE ]
[ Sacrifice yourself for others COMPLETE ]
[ Path requirements have been met. ]
Three''s path and memories were much the same as Second''s. For her, the tunnel''s stone slowly faded away into nothing, such that she eventually felt like she was walking on empty air; her knowledge that her memories would simply be fed back into her primary self kept her going. If this path was a trap, then she needed to experience it so that Misa would know not to take it.
What she didn''t expect was to find a bow floating in the midst of that nothingness. There was no quiver around, no arrow nearby or even a ce to nock an arrow into the bow but when she pulled the string taut, she still felt a strange energy reverberating with her fingers.
Notifications poured out about a locked path, and then the actual path was disyed.
[ Path of the Empty Archer Gold ]
The Empty Archer is an archer only in name. The arrows you will wield are not physical things; they are conceptual attacks, infecting your target with whatever you hold in your mind. Be aware that these arrows can be turned against you, and are only as strong as your mind.
Starting Skills:
[ Tier 1 Conceptual Arrow ]
[ Archer''s Eye ]
[ Uncanny Shot ]
Four was either Four or Two. She had no idea; it depended on whether her other selves had chosen to start from the right or the left. Four seemed like the more likely bet, though.
Her chosen path made her slow down after a few minutes, though. She grimaced a little bit, forcing herself to push on but the way the rock beneath her turned to a red slurry was not encouraging, and she was starting to get a good idea of what likelyy at the end of this path.
Hopefully the other versions of her had better luck with their own. She didn''t think she''d be selecting this one.
She was still hesitant, even when she grabbed the handle of the pulsating flesh-de that hung in the air before her, and it wrapped its tendrils around her wrist. The notifications about there being a locked path system shed by, and then:
[ Path of the Aberrant Berserker ]
Your contact with aberrations and abominations has changed you, and you have chosen to step even closer to that realm. You share a deep, personal bond with your de, and it will grow stronger as you do.
Starting Skills:
[ Biomass Forge ]
[ Blood Absorption ]
[ Twisted Fuel ]
"Yeah, no," Four said. She tore off the de and chucked it into the blood-pool at her feet, then left.
163 - Book 3: Chapter 28: M - Fifth Choice
163 - Book 3: Chapter 28: M - Fifth Choice
Five.
She was probably Five. The fifth andst simted iteration, judging by the strange impulse she had to choose the rightmost tunnel. There was every chance she wasn''t, of course, and so she proceeded into the path with all due caution; there was no reason to risk herself unnecessarily.
Something felt wrong, though. An unpleasant buzz trickled under her skin from the moment she stepped into the tunnel. Five nced back and felt her heart skip a beat; instead of a tunnel behind her, leading back where she''de, there was only a nk wall.
No turning back. The message was pretty clear. She wondered if her other iterations had faced the same, or if she was the only one that had to face what was starting to feel more and more like a trap.
She ventured down the tunnel anyway. The Roads weren''t giving her much of a choice otherwise; the best she could do was try to be careful. She tried blocking, just in case there was some sort of invisible spell being used on her but if there was, the skill didn''t qualify it as an attack.
So much for that. Endless Echoes was pretty flexible, but the only things it blocked were things that vited personal autonomy in some way those were what it qualified as ''attacks''.
And so all she could do was walk.
And walk.
And walk.
Her time was limited, if she was an echo she''d only managed to push the skill to about ten minutes, and she was well aware that the time she had to find something was running out. Misa''s walk quickly elerated into a run. Even if the only thing that happened was her running into a trap, that was information that her prime self could use.
There was the barest flicker of a notification before her time was up.
[ Path of the Endless ERROR ]
Misa, waiting back at the start of the fork, winced as the memories of five different iterations of her mmed into mind. "Right," she muttered to herself. "Maybe using that skill five times at once is a bit much."
She turned her attention to the memories.
It was a little troubling that all five of her iterations had managed to conclude that they were iterations at all that they were applications of Endless Echoes. She hadn''t really had to confront the idea that her other selves might be fully cognizant of their natures, and she wasn''t sure she wanted to.
Now wasn''t the time to dwell on that, anyway. At least her other selves hadn''t shown any inclination towards having an existential meltdown, or otherwise nning to take over the ''prime'' timeline. She''d assumed she wouldn''t be like that, of course, but she was more aware than most when push came to shove, when faced with a situation that was real as opposed to a simple thought experiment...
It was sometimes a lot harder to do what you needed to do.
Misa discarded those thoughts, and focused on the important thing.
Paths. That was new, and the way the system disyed them to her was new, too; the problem was the announcement that this was a deprecated feature. Why were the Roads showing them to her? How did the Roads even know that making contact with those weapons would be significant to the system in any way?
The system was supposed to be more isted than ever, here; it didn''t exist in this echo except for where it was attached to her and her friends. Derivan had more or less already ascertained that it was her own anchor that was keeping their connection to the system intact.
It was her anchor that the four of them were now connected to, separate from the system that everyone elsebored under.
Did that make a difference? There was every chance that it did. Dungeons were molded by their environments, and those dungeons fed into the anchors that they held. Maybe that made her anchor special, now that she was the one hosting and feeding it. Maybe her anchor was on their side now.
Misa''s lips twisted a little at that thought, and she chuckled to herself. Too much spection, she decided. She needed to decide what to do.
Even if her anchor was letting her look at this Path system, that system was still locked away from her. She was curious about it it seemed like a way she could grow beyond the ss she had been assigned even if there was a message tagged on about the Path being locked.
That made thest tunnel all the more notable. She hadn''t seen a message about the Path feature being locked or deprecated. All she''d seen was the barest flicker of a name before the memory caught up to her and cut out.
Why?
There was nothing about thest tunnel that should have made it significant. Misa red at it suspiciously, as if a powerful enough re could force it to reveal its secrets to her, but nothing changed. It was, as far as she could tell,pletely identical to the other tunnels.
There was a part of her that was attracted to the idea of the Path of the Empty Archer; Reaper and Sunshield were both too close to what she could already do, Phoenix seemed too focused on herself and was an even worse choice than Sunshield, unless she could keep blocking, dying,ing back to life, and blocking again, which...
...which was maybe a possibility? That was what [Reborn in the Ashes] implied. But that could also have been a skill that would only bring her back to life if she burned to death, or if she died of old age. It was a huge risk to take for a small upgrade to her existing kit, especially when she had Sev to heal her.
She wasn''t going to touch Aberrant Berserker at all.
Empty Archer was mostpelling. It was the option that would allow her the most flexibility, and it added to her kit rather than fleshing out what she could already do. There was a benefit in specializing even more, she supposed, but she was about as specialized as she could be already. The only thing she really needed in that department was a way to deal with rapid attacks or too many attacks at once, and Empty Archer seemed like it might have a solution for her there, too, depending on what concepts she could load the arrows up with.
There were only two problems. One, it was locked; she wasn''t particrly concerned about that part, though, since she was rtively certain Derivan''s Patch stat would easily unlock it. There was every chance that she was wrong, but if that were the case then the choice in front of her was no real choice at all, and it seemed strange that the Roads purported to lead her where she needed to go would lead her to apletely pointless upgrade.
The second problem was the Path of the Endless the one that, she realized, matched the name of her skill. [Misa''s Endless Echoes].
She still grimaced every time she thought of the full skill name.
She could wait another ten minutes and then use the skill again, sending that copy of her as deep into the Path as she could. That was her n, even, except she looked a little closer, and realized the tunnels in front of her were closing. Not the paths within just the entrances. The rock was folding in on itself.
It wants me to hurry up.
Misa half-growled under her breath. She hated being forced into decisions.
And then she thought of an idea.
[An Anchor of Heart and Home] allowed her to summon a copy of those vigers that lived in J''rokksur, her original home and vige not just a copy, but a full simcrum. The person summoned would control two bodies at once, and there was one possibility she hadn''t ever tried before, mostly because she''d just never considered it.
But she was a part of her vige, too. She was a part of J''rokksur. That was the reason the skill functioned the way it did.
So what if she summoned herself?
It might have been a stupid idea... but she tried it anyway.
The skill resisted her. There were futures she couldn''t sacrifice because they were too far away; here, in this tunnel, her future was restricted to five choices. Five roads. Five paths.
An easy enough choice to make.
First went the Path of the Aberrant Berserker. That future was just as fraught as she thought it would be, full of blood and fighting; her friends held her back and kept her from bing anything truly evil, but there was no reason they should have had to.
It wasn''t enough. The skill was resisting; this wasn''t its purpose, it seemed to say.
Next went the Path of the Reaper. That path was too much like her own already. She saw herself teleporting through the shadows, defending against powerful blows by pulling out the raw essence of the soul. None of that was her.
The skill began to give. She felt something wrap itself around her, raw Reality touching upon her core.
Last went the Path of the Phoenix. It was a good option, and she was sad to see it go, but this particr trick would only let her choose two.
Even then, there was no guarantee that the Path her doppelganger gained would transfer over to her. She suspected it would, though; experience points transferred correctly when she''dst tested it, although damagae to health and status effects did not.
The skill gave. She felt something drain from her, and then her vision was suddenly split in two. She winced a bit at the split vision, a headache quickly manifesting, but she didn''t care.
It worked.
"Mom was right," both of her selves muttered. "This is weird."
It took a little bit of maneuvering to stop both of her bodies from moving in the same direction every time she tried to operate one of them. She had no idea how her mother had been able to adapt to it so quickly. Some factor from her intuition skill, perhaps. But she got herself sorted, and made her way down the two paths, her original self going down the third tunnel and her other self going down the fifth.
Misa almost expected the Roads to try to stop her, for one of the paths to m closed. She expected something to go wrong.
Instead, the rock that had begun to close over each path pulled back slightly, as if encouraging her.
Somewhat perturbed but nevertheless willing to take it at face value, Misa made her way down the tunnels, keeping a close mental eye on what was happening in the Endless tunnel. She found the bow in one of them, grabbed a hold of it, and watched as the notifications poured out.
But that wasn''t what she was interested in. She kept her mental focus on her other self, even as her surroundings faded and she found one of her selves back on the Roads.
The Path of the Endless was not nearly so easy. The notification popped up about ten minutes in, just as before.
[ Path of the Endless ERROR ]
[ Attempting to assign Path... ERROR ]
[ You are on the Path of the Endless. Good luck. ]
164 - Book 3: Chapter 29: M - Endless
164 - Book 3: Chapter 29: M - Endless
Misa''s awareness of her prime self faded. Something about the buzzing in the air drew her attention to this path it wasn''t that she didn''t recognize she was still safe and sound in the middle of the Roads, but the more she went down this path, the more she found she couldn''t split her focus.
She was here. Her ploy had seeded, but the Roads had done something to her in turn: something that made her fully present in this body. If not for the tingling awareness in the back of her mind the strange feeling of the ground pressing into her feet, even as she walked forward; the flicker of lighting, where she saw a tunnel much brighter lit than the one she was in; the rtively cleaner scent of dirtpared to the sharp ozone that pervaded her nostrils here she would have thought the Roads had somehow canceled her use of her skill and forced her back into one body.
That, thankfully, didn''t seem to be the case. But the situation she was in didn''t seem to be much better. The buzz continued to trickle under her skin, intensifying with every step. She didn''t know if what she was feeling was magic, or if it was something else entirely. Some kind of test, perhaps.
What exactly was the Path of the Endless?
The notifications hovered in front of her, strangely immune to fading away. All the other ones had faded with time, and those that didn''t she could ordinarily dismiss but the one in front of her now refused to obey even the mentalmands she gave it.
[ You are on the Path of the Endless. Good luck. ]
What did that mean?
She stepped forward anyway. One foot after the other, she told herself; she ignored the way the tunnel seemed to narrow down around her, the way the light around her seemed to fade until she was walking forward in darkness and only darkness. She shut her eyes, then, using a hand on the wall to keep her steered straight if there was no light, then there was no need for her to keep her eyes open.
Keeping her eyes closed helped her focus. It helped her breathe. It helped her ignore the way the buzzing reached down into her bones, making every step forward even harder still
Until suddenly, it stopped.
Misa opened her eyes.
[ You havepleted step 1 of the Path of the Endless. ]
[ You now qualify for Path of the Endless Iron. Would you like to continue? ]
Misa snorted. "Is that even a question?" she asked, her voice semi-sarcastic. She allowed a grin to take over her features.
Okay. She had a better idea of where this was going now.
This was a test.
"Fuckin'' bring it," she said.
The buzz returned and expanded into a sensation that was not unlike a thousand stabbing needles. Misa tried to block it about three times before giving up entirely the Roads were preventing her from using the skill somehow, and she wasn''t sure she wanted to keep testing them. If she was given reason to try again at some point, she would; right now, it seemed all the Path of the Endless wanted her to do was endure.
That couldn''t be all there was to it, though. Pain was nothing. Misa had once fought until she died in the defense of her vige, and the injuries she had taken at the time were so fraught and severe they had stayed with her even after she had somehow managed to survive.
She''d traveled on her own afterwards for years, and she hadn''t found a proper healer until Sev.
It didn''t matter how much pain or difort the Roads gave her.
Evidently, the Roads agreed.
[ You havepleted Step 2 of the Path of the Endless. ]
[ You now qualify for Path of the Endless Bronze. Would you like to continue? ]
"Obviously," Misa snorted.
She didn''t really need to respond verbally. Whatever part of the system Paths operated on, it seemed to be an older version of it it responded to her thoughts smoothly. It was almost better, even, except it must have been removed for a reason; too many people identally responding to a prompt by thinking it, perhaps.
Either way, her response prompted the path before her to change and now she really started to wonder how much of this was the Roads, and how much of it was the system.
The tunnel in front of her opened up into a cavern, not unlike what she remembered of the other paths except this cavern held no weapon in the center, no pedestal upon which an item sat. The walls of the cave were the color of starlight and bluestone, with a shifting texture underneath that reminded her of the waves of ake.
It was beautiful.
It also reminded her, rather starkly, of a dungeon that she''d been to when she''d traveled alone. It was a small, isted dungeon that was out near the Outskirts a dungeon she shouldn''t have been to at all, really. The Adventurer''s Guild hadn''t directed her there, and there weren''t any small towns or viges nearby that needed protection from the dungeon. All she could get from it were a few mana crystals, and perhaps whatever loot the dungeon opted to give to her.
But she hadn''t been there because of that. She''d been there because it was dangerous.
Those early days had not been kind to her. It was easier to lose herself to fights than to confront what had happened to her family, and while those days were behind her now while she had her family back, which was not a sentence she had ever dared to hope she could even think...
Misa''s features sharpened. Off in the distance, the scuttling of a very familiar type of monster greeted her.
They weren''t high level at all, for all that the dungeon was on the verge of breaking and sat at the edges of the Outskirts. Most dungeons in this area were at least Silver or Gold grade, and the only reason Misa had chosen this one was that it was a simple Bronze dungeon, with its monsters in the Iron range.
The part that made it Bronze verging even on Silver was not the power of its monsters at all.
The scuttling sound intensified.
It was the number of them.
In other words the exact type of situation her abilities were least suited for.
Misa watched the wave of Bluestone Crabs crest the far corner of the cavern she was in and allowed a small smirk to take over the edge of her lips. Suited or not, it had been a long time since she had nearly died to them. She''d grown by leaps and bounds, not only in level, but in personal skill.
It was only that these were system monsters that disturbed her. Not a single thing she''d fought here had ever had a system tag attached to it before; this world was meant to be as detached from the system as possible. The fact that the Roads had produced something that could attach to the system meant it had produced something that attached to her anchor; she didn''t know what to make of that. But it didn''t change what she had to do.
The first crab scuttled up to her, pincers held out and ready to pinch. She remembered when she''d faced them down the first time remembered the nervous tension coursing through her body at the sheer number of them. She hadn''t been afraid, exactly, but it was here that she''d first learned her first important lesson after losing J''rokksur.
She didn''t want to die.
Now, though... Misa was curious. She let the crab do as it wanted. She''d grown so much in the time since that she was certain she could beat them even without a weapon. The amount of damage they could do was paltrypared to her health.
Sure enough, she felt no more than a small pinch. Misa chuckled, bending down to give the angry crab a little pat on its shell even as it scuttled angrily at her. She hadn''t even known the things could scuttle angrily.
And yet, strangely enough... the rest of the crabs didn''t attack.
They gathered in a circle around her, keeping their pincers at the ready like they were ready to swarm her at any moment. The one she stood next to kept angrily grabbing at her with its ws, unaware that its attacks were doing little to no damage to her. Misa frowned and looked around at the circle of crabs, perplexed.
"Not gonna attack me?" she asked out loud. She wasn''t expecting a response, but somehow felt relieved anyway when she didn''t get one. "Huh. Not gonna lie, y''all are pretty cute when you''re not trying to kill me."
She felt something inside her healing.
This had been... her second near-death experience. She remembered scrambling to leave the dungeon as wave after wave of crabs poured after her. She remembered how stubborn she''d been at the time, continuing to fight long after it was in her best interest to leave. In the end she''d only just made it out.
Was this the secret to the Bluestone Dungeon? Just... grab a crab, and carry it with you?
On impulse, she picked up the crab, tucking it under an arm and adjusting carefully so it stopped pinching her. It settled for iling wildly instead, and Misa snorted. She leveled her gaze at the crabs, stepped forward...
...and watched as they parted in front of her.
Huh.
[ You havepleted Step 3 of the Path of the Endless. ]
[ You now qualify for Path of the Endless Silver. Would you like to continue? ]
She''d assumed that the Path was testing her endurance. The first two steps had certainly implied that; they''d put her in a frame of mind to assume that the Path was all aboutsting as long as she could. First came her tolerance of difort, and then came her tolerance of pain.
The third step had tested neither of those things. They''d tested her spirit, if anything put her in a situation that had formed one part of who she was. The Bluestone Dungeon was the reason she was so hard on Sev every time he fell into his self-destructive tendencies. The way he was willing to sacrifice aspects of himself...
It wasn''t the same, exactly. Misa had been far more selfish.
But he reminded her of her.
She strode forward through the crabs, even as they all stared at her in something akin to reverence it made her feel ufortable. There was something almost intelligent in their eyes, and she was reminded of a conversation she''d had with Derivan and Vex, near to the start of all of this. After Derivan had revealed who and what he was, and Vex had questioned the nature of intelligent monsters, and inquired after the possibility that those they deemed monsters might be people...
"You don''t happen to be a person, do you?" Misa asked the crab under her arm.
It continued wiggling indignantly, and Misa sighed.
She wasn''t entirely surprised when it dissolved out of existence nor was she surprised when the next stage of the Path tested her by confronting her with a vision of her dead family. It slowed her down, but far less than it would have a year ago.
Her family was back, and she''d found a new one to boot.
"Too far," she told the Path anyway, and knelt beside each body, allowing herself a moment to grieve for each one. The moment had been real to her, and it seemed disrespectful to walk past them. This memory was a part of who she was, too.
That awarded her the fourth step, and a path upgrade to Gold.
The fifth step the one that Misa hoped would be thest, though she doubted it would be was a reenactment of her fight with Irvis. This time the Path showed her a vision of her losing that fight, of her friends dying in front of her. Her chest tightened, and a powerful tension rang through her body.
She almost, almost stepped into the role of her old self the one that had fought Irvis and lost. But she shook her head.
"No," she said, clearly and cleanly. Her gaze cut ahead and through the illusion, and she took a step forward; the image of her dead friends faded away like the morning mist.
She understood what the Path wanted from her now. It wanted her to define who she was. It was the Path of the Endless because the answer to that question was an ever-evolving one,prised of all the choices she had ever made, and all the choices she ever would made.
[ You havepleted Step 5 of the Path of the Endless, and have many more steps to go. ]
"I know," Misa said. She wasn''t as angry as she should have been, perhaps, for all the things the Path had shown her.
[ You now qualify for Path of the Endless Unranked. Your journey is your own. You have received your first skill. ]
[ New skill acquired: Me, Myself, and I ]
165 - Book 3: Chapter 30: V - Climb
165 - Book 3: Chapter 30: V - Climb
"Why... is this slope... so steep," Vex wheezed. He didn''t know how long he''d been climbing. It hadn''t mattered for the first hour or so it had been tiring, but he was used to being tired! He traveled with three people, one of whom could cure his own exhaustion, another who was a physical monstrosity, and the third of whom was his boyfriend and didn''t even have any muscles to feel tired with.
Talking to himself helped him feel better, but changed nothing about the fact that he''d been climbing up a steep slope for three hours, and it had only been getting steeper.
"Where is this even going?" Vex grimaced. He dug his toes into the wall the slope was soft, at least, and easy enough to make little footholds on. It really was getting steeper; he wasn''t exactly climbing vertically, but he would be soon if this kept up.
There were spells he could use to help himself. He''d tried a couple of them, even. There was a small glyph he could paint on his hands and feet that would make them stickier, and another one with a Gravity aspect to it he could use to make himself lighter. He still didn''t have anybination that would grant him flight, though, and he was starting to wonder if he needed to stop and spend his time trying to find one of those instead.
It turned out he needn''t have worried. A few more stepster and he finally saw something in the distance, barely visible in the dim lighting provided to him a thin line that implied the floor finally, finally leveled out ahead of him. Vex gathered all his remaining energy and ran up the rest of the slope as fast as he could, using his hands and tail to keep his bnce when the steepness threatened to tip him over; he grasped the edge of the floor just as the ground turned into a vertical wall, and hauled himself up and over onto it.
Instantly, the lighting around him changed. Vex blinked a few times, startled at how bright it suddenly was.
The ground beneath him was no longer soft, ylike soil; instead, his ws tapped on the familiar feeling of a hardwood floor. Vex grimaced almost instinctively, lifting his feet to clean them before he tracked dirt onto the floor of the near-pristine library he found himself in except he was suddenly and inexplicably clean.
Sure. He could ept that. That dirt had mostly been dirt-aspect mana anyway, and not actually dirt; he could fully believe that it had simply chosen to dissipate.
What drew Vex''s interest were the tall shelves around him, each one of them packed full with books. They were a good three times his height, and he had to squint to even be able to see the tops of the shelves. The library was illuminated by, near as Vex could tell, a ceiling that was made out of literal fire.
So it was a little bit difficult to look at.
"Where am I?" Vex muttered to himself. The words echoed more loudly than he''d expected, and he winced a bit, half-expecting a librarian to round the corner and reprimand him. When that didn''t happen, he took a few cautious steps forward, and picked a random book out of the nearest shelf.
The book''s design was immactely beautiful. He didn''t recognize it the style of the gold filigree on the tome was like nothing he''d seen before but he recognized the effort that went into it, the precision that it took to etch the near-symmetrical design and theny gold foil into it. There weren''t even any traces of mana on the book it was like it had been made entirely by hand.
He flipped it open, and found an empty book. Every page in it was nk.
It was the same with the next book he checked, and the next, and the next Vex felt increasingly frantic as he looked through the books. He didn''t know why it felt so wrong that they were empty, only that it was wrong. A part of him knew the books should have been filled with stories and lore and history
A hand fell on his shoulder, and the lizardkin jumped.
"They are gone." A solemn voice spoke, and Vex turned around to look at the speaker. They were humanoid, but that was where their familiarity with anything Vex recognized ended; their skin was a mottled purple, and where their mouth should have been there were instead long, sinuous tendrils. They wore stately robes of ck and red, outlined in the same gold that wasid so carefully into each book.
Their tendrils curled upward in an awkward approximation of a smile. "I apologize. I must have startled you; it would have been better if I introduced myself first, perhaps. Time has a habit of flying, in here. I am afraid I am uncertain what the social norms are in this particr century.
"My name is Isolis." They took a step back and dipped forward into a slight bow. "I am the librarian, custodian, and historian here at Sr Lagrange 1. The name is an inside joke."
Vex stared nkly. "I''m Vex," he said, opting to leave out the rest of his titles. "Uh... adventurer. Do you mind telling me what this ce is?"
"Sr Lagrange 1, as I said," Isolis said. "It is the ce we built to store the records we were able to save when the First Library burned."
"The First Library?" Vex asked. Isolis smiled again, their tendrils curling up into a whisper of a smile, and they began to walk; they beckoned Vex to follow them, and the lizard hurried to keep up. He had to take two steps to keep up with every one of Isolis''.
"The First Library," Isolis echoed. "What you call the Sun."
Xothok had mentioned something about that, Vex remembered. Xothok sent messages with what he discovered about how the stars had once been different, that they''d been libraries holding all the knowledge that the mana contained.
Libraries that were burned to keep the universe warm.
Probably. They didn''t actually know the details; Xothok had been able to find nothing further on the reason they were burned, though he''d sorted through what scraps of knowledge he could find on that dead star.
"What happened to it?" Vex asked, and Isolis sighed.
"Therees a point where any universe must end," the librarian said. "To make way for something new. The end is always a little different: heat death in one universe, a big crunch in another, vacuum decay in a third. But the universe always ends.
"Except here. Except this one and who knows, maybe infinite others, but our nar scopes can''t see that far. The existence of magic prevented the end of the universe. It burned itself to keep us alive, you see, and it reached an equilibrium one where the collective output of our knowledge kept the stars fueled, and the universe could not die.
"And so we have the first immortal universe that we know of.
"But all universes must eventually die, and that stability we achieved broke something fundamental. The Void is, we think, a response from the fundamental forces from nature though I hardly feelfortable specting. Perhaps something more fundamental to reality is required for a universe to exist, and keeping it alive with physics and magic is only part of the equation. Perhaps simply beating back entropy is insufficient.
"So. The First Library burned to prevent the heat death of this universe; that was the first transition, when we moved from a universe of light and music to one of cosmic fire. We Librarians saved everything we could. But what you saw back there..."
The empty books, Vex realized. The books that had felt so wrong the inexplicable sadness he felt while looking through its empty pages. He realized, perhaps a littlete, that the beautiful filigree decorated a book with no title at all.
"The Void marches on," Isolis said. "Consuming our history and our legacy everything that makes us who we are. Every day, another book loses its name, and the words on its pages fade away. What you saw back there is no longer a part of our library.
"It is a graveyard. A monument to all we have lost."
That pronouncement struck Vex like a bell. Their surroundings were entirely different now, he realized, although they had changed so slowly that he hadn''t quite noticed. Wooden shelves were reced with solid steel, and the ''books'' kept here if they could really be called books at all were closer to solid bs of metal, inundated with strange designs. Vex felt a small pang of loss. Gone were the beautiful filigree decorations, and in ce of them was...
...something different. Not worse, perhaps. But different, and in that difference was a small loss.
A small wire connected each one to the framework of the shelf, and each shelf in turn held wires that led away into something far off in the center of the library. Whatever that was, it was bright; the ceiling here no longer burned like fire. Instead, clinical light shone down on them from long tubes.
"What is all this?" Vex asked. He looked around in half-amazement, half-concern.
"Our database," Isolis replied. They sighed, and in that one movement they seemed to age by years. Their shoulders sagged, the tendrils on their face drooped low. "Paper is... insufficient. We cannot track the information that goes missing in the books manually; there are too many books, and only so many librarians. This way, we can keep backups on backups, and run algorithms to test if anything is missing."
"How much has gone missing?" Vex asked, frowning slightly.
"More than seventy percent of history. Eighty-one percent of all records of written media, fictional or otherwise. Sixty-five percent of cultural practices within currently active cultures." Isolis sighed. "We are doing everything we can to preserve what we had, but it is a long battle, and a losing war."
"You keep saying we," Vex said finally. The question had been on his mind for a while, but now seemed like the most opportune moment to ask. Vex felt bad, though. Isolis looked so tired. "Who is ''we''?"
Isolis chuckled softly. "That is one of the big questions we wish to answer, though that is a goal we have long since abandoned hope for. ''We'' are the Librarians those that take care of the remnants of the various Libraries. We do not know how we came about. We do not know why we have the mission that we do. We know that we care about the preservation of information and culture, and we dedicate ourselves to that mission...
"And yet, the cost appears to have been our identities. Not as persons, perhaps, but as a people. We are each of us different, did you know that? I resemble a creature of the sea, but there are Librarians that resemble humans, or orcs, or beings of pure Element.
"We share a singr culture in spite of that. Our traditions arergely the same those traditions that remain. But we do not know why we formed, or how we formed; all we know is what we are now."
Vex didn''t respond for a moment. When he did, the words were hesitant, uncertain. "I''m sorry," he offered. He didn''t know what else to say.
"We are what we are," Isolis said. The way they spoke, they had long since epted the fact. They came to a stop next to one shelf in particr Vex noticed it was different. Two new books shone on that shelf, these ones made of leather and paper, and glowing with some very familiar glyphs.
Solidity and Change.
"What is more important is why you are here," Isolis said.
He moved the books aside, revealing three smaller books behind them each one tangled in a knot of roots. Vex felt them ring with mana, even as far away as he stood.
They were thrumming with untapped power.
166 - Book 3: Chapter 31: V - Seeds
166 - Book 3: Chapter 31: V - Seeds
"What... are they?" Vex tried to keep his curiosity and excitement at bay; something about this still felt... off. For one of them, at least; closer inspection showed that one of the three root-tangled books had slightly rotten leaves, and a weaker core. It was... strange, and it made him hesitate.
"They are new books," Isolis said, heedless of his thoughts. "There have not been new books here for a long, long time. It was a joy to find these here. And yet behind them..."
Very gently, Isolis plucked out the three new, growing things from behind the books that represented Solidity and Change; they ced each one on the floor in front of Vex as if they were fragile things that would break at the slightest bit of force. Vex noticed one of them glowing more dimply than the others, like it was broken.
"These are..." Isolis hesitated, as if searching for the word. "Semerit. It has been a long time since I have seen them. They are often the sign of a great change ahead, and may evolve to embody any new concept. They are what enable the mana to create new spells. New glyphs. Or they represent such, at least."
"So other people can create new glyphs now?" Vex asked. Isolis hesitated.
"Normally, yes," they started. "But...
"You must understand, those glyphs of Stability and Change should not be possible. Not simply because this universe is dead to change, but even by the normal rules of creation... they are too broad. Too powerful. Too capable of doing anything. The mana does not allow for creations like these; they upset the bnce of magic."
"And yet it did," Vex said softly.
"It did," Isolis said. Their brows furrowed, and they let out a long sigh. "There must be a reason, but that reason is beyond me. From my perspective, it will only elerate the destruction of this universe."
"Why?" Vex felt his chest tighten slightly; that hadn''t been his intent. He hadn''t set out to create new magic in the first ce.
Not here, anyway.
"The elementals will use it to benefit themselves," Isolis said, "and nothing ill wille of that. But everyone else? These are powerful glyphs, unleashed into a world with barely any hope remaining; the mana could barely keep the state of things in ce as it is..."
"But there''s always been destructive magic." This was an argument he''d heard before about magic; not all of the noble houses in Elyra appreciated it, although that wasrgely political. They wanted the Ashion house to wield less power. "These glyphs aren''t even meant for destruction."
"Change is a form of destruction," Isolis said severely. Vex opened his mouth to respond, but the librarian raised a hand; they weren''t finished. "But not all destruction is bad, I know. Do not misunderstand. I do not feel your glyphs are anything other than a boon. But they will cause imbnce, they will cause more mana to be consumed, and in the long term..."
"The long term is already a dead end," Vex said softly.
"...I suppose that is true." Isolis frowned. "It would not change much, in the grand scheme of things. It will make people happier. I am... ufortable, I will admit. I see much potential for pain. But that is perhaps the nature of my own experiences, coloring my perception.
"Ultimately, it is moot. These semerit will not grow, and if they do not grow... it means we do not have a future. They do not respond to anything anyone has tried to create, and we do not know why. We suspect it is because of this one the broken one." Gently, Isolid prodded at the one semerit that glowed weakly. The roots around it seemed halfway rotten.
"Why would it mean you don''t have a future?" Vex frowned. He didn''t quite understand that part.
"Semerit represent future change," Isolis said. "If they will not grow, and are simply inert, then the creation of new ones serves only to mock us. But they are seeds of your potential, and so... perhaps you will be able to do something with them."
Isolis sounded almost hopeful.
Vex didn''t know how he felt about all this. It felt strange to have a near stranger put their faith in him like this particrly one that, to him, was simply so much more learned. How much time had Isolis spent in this library, studying its books? How much more did Isolis know about magic, about history?
But if Isolis was so learned, then perhaps he was right to think that Vex might be able to do something about this. The lizardkin frowned, and fed his mana into [Mana Sight], staring at what Isolis had called the semerit.
They felt off. He wanted to know why.
Even [Mana Sight] didn''t really tell him anything new, though, no matter how much mana he poured into the skill; the semerit glowed in more vibrant colors to him, perhaps, but there was nothing in the mana that was noticeably off. He frowned, ncing through a list of his skills to see if there was anything else he could use
well, no. There was something more obvious he could use.
He had his Sign.
Vex used a w and very gently traced out the sigil for the Sign of Research onto the metallic floor, doing it with careful, measured doses of [Ssh of Mana]. He ced the three semerit in the center, two whole, one broken. Isolis just watched, seemingly curious; he had no apparent understanding of Vex''s Sign.
Mana flowed, and Vex closed his eyes as information began to feed into his mind.
Previous uses of the Sign of Research had been something like speeding through the whole process of research. The Sign simted everything he would do to investigate something, then collected and presented that information back to him in a neat, organized form. He didn''t know where it got some of its information from, exactly the process by which it was able to extract the original stories behind glyphs waspletely opaque to him.
But this was...
This was different.
There was a moment of nothing, like the magic was hesitating, or having difficulty pushing through the mana around the semerit and then he felt something in it seize his magic, grabbing on to the connection it had with his mind. He almost panicked, but that connection didn''t seem malicious, and he stopped himself a second before he would have cut off his connection with his magic.
The semerit had something it wanted to show him.
In his mind''s eye, Vex saw a ce he didn''t recognize. A long, decorated hall stretched out before him, decked in colors of white and gold; lined at the sides were a number of priests and clerics.
At the end of the hallway was a book that looked surprisingly simr to the semerit he held now, though it wasn''t tangled up in knots. Vex reached out
and felt carpet beneath his feet.
He paused, almost stumbling; his eyes went wide, and a hand went immediately for his dagger. A lifetime of adventuring had prepared him for a certain set of reactions to any unusual circumstance, and this was no exception yet not a single one of those priests responded to his presence, despite the fact that he was very clearly present.
Had he teleported? But he felt the semerit in his hands, still, even though he was no longer holding them together
"We can no longer wait, sire." One of the priests spoke, though it seemed to be to no one in particr; Vex started when he realized that the priest was looking at him, and he tried to move out of the way. It was when the priest''s gaze followed him that he realized it was not that the priest was talking to no one; it was that he was talking to him. "We must ask for help. The kingdom shrinks by the day."
"What Kingdom?" Vex tried to ask. "What help do you need?"
Those were not the words that emerged from his mouth, though. Instead, he heard a deep, imperial-sounding voice emerge from somewhere in his chest. "No," he heard the voice rumble. "We have all the help we need. Have faith."
"I do have faith," the priest insisted. "But we must be realistic with our faith. Sometimes our Gods wish for us to call for help"
"Nonsense," the voice interrupted. "The Gods will provide. We do not need help."
Vex winced. He knew exactly what Sev would have to say about all of this; their resident priest had nopunctions about telling people off for exactly these sorts of attitudes. It didn''t even have to be religious in nature. Not wanting to ept help because of pride..
But what was this? Why were the semerit showing it to him?
Vex felt himself moving suddenly, and though he tried to scramble back, the entire hall shifted beneath his feet, forcing him to stumble forward; he caught himself at the edge of the window, looking out at a kingdom.
At half a kingdom.
It was beautiful, certainly a city of white baster and marble, with buildings that twisted and weaved around one another; there were nearly no straight edges that Vex could see. He could imagine what it might have looked like.
But there was a massive hole in the ground, and half of the buildings had copsed into it; at the bottom of that hole was a sheer nothing. Vex didn''t know what he was looking at his eyes refused to parse it.
"Our city is fine," he heard himself say or the voice that he was representing, at least. "It is whole and intact, and our citizens are hearty. There is little to worry about."
"The numbers do not match," the priest insisted. "We have a record of every birth, every death, and a count of every person in the city."
"And no one is dead."
"But half the people are missing!" the priest nearly exploded; Vex admired him for it, really. But his mind was distracted these people were speaking like they couldn''t see the hole.
Infolock?
"Every person in the city is ounted for," the king said calmly.
"Sire," the priest spoke, and his voice was deeply exasperated. "The number of births do not match our records of the people in the kingdom we cannot ignore this!"
Vex hated watching this.
He knew what would happen. The scene yed out in his head the way it had yed out a dozen times before; he''d seen this exact behavior from his father, from his mother, from every single one of his brothers and siblings. He''d bring to them a problem he''d seen amongst themon folk, and they wouldn''t acknowledge it was a problem at all, because to acknowledge that there was a problem meant to acknowledge there was a failure.
"Stop," Vex tried to say. "I''ve seen enough."
But the scene kept going.
"You are insolent," the voice within his chest spoke, and Vex felt mana gathering in the air.
Death mana. He saw the priest recoil, saw the small murmur start up amongst the others, the whispers. No one was going to stop the king; it was treason to speak back, or something equally absurd.
Vex responded by beginning to gather his own magic.
He didn''t care that everything he''d seen told him that this was a vision. He wasn''t going to stand by and do nothing.
A runic circle formed a system skill, Vex realized in the back of his mind and mana shed into it, too rapid for him to stop; it didn''t matter, because he''d already prepared his own counterglyph.
Stability.
The deathbolt froze in the air, and Vex fell forward, a sudden force pushing him out of the way. He reacted quickly, taking another two steps to regain his bnce and one hand whipping out one of his daggers; almost immediately, the entire hall of priests lifted their staffs, the tips glowing menacingly at his sudden presence.
Behind him, the king narrowed his eyes. He was a tall, imposing man a uzarikt, his mind supplied, the wording to mind with a strange, dizzying trim. An almost spiderlike thing, with broad shoulders and wicked-looking des emerging from his back; a low hiss was emerging between his mandibles...
...but Vex had been with Derivan for long enough to learn how to read people, and he saw the lines of guilt in the uzarikt''s face.
So he borrowed a little bit from Misa, and gave the king a severe frown. "What the fuck do you think you''re doing?"
166 - Book 3: Chapter 31: V - Lost Kingdom
166 - Book 3: Chapter 31: V - Lost Kingdom
To say that the hall erupted into chaos would be a bit of an understatement.
It wasn''t that anyone attacked far from it. No one seemed remotely interested in attacking Vex, for all that their immediate reaction had been to raise their weapons. Half the priests were whispering amongst themselves, ncing at one another surreptitiously; the other half were staring raptly at the king, waiting for him to give a response.
And the king, in turn, stared at Vex like he had no idea how to respond. "What do you mean?" he said atst. "And... who are you?"
"Who do you think I am?"
It was a gamble. Vex had no idea who any of these people were, and he had no idea where he was. He was betting that the Roads had brought him first to the Sr Lagrange and then to here for a reason, though, if he was even in a physical ce maybe this was all still part of the vision. He could still feel the semerit pressing against his hands, the floor beneath his scales.
If this was a vision, it was far different from anything he''d experienced before.
Well, not that he''d had a lot of visions. He''d just read about them in books.
"You are..." the king hesitated, looking nervous. And then he seemed toe to a decision he dipped down to a knee, surprising Vex, who had to withhold his response as all of the priests also dropped to a knee.
They were kneeling.
To him.
"Please don''t kneel," Vex finally said, trying to ignore the incredible difort he felt at having a half-dozen people kneel at him in a way that was... not unfamiliar. He''d experienced some of this before, when he went out amongst the mon'' folk in Elyra at least until he''d established that they were no moremon than he was. They''d seemed grateful to him for that, though.
Not so much these people. "We must, my lord," the king said. "We have gravely disrespected you."
Vex had... only a small idea what was happening.
"Tell me who I am," he prompted.
"A god," the king said. He kept his head close to the ground.
Vex resisted the urge to press a hand to his face. He''d been hoping it wasn''t that. Did he look anything like a god?
And what was happening here?
Vex''s mind began to crunch through everything he''d seen. He didn''t recognize this ce, but if this was an echo, it was an echo where the system existed. The runic circle the king had used to cast that deathbolt was proof enough of that, and although [Mana Sight] didn''t seem to quite work correctly in this space, he suspected that if he could use it, he''d see the same dead mana that usually floated around in his world.
This was a vision of some sort, but it wasn''t a vision of .
That knowledge helped him a bit. Perhaps this was one of the kingdoms from beyond the Outskirts, from a continent that they''d never been to; it would exin the different customs, the different people, the species he didn''t recognize.
It didn''t exin the king''s reaction to him, though. It didn''t exin the state of the kingdom.
"Which one?" Vex asked, mostly to give himself time to think. He didn''t know what the semerit wanted from him what he was supposed to do here. It was strange that he could interact with the vision at all, but perhaps it wasn''t just a vision; perhaps he was being projected somewhere...
Vex found that unlikely. There was no precedent for magic of that kind, nor magic that would allow him to cast his own magic, disrupting the king''s. Across that distance, shifted across reality itself?
But it was the best guess he had.
"P-pardon," the king said. He actually stammered a little, and Vex winced slightly; he didn''t like this. He didn''t want to be feared, and he''d never been a leader. He preferred a role in the shadows. "But I do not know. Istarnokov, perhaps, the God of Silence, but..."
Vex sighed.
He could see a few different paths ahead of him. He could try to keep up the ruse, perhaps, and tell the king that he was a god; that he wanted them to stop fighting, and to ask for help. He could tell them the truth: that he was no god at all, merely a wizard that had been sent here by a magic he didn''t understand.
He could take a third option.
"I am not a god," Vex said mildly. He walked over to the window, deliberately turning his back on the king. [Mana Sight] or not, he could still sense the presence of mana. He''d know if the king tried to attack him, and hear if the king tried to move toward him. "But I can see what''s happened to your kingdom."
"You... you''re not?" the king sounded more confused than anything. "A spirit, then? An agent of the gods?"
Thest one was the most urate, actually, ifrgely because Vex suspected he was here because of Onyx. "An agent of sorts," he decided, because it wasn''t a lie. "One who knows what is happening."
"Tell us," the king said immediately. "We serve the will of the gods."
And here, Vex frowned.
"You shouldn''t," he said.
"What?" the king''s response was reflexive, stunned. Vex shook his head, but didn''t turn around.
"You serve your people," he said. "That''s what a king does. The opinions of the gods, when there are many... they are always in conflict. Are you going to turn yourselves inside out, responding to the whims of whichever one reaches out to you first?
"Divinity is a step above us, but only a single step. You serve your people, first and foremost; the gods you choose to serve should be the ones that would most benefit your kingdom, that would have your kingdom''s best interests at heart. That is not all of them."
Vex knew this much, at least, from his talks with Sev. The cleric had impressed upon him that the gods were not the arbiters of good and evil. Many of them had their own motives, usually aligned with the specific attribute they were gods of, and there were greater duties they had that they weren''t entirely privy to. Onyx had told the answers to Sev once, but Sev had lost those particr memories, too.
The king was frozen. Vex didn''t need to turn around to know what the expression on his face was disbelief warring with anger, a conflict born from his own beliefs being pit against another. In most cases...
"If you are not a god," the king said, narrowing his eyes. "Then you are a pretender."
...In most cases, it didn''t turn out well.
Vex sighed. He''d tried.
He turned apart the deathbolt the king threw at him. He didn''t know what level he was, but it was easy enough to break apart system spells, now. The runic circles were transparent to him after months of studying with Derivan each one was just an approximation of an existing glyph, held together by the system and strings of dead mana. It took only the smallest injection of his own mana to make it fall apart.
And whatever means he was here by, he still had control over his mana.
The king didn''t have physical stats, it was clear. His eyes widened, and his breaths grew quick and fearful as he threw spell after spell at Vex; the lizardkin noted almost dispassionately that he really had grown a lot in his time in the bonus room. There was a time not too long ago when he would have struggled to analyze all these runic circles in time, but that time was no more.
Deathbolt, with a stitched together glyph for Death and Travel. Acid Spray. Burning Air.
Meteor.
That one made Vex narrow his eyes, even as he dismissed the spell with an almost contemptuous smack of the circle. Attacking him was one thing even if he didn''t cancel the spell before it happened, his own resistance would factor in if the spell hit him. He could manipte and divert the mana at thest minute, as he''d started to learn to do. This put his entire castle at risk.
"You''re an idiot," he said.
Glyph of Binding.
The Glyph he painted was a little moreplicated than a basic Binding, in fact; a basic Binding would only hold someone in ce. Small modifications to the glyph had allowed him to add additional functions to it withoutpletely fusing it with another glyph this was just a different expression of the same idea.
He reached into his pocket, not quite sure if this would work, and pped a reality shard into the middle of the glyph.
In theory...
He and Derivan had studied the way the system interacted with a person quite thoroughly. They''d worked out how the system''s mechanisms were partially Shifted, in order to allow it to be anchored to the person''s soul. The glyph he drew now had the smallest hint of Change and Stability, which were new but far easier to incorporate than the previous versions of this glyph.
And it was even more effective. The king fell like a puppet with its strings cut; he waved at the air frantically. "What did you do?!" he asked. "What did you why can''t I "
Vex ignored him, and turned his attention back to the priests. They''d been watching him. It said a lot, really, that none of them had tried to interfere in either direction; he saw the fear in their eyes.
All of this was... too simr to home.
But maybe he could convince them to do something different here. Maybe things could go a little bit better, now that he had the power to do what he couldn''t before.
When he made his way back to Elyra...
"Pardon me, lord," the priest said. "But what are we to do with him?"
Vex sighed. "I''m not your lord," he said quietly. "I''m no one at all. I don''t know how things are supposed to work here... but you shouldn''t be listening to someone that doesn''t have your best interests at heart."
He wasn''t trained for diplomacy. These weren''t words that would sway anyone that wasn''t already swayed. But a priest stepped forward, the same one that had spoken up against the king originally.
His eyes were surprisingly sharp. "What can you tell us about what''s happening to our kingdom?" he asked. Straight to business.
"Your kingdom is being erased," Vex answered. "There is a massive hole in your city, even if you can''t see it. Have you noticed anything strange? Transports taking longer than usual, streets more packed because people are forced to travel along different routes?"
"...We thought that was the way it always was," the priest said. His brows furrowed. "But you are right. We would not have built the city that way."
"My best advice is to evacuate," Vex said with a small bow and a slight wince. "I''m sorry that I don''t have anything better. But... don''t let your pride keep you here, like he was trying to do." Vex nodded at the king the former king, perhaps. "And ask for help if you need it."
The priest grimaced. "I had hoped for something better. A way to stop all this."
"If we had a way to do that," Vex said. "I suspect we wouldn''t have this conversation at all."
The priest sighed. He walked over to his king, who seemed to have slipped into unconsciousness; a hand hovered over his body, glowing with a pale light. "He wasn''t always like this," he said, half to himself. "Had the gods not abandoned us..."
"The gods, too, have their own dangers to face," Vex supplied. "It is possible you weren''t abandoned at all."
"...Then that would exin a lot, and it would mean we have failed in our duty." The priest didn''t look away. "But you are right. We have a greater duty: one to our people."
Vex nced outside. Even now, the void at the center of that city was inching outwards, slowy growing; inch by inch, it would consume more of this kingdom, and he still didn''t know where this was. He opened his mouth to ask
but the semerit in his hands glowed suddenly white-hot, and he almost gasped in pain; the vision copsed, sucked into the three semerit that appeared to have merged into one.
His original spell his Sign of Research pleted. The notes it contained were both insufficient and deeply worrying.
[ The New Semerit of the First Library ]
Allows ess to divine magics, and contains one temporal paradox.
167 - Book 3: Chapter 32: V - Lost Kingdom
167 - Book 3: Chapter 32: V - Lost Kingdom
To say that the hall erupted into chaos would be a bit of an understatement.
It wasn''t that anyone attacked far from it. No one seemed remotely interested in attacking Vex, for all that their immediate reaction had been to raise their weapons. Half the priests were whispering amongst themselves, ncing at one another surreptitiously; the other half were staring raptly at the king, waiting for him to give a response.
And the king, in turn, stared at Vex like he had no idea how to respond. "What do you mean?" he said atst. "And... who are you?"
"Who do you think I am?"
It was a gamble. Vex had no idea who any of these people were, and he had no idea where he was. He was betting that the Roads had brought him first to the Sr Lagrange and then to here for a reason, though, if he was even in a physical ce maybe this was all still part of the vision. He could still feel the semerit pressing against his hands, the floor beneath his scales.
If this was a vision, it was far different from anything he''d experienced before.
Well, not that he''d had a lot of visions. He''d just read about them in books.
"You are..." the king hesitated, looking nervous. And then he seemed toe to a decision he dipped down to a knee, surprising Vex, who had to withhold his response as all of the priests also dropped to a knee.
They were kneeling.
To him.
"Please don''t kneel," Vex finally said, trying to ignore the incredible difort he felt at having a half-dozen people kneel at him in a way that was... not unfamiliar. He''d experienced some of this before, when he went out amongst the mon'' folk in Elyra at least until he''d established that they were no moremon than he was. They''d seemed grateful to him for that, though.
Not so much these people. "We must, my lord," the king said. "We have gravely disrespected you."
Vex had... only a small idea what was happening.
"Tell me who I am," he prompted.
"A god," the king said. He kept his head close to the ground.
Vex resisted the urge to press a hand to his face. He''d been hoping it wasn''t that. Did he look anything like a god?
And what was happening here?
Vex''s mind began to crunch through everything he''d seen. He didn''t recognize this ce, but if this was an echo, it was an echo where the system existed. The runic circle the king had used to cast that deathbolt was proof enough of that, and although [Mana Sight] didn''t seem to quite work correctly in this space, he suspected that if he could use it, he''d see the same dead mana that usually floated around in his world.
This was a vision of some sort, but it wasn''t a vision of .
That knowledge helped him a bit. Perhaps this was one of the kingdoms from beyond the Outskirts, from a continent that they''d never been to; it would exin the different customs, the different people, the species he didn''t recognize.
It didn''t exin the king''s reaction to him, though. It didn''t exin the state of the kingdom.
"Which one?" Vex asked, mostly to give himself time to think. He didn''t know what the semerit wanted from him what he was supposed to do here. It was strange that he could interact with the vision at all, but perhaps it wasn''t just a vision; perhaps he was being projected somewhere...
Vex found that unlikely. There was no precedent for magic of that kind, nor magic that would allow him to cast his own magic, disrupting the king''s. Across that distance, shifted across reality itself?
But it was the best guess he had.
"P-pardon," the king said. He actually stammered a little, and Vex winced slightly; he didn''t like this. He didn''t want to be feared, and he''d never been a leader. He preferred a role in the shadows. "But I do not know. Istarnokov, perhaps, the God of Silence, but..."
Vex sighed.
He could see a few different paths ahead of him. He could try to keep up the ruse, perhaps, and tell the king that he was a god; that he wanted them to stop fighting, and to ask for help. He could tell them the truth: that he was no god at all, merely a wizard that had been sent here by a magic he didn''t understand.
He could take a third option.
"I am not a god," Vex said mildly. He walked over to the window, deliberately turning his back on the king. [Mana Sight] or not, he could still sense the presence of mana. He''d know if the king tried to attack him, and hear if the king tried to move toward him. "But I can see what''s happened to your kingdom."
"You... you''re not?" the king sounded more confused than anything. "A spirit, then? An agent of the gods?"
Thest one was the most urate, actually, ifrgely because Vex suspected he was here because of Onyx. "An agent of sorts," he decided, because it wasn''t a lie. "One who knows what is happening."
"Tell us," the king said immediately. "We serve the will of the gods."
And here, Vex frowned.
"You shouldn''t," he said.
"What?" the king''s response was reflexive, stunned. Vex shook his head, but didn''t turn around.
"You serve your people," he said. "That''s what a king does. The opinions of the gods, when there are many... they are always in conflict. Are you going to turn yourselves inside out, responding to the whims of whichever one reaches out to you first?
"Divinity is a step above us, but only a single step. You serve your people, first and foremost; the gods you choose to serve should be the ones that would most benefit your kingdom, that would have your kingdom''s best interests at heart. That is not all of them."
Vex knew this much, at least, from his talks with Sev. The cleric had impressed upon him that the gods were not the arbiters of good and evil. Many of them had their own motives, usually aligned with the specific attribute they were gods of, and there were greater duties they had that they weren''t entirely privy to. Onyx had told the answers to Sev once, but Sev had lost those particr memories, too.
The king was frozen. Vex didn''t need to turn around to know what the expression on his face was disbelief warring with anger, a conflict born from his own beliefs being pit against another. In most cases...
"If you are not a god," the king said, narrowing his eyes. "Then you are a pretender."
...In most cases, it didn''t turn out well.
Vex sighed. He''d tried.
He turned apart the deathbolt the king threw at him. He didn''t know what level he was, but it was easy enough to break apart system spells, now. The runic circles were transparent to him after months of studying with Derivan each one was just an approximation of an existing glyph, held together by the system and strings of dead mana. It took only the smallest injection of his own mana to make it fall apart.
And whatever means he was here by, he still had control over his mana.
The king didn''t have physical stats, it was clear. His eyes widened, and his breaths grew quick and fearful as he threw spell after spell at Vex; the lizardkin noted almost dispassionately that he really had grown a lot in his time in the bonus room. There was a time not too long ago when he would have struggled to analyze all these runic circles in time, but that time was no more.
Deathbolt, with a stitched together glyph for Death and Travel. Acid Spray. Burning Air.
Meteor.
That one made Vex narrow his eyes, even as he dismissed the spell with an almost contemptuous smack of the circle. Attacking him was one thing even if he didn''t cancel the spell before it happened, his own resistance would factor in if the spell hit him. He could manipte and divert the mana at thest minute, as he''d started to learn to do. This put his entire castle at risk.
"You''re an idiot," he said.
Glyph of Binding.
The Glyph he painted was a little moreplicated than a basic Binding, in fact; a basic Binding would only hold someone in ce. Small modifications to the glyph had allowed him to add additional functions to it withoutpletely fusing it with another glyph this was just a different expression of the same idea.
He reached into his pocket, not quite sure if this would work, and pped a reality shard into the middle of the glyph.
In theory...
He and Derivan had studied the way the system interacted with a person quite thoroughly. They''d worked out how the system''s mechanisms were partially Shifted, in order to allow it to be anchored to the person''s soul. The glyph he drew now had the smallest hint of Change and Stability, which were new but far easier to incorporate than the previous versions of this glyph.
And it was even more effective. The king fell like a puppet with its strings cut; he waved at the air frantically. "What did you do?!" he asked. "What did you why can''t I "
Vex ignored him, and turned his attention back to the priests. They''d been watching him. It said a lot, really, that none of them had tried to interfere in either direction; he saw the fear in their eyes.
All of this was... too simr to home.
But maybe he could convince them to do something different here. Maybe things could go a little bit better, now that he had the power to do what he couldn''t before.
When he made his way back to Elyra...
"Pardon me, lord," the priest said. "But what are we to do with him?"
Vex sighed. "I''m not your lord," he said quietly. "I''m no one at all. I don''t know how things are supposed to work here... but you shouldn''t be listening to someone that doesn''t have your best interests at heart."
He wasn''t trained for diplomacy. These weren''t words that would sway anyone that wasn''t already swayed. But a priest stepped forward, the same one that had spoken up against the king originally.
His eyes were surprisingly sharp. "What can you tell us about what''s happening to our kingdom?" he asked. Straight to business.
"Your kingdom is being erased," Vex answered. "There is a massive hole in your city, even if you can''t see it. Have you noticed anything strange? Transports taking longer than usual, streets more packed because people are forced to travel along different routes?"
"...We thought that was the way it always was," the priest said. His brows furrowed. "But you are right. We would not have built the city that way."
"My best advice is to evacuate," Vex said with a small bow and a slight wince. "I''m sorry that I don''t have anything better. But... don''t let your pride keep you here, like he was trying to do." Vex nodded at the king the former king, perhaps. "And ask for help if you need it."
The priest grimaced. "I had hoped for something better. A way to stop all this."
"If we had a way to do that," Vex said. "I suspect we wouldn''t have this conversation at all."
The priest sighed. He walked over to his king, who seemed to have slipped into unconsciousness; a hand hovered over his body, glowing with a pale light. "He wasn''t always like this," he said, half to himself. "Had the gods not abandoned us..."
"The gods, too, have their own dangers to face," Vex supplied. "It is possible you weren''t abandoned at all."
"...Then that would exin a lot, and it would mean we have failed in our duty." The priest didn''t look away. "But you are right. We have a greater duty: one to our people."
Vex nced outside. Even now, the void at the center of that city was inching outwards, slowy growing; inch by inch, it would consume more of this kingdom, and he still didn''t know where this was. He opened his mouth to ask
but the semerit in his hands glowed suddenly white-hot, and he almost gasped in pain; the vision copsed, sucked into the three semerit that appeared to have merged into one.
His original spell his Sign of Research pleted. The notes it contained were both insufficient and deeply worrying.
[ The New Semerit of the First Library ]
Allows ess to divine magics, and contains one temporal paradox.
168 - Book 3: Chapter 33: D - Void
168 - Book 3: Chapter 33: D - Void
Derivan stared at the inky darkness in front of him.
It was familiar, actually. Derivan recognized now that he''d encountered such pure darkness before when they''d recklessly crashed into the dungeon in Misa''s bonus room as it was experiencing a dungeon break. It was where they''d first encountered a Reality Anchor.
He wondered for a single, absurd moment if he was in front of the void where Elyra''s Reality Anchor was obtained. But no, that didn''t make sense; there were none of those strings of light leading up into the sky...
Oh. Oh.
Those strings of light had been the tethers for the anchor. That was the reason he''d seen the image of Misa''s vige through it that dungeon had anchored that vige in reality, their mana crystal offerings no doubt maintaining it. But no one delved it, because no one knew it existed, and so the dungeon eventually broke, monsters flooding out and into the region.
That didn''t exin everything. What happened to a Reality Anchor, when its dungeon broke? They''d seen that the one underneath J''rokksur was on the verge of breaking, and the dungeons in the Outskirts had all been broken; if that was any indication, then reality didn''t just fade away when the anchor that held it together broke. Instead, the space was slowly corrupted...
...That would exin some things about the Outskirts. If the decay was slow, it would exin why Misa still remembered J''rokksur and everything that had happened to her family, even though others rarely if ever referenced that tragedy. Derivan winced slightly, remembering her rage the first time a Guild member had been entirely unaware of the disaster.
The end of the universe exined a lot. He''d had this thought before, when they were first trying to make their way into Elyra''s dungeon. The thought had been almost half-formed, then. Spection.
Now, looking into that darkness again, Derivan was sure.
Their continent was dying. Every dungeon break brought it a step further. Reality crumbled at the edges, and no one knew.
He should, perhaps, have been afraid to step into the void. The anchors needed to exist outside of reality by their very nature; one could not anchor reality from within it. That meant he was stepping into nothing, and that the nature of that nothing would erode away at him.
Derivan considered this problem for a moment, then drew the mark of Stability on his own armor, in shades of vibrant green mana. The color reminded him of Vex.
Then he stepped into that nothingness.
The Roads had brought him here for a reason, after all.
There was no sensation of falling. Instead, he walked forward like there was still a ground beneath him, though he had to focus on the idea of it if he allowed his concentration topse, he felt himself sink down a little bit. He remembered how this space worked; he moved around by thinking himself in a direction.
The problem was... well, there weren''t really any directions to move in. He was surrounded by nothing.
Derivan nced back at the tunnel, already shrinking in the distance, and frowned. He made himself drift back to it, and with a small bit of concentration, allowed a bit of his armor to melt into Slime. His affinity with that stat was increasing every day. He smeared that Slime onto the stone it would ensure he would always be able to find his way back
And then he picked a direction at random, and started drifting.
It wasn''t long before things began to change.
What began as pure and empty darkness began to spin into shapes and images impossible ones, to be sure, but shapes nheless. They swam through the air like fish...
...and with a start, he remembered when he had encountered this before.
Exactly this.
In a dream he''d had, near to the time all of this had started, when his system had first been broken open.
He remembered the questions.
How are the Bright-Lights, the Not-Dark! The stars, you call them! Do they still spin and turn? Do they speak to the people, bring them joy and terror?
The stars. The voices here had known, hadn''t they? The stars had been gone even then, in reality, and Derivan had soon forgotten he had ever heard the word; Vex had exined to him once that dreams tended to quickly slip away, and that seemed to have been exactly what had happened.
The way the voice described the stars, though that was the way they''d seen them in the observatory here, where the stars still existed. They moved. They didn''t speak, but...
Belle had told them that the stars had been different once.
That had been far more than just a dream.
What else? He tried to remember.
Bah! What of the Great Kingdom? Does it still thrive?
There was no Great Kingdom that he''d heard of. But if the pattern held, then the Great Kingdom was perhaps something that had been erased, too. Perhaps the void erased things from reality, but everything that was erased was still left here, forgotten.
Or, more likely, slowly rotting away like they were being digested by the nothingness.
Tell me of my children. The thought-forms, the hidden-shadows. Do they fill the skies and forests?
The memory wasing to him more easily, now. This question made him... rather more sad. Derivan knew now what they meant whoever this voice was, whoever their children was, they were gone. Or perhaps lost to the void, too, and they had simply never found one another.
His presence must have been like a beacon of Reality to them, drawing them towards him. He didn''t know what it meant that he''d been able to see this ce in his dreams.
Perhaps they yet hide...
Derivan hoped so.
Tell me of the conquest of Redle! It must have been a glorious battle.
Impossible! Redle was on the verge of conquering the continent! Has their name faded so thoroughly?
Redle must have been a real kingdom, too perhaps even the Great Kingdom the first voice had mentioned, though this particr voice he remembered as being different. Equally enthusiastic and just as strange, though, to speak one moment of Redle being conquered, and then of them conquering.
But they''d seen time get twisted around more than once. The bonus rooms they had been to were both born out of echoes created by a change in time. Perhaps that voice had experienced more than one, and gotten confused. It certainly sounded confused.
And then there was the final question that he remembered from that dream.
What are you?
At the time, he''d said he didn''t know. He still didn''t, in truth he was a monster, ording to the system, a living suit of armor fueled by magic and given a mind. He knew who he was. His journey with the others had given him grounding in that, and had given him his new Sign, the new glyph that everyone could now use.
But what he was?
That was a question he hadn''t answered yet.
Irvis had said they were the same, and that was the closest he''d gotten to an answer. The voice echoed in his mind, now that he remembered.
You will, it said. You must.
There was one way he could get closer to an answer, he supposed. If he could find out what Irvis was...
The shapes in the void were just as solid as they had been in his dream, now. Derivan wondered if he would hear the same voices he had back then, but nothing spoke into his head.
Instead, a figure approached him.
He almost flinched once it came fully into view; it was one of the ant-monsters they''d fought as Misa''s dungeon broke. One hand went to his weapon, and the other examined the enemy in front of him.
Except it wasn''t an enemy at all.
He rxed almost immediately, feeling foolish. There was a glint of intelligence in the ant-creature''s eyes, and it leaned forward, its mandibles forming a curious sort of click-ck as it watched him. He didn''t understand what it was trying to say at all.
It folded its arms and gave him what he was pretty sure was an affronted frown, and then a voice spoke into his head.
Are you new here?
Derivan didn''t know how to answer that. "...Yes?" he said after a moment. "But I have been here before."
Been here... before? The ant seemed to puzzle over his words for a moment. You have left?
"I have seen this ce once near a reality anchor, I think," Derivan said. "And once in my dreams."
But you are here. The ant seemed to have decided he was just confused. I have seen a few others of your kind here, though there have been less of them ofte. The Void takes us all, you understand.
Derivan did not, but he was starting to; a slow horror began to bloom in chest. "I am afraid there has been a misunderstanding," he said slowly. "But I would appreciate an exnation."
The ant cocked its head at him. What do you mean?
"Pretend I know nothing about this space," Derivan said. "Or of anyone within it. How would you exin it?"
Derivan''s Physical Empathy allowed him to interpret the ant''s frown. We are within the Void, it told him. The hole left behind when Reality dissolves. Anything that has been removed from the world ends up here, where we slowly lose all sense of purpose, and of who we are. Fortunately for us, time doesn''t exist here in any proper sense, so it takes far longer for us to bepletely erased than it should.
But while we are here... we are gone. Forgotten entirely. You must be quite far gone, to have forgotten even that.
"Is there any way of escape?" he asked. He knew the way back to the tunnel; if he could lead everyone in here out there, perhaps they could simply walk out of the Void.
He doubted it would be that simple, though. It only took a flicker of his senses to confirm he had a reality to him that the ant did not. He could sense himself with Shift.
The ant was like a ghost entirely invisible to that sense. Not that it noticed that he''d tried to check at all.
Escape? the ant snorted, but it shook its head after a moment, giving the question serious consideration. Sometimes... people vanish. We aren''t sure why. It''s like they dissolve entirely, but they should not be that close to disappearing.
In the Outskirts, the veil between Reality and Void was thin. He understood that now, walking back through his memories at the edges of the continent, where all the anchors had burst, reality was thinner. He could even feel the gradient, whenever he paid attention. The closer he was to a dungeon''s heart, the stronger Reality seemed to be.
And when he was in Fendal, where the dungeon''s anchor had spread itself thin, there had been an equal feeling of unreality. A strangeness to the people of Fendal that had been not at all unlike the strange behaviors he had observed from his own people, in his own dungeon, so long ago.
The pieces had been there the whole time.
He remembered the way that anchor had taken sapience from the people of Fendal, lifting and transferring it to the people of Teque as though it was a physical property that could be moved from one ce to another. That was a deliberate action, but in the absence of an anchor, if Reality and Void started to merge...
Derivan could see it. Fragments of a person slipping from the Void and back into Reality. In the Outskirts, where broken anchors reigned, that would happen the most. It was what had happened to him.
That wasn''t what made him feel sick.
No. That feeling came from the fact that he was talking to a creature that looked exactly like one of the monsters that emerged from Misa''s dungeon.
He should have considered it before. The system didn''t really create things wholesale it always borrowed from something else. And in this case...
How many ''monsters'' had he encountered?
How many of them had once been a whole people?
Did the system just... keep remnants of what remained, and use them as temtes for so-called monsters?
The sheer scope of what the world might have lost staggered him. The ant didn''t seem to notice what was going through his mind it was looking at him with something that seemed like sympathy, most likely assuming he was wrestling with the idea of being forgotten, of being erased from the world.
Derivan had no such worries. He was reeling instead from the idea that he might have been part of a full species of magical creatures, once. What traditions might he have had?
...Was this why Irvis was so angry? Was this the reason for his hatred? Irvis had said they were the same, once. He and Vex had both determined that Irvis was an Aspect, the embodiment of a small part of magic, but...
That didn''t mean he had always been that way.
Derivan''s voice was steady when he spoke. It was a surprise, even to him.
"Can you take me to them?" he asked, and then he considered the question a little more. "Or... take me to everyone. Everyone that you can."
The ant stared at him dubiously, apparently thinking it was a strange request, but it eventually shrugged. Sure, it said. Not like I have anything better to do.
169 - Book 3: Chapter 34: D - Monsters
169 - Book 3: Chapter 34: D - Monsters
Derivan moved through the Void, his mind still racing. The ant was two or three steps ahead of him. He''d asked it for its name, and it had produced an impossible-to-replicate series of clicks, then sighed.
You may call me Juniper, the ant said. It''s what a lot of the others call me.
Derivan had nodded.
Now, they were making their way through the Void. He had no idea how the ant managed to find its way around as far as Derivan could tell, it was a featureless emptiness. The fact that he''d even been found by anyone was a miracle. "How do you know where to go?" he asked curiously.
The void isposed of rotting ideas, Juniper replied. And if you train yourself to look, they are like signposts. Beacons of dead concepts and disappearing peoples.
...That was a rather depressing way to navigate. Derivan almost regretted asking.
And yet, even in the darkness, there was light.
Sev had said it once, he was pretty sure. It had been a long time ago years, when he''d first met the cleric and before they''d evene upon Misa together, when it was just the two of them making their way through the Outskirts. There had been a lot of hiding, back then. Derivan had still been trying to hide the full extent of his abilities, and Sev wasn''t particrly high-level himself.
How the cleric had survived making his way through the Outskirts, he didn''t know. Probably the same way they did getting out a lot of hiding and fortuitous coincidences.
Sometimes, a lot of the things around Sev seemed a little too coincidental. But he supposed he couldn''t be too surprised.
The thought came to him now because of what showed up out of the darkness. It was sudden. It didn''t fade into sight slowly, beginning as a small spark of light in the distance; instead, it appeared within one blink and the next.
Except Derivan hadn''t blinked.
His awareness had just flickered, and now the exit of the Roads was suddenly somewhere different, and in front of him was a roaring campfire. Below it was actual ground dirt, grass, and stone and surrounding it were...
Monsters, his mind supplied, and he shook his head internally. He didn''t want to call them that, even in his mind. Especially not now that he knew the truth.
People.
Every one of them.
It was clear in the way they sat around one another, takingfort in each others'' presence. Derivan saw a spider that he''d once have called a Crystal Mimic, with a body made out of some substance that was just adjacent to mana crystals themselves. She wore a beautiful scarf around her neck, though the edges of it frayed into nothingness, and in that scarf he saw a full life stitched into it the moment she had been born, the moment she''d met her husband. It showed her with their children, teaching them to knit their own scarves from webbing and to paint it with dye.
She sat there now, half-curled up against a solemn figure that stood stone-still near the fire. He was no species that Derivan recognized spiderlike, perhaps, but far more humanoid than the other. Sharp des emerged from his back, and he stood with an almost royal bearing and yet there was a certain softness in him. One hand was ced on the more spiderlike creature''s back, as though infort.
That scene was reflected all around the campfire.
A snake Derivan was certain he''d fought before, a venomous species in a dungeon that had simply flung them at him like they were projectiles. He hadn''t bothered trying to dodge them. Here, a member of that same species was curled up around another creature''s neck, sound asleep. He had no less than a half-dozen little gadgets attached to him, some of themplete, some of them halfplete, and others fading away to the Void.
A makeshift table made of wood sat a few feet away from the campfire, and seated next to it were two dramatically different individuals one of them seemed to be made entirely of moss and fungus, a shifting biomass in a vaguely humanoid shape. It let out a displeased puff of spores as its opponent moved a chess piece on the table in front of them.
The other was...
The other was another person like him. A set of armor, though that armor was different in design.
"Your move," she said. Her voice rang, clear like a bell, with just a hint of smugness in it.
The fungus-person folded its arms and puffed again.
"Yeah, yeah," the armor said, and though there was no change in the glow of her eyes, Derivan could hear her rolling them in the way she spoke. "Again?"
Her opponent stood up, puffed at her a third time, even more crossly, and then waddled away.
Derivan took the opportunity to approach.
She didn''t look up from the board, her focus set to setting up the pieces. She did notice, though. "Here for a game?"
"Here to learn about our people," Derivan said quietly, and she finally looked up and then flinched backwards in shock.
It was presumptuous, he supposed. Perhaps he wasn''t part of a people at all; perhaps he was just a part of a small batch of creations by some entric mage. But there was a look in this other armor''s eyes that told him otherwise.
She stared at him for a long moment, and when she finally spoke, her voice was hard. "The Ishimar did not create us to forget, even here," she said. "If you have forgotten, you are a poor Scimitar indeed."
Harsh. But Derivan heard the bitterness in her voice there was a history here he didn''t understand, and so he let it go, focusing instead on the content of her words.
"Perhaps I would be, if I was," he said quietly. "But I am a recent creation, in the grand scheme of things. I have not been erased."
All around the campfire, conversation mmed to a stop. Derivan slowly became aware that his voice had carried much further than he''d expected; apparently sound carried much further than was normal in the Void.
"You what?" There was almost a hint of danger in the armor''s voice, but she stopped herself before she went too far. She red around at everyone else around the campfire. "Stop eavesdropping."
No one did.
She sighed. "My name is Jelevar," she said after a minute, her voice short and curt. Her eyes were slightly narrowed. "Exin yourself, if you would."
Derivan did his best.
The murmurs around the campfire were far more animated than before. About half of them were hopeful; they wanted to try to find the exit from the Roads, and to try to escape the Void that way. They''d never been that close to getting out before. Derivan didn''t know how to tell them they didn''t have the substance for him to even be able to Shift them out.
The other half were horrified to hear about the state of the world. They asked questions of him that were not dissimr to the ones the voices had asked him in his dream they asked him where their homes were in this new world, if anyone remembered them and their people.
They knew the answers already, of course. They had been forgotten.
But they hoped.
A quarter of them he couldn''t even give any answers to. Their homes were on Obreve, but not on the same continent Derivan had been on, as far as he could tell. Once he exined the Outskirts and that they were hemmed in, they returned to the campfire, a certain mncholy hanging around them.
Jelevar had stayedrgely silent. She let the others ask their questions, though she clearly had some of her own she just held them back.
And then, as soon as the opportunity showed, she waved the others away, and pulled him to the side.
"You do not remember," she said, searching his eyes. "Not a single thing about our people."
"No," Derivan said. "I did not know I had a people."
Jelevar sighed. It was surprisingly... organic. Derivan thought about how it had taken him weeks to learn to mimic the sound, to understand its purpose.
"We are the Scimitars," she exined. She gestured for him to follow, and he fell into step beside her. "Constructs of the Ishimar Empire. Part of their army, you could say."
Somehow, that exnation pained Derivan.
It wasn''t the answer he''d been hoping for.
Jelevar seemed to sense this. She nced at him, and her voice softened slightly. "That is what we were at first," she said. "We fought back, eventually. They made us too intelligent. They made us our own people. We were able to secure recognition as a true species within their kingdom, worthy of our own individual rights... We should not have had to fight that fight. It cost us dearly."
There was that bitterness in her voice again.
"Most of us did not care to remain," Jelevar continued. "We saw it as pointless. Why would we want to serve as citizens of an empire that did not care to recognize us as our own people? We wanted to strike out on our own, to create our own empire. We... did not."
"Creating an empire is difficult," Derivan said, not without sympathy.
"Quite," Jelevar said. She was using the walk as a way to work off excess energy; her steps were quick and heavy, but her voice softened as she continued. "But we were happy with what we did create. Not an empire, no, but our own little city, built of manaforged metal and exadite ore... You should have seen it, Derivan. It gleamed."
Derivan didn''t know how to react to most of this. Part of him had thought he would be relieved to know more about who he could have been, and yet he mostly felt... distant. None of this past really felt like his own.
He understood the pain she spoke with, at least. She had fought for a future for her own people, and lived to see it wiped off the map.
"It sounds like it was beautiful," Derivan said finally.
"It was," Jelevar said. She sighed. "I know you came here because you were led here, and there is something you can learn here, perhaps, that can help you in your quest... and perhaps even to restore us. But if nothing else"
Jelevar stopped and turned to him, showing him a small butterfly pinned to her chest. "An exadite pin," she said. "When we gained our independence, we sought to learn more about the magics that created us, and exadite was one of the hardest ores to smith with. Not all of us dedicated ourselves to it, of course, but we created a tradition out of it... Every five years, we would present our creations to one another, in a ceremony in the center of our city. We called it the day of Freeforged Light.
"If there is nothing else you get from this... Remember that, please. We as a people did not have much that just belonged to us. We did not have much time before we were erased. And if there is a chance now that a small part of us can be remembered..."
Jelevar said nothing further, but her grip on the pin trembled, just slightly. Derivan saw how she felt, in that moment.
Hope that a small piece of them could now be remembered. Anger that this conversation was necessary at all. A flicker of despair, for the part of her that felt like they had fought for nothing.
Derivan stared at the pin, and something resonated within him. It took him a moment to pinpoint, as distant as it was.
The system was responding, the way it had responded when it had first discovered reality shards.
The construct that kept him attached to the system was trembling strangely. It didn''t seem like something was wrong instead, it seemed like something within it was struggling to activate. He looked closer, and he saw new gears spinning into existence in the metaphorical clockwork.
And a momentter, a system screen popped up.
[ Potential power source found. Analyzing... ]
Derivan tilted his head slightly, then bowed at Jelevar. "I will remember," he said.
He''d learned a lot about Patch. He understood, to some degree, what the system did. He could see it was trying to turn this into another source of power an advantage it could give to people, perhaps in the hope that this new power would help save them from the decay of the universe.
Derivan didn''t care about any of that. What he understood was a smaller, more fundamental piece of what it was and what it needed to be.
In some small way, it would be a way to remember. To give Jelevar and the rest of the Scimitars a legacy.
Derivan seized it with Patch, and with his hand he spun the shape of a glyph.
Change.
[ New system function unlocked: Remembrance.
A Remembrance consolidates your understanding of a lost fragment of history. Effects vary depending on the fragment.
You have gained a new Remembrance: Exadite Pin ]
170 - Book 3: Chapter 35: D - Remembrance
170 - Book 3: Chapter 35: D - Remembrance
Derivan''s next steps were what he had already nned to do, system power or no. It seemed only right.
He couldn''t spend forever in the Void, of course. His friends were waiting for him, and even with Stability being his new Sign, there was only so much it could do in the face of the Void; given time, even that would erode away. But there was so much here to remember, and with every second he wasted, more of it was lost.
"What happened to your arm, anyway?" Jelevar asked him before he went to speak with the others. Derivan shrugged slightly and told her, and she winced with sympathy. "At the height of the Ishimar Kingdom it would not have been difficult to get that reced, but once we split off into our own vige... We had injuries like this, asionally. We could forge new arms, but the Ishimar would not tell us how to attach it to ourselves. The price of freedom, they said."
There was that note of bitterness in her voice again. Derivan considered his response carefully.
"If I am able to restore our people," he said. "I will make sure we have the means to restore ourselves in the event of such injuries."
He suspected Vex would be able to discern the runes and glyphs that made up the inside of the armor, and adjust them so that any newly forged arm could be joined to the whole. Derivan could do some magic himself, but he didn''t quite have Vex''s skill at interpreting and putting together glyphs.
Jelevar seemed satisfied with his response, and she let go of his remaining arm, which she''d grabbed by the elbow at some point. She searched Derivan''s eyes for a second.
"You have a n," she said.
"I have to talk to everyone," Derivan said. "It is not just our people that deserve to be remembered. There are many here that have been forgotten. I do not think I can remember all of them, but... What was it you said?"
"The Ishimar did not create us to forget," Jelevar said, with a look in her eyes that he understood to be a small smile. He''d never looked at his own expressions from the outside before. "Though I was angry when I said that. We don''t truly forget, but it is possible for information to fall to the wayside unless deliberately recalled..."
"But I have a means to remember." It took only a small effort of will to touch upon what the system called Remembrances. A small exadite pin, remarkably simr to Jelevar''s, Shifted into existence above his hand; she stared at it.
"What did you do?"
"It is a long story," Derivan said. There was more he could do with the pin, he knew he could feel it with Shift, a distant array of possibilities all hiding within the pin. But now was not the time, and he dismissed it, letting it fade once more into nothing. "Perhaps if I have time..."
Jelevar shook her head. "You should not stay here longer than necessary," she said firmly. "Do what you have to, speak to those of us here that wish to speak to you, then leave. I do not think your magic will protect you forever." She nodded to the Sign still painted on his chest. Small fragments of mana were dissipating, though it would be some time still before it was gonepletely.
But there was a small note of hope in her voice that wasn''t there before.
Derivan nodded to her. "I wish I could have known our people," he told her.
"I wish you could have, too."
Derivan made his way back to the campfire.
It was a little more animated than before, but not too much the Void affected everyone here, and new information was quickly lost. Derivan felt a small ache curl into his chest, to see how many of the ones he''d previously spoken to lose what little light and life they''d gained so quickly.
He supposed he shouldn''t have expected anything different, but he knew it would hurt him if he spoke to Jelevar again, and found that she had forgotten.
He nned to anyway, of course.
There were some that remembered what he''d exined to them, though their memory of it was wipsy and fragmented. Some joked about it about climbing inside his armor and marching out into the Roads, for example and Derivan had been more than willing to let them try, although he suspected it wouldn''t work. He would ask them to follow him back to the Roads anyway, just in case there was something they could do, but no one was expecting anything from that.
Exits had been discovered before, and had never led anywhere. The fragments and echoes of people here were just that, and had no more substance left to be restored.
And yet, here and there, in amounts that seemed too small to matter yet made everything brighter... there was hope.
Derivan spoke to the spiderdy who sat by the campfire, and she told him of the scarf. It was a long tradition held by her family, though not by her people as a whole; they called themselves the Eight-Legged, which she admitted was not the most creative of names but insisted sounded much more beautiful in her ownnguage.
Her people had the tradition of brewing tea when they came of age. Tea was important to her people, she said; it was tea that had originally granted them their size and sapience, stolen from a witch that left a cup of it steaming by her cauldron. They were good at alchemy as a matter of tradition, and carried potions in waterproof silk pouches that they spun in an instant.
[ You have gained a new Remembrance: Life Scarf ]
[ You have gained a new Remembrance: Endless Tea ]
He gained two Remembrances from the conversation both the scarf and a small teacup that poured an endless ck liquid. The spider seemed almost emotional, looking at the teacup. She said it looked just like the one they had used in their little vige, and he''d spent a moment with her there as she sipped at the cup and reminisced.
Therger, more humanoid spiderlike creature next to her was a different species entirely, it turned out. They had gravitated towards one another because they had the most inmon, but he seemed to remember almost nothing of his own people; he was deeply apologetic, speaking to Derivan.
"There is only one thing I remember," he said, his voice deep and grave, for all that he spoke quietly. "A meal I had as a child. I remember the taste of it, but little else. I think... I think my mother cooked it for me."
That wasn''t quite enough for the system. Derivan could feel it reaching out like it was judging the memory, trying to decide if it was worthy of being spun into a Remembrance. He could feel it pull away after a moment.
He pushed it just a little farther with Patch, feeling a bit of energy leave him with the effort, and let the notification drift by.
[ You have gained a new Remembrance: Childhood Meal. ]
He left the spider-humanoid sitting stunned, taking small sips from a steaming bowl of soup.
The snake covered in gadgets slid up to Derivan next, eager for a conversation. "You''re here to know," he said, coiling up in delight. "To learn! I haven''t had new students for a long time. Such a long time."
He faltered a little bit, at those words, and Derivan took the opportunity to sit down beside him and smile. "I will learn whatever you wish to teach," he told the old snake, who did a delighted little twirl.
"Good, good!" the snake said. "I am Hysuan, yes? You will learn! I make things. Look!"
A quick twist, and one of the gadgets attached to the snake sprung open. It was, as far as Derivan could tell, just a simple little toy built to spring open once it was twisted a certain number of times. But Hysuan twisted in on himself to push it back, and Derivan blinked in surprise when the second time, the figurine that popped out was different.
"How did you do that?" he asked in spite of himself, and the snake grinned at him.
"That would be telling!"
He spent a little more time than he perhaps should have with Hysuan, listening to everything he had to say, everything he wanted to teach and, eventually, asked him about his people. Hysuan seemed more than happy to tell him everything he remembered.
They were an individualistic species, he said, that often chose a profession important to them and then went their own way; every few years, they would gather, and share everything that they''d learned in their respective journeys. In this way, they would pass on their interests to the young ones that seemed most interested in following in their footsteps.
It exined why Hysuan was so interested in teaching.
[ You have gained a new Remembrance: Teacher''s Mark ]
And on it went.
Derivan lost count of how much time he spent with the people here, trying to learn everything he could. He spoke again with the ant that had led him here in the first ce, asking about his people, and listened intently as the means by which they kept their livestock was exined to him. He spoke with someone whose species he had no name for, made of too many arms and too many legs; he listened as they told him about how they chose the limbs they acquired.
Strange and foreign to him, but he epted and remembered it, nheless. His own lost arm ached in sympathy.
He spent, perhaps, longer than was wise. When the Sign upon his chest began to fade, he simply painted a new one on, spending more mana than usual to get it to stick. There was no ambient mana in the Void, and so every cast consumed far more of his personal mana than it usually did.
Derivan stayed until thest dregs of that mana was gone, learning and remembering everything he could.
Before he left, he searched for Jelevar. She regarded him without a hint of recognition, with the same surprise as she had the first time she''d seen him. This time, he simply asked her for a game, and yed a round of chess with her.
He lost terribly. But it seemed like a good way to mark his exit.
He could have spent more time in the Void, he knew. There were other camps out there, other so-called refugees that were spending what remained of their lives in this nothingness, their culture and history slowly forgotten. But he couldn''t stay there forever: not without risking getting erased himself.
All he could do was promise himself he would return if he was able.
171 - Book 3: Chapter 36: Interlude - Rebellion
171 - Book 3: Chapter 36: Interlude - Rebellion
"Vex better be grateful for this," Helix muttered.
He didn''t mean it, of course. At this point, he was fighting for far more than just his brother. It had taken him time to see that Vex had been right all along, but he''d figured it out eventually.
He owed it to his team the most; Larok in particr, the one member of his team that was with him today.
Helix hadn''t known Larok particrly well when he''d first started talking to the man; Larok had just had the misfortune of being nearby when Helix learned that Vex had left. Lacking any particr ability to hold back, Helix''s first reaction to the news had been to turn to the nearest avable figure somemoner orc drag him to the closest pub, and then spill every thought he had about his younger brother to the stranger.
It was a miracle that Larok had listened to him at all.
But he had. Larok paid attention to every word he said, and he''d done so genuinely, unlike all the servants that Helix spoke to that only listened to him because they were obligated to. Or because they were being paid to do so. It was the first time Helix had felt like someone was actually taking him seriously.
And then he''d looked Helix in the eye and told him he was wrong.
He''d been furious at first, of course. He''d been the scion of their House until Vex hade along and shown his particr knack for magic, and now that his younger brother had left, he was once again the heir but his ce in his own family had never felt so precarious. He was uncertain, thrown off.
He''d been happy and proud of Vex, and then his younger brother threw it all away for what Helix had seen as nothing more than a phase. And now this stranger was looking him in the eye and telling him that his brother had been right to do so?
"Who the fuck do you think you are?" Helix had asked. The fireball that lit up in his hand gave him a dangerous look, he knew. He''d never been able to control his use of magic particrly well. He spent mana like water.
"No one." Larok hadn''t seemed even slightly perturbed. He''d even taken a sip of his drink, looking Helix in the eye. "Hurts, doesn''t it? That a nobody like me disagrees."
There had been a certain self-loathing bitterness in his voice that had cut straight through Helix''s anger. He''d paused, staring at Larok, the fireball flickering out in his hand; the rest of the tavern had paused to stare at them, and a re from him sent them all back to looking at their drinks and gossiping with one another.
He wasn''t interested in all of that. He was interested in Larok, and whatever it was that made the man so brave.
And foolish, arguably.
He''d invited the man to his house that night, and to his surprise, Larok had epted.
Without the barrier of nobility andmoner between them, they''d had a surprising amount of things inmon. They liked the same books, seen the same ys; Larok even knew a little bit about magic, even though his own ss was rted to administration and basic clerk duties.
He''d borated more on his point of view, too. Helix had never told him the House secret, of course; he''d just exined that Vex left to protect his brother, and all his opinions about the divide between the nobles and themoners.
And Larok, in turn, talked about what it was like for them. It was a perspective that had been entirely foreign to him at the time, and even now he found he kept learning more things about the ss of people he had once considered beneath him. Larok had eventually brought him around to meet his friends, and Helix had slowly been exposed to a perspective that was far different from the one his parents always spoke of.
Anyone could be a noble, his parents had said. They just had to work hard enough and find something a new House could be founded around.
Helix saw how hard Larok''s friends worked, in every spare scrap of time they had. He saw how they achieved nothing. The materials they needed were too expensive; a single drop of the reagent they needed took weeks for them to earn. They could have done it in a week, with funding from a noble house, but then they would be relegated to a sub-branch of that house, and would be no better off than before.
And slowly, he''d changed his mind.
His brother had been the catalyst, certainly, but he was fighting with the Elyran rebels for his own reasons, now.
That was what had led him here. Larok stood by his side, a sheaf of papers folded under his arm. Talking to the Adventurer''s Guild had changed things for them dramatically it put them into contact with J''rokksur, and the people in that vige seemed almost proud of the way they broke apart the system''s skills for their own ends.
Now that was a power they had, too. Some of the secrets J''rokksur had shared freely could easily have earned them a noble house in Elyra themselves.
"I''m sure your brother would be grateful," Larok said, smiling at him. "Pity I missed the opportunity to meet him."
"You''ll get the chance soon, I bet," Helix said with augh. "I''ve heard a bit about what they''ve been getting up to. They figured out a way to interfere with things from inside the bonus room."
"What, really?" Larok raised a brow. "That sounds... dangerous."
"He''s found a good team." A good family, Helix thought to himself. He''d strive to be the same to his brother, once he got the chance.
"Are you just ignoring us?" a voice demanded, and Helix rolled his eyes. "Leave. Now. Noble or not, you are trespassing on House Herastul grounds."
"We were having a conversation," Helix said. He conjured a fireball in his hands, letting a wave of heat wash over them all; it was strong enough that even the enforcer on the opposite side of the garden flinched, through all the protective magics he wore on his armor.
Helix took a moment to feel bad for the man. He was only doing his job.
He was in their way, though.
"And you can do that outside," the guard insisted, sounding considerably more nervous.
Helix pretended to consider it for a moment. The fireball hung in the air, the heat from it visibly wilting the nts surrounding them. It was a direct interaction between fire and nt aspects of mana non-magical nts would not have been nearly as affected but the enforcer nced back and forth between Helix and the nts, clearly noticing the effect he had.
"I gotta say," Larok said, sounding amused. "This is a lot more fun when I''m on the other side of it."
Helix grinned and elbowed his friend. "I don''t think you''re supposed to be encouraging me."
"I''m not, I''m not," Larok said. "I''d stop you if I thought you were abusing your power."
"Am I abusing my power?"
Larok''s eyes sharpened as he looked at the guard, and Helix abruptly focused. The guard had abruptly stopped radiating fear, like it had been cut off by something Helix recognized the working on his helmet, the glimmer of runes etched into the metal.
Wisfield.
They were making progress with the emotional suppression, it seemed. Of all the noble houses, they were the ones most likely to catch on to what they were doing and the hardest one to break into.
If they wanted to steal House secrets, they needed to start here, with the Principle of House Herastul. They were Elyra''s spies, able to slide themselves out of perception like the Guildmaster herself did though their methods were assuredly different. By the Guildmaster''s own word, Herastul spies were far worse than she was.
But that didn''t matter when Helix had no hope of spotting either of them. It was the reason for the fireball being asrge as it was Herastul grounds were hidden from the rest of the city, and the heat would spur anyone hiding to act.
As it did now. Someone triggered the enchantment on the guard''s helmet, after all.
Fortunately, it wasn''t impossible to fight someone you couldn''t see.
Larok and Helix both focused on the guard, as if they thought he was the only threat around. Helix pulled a hand down,pressing the enormous fireball hovering above his head into a bright spark of light in his hand, and then sent it flying forward; there was a sh as it struck the enchantment on the guard''s sword and all that energy was converted into pure light, impossibly and blindingly bright.
It was a calcted move. Helix knew the spell would do nothing against the standard setup the guards carried, but it would blind anyone that happened to be looking in that direction.
Larok had closed his eyes in preparation for the sh, but he didn''t need to open his eyes to throw the sheaf of papers in his arm up into the air. A gust of wind from Helix scattered the tax forms all over the garden, every individual piece fluttering to the ground in a poor imitation of snowfall.
"[Know Your Paperwork]," Larok said, and Helixughed.
"You don''t have to say your skills out loud, you know."
"It''s cooler."
"Not when you''re talking about paperwork!"
"Shut up," Larok grumbled, but in the same motion he pointed, and Helix reacted instantly; a sh of mana gathered into a runic circle that sted out a powerful jet of water. It mmed into something invisible, and there was a cry of pain. A twist of his hand made the water-aspect mana dissipate before it could saturate the still-falling paper.
"One," Helix said.
"They know we''re onto them, now," Larokmented. Helixughed.
"Doesn''t mean they can stop us, does it?"
Another spell sent the remaining pieces of paper swirling around the garden in a wide circle; the guard stumbled out of the way, anticipating a trick, but Helix mmed the base of his fist into the base of his helmet right as he moved. He cracked his neck, tossing the dagger he held to the side.
He wasn''t his brother. Fighting with a dagger felt like a small tribute to Vex, but it wasn''t really what he preferred.
"There," Larok said, and this time Helix struck out with a different spell entirely; threads of mana burst out of his fingers, spooling towards the spot Larok had indicated. The Herastul spy tried to step out of the way, but threads were far harder to dodge than a single jet of water; they caught around the spy anyway, and Helix''s expression changed to something a little more grim.
A simple [Aspect Realignment], and the threads of mana changed to lightning.
"Two." Helix ignored the scream, his eyes flicking back towards the guard, who had gotten up again and was approaching with an unsteady sword. He stepped forward, striking into the center of the armor with both his hands; mana coursed down his hands and pulsed into the armor, mming it inward.
"One more?" Larok said.
Helix inclined his head towards the entrance to the garden, where he''d left a number of small runic circles embedded in the ground. Spikes of earth erupted from the ground a second afterwards, cutting off a strangled cry.
"Three," Helix said. Larok shivered a bit.
"You can be pretty scary."
"Thanks, I try." Helix remained tense, his eyes looking around the garden. One guard and three handlers; it matched the reports they had, but this still all felt a little too easy. Herastul wasn''t exactly abat house, but they should have been better than this. It had taken one blow each...
Granted, every one of his spells were loaded with more than enough mana to take out most tanks, and if they were low on health from one blow, they would be smart enough to stay down.
"Your family doesn''t make you immune to consequences, Ashion."
The words wisped by an ear, and Helix reacted quickly; fire burst from his body in a sphere, powerful enough to roast anyone standing nearby. He had to cancel the spell just as quickly when Larok stumbled, pushed into him.
And then the rest of House Herastul unveiled themselves. There were a dozen of them, standing in a circle around the pair, and one member of Wisfield.
That exined a lot. Wisfield''s ability to keep them all connected mentally would let them coordinate perfectly.
"Why don''t we try this again?"
The head of House Herastul was an old orc, but there was no humor in his smile. "What are you doing here, Ashion? With one of my clerks, no less?"
Helix sighed dramatically.
It was a good thing they were just the distraction.
172 - Book 3: Chapter 37: Interlude — Tax Fraud
172 - Book 3: Chapter 37: Interlude ¡ª Tax Fraud
"You didn''t file form E27," Larok replied promptly. Helix gave him a dumbstruck look, and Larok waved him off. "That makes you liable to a seizure of assets."
"And you thought you''d take it yourself, and enlist Ashion to steal from me?" the old orc asked. His voice was pompous, as if he didn''t consider either of them a threat despite everything they''d just done.
Helix supposed he had a point. If they were willing to show themselves after they''d seen everything he could do, then they were very sure they could win. There was no doubt that Herastul had tricks other than just stealth; like all noble families, they funded a fair amount of research into various aspects of the system.
But neither he nor Larok could afford to get caught here. Not yet.
"We could cut you a deal," the old orc said. "What you did with the paper that was interesting. Not nearly enough to be a full House Principle, of course, but we could buy it from you. What do you think?"
"I think you can fuck off," Larok said, pleasant as could be. Helix grinned.
It wasn''t like they hadn''t nned for things to go wrong.
A runic circle appeared in front of him, and he poured his mana into it. As an [Elementalist], he didn''t have the same variation of spells that Vex had. His little brother might be able to find something more appropriate for the situation, perhaps, but most of what he had were elemental spells. He''d exchanged versatility for sheer magnitude of power.
But that didn''t mean he didn''t have options.
Smoke poured out of the circle in voluminous amounts, almost instantly filling up the garden. Helix caught the old orc''s eyes widening just slightly before he vanished beneath the smoke. The most even-handed way for them to fight would be if neither of them could see the other.
One hand grabbed on to Larok''s, so he didn''t lose hold of his friend. In a full fight, the orc was far more likely to die than he was. He was still only level twenty-one, even with all of the training they''d done. Clerks didn''t get a single health skill, so he had the base four hundred and twenty health that came at that level; they hadn''t yet equipped him with gear that would keep him safe.
Two tasks, then. First priority: Keep Larok safe. Second: Keep Jakka Herastul and his cronies upied for as long as possible. Third: Don''t get caught.
He could do that. Probably.
Helix moved.
Mana wrapped itself around him as he did, boosting his stats and making him just a little more aware of everything around him. It wasn''t as good as anything Vex would be able to do, but it was a functional substitute a basic [Mana Boost]. Larok yelped as he was dragged along, but Helix was moving with purpose, and couldn''t stop to discuss the n.
He''d have to trust that Larok remembered. He had a number of administrative skills, after all, beyond just the one for paperwork. The problem was the Wisfield House member; if he could peer into their minds, he could anticipate anything they wanted to do.
They needed to target him first.
Right on cue, Larok spoke rapidly, trying not to cough through the smoke. "Wisfield House member, Unek Wisfield, second branch family. Moved a total of two hundred and ten tinum coins across various businesses owned to reduce tax bracket and therefore taxes owed"
Helix felt a burning sh of mana and yanked, clearing his mind as he did so; he needed to make sure the Wisfield member didn''t just adjust where his magic was going. A ssh of deadly goldfire drifted just past Larok''s elbow, and Helix let a low growl escape his throat.
Larok didn''t let himself get distracted, though he had to bite back a yelp from the near-dislocation of his shoulder.
"and thereforemitted [Tax Fraud]," Larok rapidly finished.
The skill resonated in the air, carried by the orc''s voice.
It was not, unlike the name implied, a skill to help onemit tax fraud. Helix had assumed that to be the case at first, and aughing Larok had to exin that the skill was all about reiming lost assets; he had no idea why the thing was named Tax Fraud.
He''d learned exactly what assets meant from a certain merchant in J''rokksur. It included a number of different things, exactly one of which wasbat-relevant.
Mana.
And as long as Larok owned it, Unek couldn''t use it. Helix knew for a fact that the Wisfield House still needed mana to use their skills, with very few and very rare exceptions. The one part of their n they were worried about was their ability to pull this off at all there was every chance that with the Wisfield''s ability to read their minds, he would do everything in his power to stop him and he had. Goldfire was rare and powerful, a magic item asionally harvested from Elyra''s Prime Dungeon itself; it had the ability to track and destroy any target it was aimed at.
It also needed to be fueled with mana.
Without it, the string of goldfire fell to the grass, useless. The grass surrounding it didn''t even burn. Helix didn''t spare it more than a nce he pulled Larok forward, away from the building mass of mana he could sense.
For now, with the smoke surrounding them obscuring their vision and their Wisfield member otherwise disabled, the Herastul members would be afraid to really let loose with their skills. They''d be more likely to strike one another, or worse, the head of their own house.
Not that Jakka seemed to give a shit.
"Kill them!" he roared, and Helix only barely stopped himself from rolling his eyes.
Honestly.
That building mass of mana turned into a ze as twelve different members of House Herastul unleashed their skills, and the center of the garden turned into a deadly inferno; Helix grimaced at the heat, channeling a small amount of wind-aspect around himself and Larok to keep them cool. Two figures vanished in his mana sense, apparently caught in the crossfire or otherwise out of mana.
Larok shot him a nervous look, only barely visible in the thick fog of smoke, and Helix gave him a reassuring grin back. They could make it out of this. They''d taken out the most important member of the opposing team, and all they needed to do now was keep everyone upied...
...a strong gust of wind began to blow.
Helix frowned. He kept a tight grip on the smoke-aspect mana he was spreading throughout the garden, but something about this opposing magic seemed to loosen the grip he had on his power. More and more, his own smoke slipped out of his grasp and began to dissipate, and he felt Larok clutch at his hand nervously.
Helix tightened his own in response, narrowing his eyes. This was different.
This, they hadn''t nned for.
Jakka''s smirking face emerged from the smoke. Helix half-expected him to waste time monologuing he certainly looked like he was about to but he gestured instead, and a tight de of power emerged from his fist.
Helix''s eyes widened.
He only barely threw both himself and Larok out of the way in time, and this time he was sent tumbling. He was vaguely aware in the back of his mind that he couldn''t afford the time to get back up again, that Larok was in danger Jakka wasn''t their only opponent
He heard Larok cry in pain, and all hesitation vanished.
A tide of mana swelled and ripped out of him, shifting between all the basic elements at once; it folded neatly around Larok through an effort of will but mmed into everyone else at once. Helix pulled it back into his control just a fraction of a second before the skillpleted and it left his range. [Elemental Burst] was a cheap,mon skill, but it scaled drastically with the mana poured into it.
And Helix''s whole thing was monstrous amounts of mana.
He wove a [Barrier] around Larok, pouring almost a quarter of his well into it; he saw the orc''s eyes widen in the near-solid barrier of energy, but didn''t bother arguing. He''d handle this alone.
Burning mana flew back towards him, and he willed it into coat his right arm in a [ming Gauntlet]. He was a physicalbatant, first and foremost, and he wanted to punch Jakka in his stupid, smug little face.
[Mana Boost] still boosting him, he rocketed forward, fist clenched. Ten Herastul members knelt on the ground, aiming some sort of device at him that he couldn''t quite spare the time to look at. He shifted the nature of the [Mana Boost] slightly, giving himself more agility, boosting and shifting his stats to make his movement just a little bit too erratic.
Jakka wasn''t going to stand still, of course. The orc frowned at him and did that contemptuous motion with his hand again, and this time Helix saw the ring he wore pulsing with borrowed mana. Compressed air-aspect formed in the air, sharp enough to tear through a boulder with little resistance.
It met his will and shattered.
Ashion members were used to dealing with immense amounts of mana. What did Jakka think would happen?
A [Mana Boost]ed [me Gauntlet] with his amount of mana was enough to do three thousand damage at least, and Helix didn''t give a shit about holding back. His fist met Jakka''s jaw
but a fraction of a second before it did, one of the Herastul members finally managed to target him, and he felt his grip on his own mana suddenly loosen again. Both skills began to unravel.
Notpletely, though. His fist smashed into Jakka''s jaw, and the orc was sent sprawling, no matter that he was nearly twice Helix''s size. Helix spun around before Jakka could recover, sprinting for the nearest Herastul member; he needed to get rid of whatever that device was instead of letting it rip his own mana out of his control.
But he was slow, now. Without [Mana Boost], his stats were just like any other level fifty-three, and while he wasn''t low by any means, the Herastul members were more explicitly dedicated to fighting. They were faster, stronger, and more well equipped than him.
He knew before he''d taken even two steps that he didn''t have a chance.
The damn [Barrier] that he''d left around Larok was unraveling, too. He tried to keep his grip on it, recapturing that mana again and again with [Mana Maniption], but it was a losing battle. Every Herastulbatant was heading for him, faster than he could track, and Jakka was getting up.
For the first time, Helix felt fear.
And then he heard a very familiar voice.
"Looks like you need help," Vex said. His younger brother smiled at him a small, light smile, but it struck Helix like a dagger to the heart. He hadn''t seen Vex smile at him like that for years.
He barely even noticed that every single person on the field was frozen in ce except for him and Larok.
"Uh," he said after a moment, and then cleared his throat. "Yeah. Um. Help would be nice."
"Still like dramatic entrances?" Vex said, just the smallest trace of a smirk in his voice, and Helix couldn''t help butugh, equal parts relieved and confused.
"You know it."
172 - Book 3: Chapter 38: Winds of Change
172 - Book 3: Chapter 38: Winds of Change
The nice thing about was really the time dtion aspect of it. It gave Derivan so much timepared to the people that were on Obreve proper time for him to use Shift, open up a portal, recharge, and then use Shift again. In that amount of time, only about an hour would have passed on Obreve.
It took him ten hours to recharge fully.
That amount of dtion gave them the time to inspect the details of everything that was happening with the rebellion to look through their ns, to keep an eye on things in case anything went wrong.
They''d made sure to check in from time to time, and everything seemed to be going about as well as could be expected. The rebellion used the glyphs that Vex had taught them to set traps and cast magics they never could have otherwise, and even developed a few new ones that Vex subsequently copied and stole.
If Helix hadn''t left for the Herastul estate a little earlier than scheduled, Derivan and the others would have made it just on time. As it was, they realized what was happening only barely on time. Helix had missed a scheduled check-in, and Vex had asked Derivan to see what was going on.
Then once they''d seen all they needed to see Derivan ripped open a hole in reality between the dungeon''s bonus room and the Herastul estate.
Sev''s first move was to use [A Moment of Time], which he''d received from Tempus and which was a far better version of the skill he''d gotten from Aurum. It took a lot more divine magic, ordingly, but the artifact Vex had retrieved seemed to have it in spades.
That skill froze everyone in time except for the people he chose. They would all have to return to their initial positions before the skill released, but it gave them ample opportunity to talk, n, and cast new skills.
"Ready?" Vex asked. He gestured to Sev, who was holding a key inside a lock that looked like it was trying to fight him. Time, after all, didn''t like to stop. "We can''t keep this up forever."
"Should''ve invested more points in Strength," Misa said, smirking at Sev.
"Shut up," Sev grumbled, gritting his teeth. The key was forced to turn half a degree back in his fingers, and all of reality shifted half an inch; the closest Herastulbatant was now close enough for Helix to see the glint of their de.
"You''re gonna help me, right?" Helix said, looking at the crowd dubiously. "I can''t take ''em by myself."
"We got you," Vex assured.
"Especially me," Misa quipped.
[Me, Myself and I], it turned out, was a skill that codified what she''d done with [An Anchor of Heart and Home]. It allowed her to summon semi-independent copies of herself at the cost of half her health and it was that skill she used now, far more liberally than was practical.
Sev sighed, letting go of the key with one hand to make a quick gesture; divine magic spread into each one of Misa''s copies, healing them and her back up to full. The key forced itself another two degrees in that instant, and he grabbed a hold of it again. "Come on, guys," he said, his voice strained.
"Go ahead," Helix said. He settled down, taking a breath, and his eyes gained a gint of steel in them; threads of mana began to collect around him, coalescing into another [Fire Gauntlet] and a new [Ice Gauntlet] on his arms. "I''m ready."
Sev let the key go, and time returned with a snap.
It was nice to have control of his mana again, Helix thought.
A half-dozen copies of his brother''s orcdy friend appeared in the garden, and the ensuing confusion kept the Herastul henchmen from noticing the threat he now posed. Roughly half of them still had their attention on him, and the closest was still mid-step, a bright sh of crimson flickering within his fist.
Helix punched him in the face.
Whatever he was carrying didn''t matter the man went flying, concentrated fire exploding first from the back of the gauntlet, then the front; the effect was an elerated punch that smashed the man''s face in. He swung his second arm almostzily, letting the weight of the [Ice Gauntlet] spin him around, and it shattered in another Herastul member''s face.
Neither of those blows were enough to take care of either of those men, of course. Herastul employees and House members were better trained than that, and passive buffs like his gauntlets weren''t the sorts of spells that would eradicate people in a single blow.
They were made for sustainedbat. It wasn''t quite as practical it didn''t take full advantage of his massive reserves of mana, for example but it helped in extremely prolonged fights, namely the ones he had to fight in Mana Nuclei.
The first henchman rose to fight again. This time, enough of the man''s cloak had burned away that he could see his face, too, distorted in a rictus of startling anger.
"What, did I do something to you personally?" Helix quipped. He danced out of the way of the blow the Herastul man tried to strike, making sure none of that crimson got anywhere near him, trying to remember where he recognized the man''s face.
And then he frowned, a chill flooding his body all at once.
He wasn''t really taking this seriously enough. This wasn''t just some random member of the House this was the Herastul heir. Jakka''s son. Arkul, if he remembred correctly.
Why in the world had Jakka involved his son in this fight? He was barely eighteen! And he recognized the crimson glow in the man''s hand now he was using a Life-Corer! Those things were artifacts from the Vitalia House, and though they were powerful, they tore at the user''s life for every blow they struck.
Not their health. Their life. A Life-Corer would make you age with every blow, and in return, a single strike...
"What the fuck," Helix hissed, and he almost paid for it. He felt the wind of the attack behind him and threw himself out of the way, and a fraction of a secondter a version of Misa appeared in front of the blow, catching thest fraction of it the moment before it would have struck him.
This one was Jakka''s daughter. Ikaya.
She wasn''t using anything as absurd as a Life-Corer, at least, but she seemed just as lost in her anger. Helix felt his rage burning brighter in him, and the gauntlets on his fists responded, one ring hotter and the other colder. He couldn''t retreat from this fight to deal with Jakka now but he could disable these two.
"Heads up!" he called. "These guys are Jakka''s kids! I think there''s something wrong with them! Might be true for the others, too!"
Over in the corner, Larok''s eyes widened, and he began rapidly flipping through a notebook he kept with him. His younger brother and his three adventurer friends all reacted immediately, exchanging worried nces with one another and then shifting the way they fought
But Helix didn''t have the time to pay attention. The Herastul heirs were on his back again, both of them attacking at once.
He couldn''t get hit by the Life-Corer. He dodged out of the way of that one as a priority, gritting his teeth and letting the manadrill Jakka''s daughter wielded bore its way into him. He crushed the hand holding the Life-Corer between his gauntlets a momentter, and found himself disturbed by the way Arkul didn''t even flinch. The Life-Corer''s light flickered out, its elements disrupted by the dual assault of fire and ice, and he immediately twisted.
Using his own body as leverage when there was a weapon stuck in him was a little disconcerting, but nothing new, really. A manadrill was the worst weapon to bring against an Ashion House member.
He had mana to spare. Those things wouldn''t hurt him if they were left on him for days.
That sent Ikaya crashing to the ground, too, and a quick spell sent tight vines wrapping around their bodies. Helix panted as his Health took care of his wounds, then nced up to continue the fight...
...only to find that every single one of them had been struck down and bound.
The other four hadn''t been idle, after all.
Helix promptly ignored the aftermath of the battle and hurried over to Larok. His mana barrier had held, fortunately, and by some miracle Larok had emerged from the whole conflict without a scratch. If Jakka had had any sense at all, he would have sent some of his men to target Larok Helix would''ve had to abandon fighting to defend him.
But Jakka, he supposed, hadn''t even stopped to consider that amoner might mean something to a noble.
"You doing okay?" Helix asked, helping Larok to his feet.
"Am I okay?" Larokughed. "I should be the one asking you that! You were amazing! Not that I didn''t know that already, but..."
"First time you''ve actually seen it?" Helix asked. Despite himself, he managed a small grin.
"I''ve seen it before." Larok smirked back, but he''d heard what Helix had yelled too, and that smirk quickly fell away. "I''m d I was able to help, but... do you have any idea what''s going on here?"
"You helped?" Helix blinked.
Larok stared at him and raised a brow. "You didn''t think it was weird they didn''t use any skills?"
A broad grin spread over Helix''s face. He let himself forget, just for a moment, about what Jakka had done to his own children, and wrapped Larok in a hug. "Shit, I should''ve realized. That''s fucking amazing."
"Too tight!" Larok yelped, and Helix released him.
"Whoops. Left [Mana Boost] on."
"Like always." Larok huffed at him, and Helix smiled slightly.
"I guess we can''t really take the credit for most of this, though," Helix said. "Those four are something else."
Larok stared at them and shivered a little. "Yeah, no kidding. d they''re on our side."
"Yeah." Helix was silent for a moment, then nced over at the field of groaning bodies. "You think the kids are gonna be alright?"
"...I hope so."
"Something is wrong," Derivan said. He nced around the garden with a furrow in the glow of his eyes. Part of his mind was upied, taken up by the effort it took to keep the portal to their bonus room open if he allowed it to snap shut, it would copse the whole thing, and they weren''t quite ready to leave.
Not yet.
"What, besides the thing where the orc sent his children to fight rebels?" Sev raised an eyebrow. He nced towards Jakka with distaste the orc wasn''t saying a word, and couldn''t say a word, bound up as tight as he was.
"Yes," Derivan said. He didn''t mind the sarcasm; Sev was worried, he knew, and none of it was targeted at him. And yet...
There were strange, half-visible ripples in the air whenever he looked. None of his skills or stats were quite able totch on to them. It wasn''t mana, it wasn''t the Shifting undertones of reality, and it couldn''t have been divinity, either. Sev or Vex would have sensed it. "You do not see this? The distortions."
"Distortions?" Sev frowned. He nced around worriedly, and so did Misa and Vex; all three of them shook their heads. "No."
"I cannot sense them," Derivan murmured. "But I can see them..."
Very carefully, he stepped forward, closer to one of the wriggling shapes. Now that he paid closer attention, he could see that they were gathered mostly around the flowers, herbs and bushes nted in the garden. He brushed a finger against one of them, curious and cautious.
The system responded.
He felt it through Patch, but no screen appeared in front of him. It was trying to show him something, but the mechanism it was activating was broken he could feel where the threads in the system had vanished. It was almost like they had been eaten away.
That was, fortunately, an easy enough Patch. He couldn''t link it to the main system it seemed to reject it the moment he tried to link it, shifting away from the mental thread he tried to extend to it, almost as if it was afraid. But there was an older system attached to Misa, and he appropriated that connection, switching the thread to tie into that older engine.
Text floated into his vision, with no box to apany it.
"Ah," Derivan said.
The word wasn''t quite sufficient for the sudden worry he now felt. He took a step back, trying to organize his thoughts, and felt Vex walk up to him.
"You found something?" his boyfriend asked.
"I believe I have," Derivan said. "And if I understand what this is correctly... then Elyra is in greater danger than we thought."
He nced grimly at Helix. "We may have to elerate our ns."
173 - Book 3: Chapter 38: Winds of Change
173 - Book 3: Chapter 38: Winds of Change
The nice thing about was really the time dtion aspect of it. It gave Derivan so much timepared to the people that were on Obreve proper time for him to use Shift, open up a portal, recharge, and then use Shift again. In that amount of time, only about an hour would have passed on Obreve.
It took him ten hours to recharge fully.
That amount of dtion gave them the time to inspect the details of everything that was happening with the rebellion to look through their ns, to keep an eye on things in case anything went wrong.
They''d made sure to check in from time to time, and everything seemed to be going about as well as could be expected. The rebellion used the glyphs that Vex had taught them to set traps and cast magics they never could have otherwise, and even developed a few new ones that Vex subsequently copied and stole.
If Helix hadn''t left for the Herastul estate a little earlier than scheduled, Derivan and the others would have made it just on time. As it was, they realized what was happening only barely on time. Helix had missed a scheduled check-in, and Vex had asked Derivan to see what was going on.
Then once they''d seen all they needed to see Derivan ripped open a hole in reality between the dungeon''s bonus room and the Herastul estate.
Sev''s first move was to use [A Moment of Time], which he''d received from Tempus and which was a far better version of the skill he''d gotten from Aurum. It took a lot more divine magic, ordingly, but the artifact Vex had retrieved seemed to have it in spades.
That skill froze everyone in time except for the people he chose. They would all have to return to their initial positions before the skill released, but it gave them ample opportunity to talk, n, and cast new skills.
"Ready?" Vex asked. He gestured to Sev, who was holding a key inside a lock that looked like it was trying to fight him. Time, after all, didn''t like to stop. "We can''t keep this up forever."
"Should''ve invested more points in Strength," Misa said, smirking at Sev.
"Shut up," Sev grumbled, gritting his teeth. The key was forced to turn half a degree back in his fingers, and all of reality shifted half an inch; the closest Herastulbatant was now close enough for Helix to see the glint of their de.
"You''re gonna help me, right?" Helix said, looking at the crowd dubiously. "I can''t take ''em by myself."
"We got you," Vex assured.
"Especially me," Misa quipped.
[Me, Myself and I], it turned out, was a skill that codified what she''d done with [An Anchor of Heart and Home]. It allowed her to summon semi-independent copies of herself at the cost of half her health and it was that skill she used now, far more liberally than was practical.
Sev sighed, letting go of the key with one hand to make a quick gesture; divine magic spread into each one of Misa''s copies, healing them and her back up to full. The key forced itself another two degrees in that instant, and he grabbed a hold of it again. "Come on, guys," he said, his voice strained.
"Go ahead," Helix said. He settled down, taking a breath, and his eyes gained a gint of steel in them; threads of mana began to collect around him, coalescing into another [Fire Gauntlet] and a new [Ice Gauntlet] on his arms. "I''m ready."
Sev let the key go, and time returned with a snap.
It was nice to have control of his mana again, Helix thought.
A half-dozen copies of his brother''s orcdy friend appeared in the garden, and the ensuing confusion kept the Herastul henchmen from noticing the threat he now posed. Roughly half of them still had their attention on him, and the closest was still mid-step, a bright sh of crimson flickering within his fist.
Helix punched him in the face.
Whatever he was carrying didn''t matter the man went flying, concentrated fire exploding first from the back of the gauntlet, then the front; the effect was an elerated punch that smashed the man''s face in. He swung his second arm almostzily, letting the weight of the [Ice Gauntlet] spin him around, and it shattered in another Herastul member''s face.
Neither of those blows were enough to take care of either of those men, of course. Herastul employees and House members were better trained than that, and passive buffs like his gauntlets weren''t the sorts of spells that would eradicate people in a single blow.
They were made for sustainedbat. It wasn''t quite as practical it didn''t take full advantage of his massive reserves of mana, for example but it helped in extremely prolonged fights, namely the ones he had to fight in Mana Nuclei.
The first henchman rose to fight again. This time, enough of the man''s cloak had burned away that he could see his face, too, distorted in a rictus of startling anger.
"What, did I do something to you personally?" Helix quipped. He danced out of the way of the blow the Herastul man tried to strike, making sure none of that crimson got anywhere near him, trying to remember where he recognized the man''s face.
And then he frowned, a chill flooding his body all at once.
He wasn''t really taking this seriously enough. This wasn''t just some random member of the House this was the Herastul heir. Jakka''s son. Arkul, if he remembred correctly.
Why in the world had Jakka involved his son in this fight? He was barely eighteen! And he recognized the crimson glow in the man''s hand now he was using a Life-Corer! Those things were artifacts from the Vitalia House, and though they were powerful, they tore at the user''s life for every blow they struck.
Not their health. Their life. A Life-Corer would make you age with every blow, and in return, a single strike...
"What the fuck," Helix hissed, and he almost paid for it. He felt the wind of the attack behind him and threw himself out of the way, and a fraction of a secondter a version of Misa appeared in front of the blow, catching thest fraction of it the moment before it would have struck him.
This one was Jakka''s daughter. Ikaya.
She wasn''t using anything as absurd as a Life-Corer, at least, but she seemed just as lost in her anger. Helix felt his rage burning brighter in him, and the gauntlets on his fists responded, one ring hotter and the other colder. He couldn''t retreat from this fight to deal with Jakka now but he could disable these two.
"Heads up!" he called. "These guys are Jakka''s kids! I think there''s something wrong with them! Might be true for the others, too!"
Over in the corner, Larok''s eyes widened, and he began rapidly flipping through a notebook he kept with him. His younger brother and his three adventurer friends all reacted immediately, exchanging worried nces with one another and then shifting the way they fought
But Helix didn''t have the time to pay attention. The Herastul heirs were on his back again, both of them attacking at once.
He couldn''t get hit by the Life-Corer. He dodged out of the way of that one as a priority, gritting his teeth and letting the manadrill Jakka''s daughter wielded bore its way into him. He crushed the hand holding the Life-Corer between his gauntlets a momentter, and found himself disturbed by the way Arkul didn''t even flinch. The Life-Corer''s light flickered out, its elements disrupted by the dual assault of fire and ice, and he immediately twisted.
Using his own body as leverage when there was a weapon stuck in him was a little disconcerting, but nothing new, really. A manadrill was the worst weapon to bring against an Ashion House member.
He had mana to spare. Those things wouldn''t hurt him if they were left on him for days.
That sent Ikaya crashing to the ground, too, and a quick spell sent tight vines wrapping around their bodies. Helix panted as his Health took care of his wounds, then nced up to continue the fight...
...only to find that every single one of them had been struck down and bound.
The other four hadn''t been idle, after all.
Helix promptly ignored the aftermath of the battle and hurried over to Larok. His mana barrier had held, fortunately, and by some miracle Larok had emerged from the whole conflict without a scratch. If Jakka had had any sense at all, he would have sent some of his men to target Larok Helix would''ve had to abandon fighting to defend him.
But Jakka, he supposed, hadn''t even stopped to consider that amoner might mean something to a noble.
"You doing okay?" Helix asked, helping Larok to his feet.
"Am I okay?" Larokughed. "I should be the one asking you that! You were amazing! Not that I didn''t know that already, but..."
"First time you''ve actually seen it?" Helix asked. Despite himself, he managed a small grin.
"I''ve seen it before." Larok smirked back, but he''d heard what Helix had yelled too, and that smirk quickly fell away. "I''m d I was able to help, but... do you have any idea what''s going on here?"
"You helped?" Helix blinked.
Larok stared at him and raised a brow. "You didn''t think it was weird they didn''t use any skills?"
A broad grin spread over Helix''s face. He let himself forget, just for a moment, about what Jakka had done to his own children, and wrapped Larok in a hug. "Shit, I should''ve realized. That''s fucking amazing."
"Too tight!" Larok yelped, and Helix released him.
"Whoops. Left [Mana Boost] on."
"Like always." Larok huffed at him, and Helix smiled slightly.
"I guess we can''t really take the credit for most of this, though," Helix said. "Those four are something else."
Larok stared at them and shivered a little. "Yeah, no kidding. d they''re on our side."
"Yeah." Helix was silent for a moment, then nced over at the field of groaning bodies. "You think the kids are gonna be alright?"
"...I hope so."
"Something is wrong," Derivan said. He nced around the garden with a furrow in the glow of his eyes. Part of his mind was upied, taken up by the effort it took to keep the portal to their bonus room open if he allowed it to snap shut, it would copse the whole thing, and they weren''t quite ready to leave.
Not yet.
"What, besides the thing where the orc sent his children to fight rebels?" Sev raised an eyebrow. He nced towards Jakka with distaste the orc wasn''t saying a word, and couldn''t say a word, bound up as tight as he was.
"Yes," Derivan said. He didn''t mind the sarcasm; Sev was worried, he knew, and none of it was targeted at him. And yet...
There were strange, half-visible ripples in the air whenever he looked. None of his skills or stats were quite able totch on to them. It wasn''t mana, it wasn''t the Shifting undertones of reality, and it couldn''t have been divinity, either. Sev or Vex would have sensed it. "You do not see this? The distortions."
"Distortions?" Sev frowned. He nced around worriedly, and so did Misa and Vex; all three of them shook their heads. "No."
"I cannot sense them," Derivan murmured. "But I can see them..."
Very carefully, he stepped forward, closer to one of the wriggling shapes. Now that he paid closer attention, he could see that they were gathered mostly around the flowers, herbs and bushes nted in the garden. He brushed a finger against one of them, curious and cautious.
The system responded.
He felt it through Patch, but no screen appeared in front of him. It was trying to show him something, but the mechanism it was activating was broken he could feel where the threads in the system had vanished. It was almost like they had been eaten away.
That was, fortunately, an easy enough Patch. He couldn''t link it to the main system it seemed to reject it the moment he tried to link it, shifting away from the mental thread he tried to extend to it, almost as if it was afraid. But there was an older system attached to Misa, and he appropriated that connection, switching the thread to tie into that older engine.
Text floated into his vision, with no box to apany it.
"Ah," Derivan said.
The word wasn''t quite sufficient for the sudden worry he now felt. He took a step back, trying to organize his thoughts, and felt Vex walk up to him.
"You found something?" his boyfriend asked.
"I believe I have," Derivan said. "And if I understand what this is correctly... then Elyra is in greater danger than we thought."
He nced grimly at Helix. "We may have to elerate our ns."
174 - Book 3: Chapter 39: Next Steps
174 - Book 3: Chapter 39: Next Steps
Figuring out what to do next was rather moreplicated than it should have been, Vex thought.
Jakka and his children could not be allowed to go free, that was a given. The rebels would have to capture and house them far easier said than done, although Helix was insistent that they would be able to do it.
Vex had no idea how. He seemed fully intent on just dragging their bodies through the streets.
"You''re not going to just drag them through the streets, right?" Vex asked his brother hesitantly.
"Of course not!" Helix said indignantly. "We''re going to dress them up as potato sacks."
Vex took a deep breath, then saw Helix''s smirk, and let himself rx. "Almost got me with that one," he said with a small smile.
It was strange, being so amicable with his older brother. His rtionship with Helix had never been like this it had always been fraught with jealousy and shing viewpoints, arguments about how best to use their magic... They had never had the opportunity to just be brothers.
Helix seemed far morefortable in his own skin and with the people around him, now. Before, he had been far more irritable.
"Vex?" Derivan called gently. "We must go. I cannot keep the portal open for much longer."
"I''ll keep you up to date," Helix said with a wink, mimicking typing through the system. Vex gave his brother a nod, hesitated for a second, and stepped up to give him a quick hug; Helix stiffened for a moment, then returned the hug, some unseen tension in his body slowly dissolving.
"Good to have you back, brother," Helix said quietly.
Vex gave him a small smile, then turned and darted back through Derivan''s portal, and back into the little home they had made for themselves in the middle of the Roads.
It was more of a temporary base than anything. The Roads had allowed all four of them to meet back up after they''dpleted their respective paths, dumping the four of them into arger, circr cavern with a number of square-shaped empty homes built into the dirt.
It reminded Vex strangely of Mundane. He wondered if this was an abandoned city, or if it was waiting to have people move in. Everything within it seemed unused and clean, so perhaps the Roads were preparing it for use... It served them well enough for now, though, so they decided to take a break.
None of them quite wanted to go through the red, menacing door at the other side of the cavern yet.
Well, except for Misa. Misa really wanted to go through the red, menacing door.
For now, though, the four of them had other things on their minds.
"You said you saw something?" Vex asked. He sat on one side of the table in the small, square home they''d appropriated for themselves; the furniture in the ce was in but functional, andfortable enough for all of them.
Derivan''s expression was grave. "I believe I know the cause of the growth spells failing. If they are what I think they are, then we do not have as much time as we think. Elyra will need evacuation."
Vex jolted. "Evacuation?"
"That seems extreme," Sev said, but he didn''t sound skeptical. He frowned slightly, ncing off into the air like he was quietlymunicating with someone, and then furrowed his brows. "You''re worried about disrupting the rebellion''s ns, yeah?"
"It is a concern," Derivan admitted. "They will not have as much time to raid the Houses as would be ideal for them. By my estimations, we have less than a month before growth as a concept stops functioning in Elyra entirely."
"What did you see, Deri?" Vex asked, his voice almost pleading. Elyra was his home. His rtionship with his home wasplicated, certainly; he didn''t like almost any of Elyra''s policies, and he had almost no love left for his family save for his well, now two of his brothers.
Derivan sighed. "Void Wyrmlings," he said.
And then he exined.
He''d already told them all about what he''d experienced in his section of the Roads the way he''d entered the Void, the fact that he''d encountered others in there. The fact that monsters had all once been people was a true shock to them all.
It was even more of one when he shared that many of them were neshifted species as well. Obreve had once been far more diverse, containing peoples from all sorts of realms.
Now they had barely anyone left.
"I suspect that the wyrmlings are not truly wyrmlings at all. They do not seem alive. The system knows that they exist, in a manner of speaking, but I had to Patch it for it to disy them at all. I suspect the system once directly pointed out the Void..." Derivan tilted his head, aiming his gaze suddenly towards Misa. "Ah. But I can see why it no longer does so."
"What?" Misa sounded slightly nonplussed. "Why are you looking at me?"
"I had to borrow from your Path system to force the system to create a disy for the wyrmlings," Derivan exined. "It did not cause any damage to your part of the system, but... the piece that was connected to the wyrmling had further deteriorated. It is difficult to interact with the Void without deteriorating, I suspect."
"Eugh." Misa made a diforted sort of noise, shaking her head. "Not sure I like the thought of Void worms poking their way through reality."
"Regardless," Derivan said. "They appear to feed on the concept of growth. We understand now that magic functions through the application of glyphs, which themselves pull from the conceptual sphere. It appears that within the area dominated by Elyra''s reality anchor, the concept of growth itself is slowly being erased."
Silence reigned for a moment, and then Vex spoke.
"You''re worried about what will happen after," he said. "It''s not just theck of food, but once the wyrmlings run out of things to eat..."
"The Void is already encroaching on Elyra," Derivan said with a nod. "The anchor is still functioning, or we would not be here; the wyrmlings are either a new development, or the anchors themselves are no longer enough, even fully intact as they are."
"Or the Void is evolving," Misa mumbled, and the rest of her team stared at her. "What? It''s possible!"
"I hope not," Sev said with a shudder. "Bad enough that we''re faced with the end of all reality. We don''t need it being alive."
"I do not think that is the case, fortunately," Derivan said. "But if the rebellion is to seed, it must do so soon. If we impress upon them that they need to evacuate the city..."
"We''ll tell them what''s going on," Vex said. "Helix knows something is up, anyway, and I trust them to figure things out and ask for help if they need it. They''re more likely to believe us than the nobles, anyway."
"We''ll ask them for help," Syv decided.
She was too old for this. Ingress was looking at her with a sad-but-understanding sort of look on his face, Helix had his brows furrowed, and half the rest of the rebellion''s leaders looked angry. The others looked resigned.
"You want to ask for help?" one demanded. He was cloaked in shadow, his voice distorted by the magics on it, but she knew who he was. Justin ran a food kitchen somewhere in Southern Elyra. He''d seen what the nobles had done more or less firsthand. She understood his anger understood what she was asking of them all.
"This is bigger than us," Syv said quietly. "If Elyra itself is in danger, then even the nobles must put aside their struggles for power."
"They won''t do that," Justin scoffed; several of the other members of the rebellion nodded beside him. Syv couldn''t deny that they might have a point. The food crisis was, in itself, something the nobles should have put aside their differences to handle and yet they had not.
The people of Elyra had mostly been left to starve.
But what were they going to do? Evacuating Elyra would be far harder without the help of the nobles. Getting their help would make it that much faster.
"Are you even sure that your brother is telling the truth?" another person spoke up. Kr, a simple lizardkin apothecary in the western corner of Elyra. In the wake of the growth spells beginning to fail, she had worked tirelessly to create a potion that reduced the need for food, and had even been partially sessful but none of the nobles had funded her, no matter how much she begged.
Now she spoke directly to Helix, who stiffened slightly at the hint of condescension in her tone. "You and he are both nobles. Are we to take your word for thising disaster?"
"You do not have to." This time, the person that spoke up was a priest Jukar, of orcish descent. Syv remembered seeing him working in the streets, healing the starving and the sick; healing could stave off the effects of starvation, but never enough. He''d driven himself to mana exhaustion with it. "I have spoken with Urasta. The danger is true."
"The gods are involved with this?" Kr asked, and this time she sounded appropriately chastised; she sent an apologetic look to Helix, who waved it off. Syv watched the exchange with a small amount of pride.
It wasn''t the first time Helix had had friction with other members of the rebellion, and it likely wouldn''t be thest. She''d smoothed things over as best as she could, and they were slowly getting used to one another, even if sparks still flew at times. What was important was that Helix understood their distrust, and the other members of the rebellion were willing to admit to their mistakes.
"They are," Jukar confirmed. "They have been receiving warnings... There is a threat, previously unknown to them. Gods have been erased, and no one has been the wiser, for the information has been hidden from us. And this is just another part of that problem. Our world is crumbling. There is no longer time to struggle for power. We must find somewhere safe. For the people."
It was the longest thing Jukar had ever said in a meeting, and it left the entire hall silent. Ghostly fire flickered in the walls around them, protecting them from the prying minds of the Wisfield house.
"So the threat is real, we are agreed," Syv said finally. "We vote on reaching out, and working with the nobles to evacuate?"
"And on what to do if they fail to help us," Kr said. "They have no reason to believe us, and even if their own priests tell them..."
"I doubt they''ll want to help," Helix said, and many eyes in the room turned to him. He shrugged. "They aren''t going to believe you. I''m sorry. Doesn''t matter if their own priests tell ''em otherwise. This threatens their power."
"We must try," Syv said, but there was a small downward quirk at the corner of her lips; she did not have high hopes, either. "But if they do not help us... what we must do has changed. Elyra is no longer safe to stay in, and so the rebellion will no longer focus on taking the kingdom from the nobles. We will focus on evacuation. We might not win in a straight fight, but they cannot stop us from leaving, and from bringing as many as we can with us."
Quiet murmurs erupted across the room, but most of them were in agreement.
The vote passed, and the people in the room slowly filtered out. Syv sighed, turning back to her books, and let the rest of the library slowly shimmer back into existence around her.
She hadn''t expected to end up in quite this position when she''d chosen to help a young lizardkin, so uncertain about his ce in the world. What Vex had uncovered now was so far beyond her she felt her scales aging just from thinking about it. And yet if he hadn''t...
A tongue flicked out, and she turned the page of the book she was reading delicately, respectfully.
It would be some time still before she could rest.
175 - Book 3: Chapter 40: Time
175 - Book 3: Chapter 40: Time
The ominous red door loomed in front of them. Vex had chosen to deem it the ORB, for "ominous red boundary". No one had really taken on the name yet, but they hadn''t disputed him on it, either, so he was confident they''d pick up on it eventually.
"About time we go through," Misa said, eyeing it.
"If we do, I''m not sure we''re going to be able to help the rebellion if anything goes wrong," Sev said. "This thing"
"The ORB," Vex supplied.
"Yes, Vex," Sev sighed. "The ORB. It looks like... it looks final? It looks like when we go through it, we''re going to face thest trial of the bonus room, and then we''llplete it."
Derivan patted Vex on the head, and the lizardkin gave a low trill of pleasure. "I do not think we should dy," Derivan said. "There is an advantage to remaining here, certainly, but we are aware that it pulls resources from the Elyran anchor. It is possible that by staying, we are elerating Elyra''s eventual fall."
"Elyra''s going to fall anyway," Vex said. Some of his earlier humor faded from his eyes he was trying everything he could to distract himself from everything happening in his home. Arge part of him wanted to go back and do everything he could to help, but...
He was more valuable here, with his friends.
"You want to go back, though," Derivan said, observing him closely, and Vex sighed as the armor pulled him into his arms.
Arm.
They still hadn''t fixed that.
"I do," Vex admitted. "It doesn''t feel right to be... I don''t know, safe? Not that it''s safe here, but Elyra''s in danger, and I''m not there. Helix is trying to protect it, Riss has no idea what''s going on. I don''t think the nobles are going to agree to work with the rebellion, so if the rebels just leave, Riss is going to be stuck there..."
"Do you really think Helix would leave your little brother there?" Misa asked, raising a brow. "That doesn''t seem like him."
"No," Vex said, shaking his head in frustration. "But my father..."
He trailed off.
Karix was powerful. Helix couldn''t fight off the man even at his best. If Vex helped...
But that was their conundrum right now, really. If they went through the trial and it somehow prevented them from working with Elyra from keeping an eye on everything happening with the rebels and the nobles then they would effectively be on their own. If they waited, they might elerate everything that was happening, and no matter what they''d have to enter the door eventually.
The ORB. The joke seemed a little less funny, now, but sometimes a little levity was... needed, Vex thought.
"Sooner rather thanter, I think," Misa said, and her words were surprisingly gentle. A strong armnded on his shoulder, and Misa smiled at him. "No matter when we go, we''re going to end up indisposed for a while. The sooner we get it over with, the sooner we can help the rebels if anythinges up. And knowing those noble fucks, something is gonnae up. Right?"
Vex nodded slowly. She was right. It was pretty clear, even, in the way Rakka had fought back against Helix with his own children. There was... something going on there; he just didn''t know what.
Better to be ready by the time they did something. Derivan''s portal time was limited, anyway, and if they were forced to retreat in the middle of a fight or let the portal close on them Vex doubted the results would be pretty.
In one universe, Misa opened a door.
It was only practical that she tested out what was behind the door first, with an application of Endless Echoes. Just in case they were wrong about what the door was, and it was a trap.
In all universes, the door opened.
It wasn''t a trap, thankfully. Derivan apologized, and said that he should have noticed; the door was almost a fixed point in reality, solid across all the wavelengths he could reach through Shift. The door existed even back in the ''real world'', for all that their definition of that concept was rapidly falling apart.
Misa let her Endless Echoes dissolve, and stared past the door at whaty beyond.
It was chaos.
"What the fuck is this?" she said, almost dumbly. She reached out with a hand, brushing it against the blistering light thaty just beyond the door; thankfully, it did nothing to her. She''d been half-expecting her health to start dropping just from the contact.
"I don''t know what I''m looking at," Sev admitted. He stepped inside, somewhat braver than Misa had been, waved a hand; a small dome of shade appeared around him, blocking off the excess light that made it near-impossible to see. Misa joined him, and Derivan and Vex followed soon after.
Being able to see better didn''t make it much easier to parse what was going on, though.
It was like up was down and left was right; the world paid no attention to the petty requirements of things like gravity and . Chunks of rocks floated in the sky, upside-down, and Misa could see small figures moving upside-down along with them, entering little homes and drinking from tiny teacups. She wasn''t even sure if they were alive something about their movements were false, mechanical.
The wind blew around them, but something about the breeze was wrong. The air was denser and heavier than it should have been, and so what should have produced a rustling breeze was instead a deeper howl. The air smelt, strangely enough, of cinnamon and blueberry and the static crackle of an oing storm.
"I think..." Vex started, hesitating; the wind almost drowned out his words. "I think this is a ce that the magic hasn''t fixed yet. I think it''s a ce the magic is working on fixing."
"Perhaps that is what we were intended to do?" Derivan suggested. "To help the mana repair thisnd?"
"I... don''t know." Vex looked surprisingly lost. He knelt down close to the ground, brushing his fingers through the faux grass beneath them. When he made a face, Misa knelt down to copy him, and shuddered.
The grass felt like wet paint.
"I wouldn''t even know where to begin," Vex said quietly.
The four of them stared out across thendscape for a moment, taking it in.
"Let''s just explore," Sev said after a moment. "Take it one step at a time. We''ll figure something out."
"We always do," Misa agreed.
A few hours in, and they had discovered a few basic rules about the new space they found themselves in.
One, they couldn''t go back. The door they''d gone through had vanished as soon as thest of them had stepped through, leaving grass and air in its wake. Shift, too, failed; reality here seemed denser, Derivan said, for all that it was technically weaker than it was anywhere else. It was like there was something holding it in ce, and Shift was not nearly strong enough to move it.
Two, for that same reason, Derivan couldn''t use Shift to reach out to Elyra or anywhere else, for that matter. Their time here was indeed locked, and they had to work quickly if they wanted to help with the evacuation.
Three, the system itself still worked, as well as their ability tomunicate with the outside world using the chat function.
Case in point was the message they received from the Guildmaster, shortly after entering what they had deemed "the ruins".
[Not sure if you''re able to receive this message,] she sent, her words surprisingly short and clipped. [System is experiencing far more trouble than usual. Some ces have it worse than others. Finish up quick. Assistance may be needed.]
"Ah, shit," Sev muttered, reading the message, and Misa made a disgruntled noise of agreement.
"Is it not just Elyra?" Vex frowned. "I''m sure she would have said something if any ce was as bad as Elyra."
"I doubt any individual settlement has it as bad as Elyra, but a lot of smaller things can ruin a settlement without the supplies to keep it going," Misa said, frowning. She nced at her own system. "Things are... apparently going well in Teque and Fendal. J''rokksur is assisting as best as it can with the Guild many of its guards have joined up, so they''re fighting the manpower shortage for now. Mom says that she''s helping to keep track of the numbers, and she''s pretty sure at least five adventurers have gone missing with no record... Shit."
"Let us hurry," Derivan said, and no one protested.
The first ce of significance they encountered looked something like a ruined pce. Most of it had crumbled to dust, leaving very little left to indicate who or what might have once lived here.
"Noram said something about how the world began to crumble and fall apart, and the mana put it back together," Vex said softly. He knelt, letting some of the dust trail between his fingers. "This was someone''s home."
"It''s just dust, now," Misa said, though her voice was gentle. "Let''s move on."
The second ce they encountered was a little more intact. More of the walls were left behind, though they swayed dangerously in the wind. Vex walked up to them and brushed his fingers across the faded murals, a faint sense of recognition sparking in his mind.
Why did this ce seem familiar?
He didn''t know, and there was nothing else here for him to find.
They''d been wandering for almost a day, now, and had yet to find anything that might give them a hint as to what they were supposed to do here. Food and water was at least abundant, if strange-tasting; Sev made sure to purify any of the food they came across, just in case.
The second day saw a new message from Helix, and one from the Guildmaster.
[Nobles didn''t listen,] Helix said. Vex imagined him typing the message and rolling his eyes as he did so, like he''d known the whole time it would happen. [Not even dad would listen. Didn''t expect any different, but it''s still frustrating.]
[They didn''t try to spring a trap?] Vex sent back.
Helix took a long half-hour to respond three minutes, in his time. [Of fuckin'' course they did,] he said. [We were prepared. No casualties. Took a little souvenir with us, too.]
Vex managed a small smile. [Any update on what the deal with Rakka is?]
Three hours before the reply on that one. [No. Rakka still won''t talk, and all his kids won''t either. We think it''s a Wisfieldpulsion, so we''re asking the Guild for help removing it.]
The Guildmaster''s message exined why the Guild hadn''t already sent them that assistance. [Guild''s overloaded right now,] she sent. [Dungeon breaks are getting moremon, even when the dungeons themselves are getting cleared. System seems to be stabilizing for a bit, but no guarantee it''llst. Any rmendations?]
[Wait for us,] Misa had sent.
J''rokksur had thus far not experienced any of the problems with the system that many others had. The prevailing assumption at the moment was that Misa''s particr anchor was immune, or at least protected, from whatever degradation was affecting all the other ones. They''d told the Guildmaster how Misa had ended up binding the anchor to herself, but the Guild had had no luck replicating those particr circumstances so far nor did they want to risk their already limited adventurers on broken dungeons.
The best thing they could do was to find a way to link everyone to Misa''s anchor instead. With enough reality shards, they could handle the load, at least for a little while, and they''d managed to stock up a bit while they were here.
And yet they still didn''t know what the objective was. What did the bonus room want them to do?
The third significant location was a good three days away. This time the ruins were intact enough that Vex recognized a small piece of architecture, and the lizardkin caught his breath.
"This was Elyra," he said. "I should''ve realized. Everything was so broken... but this ce was Elyra."
176 - Book 3: Chapter 41: Vault
176 - Book 3: Chapter 41: Vault
The ruins of Elyra were spread out across kilometers, along broken rocks that floated on separate inds. Vex saw cracks in the ground beneath led to a pure nothingness; Derivan identified that nothingness as the Void, and so they collectively chose to avoid falling.
Not that they weren''t going to do that already.
Now that they knew these were the ruins of Elyra, Vex had a better idea of where they needed to go.
"There''s a vault near the center of Elyra," he said. "No one''s been able to open it it''s not just locked and reinforced, it''s system-locked. We can''t use any skills on it, because any skills we try to use the system automatically disables, and the box itself is reinforced to indestructibility by the system."
"But this is a world without a system," Misa said, her eyes gleaming.
"Yeah." Vex didn''t look as excited as he might have about the potential discovery. "I''m just worried. This is... All this stuff is old. We have two hundred years of history. These ruins... I''ve checked with my spells. They''re over a thousand years old."
"We know the world is older than we think," Misa said with a shrug. "What makes this new?"
"Elyra is meticulous," Vex insisted. "We record everything. We record our records! If we lose our records, we should at least have a record of losing them. But we don''t. It''s like Elyra''s only existed for two hundred years. I figured we were probably founded a little bit before that, and then maybe we lost some of the early documentation, or it got eaten by the Void. But this would be almost twelve hundred years of lost history. That''s... so much more than I thought."
"I''m worried too," Sev said. He frowned, running his fingers over the wall and staring at the dust that came off onto his fingers. "I''ve spoken to Tempus, and he agrees. This ce is old. He''s not sure why. All he has ess to are fragments of history, and none of the fragments he has has Elyra in it."
"Is it that Elyra is older than we thought?" Derivan mused. "Or is it possible that there was a different kingdom here, once upon a time, and it was merely repurposed?"
"I wish I knew the answer to that," Vex sighed. He nced out across the ruins. "It''s hard to identify exactly where the center is, but if we find a few more recognizablendmarks, I can figure it out. Hopefully the vault is what we''re actually supposed to find."
"Hopefully the vault''s here at all," Sev muttered, and Vex let out a small grumble that sounded like reluctant agreement. Misaughed at both of them, throwing her arms around their shoulders in a move that was horrendously awkward, considering how different in height all three of them were.
"It''ll be fine!" she said. "When have we ever lost, eh?"
Derivan chuckled softly. "d you''re back, Misa."
Even with an idea of what they were ''supposed'' to find, it took them a while to find it. Vex had a tough time recognizing Elyranndmarks when most of them had evidently changed drastically in the thousand years since this version of Elyra had started to crumble a few notablendmarks remained the same, but even then they were dpidated enough that they were hard to spot from a distance.
Eventually, Vex frowned. "I think I''m getting a sense of what structures remained the same," he said. "The noble houses all seem... I mean, they''re the most intact out of everything. They haven''t been built over or knocked down."
"Is that a surprise?" Derivan asked, and Vex shrugged ufortably.
"I guess I was hoping that Elyra used to be different," he said quietly. "Maybe we used to be something better, and with the advent of the system, something changed. I could believe that. The system makes it so much easier topare yourself to others we have levels, stats, metrics. You have a supposedly objective arbitrator of the quality of a person. I can see how that might cause people to start viewing one another as lesser."
"The system''s probably been around longer than two hundred years," Misa pointed out. "Maybe you were different once. Besides, just because the buildings are here doesn''t mean they were used for nobility, right? Could''ve been ces of learning. Or used to house ancient artifacts." She grinned, clearly trying to cheer Vex up.
"Maybe," Vex said. He managed a small smile back at Misa, and then cast his gaze around.
They stood in the remnants of a tower, though half of it had crumbled and was scattered into moss-covered rocks on the ground. Some of the stone faded in and out, like it wasn''t sure whether it was stone or fog. "I think this one is House Wisfield''s tower. I can tell where the center of the kingdom is from here."
"You are okay?" Derivan prompted, and Vex gave his boyfriend a soft smile.
"I am," Vex said. He hesitated, pulling open the system for a second, just in case there were any new messages; he''d sent a message to Helix not long ago, just to check in and make sure everything was going well with the evacuation. "Just have a lot on my mind."
"Any word from your parents?" Sev asked, and Vex shook his head.
"Nothing from them, either," he said, checking briefly. "Helix said he spoke to them, but they''re both being pretty stubborn about the whole thing. They''re holding the rest of my siblings hostage..."
Vex clenched his fists, then slowly rxed.
"Hostage?" Misa asked, an undercurrent of anger in her tone. Vex gave her a weak smile.
"Not as bad as what you''re thinking. I phrased that a bit... they''re basically grounded, all of them. Except Helix, because they can''t get a hold of them. But that''s bad, because they need to evacuate. I think Helix is nning a rescue operation."
"I hope they''re all on your side now," Sev said. "I know you''ve been talking to them."
"It''s hard getting through to them." Vex frowned at the system for a moment. "But I think... I think most of them understand where I''ming from. None of them are bad people. They just think the system in Elyra works, because they don''t see how it affects everyone else."
"Not much of a choice, now," Misa noted.
"Not at all," Vex said softly. "With the protests some of the civilians are putting up... It''s hard not to see what''s going on. Maybe that''s why they got grounded, but that''s not enough to hide it from them. So I think they''re starting to see."
"What about Riss?" Derivan asked.
"He doesn''t understand any of what''s happening," Vex said with a chuckle. "He''s barely five. The one thing we all agree on is that we want to protect him from all this. We just don''t agree on how to do it. My parents are still convinced that the evacuation order is a rebel trick."
Misa snorted. "Hell of a trick that puts their own people at risk," she said, making it clear exactly what she thought of the whole thing.
"Yeah, I... we need to hurry." Vex nced over his system messages again, and his scales seemed to pale just a bit. It wasn''t a message from Helix, but the Elyran branch of the Adventurer''s Guild. "Healing spells have started failing in Elyra, too. That''s... not good."
"Not at all." Sev frowned. "You''re relying on those to keep people alive without enough food, right?"
"It''s barely enough, but yes," Vex said. "The evacuation''s under way, but it''s hard to convince the poption when most of the nobles are trying to assure everyone that everything''s okay."
"Let''s not waste time," Misa said gently. "We can talk about this all we want on the way, but we need to get going. Lead the way, Vex."
Vex nodded nervously. He took onest look at the ruins they stood in, and then nced around at the two otherndmarks they had found. He mapped it against what he knew about Elyra in his head.
"This way," Vex said.
They moved quickly. Faster than had been possible for them before the Roads, even, because Sev had created a connection with Is, the goddess of Travel; every step they took was magnified tenfold, and it took them almost no time at all to find the vault Vex spoke of.
It was, technically speaking, located above the Elyran dungeon the other major structure at the center of the kingdom. Now that they were here, Vex could see the tunnels extending below the rock into where the dungeon would be.
Here, however, the tunnels led nowhere. There was a dark void where the tunnels ended, no doubt leading straight into the Void.
"I wonder why these tunnels are here," Sev said, frowning at one of them. It was built directly into one of the still-standing walls, and led almost straight down. He peered down the shaft cautiously, then took a step back.
"They lead to the dungeon," Vex said.
"But there''s no dungeon here, right?" Sev pointed out. "This is an alternate history. There was never a system here, so there shouldn''t be a reason for a dungeon to exist."
Vex hesitated. "...Good point," he said eventually. "Maybe there was something down there they were mining. The more important thing is the Vault, though. I was worried it wouldn''t be here, but..."
The room was there, right in front of them. Unlike all the other ruins in this space, it wasrgely intact if everything hadn''t been so spaced out among floating rocks and empty space, it would no doubt have been visible from a distance. But the obscuring fog had kept itrgely out of sight until now.
It was strange, really, to see massive metal doors standing perfectly intact in the middle of a ruin. Vex approached the door hesitantly, pressing a w to it half-expecting the system to respond with a message instantly, as it always had but nothing happened.
"I''m not actually sure how we''re going to open this thing," Vex admitted after a moment. "I don''t want to just st it out of the way"
Misa snorted. "Leave it to me," she said, grinning. Vex blinked.
Misa did a few dramatic stretches, then reached for the edge of the door and Vex''s jaw slowly dropped open as her fingers dug into the metal, giving her leverage to pull.
Slowly, the massive doors slid open, metal screeching and creaking as Misa opened a gap just wide enough for everyone to walk through.
Then she took a step back and smirked, dusting her hands off.
"Holy shit," Sev said. "How many points have you been putting into Strength?"
"A lot." Misa lifted an arm, flexing yfully, and Sev just shook his head in amazement.
"There''s that problem solved, I guess," he said.
They walked through, and the doors mmed shut behind them.
177 - Book 3: Chapter 42: Interlude - Evacuation
177 - Book 3: Chapter 42: Interlude - Evacuation
"Ma''am, please," Helix said.
He was in charge of the evacuation. Of course he was in charge of the evacuation. Syv had said it was because he was a noble, and his status would help some of the people trust him.
As far as Helix was concerned, he was about fifty-fifty on that. There were certainly people who trusted him because of his status. There were others who hated him because of it, and there were still others that just didn''t recognize him.
Thest one was a little bit insulting. He was a very handsome and recognizable lizard! He was ny-percent sure of that.
"No," the old human woman told him, and mmed the door in his face.
Eighty-five percent.
Hellix hesitated at the door for a moment, contemting knocking on it for a moment and then he sighed and moved on.
It wasn''t that he didn''t want to convince everyone he spoke to.
It was that he couldn''t.
And the more time he wasted, the less prepared they would be when the time came.
Others would be back, he assured himself. They had no ns on leaving anyone in Elyra to fend for themselves not even the nobles, although they were absolutelyst on the docket, and no one intended to fight them just to get them to leave. That would put them at unnecessary risk. But if they wanted to evacuate, they would have the opportunity, like everyone else.
Helix only hoped his own family would listen when the time came. His siblings were getting close to understanding, he thought; it was hard to hide the effects that theck of food was having on the popce, now, and although food was stilling in from Anderstahl, it was no longer enough the wagons contained less food each day, and came further and further apart.
The n was to go straight to Anderstahl and help them till theirnds and grow their food. It would hopefully result in enough to sustain them all especially since reports were that thends surrounding Anderstahl were still rife with wildlife to hunt.
Helix only hoped that remained true.
"What do you mean, we have to evacuate?"
A little orc boy looked up at him with wide eyes, and Helix grimaced slightly. He didn''t like talking to children mostly because he was bad at it. Put him in a tavern any day, but children?
"Are your parents around?" Helix asked gently. He nced around inside the home it was warm and inviting, but he didn''t see any signs that anyone else lived there. A small worry gnawed at his chest, but... it was probably nothing.
The child shook his head. "They left," he said. "They said House Julia called on them! So they had to go. They told me to be good. But I''m hungry... I hope they''ll be back soon."
"How long ago was that?" Helix asked gently, trying not to let the pit in his stomach show. The boy thought for a moment.
"Two days," he said.
"You haven''t had food for two days?" Helix tried not to let any of his anger show, but some of it must have bled through; the boy took a step back, and Helix hurriedly lowered his voice and his stance both, trying to make himself less imposing.
"They left some food for me!" the boy said. "But I finished it this morning. So I haven''t had lunch."
Helix grimaced. On the one hand, he could ask this child toe with him... He wasn''t sure House Julia would be returning anyone they called to arms. But if they were calling people to arms, this was information that the rebellion didn''t already know. Heposed a quick message to Syv
"Helix Ashion," a voice behind him said clearly, and before Helix could react, he felt cuffs suddenly click around one of his wrists. He reacted with a re of magic all of which was quickly drawn into those cuffs.
Shit. He could fight with his magic limited, but not well enough to beat a physical enforcer. "You''re under arrest," she continued.
The boy hadn''t stepped back because he was frightened of him. He''d stepped back because of who had slipped behind him.
"Mom?" the boy said. The woman that had arrested him nced over his shoulder at him.
"I''ll be back with some food soon," she said, but that was all. Her voice was emotionless. Her son nodded.
"I miss you," he said to her, his voice intive.
"Come quietly," the orc woman said, her voice emotionless. She shut the door in the boy''s face, her expression not changing a bit. Helix clenched a fist.
This was House Wisfield''s work, he was sure of it. One hand slipped to his side, and he cracked the rune that he kept with him the Communication-Maintain hybrid rune that every field agent kept with them.
At least this way, the rebellion would know something was wrong, and could pass the message on to his brother. Helix managed a grim smile as he followed the orc woman.
Not even House Ashion had any idea how much Vex had grown.
"I''m d you''ve made so much progress." Syv managed a smile, gently shutting the book she was holding and ncing over to Ingress, who was the only one with her at the moment. The cksmith was working hard on creating a cure for his father using the glyph-magic Vex had gifted them, and by all ounts, he''d made a lot of progress.
He''d visited to tell her the news, in fact. For the first time, he''d managed to find abination of glyphs that allowed his father to speak. They shared their first words in years, and Ingress had wept deeply to know that he had not been wrong to keep his father alive; the man was as determined to live as ever. Too much left to do, he said. Too much left to learn.
He''d been worried. He didn''t know that he was doing the right thing, keeping him alive in the midst of Rustbite; that disease was functionally torture. Syv privately thought that Ingress should have let go of his father months ago, but she was also d to know she''d been wrong.
"I''m so close," Ingress said. "There are glyphs for Metal and Oxygen we''ve reverse-engineered them from simr looking spells, and I think I can use them to dpose Rustbite but I need to make sure I don''t do more damage in the process. I might... I might have to wait for us to evacuate to be able to do more. I think I''ll need a healer present for the next step."
"Healing magic getting weaker is worrying," Syvmented, sighing in thought. Things were moving slower than she''d hoped.
"It is," Ingress said. The human swept a hand through his hair, messing it up slightly. "I''m sorry. I know I should be more worried. It''s just, my dad"
"I understand," Syv interrupted. "I am d you''ve made progress. Keep us updated. We all want him to get better."
"Thanks." Ingress gave her a relieved smile, and turned to leave
A bell rang, and both Ingress and Syv froze.
Once, twice, three times. Ingress turned to stare at Syv. "Is that bell the one I think it is?"
Syv cursed. She was already reaching for her stack of books she sorted through them in an instant and picked out the right one.
Library magic, unbeknownst to most, was great for recordkeeping. It was even able to keep tabs on people, as long as a particr book was written with that intent. It was, technically, something she could have been awarded nobility for if she''d ever bothered to report it but Syv had never been interested in nobility.
"Yes, it is," Syv said. The words tasted bitter in her own mouth. "Three of our agents captured, at around the same time. One of them is Helix. The other two are part of his group too."
"Do you know where they''re being taken?" Ingress leaned forward to try to peer at her book, and she nodded.
"The House Julia cells," Syv said, marking the spot on the book with a w. She felt a coldness grip her heart. "The nobles have been ignoring us and the evacuation order as just a minor threat, but..."
"Not anymore," Ingress said. "Should I send out retrieval teams?"
"Against House Julia?" Syv shook her head, looking worried. "We don''t have anyone that can handle Julia. Or we do, but that was Helix, and he''s... well."
"How in the world did Helix get caught, anyway?" Ingress muttered.
"Careless," Syv said. "Me, not Helix. I shouldn''t have sent him out when he''s this valuable, but the nobles haven''t really been acting against us after that meeting, and I didn''t think they''d be able to get him. Or act against him without House Ashion getting in the way."
"He shouldbe immune," Ingress agreed. He seemed equally concerned. "If Julia is acting against him, they probably have permission from Ashion."
"We''ll send messages out to his brother and make sure the Guild is aware of what''s happening," Svy decided. "It might be time for the Guild to drop the neutrality act."
"Should''ve known you were behind this, Dad," Helix said.
He sat with his back pressed against the cell wall. It was ufortable. The stone was cold, and there was no real ce for his tail to go, and so it was pressed ufortably between his body and the stone. He''d move away from the wall if he could, but the cuffs kept him from moving.
"I didn''t want to do this to you," Karix said with a sigh. "Your mother is worried about you, you know. You could have answered our summons ande back to us."
"You know you''re just pushing us further away, right?" Helix let his yful demeanor fall away for a moment. He stared at his father with all the solemnity he could muster. "If you want to get Vex back, this isn''t the way to do it."
"What makes you think that''s what I want?" Karix snapped. "Maybe I''m just tired of having two of my brightest children shame House Ashion. Maybe I want you two to figure out where you belong."
Helix couldn''t help but roll his eyes. "You can''t seriously tell me you believe what you''re saying."
"You''re staying here until you learn your lesson." Karix''s voice was cold, and Helix tried not to show his anger. The man wasn''t even trying to understand. The fact that he''d directly acted against him only showed he was getting worse, not better.
He had no idea how else to get through to either of his parents.
"We don''t need all this power, Dad," Helix finally said. It wasn''t going to work he knew before he even spoke. Vex had had this same conversation with Karix dozens of times, and each time their father had dismissed his brother''s concerns. "There are bigger concerns right now than Elyra, and prestige isn''t a good enough reason to torture Riss or take food that the people have. We can find something better. Vex has found something better."
"And he shared it, so it''s useless," Karix said with a scowl. "We represent Elyra''s military and political power. It only makes sense that the majority of the kingdom''s resources should go to us."
Helix sighed. "To protect the kingdom," he said. "That''s the point of our military and political power. If we let the people starve, we''re not going to have a kingdom left to protect."
Karix frowned darkly at that. "And yet you rebels want to evacuate Elyra," he said. "It seems to me like either option leaves us without a kingdom."
He hadn''t denied what Helix had said. The lizardkin tried not to let his hopes rise too much. "Is a kingdom its buildings?" Helix asked. "Or its people?"
Karix glowered. Helix thought hoped, just for a moment that he''d been able to get through to his father.
Then Karix turned and left, letting the cell door swing shut behind him, and Helix''s heart sank.
178 - Book 3: Chapter 43: Orbs Again
178 - Book 3: Chapter 43: Orbs Again
The door mming behind them made all four adventurers pull out their weapons cautiously.
"Never had a door m on me in a dungeon and have it not be a signal for a boss fight," Misa muttered, and the others made various noises of agreement. "Think we''re going to get attacked by Irvis again?"
"No," Vex said, then hesitated. "I''m... pretty sure that can''t happen. Irvis can''t exist here."
All four of them stared at the center of the room anyway, waiting.
The room itself was massive. The walls were a pure, pristine white, lit by no apparent light source to speak of. There didn''t seem to be a point to all the space in the room there was nothing there save for the pedestal in the center, and that pedastal was a fraction of the size of the room.
Which was to say that the room wasrge enough tofortably drive around a caravan, but the pedestal was just barely smaller than Misa.
"I can''t see what''s on the pedestal," Vex grumbled. Derivan stifled a chuckle and offered a hand to the lizardkin, who promptly climbed up onto his shoulders. "Is that just an orb?"
"It''s just an orb," Misa said. She held her mace in front of her cautiously. "I remember thest time we faced up against an orb. It''s not getting me this time."
"I don''t think it''s the same type of orb..."
"You guys know I''m the only one that can''t see this orb, right?" Sevined. Vex grinned down at Sev.
"No more space up here, sorry."
"You''re not climbing up on my back," Misa added dryly. Sev grumbled and waved a hand, creating a quick shield out of divine energy that he used as a stepping stone.
"Okay, I see the orb now." He paused. "Is there something we''re supposed to... do with it?"
"Only one way to find out," Misa said, poking the cleric. He yelped, nearly stumbling off his makeshift tform.
"Why me? You''re the one with all the defensive skills," heined.
"Yeah, so I need to be avable to block." Misa grinned, enjoying Sev''s difort. "Can''t react in time if the orb gets me, yeah?"
"Perhaps I should grab it instead?" Derivan suggested. "I still do not have health."
"I''ll do it." Sev shook his head, staring at the orb. "It actually feels kind of... familiar. I don''t know why, though. I doubt I existed here."
"It would not matter," Derivan said. "This room is much like the door we stepped through it is locked in ce through Shift, and is stable across all realities and nes. For all intents and purposes, the orb here is identical to the one held in the true Elyra, and what we see here is proof of what is kept within the Elyran Vault."
"You''re sure?" Vex asked, worrycing his voice, and Derivan nodded solemnly.
"I was uncertain at first," he said. "But I have reached as far as I can with Shift, and I am certain."
"That''s gotta mean something, right?" Misa asked. "I mean, a room that''s the same across all realities..."
"It is reinforced," Derivan said. "If the void were to consume everything, this room would be one of thest things consumed. It is as though it was built to protect something."
"It was," Sev said softly.
The other three adventurers nced sharply at the cleric. Sev''s tone had changed dramatically there was a sudden wistful quality to his voice that hadn''t been there before, and all the levity seemed to have drained out of his voice.
"Sev?" Misa''s words were sharp, worried. "You doing okay?"
"I don''t... know." Sev''s voice was distant. "I think so. It''s not an effect, I''m just... I think I''m remembering? Everything''s so familiar..."
His voice trailed off, and he stepped forward again.
Misa nced at Vex and Derivan. "Did he just say he feels like a vault built over a thousand years ago is familiar?"
"Yup," Vex said.
"I also heard that," Derivan confirmed.
"I feel like you guys are calling me old over there," Sev''s voice came drifting back towards them. Misa snorted and gave him a thumbs up.
"At least I know you''re not being mind controlled!" she called back. Sev pointedly gave her the finger, grinning.
And then he looked back to the orb, and took a deep breath.
Sev let the world fall away from him.
Misa, Vex, and Derivan all fell silent, perhaps sensing how serious this moment was for him. There was something about the room and the orb that resonated with him, though he didn''t understand why. He''d never been here before. He''d never been close to the center of Elyra, even; his wandering had taken him along the Outskirts and among the various settlements and viges between the Prime Kingdoms, but he''d spent almost no time inside any of the kingdoms proper. He''d certainly never done so for long enough to gain ess to the Elyran Vault.
(So why was this ce so achingly familiar?)
It didn''t just feel like he''d been here before. It felt like he''d spent a long time here, trapped within the walls; it was part of the reason the room was so big. He needed space.
(Why had he needed space?)
The orb was important. The room was important, though the importance of this room would fall away once he imed the orb; the whole purpose of it was to give him a ce to work, and then to protect that which he had created.
Had he... had he made this? He didn''t know how to make artifacts. That was high-level divine magic of a type he''d never explored.
But if he had needed to make artifacts, his connection with Onyx was undoubtedly a part of that. A God of Sculptures would no doubt be able to help him sculpt the perfect artifact.
That couldn''t be the reason he''d chosen to be a priest of Onyx, though. He remembered the day he''d chosen Onyx. It had been almost at random out of a list. He''d selected a rtively minor deity, reasoning that doing so would afford him the ability to connect with that deity; they would have less prayers, less mortals vying for their time and affection. Sev had just been looking for a friend, and he''d found one in Onyx.
He was pretty sure that was right. His friendship with Onyx wasn''t a product of some deeper n. It was exactly what it seemed a friendship forged of circumstance and molded to steel.
Sev reached for the orb...
...and when he touched it, it resonated.
A notification appeared.
[ Grand Anchor Magic ]
That was it. Nothing about rarity, no description, nothing.
And yet... he knew what it was for.
Sev cradled the orb carefully in his arms, stepping down from his barrier and walking over to his friend. "This is yours," he said, looking at Vex. Vex blinked.
"...Mine?" he asked. Then he poked the top of Derivan''s helmet. "Or Derivan''s? I''m sitting on top of him, so I can''t tell."
Sev rolled his eyes andughed, thest of whatever fugue had gripped him falling away. "Yours, you goof," he said. "Get off of Derivan! You don''t need him to see the orb anymore!"
"I don''t want to. It''sfortable up here." Vex hummed, then let out a startled yelp when Derivan tilted his head in amusement. "Deri! Warn me if you''re going to move!"
"I apologize," Derivan said, stifling augh. Misa was doing her best to hold back a shit-eating grin, and not really seeding.
"What do you mean, the orb''s Vex''s?" Misa asked. "What''s the deal with you saying this whole ce looks familiar? You remember something, don''t you?"
"I think so." Sev hesitated. "This isn''t stuff that was erased from my memory, exactly. I think this is just stuff that was... locked away from me. To make sure I didn''t throw off the wheels of fate too much, or something."
"I''m going to level with you." Misa gave Sev a serious look. "I have no idea what that means."
"I''m not sure either," Sev admitted. "Just feels right. Uh, I think I made this for Vex. Or someone like Vex."
There was a long pause.
"You think you made this?" Misa asked. "Like, the thousand-year magical artifact?"
"...Yes?" Sev couldn''t quite meet Misa''s eyes. "I know it sounds ridiculous."
"I mean, I believe you, but I''m going to be real mad if you''re trying to tell us we''re chosen ones and you''re the wise old sage."
"I don''t remember doing any of this," Sev said, shaking his head. "I don''t think you''re chosen, exactly. I think you''re just... the right people. I think I spent a long time searching for the right people, and I think you guys are the closest I''m going to get."
"That''s a lot of ''I think''s," Misa remarked, but she softened when she saw how distressed Sev seemed; there was a shadow over his eyes, like even remembering all of this tired him out on some fundamental level. "...Do you remember anything else?"
"There should be another ce like this under Anderstahl," Sev said. He winced, pressing a hand to his head. "...One under each of the Prime Kingdoms. A vault that holds something that will help. I don''t... I don''t know anything else. But it''s more than I''ve ever remembered."
"It''ll have to be enough." Misa nced up at Vex. "Vex?"
The lizardkin hopped off of Derivan, a sudden serious expression settling on his face. "You know you don''t have to go about this alone, right?" he asked Sev. "I don''t know what you''ve been through, and I know you don''t remember much. But you sounded lonely when you were talking just now, and I just want you to know that you''re not alone. We''re going to stick with you no matter what."
"...Thank you." Sev''s words were soft. He didn''t know why Vex''s words stirred an emotional response from him, but they did; a deep ache buried somewhere in his soul, called forward and gently soothed by the lizardkin''s sincerity. By Misa''s determined smile and yful thumbs-up, and by Derivan''s calm, solemn strength and certainty.
Vex grabbed a hold of the orb, and there was a sh of light.
[Grand Anchor Magic] has been integrated.
[ Bonus Room: A World without a System> has beenpleted! Rewards: ERROR>
Elyran Prime Anchor at insufficient integrity to generate rewards. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Bonus room shutting down. Returning participants to start location for bonus room dissolution.
Bonus room will be dissolved in: 30 minutes.
The room around them vanished, and the four adventurers found themselves back in the Prime Dungeon.
Where an enchanted suit of armor stood staring at them, clearly surprised by their sudden presence.
179 - Book 3: Chapter 44: Armed and Ready
179 - Book 3: Chapter 44: Armed and Ready
"You''re the one who awakened me," the armor said.
"I am, yes." Derivan stepped forward he didn''t sense any ill intent from the armor he''d awakened, as impulsive as the act had been. The armor stared at him for a moment, considering him, and then gave him a slight nod.
"I''ve chosen the name Gant," he said. Behind him, Sev made a strangled noise, and Derivan found a moment to give a withering stare at the cleric, who to his credit looked apologetic. Misa patted him on the shoulder.
"I am Derivan," Derivan said, not unkindly. "I apologize for leaving so quickly after awakening you. Circumstances were difficult at the time."
"So it seems." Gant didn''t seem particrly surprised. His gaze lingered on Sev for a moment, some amusement dancing in his eyes, and then he nced out of the hole in the wall. It was the one the adventurers had left through months ago. "I''d considered following, but I don''t think I''d survive the drop."
"Not well," Derivan agreed.
"This is awkward," Gant admitted after a moment. "I keep wondering if I should call you dad or something."
This time, both Sev and Vex made a strangled noise. Misa didn''t even bother hiding her snort ofughter, while Derivan briefly looked panicked, Gant allowed a smirk to touch his eyes.
"No, I''m kidding," he said after a moment. "I''m thankful you awakened me, though. I was wondering if I''d see you again. Could you follow me?"
"Sure," Derivan said cautiously.
The four of them traipsed after the armor. He was silver,pared to the deep purple of Derivan''s own armor; Derivan wondered for a moment how much Gant remembered of the Scimitars, of their people. Nothing, if they were anything alike, and yet...
...and yet, Gant seemed much more fully formed than he had, a few months after his own awakening. Derivan remembered only bits and pieces of it, in truth; his awakening had been slow and gradual. Perhaps he''d skipped something crucial in his awakening of the armor, or perhaps a more fully-formed imprint from the Void had managed to find itself within Gant.
That thought only seemed more likely when Gant led them to a cksmithing workshop. Jelevar had told him that their people had taken up smithing as a form of art and expression, after all.
"I noticed you were missing an arm," Gant said, his voice just slightly dry, and Derivan took a second look at the workshop.
The entire ce was scattered with arms. If he hadn''t had context from his own missing arm, Derivan would have found it slightly creepy.
"Have you been trying to make me a recement?" Derivan asked, stunned. "You did not have to."
"I know that." Gantughed. The armor''s voice was much lighter than his own, he noticed; theugh sounded almost like the tinkling of chimes. "But it was an interesting challenge, and most of the books here are about the weapons wielded by great heroes. I''d like to be a great hero, but I''m rather trapped in here."
"Ah." Derivan felt briefly ashamed. "Perhaps we should have tried to retrieve you. I apologize."
"I was quite happy here," Gant said dismissively. "And I wouldn''t have wanted to leave, I don''t think. Even now, the thought of leaving the dungeon is... ufortable."
He frowned for a moment, as if lost in thought, and Derivan didn''t interrupt him. After a moment, Gant shook his head and bent down to pull open a chest.
"This is the closest I was able to get," he said.
It was a near perfect replica of Derivan''s arm.
"I needed a project, and this seemed as good a project as any," Gant said with a small smile. "I don''t know how well this will work, or if our kind can even just reattach parts like that, but I hope you''re able to do something with it. I''m afraid I don''t know how it all works, and I wasn''t particrly willing to pull off my own arm to check."
"Understandable," Derivan said with a slight chuckle, hiding his astonishment. He picked up his copy of the arm, looking it over with no small amount of wonder; Gant had only seen his arm once or twice, and only briefly.
Unbidden, a Remembrance grew warm within his soul.
The Exadite Pin was calling to him.
He invoked it without thinking, the crystalline butterfly materializing in his hand. It pulsed with a faint glow, and Gant made a noise that sounded like a sharp intake of breath, his eyes focusing sharply on the pin.
"Where did you get that?" he asked.
"It is... a piece of our people," Derivan said carefully, watching Gant. He didn''t know what the pin wanted from him only that there was something that it wanted, something he could do. He held with him a small piece of their people, and Gant had just done something that was in line with what Jelevar had told him of their traditions.
Perhaps this meant something.
"May I?" Gant said, reaching out almost hesitantly. Derivan didn''t stop him from taking the small, beautifully crafted pin into his hands; he cradled it like it was something precious.
A spark grew, snapping between the pin and Gant.
Itsted for a fraction of a second, and Gant stumbled, then straightened.
"Oh," he said softly. "I need to sit down."
Gant, it turned out, remembered.
Not entirely. A Remembrance couldn''t contain the entirety of their history, and the power it contained was bent towards more than simple remembering; there was more it could do. Derivan could, for example, use the Exadite Pin to draw upon some of the greatest things his people had crafted.
This was a different function, borne of the small change he had made when he had altered what Remembrances did, giving it a function beyond power.
But Gant now remembered pieces he didn''t remember before. He remembered his first attendance of the Freeforged Light, and the wonder he felt at the things his friends and family had created. He remembered the moment he had forged his own first piece of art no weapon nor shield, nor even a pin. He''d forged a little needle, lined with gold trim in a delicate pattern, and gifted it to a friend who loved to sew.
She was his girlfriend not more than a yearter. She was a dryara, Gant exined; yet another species that had been lost to the Void. They were simr to humanoid nt-beings, and were a beautiful people that lived and died in cycles. None of them truly died, but their souls shifted among the seeds, and every time they died they would be reborn elsewhere; to hold a rtionship with one of them was to know that it could notst.
It was still, Gant said, some of the happiest years of his life.
He seemed hopeful that Derivan would have a Remembrance of them as well, but Derivan shook his head sadly. It was a miracle that Gant remembered that much of them at all perhaps the Remembrance carried more power than he had hoped.
Gant sighed.
"I''m keeping this name," he told them after a moment. "The books I read here still meant something to me, and the name is a name I chose. I had a different name before, but it was given to me by our creators; it wasn''t something I chose. This means more to me, I think."
"Self-chosen names are always more meaningful," Sev offered. Gant gave him a t look, and then grinned.
"The arm I made won''t work for you," he told Derivan after a moment. "Now that I remember more. It''s missing the connecting runes that would let it attach to the rest of your armor. I''ll need to forge a new one and etch it into the metal while it''s forging. I''ll forge you a new one."
"We don''t have much time left," Vex said worriedly. "About fifteen minutes before the system copses the bonus room and takes us back to Elyra."
Gant smirked. "Give me ten."
He was true to his word. He worked rapidly, magic ring around him smithing skills that sped up the process, most likely, considering how quickly the metal he was working with heated and cooled. His hands blurred as he worked and etched, a look of pure concentration in his eyes.
Derivan watched. It was the first time he''d seen a true Scimitar smith, after all, and with some of his memories returned even if they weren''tplete Gant was the closest there had ever been.
Ten minutester, a glowing arm sat in front of Gant, and a final skill cooled it down instantly. Gant picked it up and gestured for Derivan to approach, and when he did, he snapped the arm on.
Derivan felt a small surge of magic, and then feeling returned to him. A whole arm that he''d lost.
"Thank you," he said.
"Don''t go losing any arms again." Gant grinned, and then that grin faltered. "You were saying we''d be back in Elyra in... five minutes?"
"Five more minutes," Vex confirmed. They nced out of the hole in the wall, and saw the rapidly-approaching border of the sub-reality they were in; Derivan realized with a start and a small clenching in his chest that it was likely that Clyde and the others were already gone.
They wouldn''t experience true deaths, they had said; elementals like them existed in every reality, with something small shared between all of them. But those iterations of them, the ones they had be friends with...
...he wished, for a moment, that he''d had a real chance to say goodbye.
He reached out through Shift. He understood, in some small way, what the system was doing here; it had created an echo of a world using the eddies and currents inherent in reality. This whole room was an alternate history, born from a single strand of reality, a single wavelength.
Derivan memorized it. It was all he could do right now. Maybe once they understood the system better, and could replicate what it did...
Though of course, they had other problems to worry about first.
"One minute," Gant said softly. "I don''t know what I''ll do in Elyra."
"You can''t stay here." Vex was the one to speak again, though his expression was appropriately sympathetic. "Or even in Elyra. We have to evacuate the kingdom. The Void is encroaching."
"The thing that took our people?" Gant nced at Derivan, who nodded. "Can we fight it?"
"It''s not a force we can fight," Sev said, shaking his head. "It''s just the end."
"Oh."
The word was small. Derivan nced at the others.
The moment they got back, they had to be prepared. They had run away from Irvis the first time.
And there was no guarantee he wouldn''t be waiting when they returned.
180 - Book 3: Chapter 45: Jailbreak
180 - Book 3: Chapter 45: Jailbreak
Helix sat in his cell, bored out of his mind.
He''d had almost no visitors after Karix. A small human came in every day to feed him his food and really, it was demeaning, to have to be fed. They didn''t seem willing to uncuff him and let him eat on his own, and Helix wasn''t willing to let himself starve out of pride, so he was forced to let them feed him like he was a child.
At least the kid feeding him didn''t seem particrly enthusiastic about it either. Helix wondered if he could get him to free him from his cuffs. Probably not. The cuffs required some delicate magic to open, rather than a key, and even if it had just required a physical key he doubted Wisfield trusted the boy with anything.
A little prodding didn''t hurt, though.
"Is this your job here?" Helix asked, raising a brow. "Feed the prisoners?"
The boy didn''t answer. He gave him a quiet, vaguely frightened look, and quickly fled. Helix just frowned.
Didn''t seem like the poor kid was being treated well, either.
He''d gone over a couple of possible escape ns in his head, but most of them didn''t seem realistic. They wouldn''t be letting him go any time soon, and there were no apparent ns to transport him; Karix seemed perfectly willing to let him stay here for however long it took for the nobles to finish figuring out what they wanted to do to grandstand at one another.
He doubted his father actually wanted him dead. Karix would want him back in the family eventually, but he wanted Helix to feel appropriately punished first.
Which meant he just needed to escape sometime before that. Helix had no intention of owing his father anything.
It was easier said than done, though.
The second best thing he could do was be prepared for when someone else tried to break him out. The rebellion would likely be pulling any strings they could to get him back, simply because he was one of their highest-leveled supporters; they would no doubt be trying something. Helix didn''t exactly want to rely on that, though. He''d be prepared, but only if his first n didn''t work out.
His arms and legs were both cuffed in magic-restraining cuffs, but there was just enough give that he could draw some runes.
Or, more urately, some glyphs.
Vex had shared his secret with the rebellion, after all.
There was a possibility that this was what Karix wanted. The rebels had been careful to use their glyphs in ways that would be hard to replicate: invisible ink on parchment that couldter be burned, manafire that would obscure the true shape of the glyph. The Wisfield spies would no doubt catch some of the moremon shapes through their thoughts, but there was a reason the majority of the people that researched glyphs stayed in rooms protected by magefire, where their minds couldn''t be casually read. They would scribe the glyphs onto disposable pieces of parchment, write out the effects, and then distribute the glyphs among their members.
They had ones for healing, ones forbat, and other ones that simply helped with the food issue. None of the Growth-rted glyphs seemed to work when they tested it within the bounds of Elyra, but there were other glyphs that could prolong the effect of a single loaf of bread, that could stretch out what wheat and food they had.
Helix hated that it was necessary.
He knew some of the glyphs, because as a member of the Ashion house he was somewhat protected from House Wisfield''s interference and mind reading. He tried to think through the glyphs he knew, to figure out which ones would help him here, assuming he managed to power a glyph using ambient mana alone.
The glyphs of Heat and me wouldn''t do much to the magically protected cuffs. None of the other basic elemental glyphs would help them, either. The more esoteric ones, like Book and Sound, would only help in abstract ways Sound could maybe be used for a distraction, and Book...
Book might help him, but only if he felt like instigating a needlessly contrived scenario in which he''d escape, and was equally likely to make things worse. Helix filed the Book glyph under st resort only''.
The other glyphs they''d discovered weren''t likely to help here, and given Helix would have to w the glyph into the ground, he didn''t want to give away a particrly powerful one to the nobles to use.
There was one option he had avable to him. A few of their number had managed to acquire what Vex deemed a Sign, which was a more personalized sort of glyph that would be difficult for anyone that wasn''t the owner to cast like a signature, of sorts. Helix had attempted to figure out what his own Sign was a number of times, and each time he''d mostly just scribbled into the ground and failed to cast any kind of spell.
Signs were supposed to be symbolic representations of something important to you. What did he think was important to him?
He''d tried thinking about the rebellion. He''d tried thinking about his family. He''d tried thinking about a number of smaller, disparate goals, like what he wanted to do after the rebellion; Helix thought he might enjoy trying out acting, or something simr. Magic was fun, but he had a ir for the dramatic.
None of those things were quite right, though.
Who was he, really? More than what he cared about, more than who he wanted to protect: what defined him?
Without quite thinking about it, Helix began to scratch a symbol into the ground.
Larok was trapped in his own cell.
Unlike Helix, the nobles hadn''t bothered with cuffs on him, and he had no personal servant to bring him food; someone would toss in a loaf of bread every day, and that was about it.
They kept him away from paper, too! As if he could do anything with paper. They remembered what he''d done with the tax forms back at the fight at House Herastul, and apparently decided that any kind of paper was dangerous in his hands.
Which was somewhat true, but Larok privately thought they were being ridiculous.
He couldn''t help but worry about Helix. He''d seen Karix passing by his cell, and he was familiar enough with the Ashion family now to recognize what Helix''s father looked like. If Helix''s own family was behind this somehow and Larok would not have been surprised if they were then his friend was no doubt going to me himself.
Assuming he knew that Larok and Kirsa were in trouble at all, anyway. Speaking of which...
"Any luck getting out?" Larok called out across the hallway, and the orc woman let out a grumble.
"If I got out, you''d know," she told him. "And I wouldn''t yell about it across the damn prison.
Larok shrugged. She had a point. He was just making conversation, anyway. Who would''ve thought prison would be so damn boring?
He''d already tried to break out on his own, but none of his skills really lent themselves to prison escape. Kirsa had more stealth-oriented skills, though her ss was technically [Street Cleaner]; she had a lot of words for whoever had defined the skills of that particr ss, considering how many of them were oriented around not being noticed by other people.
Larok privately thought that skills might be defined in some part by the public consciousness, and felt that the skills of a [Street Cleaner] in Elyra said more about the people living in Elyra than it did about the system itself. He''d never been brave enough to have that conversation with Kirsa, though. As much as she acknowledged the ws of Elyra''s system, she still loved the kingdom fiercely. Her presence in the rebellion was out of a desire to see the kingdom made better.
She''d fought the hardest against the decision to evacuate, but even she had eventually seen the necessity. They woulde back once they found a way to reverse what was happening, he''d had to assure her, and he could see that she didn''t quite believe him.
He wasn''t sure he believed himself, either. Larok didn''t know if there was a way to reverse what the Void had done. The reality that Helix''s brother had found out about their reality that it was all ending, and that their world was falling apart a reality backed up by the gods themselves...
That was a reality that seemed hopeless.
But Larok had decided he would prefer to live his final days in hope than not, and many of the other rebels had been the same way. They''d chosen their path because they believed things could be better, after all.
And part of the reason they believed things could be better at least for he and Kirsa was, strangely enough, because of Helix.
Larok wasn''t a mage. He couldn''t see the sympathetic magic building, the way mana began to swirl around him. He did feel a strangeness in the air, an electric buzz that made the hair on his skin rise, and across the hall he could hear Kirsa''s own confusion expressed as a sharp bang against her cell door.
"Whatever you''re doing, stop it!" she barked, a touch of fear in her voice. She was scared of magic, Larok remembered.
"I don''t think this is them," Larok said, just loud enough for his voice to carry over the rising buzz of the magic.
Elsewhere, Helixpleted his glyph.
And both Larok and Kirsa vanished from their cells.
"Hey, guys," Helix said.
His voice was appropriately sheepish, which Larok thought was a good thing, or else he would have smacked his leader on the head.
"What in the world made you think making up a new spell was a good idea," Larok said. It wasn''t a question.
"I figured it would help us escape?" Helix said. That was a question; it had the proper lilt and all, and Larok rubbed his fingers against his temples in exasperation.
"Okay," Larok said. He didn''t bother to question Helix any further.
The problem with Helix''s Sign which appeared to teleport the people he considered ''his team'' to him, if they were close enough was that now all three of them were trapped in the same cell, and that was about the only thing that changed. Neither Larok nor Kirsa had the magic to remove the cuffs Helix still wore, and the door to the outside was unfortunately locked.
"You sure you can''t break open the cuffs?" Helix said, eyeing the metallic chains that kept him locked against the wall. Kirsa gave him a deadpan look, then walked up and punched the cuffs as hard as she could.
"Nope," she said mildly. Larok and Helix both stared at her.
"Let me try something," Larok said with a sigh.
[Tax Fraud] which was still, in Larok''s opinion, a terribly named skill allowed him to confiscate an asset from someone that owed the kingdom taxes. The Ashion family most likely did owe them some taxes, but the cuffs had to count as belonging to Helix. The idea that they would belong to him just because they were currently restraining him seemed like a far-fetched call at best.
And yet, after a moment of resistance, the cuffs vanished and reappeared in his hands anyway.
"Uh," Helix said. Larok frowned at his hands.
He was pretty sure that shouldn''t have worked. He''d tried it before. He nced up, about to speak, and then stopped and stared at the system notification instead.
[ Elyran Prime Anchor at insufficient integrity. Skills may not work as intended. Please evacuate. ]
"Oh," Larok said. "Oh, shit."
Helix stared up as well. "Maybe they''ll listen to us now?"
Kirsa snorted. "They''re going to me us for this, and you know it."
181 - Book 3: Chapter 46: Boss Fight Redux
181 - Book 3: Chapter 46: Boss Fight Redux
The transition from bonus room back to Elyra was one of chaos. Derivan was certain the transition to the bonus room had not nearly been so jarring but then, they''d been escaping Irvis at the time.
When the boundary of the bonus room had snapped closed around them, flesh had started manifesting on the walls, and that had only been the start.
"I knew you''d be back," Irvis said. His voice was echoed through a thousand mouths, repeated and distorted along the walls.
The mouths had been the second thing to appear along the walls, embedded into the flesh.
After that came the eyes, angry and burning with hatred, just like Irvis'' eyes. Sev reached out and tapped Gant on the shoulder, and a barrier of golden light wrapped itself around the young armor.
"This isn''t your fight," Sev said, half-apologetic, half-determined.
"Will that be enough?" Derivan asked, ncing at the barrier. Sev nodded.
"It''s a divine shield," Sev said. "New one. I can only use it once a day, and it puts the person in stasis for a day, but it''s fueled directly by the gods. If Irvis can break that, we have bigger problems."
Irvis''ughter echoed around them, loud and mocking. "You already do."
And then the walls attacked, long tendrils of flesh ripping out of the walls at the four of them. They didn''t bother targeting Gant at all, either because the divine shield Sev had ced truly was an absolute form of protection or because Irvis didn''t care to about a random bystander.
Derivan was, strangely enough, reminded of thest time they''d been in something like a living building. The Elyran Adventurer''s Guild had been modified to look almost like this not so long ago, except that had mostly been the way the system was modified and attached to the building.
This was far worse on a ''viscerally disgusting'' level.
Derivan hadn''t really had the time to fully investigate what the Remembrances could do. He''d been able to go through a few of them, the Exadite Pin being the primary one but they''d only spent a few hours in the Roads to practice fighting together with their new abilities. Vex had uncovered a few things about his Semerit, Misa had practiced with her new bow, and Sev had tested a few of the skills he''d received from the connections he''d established with a number of gods, though he had to apologize to them afterwards for ''frivolous usage of their powers''.
Fortunately, the Remembrances called to him. He didn''t need to reach out himself the ones that could be used reacted to the situation he was in, almost like it was begging to be used.
In this case, the Remembrance that grew warm within him was the Guardian Root. It came from a species that cultivated a strong friendship with a chosen nt, strengthening it and being strengthened in turn by mutualistic magic. Derivan called it out of him, and let the seed that appeared in his hand fall to the ground.
"It needs mana," he told Vex, and the lizardkin didn''t hesitate to press his hand against it, flooding it with power.
The effect was immediate. The seed burst to life, roots growing out of it and digging into the ground, then up the walls and straight into the flesh; branches whipped out from a rapidly-growing seedling, each one whipping away at Irvis'' own tendrils defensively. They curled around all four adventurers with almost expert precision.
Misa whistled. "Didn''t know you could do that," she said.
"Neither did I," Derivan admitted honestly.
They were calm too calm, perhaps but why wouldn''t they be? They''d been prepared for Irvis, after all.
Misa called out her bow, her expression bing deadly serious as she focused on a concept. The arrow she fired was intangible and immaterial, but the effect was very real as it shot down the corridor, it stripped Irvis'' flesh off of the walls like it was peeling the skin off a fruit. Irvis'' roar of pain followed, and Vex winced.
"I don''t think I needed to see that, uh, ever," he said. Sev shuddered in agreement, and Derivan nodded. Misa just smirked.
"Let''s go," she said. "He''s gotta have a core of some kind somewhere."
"Wow," Misa said. "I''ve never hated being right this much."
Derivan privately agreed. If the walls being covered in flesh had been bad, then this was... several times worse. Red, meaty-looking strings covered the ceiling like cobwebs, all trailing down to a central structure that could be charitably described as ''a core''.
"It''s another fucking orb," Misa said.
Or that.
"You really just going to give us a massive fuckin'' target, Irvis?" Misa called out. "I expected more of a fight!"
Sev nced at Misa, exasperated. "Are you seriously provoking the eldritch flesh-orb?"
"Look, I just really don''t want to fight another orb," Misa said. She held her bow in one hand and her mace in the other, which in anyone else''s hands would be an incredibly awkwardbination of weapons. Derivan had seen her fighting with it, though, and she was actually sort of terrifyingly effective.
Whatever response Sev might have had was swallowed quickly by the angry roar from Irvis. Meat began to strip itself away from the walls and ceiling, collecting back into the central Irvis-orb like it was some sort of angry ck hole.
Vex shot it with aser full of magic.
"What?" he said, when Derivan looked at him. He sounded vaguely offended. "I wasn''t going to wait for him to power up."
"I was not expecting you to," Derivan said. His voice was amused and affectionate. "I was simply impressed."
"I love you two, but save it forter!" Misa yelled.
She''d flooded the room with a half-dozen copies of herself using that new skill of hers and good thing, too, because the tendrils whipping out from Irvis were multiplying. Derivan nced through Shift, trying to find out if Irvis had any tricks in store for them, and Sev made a twisting motion with a hand, causing half the tendrils to drop to the ground, lifeless.
Irvis roared in response. "How are you doing this?!"
"We don''t owe you any answers!" Misa yelled back.
Sev spoke at the same time, incredulous. "Did you really think we''d be doing nothing for months on end?"
"Guys, don''t banter with the guy that nearly killed usst time," Vexined.
Derivan hummed. He wasn''t an expert on Irvis, of course, but he rather thought that snippet of conversation would only make the eldritch Aspect all the more angry a thought that was proven a momentter when the entire room began to shake. The walls cracked apart, brick and stone splitting to reveal pulsating flesh within
"Nope," Sev said, and shoved a key into a lock. His connection with Tempus red, and time froze.
Just for a moment.
"Holy shit, this is actually kind of hard to maintain," he grunted. The lock was slowly forcing itself back no surprise, considering the amount of power Irvis seemed to wield. Vex looked worriedly around.
"He''s going to bring the whole dungeon down," he said. "We can''t let him. The dungeon''s right underneath the center of Elyra; it could make the half the kingdom copse."
"Not sure how we''re going to stop him," Sev said, jerking his head at the walls and holding on to the key with both hands. "He''s sort of already infested the ce."
"I might be able to reinforce the walls for a bit with some arrows, but that''s not going to stop him for long." Misa gave the lock Sev was holding shut a significant nce. If Irvis was strong enough to resist a time lock... "We''re just going to have to kill him faster than he can bring down the ce."
"You are our best chance with that," Derivan said gently. They''d discovered a few things about Vex''s [Semerit of the First Library], one of them being what happened to him when he tapped into the divine paradox held within. The sheer offensive power he held with it was only outweighed by the rtive inconvenience of using it; it had to be charged with a lot of divine energy, and while Sev could provide, it wasn''t an infinite resource.
Vex sighed. "I didn''t want to use this until I figured out a change of clothes," he grumbled.
"Better hurry," Misa said. Her voice was serious; she nced into the air, her eyes scanning through some messages they''d received. "The nobles have captured Helix. He''s mid-escape, apparently, but something''s going on. We need to get out of here and help them."
Vex hissed through his teeth. "Fine," he said. He reached out, and Derivan felt the immense Shift in the air as he brought out the semerit however it merged with the system, it had massive metaphysical weight to it.
All that weight was brought to bear as Vex concentrated, pulling all that divine energy out of the sphere and into himself. Golden light wreathed him, spiralling up his arm and around his body.
Derivan, Sev, and Misa all took several steps away in preparation.
There was no extended transformation sequence. One moment, Vex was a lizardkin; the next, he was a dragon, his presence suddenly ten timesrger. Silver scales adorned his body, cutting through his natural green; his eyes shone with a sharp intellect, and radiated raw magical power. Wings red from his back, stretching out wide enough that Derivan had to duck out of the way.
Sev let go of the lock, time snapped back into ce, and all four of them acted.
They''d discussed exactly what to do, after all, if it came to this. Derivan and Vex, specifically, could get rid of Irvis, despite his status as an immortal Aspect.
But first, they needed to try onest thing.
Derivan hopped up along Vex''s wing and onto his back, a Remembrance snapping out as a saddle that connected his mind and body to the dragon. Vex needed his eyes they''d discovered quickly that he couldn''t adaptpletely to the body of a dragon. The Remembrance provided an essential bridge, allowing Derivan to handle some of the processing and some of thebat.
Sev said a word that had no meaning. It came with a pulse of divine power, an imposition of Silence and that imposition held the walls in ce, though they trembled with effort. Misa contributed, firing arrows of Reinforcement at sections of the walls that looked like they were about to crumble.
And so it was up to Derivan and Vex to focus on Irvis'' core. A massive eye opened up in that sac of flesh, ring angrily at them. "You don''t know what I''ve been through," Irvis hissed. "You don''t understand."
Derivan answered for both of them. "We do," he said simply. "If you give up, we will help you."
"Never," Irvis howled.
They knew that would be the answer.
They''d tried. And though this part they hadn''t specifically nned, the resonance between their minds brought out the essence of their thoughts.
"You are Hatred," Derivan and Vex both spoke together, their minds aligned through Remembrance. Chains of pure mana snapped out from Vex''s wings,tching on to Irvis'' flesh and holding him back; raw power pulsed into him, charring his flesh ck, though strangely without any apparent pain.
"You are the anger and pain of the mana, coalesced into a single entity. You have experienced torture and death at the hands of the system for over a millenium."
The charred flesh spread like it was a virus, rather than mere overloading of mana. It infected every part of Irvis it touched, turning flesh to shattered obsidian.
"We condemn what has been done to you. No greater good justifies your pain; there is no honor in what you have been forced to endure.
"But your ns would end all life on Obreve. You are one part of a whole a part that has forgotten what the whole knows. The mana loves life, beyond all else; it makes its sacrifice willingly, every day.
Derivan and Vex both briefly looked terribly, terribly sad. But they were determined, and their minds were one.
"An idea cannot be killed, and an Aspect cannot be destroyed. You have grown to be beyond either of those things... But you can still be forgotten."
A Shift, powered by the raw strength of Vex''s draconic form, a mixture of divine and magical energy.
Irvis wasn''t being charred ck, or changed to obsidian, though it certainly looked like both of those things. He was simply being forcibly Shifted through reality after reality, falling right to the crumbling edges where the Void ate away at the raw metaphysical structure of the universe.
Flesh did not change to obsidian. It changed to voidstone.
And then onest Shift, forcing it back to regr stone, to avoid misuse of a terrible power. Vex staggered, his lizardkin form abruptly shifting back into ce, and Misa quickly wrapped a nket around him.
"He is dead," Derivan said. He didn''t enjoy the words. Misa just nodded, grimly.
"We have to help Helix," Misa said. "Are you alright, Vex?"
Vex took a shuddering breath. "I will be," he said, his eyes determined... and then embarrassed. "Um. Once I put on some clothes."
"We''ll get you something on the way," Sev said, giving his friend a small smile.
182 - Book 3: Chapter 47: Domain
182 - Book 3: Chapter 47: Domain
"Okay, I know we thought Wisfield was up to something, but this is fucking ridiculous," Helix panted.
He wasn''t the only one. Larok and Kirsa were both out of breath, too; the three of them had been doing nothing but running for the past half-hour or so, and their legs were aching beyond belief. Kirsa was the most fit out of the three of them, and even she was struggling. She peered back around the corner.
"Nope, they''re still following us," she said grimly. "You sure your magic can''t do anything?"
"I only know offensive magic," Helix grumbled. He reached out with a hand, a brilliant barrier of pure mana springing to life right around the corner. "And my barriers don''tst if I walk away from them."
It would buy them a little time, at least. He leaned against the wall, trying to catch his breath, and next to him, Kirsa and Larok did the same.
House Wisfield had, as far as Helix could tell, somehow managed to nt some sort ofmand in the minds of all the civilians that lived in the Wisfield district. Maybe further. It was a monumental feat that he was surprised they hadn''t announced but then again, he supposed he wasn''t that surprised. This was the sort of trick they could only really use once.
They were making a y for power.
It put everything that happened with House Herastul into perspective, too. The Lord of the house using his own children as soldiers theirck of protest in using artifacts that would eat at their own lifespans. What was surprising was that Wisfield had managed to keep all of this hidden.
Or maybe they hadn''t. Maybe it had leaked, more than once, and they''d used their own abilities to cover it up; it wasn''t like they wouldn''t know exactly who knew what they could do and where they were. Mental magic was a barely studied field because it was so difficult to parse the minds of other people, and it was even worse because it couldn''t be used offensively: without divine assistance, it could be used to read minds, but never write to them.
Except Wisfield had either found a way around that limitation or somehow gained the support of a god. Helix doubted it was thetter; there was no god that could empower their followers this much, nor make a move this bold. The other gods would almost certainly retaliate.
The worst part was that he didn''t know if he waspromised if he and his team were safe.
It was a possibility. He didn''t feelpromised, but then all the civilians had seemed perfectly normal until they recognized Helix and the others, like something embedded within them had been activated.
The obvious conclusion, then, was that they couldn''t go back to the rebels. It was the reason they''d just been running non-stop, trying to find a ce to hide that wouldn''t reveal them to anyone else a task that was surprisingly difficult when everyone they ran into recognized them and then joined the chase.
"How many people did they get?" Larok grumbled.
"It''s probably safe to assume they have everyone under some sort ofpulsion," Helix said. "Our best bet is to get out of the kingdom."
"We''d need to find a way to get past the guards at the walls," Kirsa pointed out. "All the other passages we know of have a couple of rebels stationed there. We can''t risk that, and we can''t fight the guards alone."
"I hear Liz is back in the Kingdom, too," Helix said. He nced at his barrier he was powerful, and so it wouldn''t be at risk of breaking until he ran... or unless Liz appeared. As one of the few tinum-ranked Elyran soldiers, she would barrel straight over him. He didn''t want to imagine what they''d have to deal with if she and her team werepromised.
Or worse, part of the conspiracy to begin with.
"Think we can rely on your brother to save us again?" Larok said hopefully. Helix managed a chuckle. Dire as their circumstances were...
"We shouldn''t," he said. "But having Vex around would make things a lot easier right around now."
"Something''s wrong," Sev said. They''d barely stepped outside of the dungeon, and Sev frowned, his eyes immediately narrowing slightly. He wove his fingers expertly in the air, manipting divine threads directly, and stared at what he saw.
Divinity was present everywhere. A basic essence of divinity was that it permeated all of reality, and the threads could be adopted by any of the gods if they so chose; in effect, it allowed the gods to im an area as their ''domain''. It was typically only really done for churches and the like.
Flooding out a domain with his own was a way to cancel the abilities of other clerics and pdins it was how he''d stopped Jerome from using his magic, by asserting his right to the divinity in the area before Jerome could, even if he didn''t use it for any particr spell.
"What is it?" Misa asked, her voice sharp, and Sev shook his head.
"I can''t tell. The air seems... foul." He frowned again, poking at the threads. [Divinity Maniption] had made them a little clearer to him, and he could tell there was something wrong with it, but he couldn''t tell what. It was like a nascent god was trying toy im to the entirety of Elyra.
Except that couldn''t be right, could it? The closest thing to a nascent god here had been Irvis, and they''d essentially vanquished Irvis deleted him from reality.
"Let''s hurry, please," Vex said quietly. His fists were clenched. "I''m worried about Helix."
"Yeah, you''re right, let me just..." Sev frowned, and twisted his fingers again; a flicker of his own divine control rang out, and he imed the domain around himself and his friends for his own.
Nascent god or not, the whiff of control it had was marginal at best. It was easy to overwhelm.
This would protect his friends from anything a divinity tried to do to them, as long as their will wasn''t stronger than his own and he was confident that with as many gods on his side as he had, he had a powerful im when he wanted to.
Still, Sev was uneasy. This couldn''t be a good sign for what was happening in Elyra and though Helix hadn''t been specific about what was happening (and his messages were, in fact, rather rushed and difficult toprehend), he had a feeling there was something going on that was rted to these polluted divine threads.
He only hoped he was wrong.
He was not wrong.
This was a problem, because they were surrounded by civilians. It was less of a problem for their team in particr, because Vex had invested in the skills necessary to restrainrge groups of people, and everyone was currently held down by brightly-glowing bands of mana.
"Any idea what''s going on?" he asked Vex, who gave him a perplexed look.
"I''ve been with you this whole time!" he said. "I don''t know anything you don''t."
Right. Sev grumbled a little as he nced at the system, checking to see if they''d received any messages, but the lines seemed to be dead; either no one was able to send messages or they had been simrlypromised. He was really hoping it was the former.
Holding down random civilians was one thing. He didn''t want to have to fight friends.
"Derivan," he said. "Any idea where Helix is?"
"Not yet." The armor was frowning, searching through the city as fast as he could with Shift; from what he''d said, it was actually more difficult to do when he was in the same reality as the target. It had been easier when he was in the bonus room and only needed to punch through oneyer of reality. "I may require assistance."
"I''ve got a tracking spell I might be able to use," Vex offered. "But we need to find somewhere to hide so I can cast it. It''s not fast. I could do it here, but..."
"I don''t think I want to stay out in the open longer than necessary," Misa agreed. She stared out at the crowd with a disgruntled frown. "Dunno what''s triggering this shit, but it happens when they see us. Better we get to hiding."
"We''ll use the perception bracelets and get somewhere safe," Sev decided. "Any empty building will do. I need to talk to some of the gods and see if they know anything about what''s going on."
Vex grimaced. "We''ll have to be quick about it," he said. "Using it like this is going to drain the bracelets fast."
He was right, of course.
The bracelets nearly burned on their wrists as they dodged the perceptions of dozens of people at once, and Sev noticed his cracking in several ces. He winced slightly the cracks came with a feeling of loss, like he was suddenly missing something, and Sev remembered that Vex had said there was something strange in the description of the bracelets but there wasn''t the time to think about it.
The four of them broke into the first empty building they could find. It was a shop that was closed for the day, the lights turned off and bars pulled down over the windows; fortunately, an unlocking spell was easy, and there was no one inside. They locked the doors and shut the curtains for good measure.
"Better hope the owner doesn''te back," Misa muttered. Vex winced.
"They''ll understand, hopefully."
It was a jewelry store, though the setting wasn''t important to any of them per se. Vex gave the ss cases a passing nce, then found a small clearing in the room and began to draw up a modified glyph; Derivan joined him, empowering it with Shift so it could work a little better and faster. Misa sat in the corner, tersely monitoring the system for any messages, in case there were updates about the situation.
Sev made his way to a corner to pray.
It was a small prayer, really effectively a ping through the divine connection he shared with Tempus, Aurum, and a few of the other gods he had created connections with in his time in the Roads.
So he wasn''t expecting the response that mmed into him through the connection, louder than he could handle.
Panic.
Sev, none of us can get in contact with our priests in Elyra, Tempus said without preamble. We have been trying to contact you for hours, but it seems even that does not work unless you open the connection. What is happening?
Sev winced. He stared at the threads of divinity in the area, resonating with something that was just slightly off.
But the deeper he looked, the more he saw.
I don''t know, he finally answered. But there was something there, he could see: something he hadn''t spotted when he''d looked at it before. It hadn''t been obvious until now, with his connection with the other gods resonating within him.
There was something there. Maybe it was a nascent god, residing in a loweryer of reality. Maybe it was something else a parasite, chewing away at the connection that gods had to their believers here.
But there was something there something alive something that he could reach out to connect with, just like he had with the other gods.
So he did.
I believe I''m about to find out.
183 - Book 3: Chapter 48: Unknown Forces
183 - Book 3: Chapter 48: Unknown Forces
Sev winced as what felt like a thousand mental cries maybe more suddenly mmed into him; if he hadn''t experienced nearly exactly this dozens of times by his own volition, his mind might have cracked from the force of it. As it was, his eyes widened and he stumbled back, almost shattering a ss case if not for Misa reaching out to steady him.
Her eyes were concerned. "Sev? You alright? The fuck''s happening?"
Sev tried opening his mouth, but no words came out. Stupid. Shouldn''t have tried connecting to something unknown
But there had been no better way to find out.
He could handle this. He had handled this, even if it wasn''t quite the same. Absorbing the pain of others as a part of his healing had prepared him for this.
He just needed to anchor himself and find the voice inside him that was him.
Sev focused on the feeling of Misa''s hand on his arm, on the concern in her eyes. He focused on the faintly dusty smell of the jewelry shop, mixed with the slightest scent of polish and perfume. The ss case behind him dug painfully into his back, but even that pain was something he could grasp at that anchored him to the present to who he was.
Slowly, he made himself remember. There were voices in the chaos of the connection he''d established, but he made himself a rock in a river, and the voices rushed past him instead of through him.
He let out a long, slow breath. "I''m fine," he said. "Did something dumb. Took me a second to correct. I''m... doing better now."
"If you''re sure." Misa didn''t take her eyes off of him, nor did she let go of his arm. She kept him steady as he moved himself over to the nearest chair and sat, and then sat herself down next to him, watching him as he tried to parse his way through the voices in his head.
It was thousands of voices. More than that, probably, but scale wasn''t something the human brain was good at grasping after a certain amount. Some of the voices even seemed familiar.
Who are you? he tried to ask, but he thought the words to himself instead of sending it through the connection. The link was sore, and it pushed against his attempt to speak through it. Sev winced and tried again. Who are you?
A roar responded a cacophony of voices that made Sev wince and clutch at his head. Misa said something, sounding concerned, but he could barely hear her over the roar he simply gripped at her shoulder, his fingers digging into her skin as he tried to understand.
We
are
Names. So many names, rushing past him in a river of noise, thousands of identities and concepts of the self; fathers and mothers, sons and brothers, shopkeepers and knights and soldiers and thieves. People who thought themselves worthless and people who thought too much of themselves, all mixed together in a single, incoherent whole.
And yet one thing stood out above it all: they were all people. Ordinary people. None of those identities had led lives that had lead to their ascension Sev knew what those felt like.
These were just citizens.
The people of Elyra.
Sev caught his breath and closed his eyes, trying to calm the tumbling turbulence in his mind. Misa''s hand on his shoulder provided him an anchor as he tried to pluck out details, tried to understand.
They weren''tplete. These were fragments of people small pieces of stolen identities, forgotten dreams, lost ambitions. It was like someone had somehow tapped into a small piece of every single person in Elyra and wrapped it all up into a single, haphazard whole.
Sev was, in fact, almost certain that that was exactly what had happened. It exined too much about what was going on. Steal a small piece of self from thousands upon thousands, and turn it into a nascent god; bend that nascent god to your will, and use the link it still had with the people it was formed from to manipte them, influence them, control them.
What do you want?
It was the next obvious question but when he asked it, he felt the presence falter. The river of noise became a stream, then a trickle, and then silenced into nothing at all; the air hung with tension, like the presence was confused.
It didn''t know what it wanted.
Obey, it finally said, but the word was a whisper and a response, not amand. It wanted to obey. That was all it really knew, all it understood.
Obey who? Sev asked.
There was another series of shes in his mind.
People wearing robes of white, the colors of the Wisfield house. A man who emanated menace, who made even this nascent god flinch in fear. The resonance of amand so powerful Sev almost felt the residual power of it even through the mere memory of it.
[Obey.]
He shook it off. The power of it was weak,pared to what had actually been leveraged against this half-formed god formed out of the Elyran consciousness. "It''s House Wisfield," he said, looking up at Misa.
"The House that specializes in mental magic?" Misa raised an eyebrow, then nced at one of the cked-out windows, listening to the sound of people talking just outside. "I could''ve told you that."
"You don''t understand." Sev shook his head. "This isn''t normal mental magic. It''s divine. They''ve created and hijacked a god somehow."
Misa paused, then frowned. "That sounds dangerous," she said. "Can we prepare for it?"
"I''ve already done what I can to protect us from divine influences," Sev said. "I might be able to extend that, but my limit is about a block at most. You guys will need to stay close by." His brows furrowed. "There are ways I can extend that range if we need to split up, but I''d like to avoid it if possible.
"Also, Wisfield''s somehow restricting full gods from interfering with Elyra, so I''m betting there''s some chaos at the temples right around now. Our first step is probably to find a way to let the gods back in."
"Or kill the new god in its cradle," Misa said, cracking her knuckles. Sev frowned at her.
"It''s a proto-god formed from the collective consciousness of every Elyran citizen," he said. "That''s how it has ess to everyone''s minds. I don''t think killing it is a good idea, even if we could, and no matter how strong we are I don''t think we''re at godkiller levels quite yet."
"That''s what you think," Misa snorted, but she took his words seriously. She nced over to Vex, and Sev followed her gaze Derivan had both of his hands held in both of Vex''s, and their eyes were shut. Around them, an aura of magic pulsed, strong enough that Sev could feel it as an electric buzz over the hairs on his skin.
"We need to do something about Wisfield," Sev said quietly. "I don''t know exactly what their n is, but with the Void encroaching they''re doing it at the worst possible time."
"The worst part is that they should know what''s going on." Misa frowned, spective. "They have to, right? They''re mind readers. They''ll have seen everything we have they probably figured it out sooner."
"So if they''re not evacuating themselves..."
"They either have a way around it, or they think they can benefit from it somehow." Misapleted the thought, her expression grim.
"Five gold it''s thetter," Sev said with a sigh. Misa snorted.
"No bet," she said. "I know better than to bet against you. Especially on that."
Sev managed a small smile, though the joke didn''t do much to lighten the mood. He shot a tense nce over to Vex and Derivan, who were just getting up from their positions. Their expressions didn''t make him feel any better.
"Wisfield district," Vex said. "They''re cornered."
"Can you make us a portal?" Sev eyed Derivan, who hesitated.
"It will take me a moment, and will onlyst a short while," he cautioned. "But I can do it. I believe it will be best for us to retrieve Helix and his team, and then regroup."
"We gotta be prepared," Vex said. "I dunno what''s going on, but I don''t think Helix is going to be exempt from it. I mean, he''s a target, so maybe he is, but..."
"I can flood out divine influence if I have to," Sev said. "I''ve been keeping it just around us because it''s costly to try to expand it, but I think I can keep your brother safe too."
"We''ll need a better long-term solution," Vex said. "We can''t rely on you to keep us free of whatever this is."
"Divinity," Sev said, and he gave Vex and Derivan both a quick exnation of what he''d figured out. Vex frowned as Sev exined it, contemtive.
"If they''re making a y like this, they''re going to be prepared for us," Vex said. "We need to make sure we''re prepared for anything they might throw at us. Hostages, tinum-rankers, whatever."
"The goal is to help the rebels get everyone out of Elyra," Misa said. "Wisfield can rot in here by themselves if that''s what they want to do."
"So if we can evacuate small groups..." Vex frowned. "That''ll take too long if Sev is the only one that can counter this. Misa, you think you could block the divine influence?"
"Once, probably," Misa allowed. "Mental influences count. But I can''t do it for every single citizen, and not constantly."
Vex winced. "It''s a good option to have in case Sev is knocked out or something, though," he offered.
"If I get knocked out, we have bigger problems," Sev said. He was immune to most status effects; par for the course with his ss; if something could ovee that, then they were in trouble. "We need to focus. Is Helix in trouble? If so, we should get him right now, and any other crucial members of the rebellion. My bet is that there are limitations to what Wisfield is doing that we''re not aware of yet otherwise all the rebels would be turning themselves in, instead of civilians being turned against them."
Vex paused. "Huh," he said after a moment. "You''re right. Helix is... he''s okay for now, but we should get him as we''re done here. He''s holed up in a barrier and is surrounded. The barrier willst for a while barring anything unusual happening."
"There are definitely limitations. It''s not full control, it''s a state that''s triggered on sight," Misa said. "I was paying attention. They only started acting strange once they caught a glimpse of us."
"Then they must know who''s affiliated with the rebellion, somehow," Sev frowned. "Maybe because the god is connected to every citizen of Elyra. It knows which parts of itself to attack."
"Does that mean they only knew to attack us because I was with you guys?" Vex asked worriedly.
"...Probably." Sev didn''t meet Vex''s eyes. "Look, let''s go get Helix. We''ll be able to n better if we have a solid idea of what''s happening with the rebellion."
"I am ready when you are," Derivan said, and Sev gave him a nod.
There was a pregnant pause. Sev felt the buildup of system-energy more than anything else, something he''d learned to sense after his recent exposure to reality shards; it was a prickling in the air, a faint sense of wrongness. Derivan pushed through the air, and the air in front of him rippled.
A hole tore open. For a moment, it led to an empty nothingness then Derivan pushed again, and the nothingness was reced by an image of Elyran streets, bright mage barriers, and Helix sweating as he tried to keep away a massive crowd of civilians.
"About time," Helix said, noticing the portal. "Come on, guys, let''s go"
He paled, ncing at something past them and then sprang forward without another word, dragging his twopanions with him.
"Close the portal," he hissed once he was through.
"I am trying," Derivan said. He sounded as close to panicked as Sev had ever heard him. "I cannot."
"That''s because I''m holding it open." A woman wearing white robes peered pleasantly into their portal, smiling. "Seems we''re due for a chat, aren''t we?"
"Liz," Helix hissed.
184 - Book 3: Chapter 49: Platinum
184 - Book 3: Chapter 49: tinum
"What do you want?" Sev''s tone was cautious, guarded. He wasn''t afraid. Liz was a tinum ranker, but his team was more than capable of fighting a single tinum-ranker, at this point. The biggest issue here was information disparity he didn''t know what Liz could do, but Liz might have a good idea of what they could do, if she had ess to Wisfield''s information.
Though they''d gained a lot of new abilitiestely, so even then...
"I just wanted to talk," Liz said, her tone friendly. She waltzed in through the portal, the hole in the air snapping shut the moment she stepped through; she nced around and let out a low whistle. "Nice ce. Is it yours?"
"Obviously not,dy," Misa said. "You think we own a jewelry shop? We''re hiding out here so we don''t get attacked."
"Whoa, whoa." Liz held up her hands. "Why the hostility?"
"It might have something to do with the whole ''being attacked'' thing," Sev said dryly. "Tell us what you want."
Helix had retreated almost to the other side of the room, in the corner where his brother was standing and behind the big, tall suit of armor. Sev thought that was probably the safest ce for him but he didn''t fail to notice the mana gathering around Vex''s brother. Helix was afraid, but he wasn''t actually nning to go down without a fight.
The fact that he expected a fight at all, though? Concerning.
If nothing else, Helix and his team didn''t seem affected by the divine mind-maniption. Sev couldn''t tell if Liz herself was affected, a conspirator, or an entirely neutral party [Triage] didn''t ping on whatever kind of maniption Wisfield was using. That she wasn''t immediately attacking was probably a good sign, though.
"I dunno," Liz said contemtively. "I mean, a traditional adventuring team, skulking around Elyra? I was interested, that''s all. Can you me me?"
"Yes?" Misa stared at her. "You''re one of Elyra''s tinum rankers, aren''t you?"
"That''s me." Lisa almost seemed to preen at the title.
"And you''re working with them willingly." Misa''s tone became a touch usatory, and Liz''s own expression changed. She looked defensive.
Sev wondered if Misa had hit upon a sore point.
"Why wouldn''t I?" she said. "They got me where I am today."
"Have you even heard about what''s been happening in Elyra?" Misa asked in disbelief. "The nobles are starving their own damn citizens. I dunno whose side you''re on,dy, but if you''re part of their military you''re supporting what they''re doing."
"Unless you''re here to help us, I suggest you leave."
Sev cast a surprised nce at Vex. He hadn''t been expecting the lizardkin to speak at all, much less with such a firm tone but he was standing with his back straight, staring firmly and pointedly at Liz.
"Aren''t two of you nobles yourselves?" Liz drawled. "Seems pretty hypocritical to tell me I''m on their side, don''t you think? Besides, you don''t know what side I''m on."
"We''ve been trying to get you to tell us for the past minute," Sev said, exasperated.
"Then let me give you a in answer." Liz''s expression became a little more serious, but there was a flicker of a mischievous grin one that seemed, to Sev, just a little too empty. "I''m not on any side. I''ll side with whoever I think will win. The question is... are you guys gonna win?"
"Not a very good way to pick sides," Misa said bluntly. "Doesn''t make you trustworthy, either. Means you''ll switch sides at the drop of a hat."
"I think you should leave," Sev agreed.
"Now, now," Liz said, affecting shock Sev could see she wasn''t used to being denied. Her status as a tinum ranker most likely made other groups eager for her assistance, but they just... didn''t need her. No matter what she could do, it wasn''t worth it if they couldn''t trust her. "I''m willing to take an Oath, if that''s what it takes for you to trust me."
"We don''t have an Oathmaker," Helix said warily.
"I do!" Liz answered cheerfully.
"Because we can trust an Oathmaker that''s on your side?" Misa raised an eyebrow, unimpressed.
"You can, because it''ll be a public Oath!" Liz said, her tone not changing a bit but a hint of danger entered her eyes, like she didn''t really like being questioned so much. "You can verify his ss and everything, I don''t mind."
"What do you want from us?" Helix finally repeated the question on all their minds. He drew himself up to his full height a bit taller than Sev himself, the priest noted with surprise and folded his arms across his chest. "To prove that we can win?"
"Are you sure you want her help?" Misa whispered to him. She didn''t bother actually keeping Liz from hearing her. "We don''t even know if she''s take the oath. She''s not trustworthy."
"We''ll need it," Helix said with a sigh. "Realistically speaking, the rebels need as many powerful yers as we can get. Liz isn''t the only tinum ranker working for the nobles. Any one of them could wreck our forces. We were relying on them not being anywhere nearby, but if Liz is here... You four can''t be everywhere at once, you know?"
"Wanna bet?" Misa muttered under her breath, but it was so low that no one except Sev heard her. He gave her a warning nce Sev didn''t want Liz to know more about what they could do than she had to.
Liz, on the other hand, seemed intrigued by what Helix said. "You think these four can beat us? Beat me? Bit of a tall order, don''t you think?"
"They can beat you." Helix''s tone was t and unimpressed not a shred of doubt in his voice.
Liz raised her brow, but nothing about Helix''s expression changed, and after a moment she hummed thoughtfully. "Huh."
"Do you know what''s happening?" Vex spoke up. He might have been the smallest out of all of them, but there was a force to his voice that there hadn''t been before Sev couldn''t help the flicker of pride that danced across his face. "I don''t know what you''ve been told, but the world is dying. Elyra''s dying especially fast. None of our crop-growing methods work anymore, and even the food we ship over here decays faster than we can eat it. There isn''t a kingdom to rule anymore. It doesn''t matter what ns Wisfield has we need everyone to leave."
"This isn''t a rebellion anymore," Misa agreed, her face solid as stone. "It''s an evacuation. Just because some people are too stubborn to leave doesn''t mean there''s a winning side and a losing side."
"There is no victory here," Derivan said mildly. "Elyra falls whether you stay or leave."
"Different degrees of losing," Sev said. "A kingdom is its people. Not the infrastructure, not the military, not the nobles. Evacuating minimizes how much of the kingdom will be lost, and that''s the best we can do."
There was a long pause. Liz stood expressionless, her head cocked slightly in consideration; Sev had no idea what she was thinking.
And then she sighed.
"I''ll give you one thing for free," she said, all traces of yfulness gone from her face. "Wisfield thinks they can control it."
"Control what?" Vex asked nkly, and when she shot him a look, he froze, his eyes narrowing. "The Void? The end? That''s not that isn''t something you can control. It''s just the end of the universe. There''s nothing to control."
"And yet," Liz said mildly. "They seem pretty sure they can do it."
"Then they''re idiots," Misa said firmly. Liz quirked a smile.
"The funny thing is," she said. "I think you''re right. I don''t think Wisfield really understands what they''re working with, and I think you guys do."
"So that means you''ll work with us?" Helix said. Sev noticed the lizardkin sounded guarded, though he''d been eager to work with her earlier it seemed he''d figured out exactly how dangerous she might be.
"No," Liz said, and all five of them tensed. She shook her head. "Rx. I''m not gonna fight you. I don''t care one way or another how this works out, honestly. I just want to have some fun. And just between us, I think it''s gonna be way more fun to watch Wisfield mess up than help you convince people to leave."
She grinned. "But hey, tell you what, I''ll help you out. I''ll tell you whatever Wisfield is nning. They order me around, I''m gonna do what they say, but I''ll tell you whatever they tell me. They can''t read my mind I''m not stupid, I found a workaround to that aaaages ago. They can''t control me through whatever divine nonsense they''re doing here. So! There you have it. De facto tinum spy, at your service."
She bowed, then winked. "I really hope we get to fight, though. I hope you''re as good as they say."
Liz turned around, making as if to leave then stopped right before she walked through the door. "Actually, one more thing!" she said. "Wisfield told me toe capture you. That''s the one thing I''m not gonna do for ''em. They''ve brought back two other tinums, Jakos and Ilyrr. Both of them are pretty uptight and loyal, so I''d watch out for them if I were you. Good people, but very misled. I think they were sent out to go capture other important rebel figureheads. Dunno which ones."
Instead of walking through the door, she ripped a hole open in the air. Sev wasn''t particrly surprised she''d kept Derivan''s portal open, she clearly had skills rted to spatial travel. "Well, toodles!"
She vanished.
Misa was the first one to speak, and she sounded incredulous. "Who says toodles?"
The n was, supposedly, simple.
They couldn''t individually check up on all the rebels Derivan''s skills weren''t exactly suited for it, and Vex''s rituals took too long toplete. Every second mattered when it came to people that could potentially be under attack by tinum rankers. That meant they needed to split up and target the rankers themselves Vex and Misa for Jakos, and Derivan and Sev for Illyr.
Sev would give everyone a minor blessing to ount for splitting up. The blessing would suffuse each of them with enough divinity to push away the foreign influence of the nascent god, temporarily deemed the God of the End. It was clear that god couldn''t target everyone, and there was some sort of trigger condition for its activation, but no one wanted to risk beingpromised.
They did all this after verifying that Liz was telling the truth, of course. She wasn''t someone any of them felt they could trust. But Jakos and Illyr were both in Elyra, and they were both moving quickly; that was proof enough, for now. Everything else they needed could be done through confrontation.
Hopefully it wouldn''t get to a fight, but if it did...
"Jakos is a physical fighter," Helix cautioned. "He''s fast, strong, and very hard to kill. If you get in a fight, you hit first or not at all."
"Vex and I will get him, then," Misa decided. "I can counter him."
"Illyr is an illusionist," Helix said. "A very skilled one. He makes you believe his illusions, and then whatever happens stays with you permanently. It takes a high level cleric to remove that kind of illusion."
"Suppose I''ll have to fight him, then," Sev sighed. He hated illusionists.
"I suspect he will have trouble fooling my other senses," Derivan offered.
Helix considered that. "It''s possible," he allowed. "He''s only lost in a duel against Liz, and that''s supposedly because of Liz''s spatial sense. He can''t replicate anything he doesn''t already know. But I wouldn''t trust any information about them that''s public. They''re bound to have tricks up their sleeves."
"Doesn''t matter what they''ve got," Misa said. "We stop them here and now, and then we stop Wisfield and get everyone out of here. We don''t have time to mess around. The Guild''s already reporting more incidents across the continent. Anderstahl might be the only safe haven left."
"Might," Sev muttered. "I''ll believe it when I see it. It''d be pretty suspicious if Anderstahl''s the only ce that''s fine and dandy."
"We are wasting time," Derivan said. "It will tax me to open the remaining two portals. If we are ready, we must leave now."
"I''ll stay here and keep an eye on things," Helix decided. "We can set up the same kind of control room dungeon delvers usually use. I at least know that set of spells. Let me just get [Telepathy] set up."
185 - Book 3: Chapter 50: Battle Orc
185 - Book 3: Chapter 50: Battle Orc
Jakos was not willing to talk.
Apparently, he wasn''t one for words at all. The moment Misa and Vex appeared behind him, he let out a guttural roar of what Misa was pretty sure was excitement which was disturbing enough as it was.
Then he sped towards them, almost too fast for Misa to react. She blocked just in time, her mace morphing into something that flickered between a sword and a shield. It was a not-quite-possible configuration that demonstrated just how hard it was to find a reality in which Jakos''s attack could be blocked.
If anything, his grin grew wider. Misa winced as he ran back, winding himself up for a second blow; she could feel the mana gathering from here. Behind her, Vex muttered frantically under his breath, chanting an incantation that would no doubt buy them some time.
Is this normal for Jakos? she asked, her brows screwed up in concentration as she blocked his second blow. This time, the orc practically bounced off of her, and then spun and targeted Vex she teleported neatly into ce to block that, shaving off yet another fraction of her mana.
Good thing she''d loaded up beforehand.
Uh, Helix said. We think Jakos is some kind of berserker. So... yes?
Thanks for the warning, Misa sent, as sarcastically as she could muster midbat.
Of all the sses she had to fight. Berserkers were probably her least favorite ss, ifrgely because they reminded her too much of how she''d acted just after she lost her home. If she hadn''t found her current team...
Jakos attacked again, spinning a massive axe he''d somehow pulled out of nowhere directly towards her face; she shoved the thoughts out of her mind. Behind her, Vex finished whatever he was doing, a glyph spinning into ce in front of him and a woosh seemed to follow, one that left Misa dizzy and disoriented.
She almost yelled at Vex she couldn''t afford that distraction, and the axe nearly took her head off but whatever the glyph had done to her, what it had done to Jakos was far worse. The orc staggered almostically, lurching to the side and busting a hole through a wall in the process; he copsed in the middle of a shop, staggered back to his feet, and then nted face first into the brick again.
His face left a small crater in the ground, right down to an imprint of his nose.
"What the fuck did you do?" Misa blinked, impressed.
Mana vacuum, Vex responded telepathically, his mental voice terse and stressed. Like ripping all the air out of a room. The more dependent on mana you are, the more it throws you off. He''s almost fully running on the stuff, but It won''tst forever.
"Time for some arrows, then," Misa muttered to herself, and then pulled out her bow.
Conceptual arrows were still one of the most interesting things in her kit. They were, in theory, almost as versatile as spells themselves thest time they had tested it, Vex had told her he''d sensed a glyph forming for a fraction of a second as she fired her arrow.
They hadn''t been able to investigate it thoroughly in the limited time they had, though. All she knew was that the arrows could be immensely powerful if shended on the right concept.
In this case, Jakos'' Berserker Rage was clearly focused on a love for battle and so the arrow she fired was simple.
Pacify.
Ethical considerations for potential mind-affecting arrows didn''t really apply when her opponent had attacked with the full intent of killing her, and very well still could. The arrow mmed into Jakos at point-nk range, then bounced off his flesh and cracked a tile nearby; Misa winced. He was just as durable as Helix had said.
It didn''t matter, though. The arrow didn''t need to pierce Jakos'' skin to have an effect. The orc''s writhing slowed within moments, and hisbored breathing became suddenly calm and steady; he sat up after a moment passed, confused and wary.
"What did you do?" he asked.
"Took away your desire to fight," Misa said dryly. She didn''t see any point in lying.
"That''s who I am," Jakos said. He sounded... well, he sounded entirely neutral about it. Like he''d just told them what he''d had for breakfast. "I wouldn''t be happy that you took that away from me."
"You were trying to kill us, so forgive me if I''m not very sorry about it," Misa said, narrowing her eyes.
This wasn''t really the best option, she thought. An arrow of piercing might have done enough damage to Jakos; an arrow formed out of the concept of damage might be able to pierce whatever defenses he had. Jakos wouldn''t be able to ignore either of those things.
She''d chosen this option because she wanted to talk instead of fight. Because she needed to gain a measure of who Jakos was as a person.
Because Jakos reminded her of who she''d been.
"I wasn''t trying to kill you," Jakos scoffed, and then considered his own sentence for a moment. "Although you might have died, I suppose."
"You don''t sound very sorry about it."
"I''m not." Jakos shrugged. "I don''t like killing people, I guess? But I like fighting. And Elyra lets me fight, so I work for them."
"There are bigger problems right now than fighting."
"Don''t care." Jakos paused as he said the words, cocking his head as though he was thinking about it a bit. "Well, I care a bit, I guess. Depends on what the problem is."
"End of the world," Misa said dryly. "Death of everyone and everything, forever."
"Oh." Jakos blinked. "That''s pretty big. I guess I would care about that."
"There we go." Misa let a little bit of the tension bleed out of her body, though she didn''t let go of her mace; her arrow wouldn''tst forever, and although she could in theory keep hitting him with them, she doubted Jakos would allow himself to be hit a second time. "Do you know what''s happening in Elyra? Or did the nobles just send you out?"
"They sent me out to a bunch of rebels to capture," Jakos said. "I was hoping they were going to be a good fight."
"Jakos, the rebels are basically all civilians."
"...Ah." Jakos frowned. "I would have felt bad about that. After the Rage. I only want to fight people that can fight back."
"You''re... kind of reckless, aren''t you?" Vex spoke up for the first time, grimacing a little, and Jakos'' gazended on the little lizard as if he''d only just noticed him.
"Are you a good fight?" he asked. "You''re the one that made me all dizzy and stuff, aren''t you?"
"I do magic," Vex said bluntly. "I''m not very good at fighting, sorry. I don''t think I''d make a good opponent."
"I think you would," Jakos said. "I think you both would. How about we have a fight right now? You win, and I stop following Elyra. I win, and... I dunno, I haven''t thought about it yet." He bounced on his feet expectantly, the glimmers of a smile starting to emerge on his face.
It was... a little bit creepy.
Misa sighed.
"Arrow''s worn off," she said, a little regretfully. At least Jakos wasn''t being outright homicidal anymore. "Surprised you''re not mad about the arrow."
"We were fighting. Everything''s fair in a fight. It was a good skill, too pretty cool, to be honest." Jakos shrugged, then grinned. "I''ve got better, though. You gotta do more than that if you want to be my rival. Anyway, do you agree to the deal or not? I don''t have all day. I have rebels to capture."
Misa grunted. "It''s a deal" she started and before she could finish, Jakos burst into action.
Because of course he did. She''d been expecting it.
Her mace shed against his fist with a powerful boom. The axe he was using had vanished again some kind of pocket dimension with different weapons, maybe and he was once again using his fists, but his fists were hard as steel. He knocked her mace away but didn''t follow through with the attack, then followed up with another one, and it took all her focus to bring up a second block in time.
He''d figured her out already.
Vex was working quickly, and surprisingly enough, Jakos was giving him the time evidently thinking that he needed more of a challenge or something equally ridiculous. The second mana vacuum took the breath of both of them, but didn''t do much more than disorient Jakos; he''d done something to stabilize himself, apparently.
Or he just wasn''t using any mana. As far as Misa could tell, he was attacking her with raw stats, and she was still barely keeping up.
She couldn''t have been that far behind him in stats, though. Some sort of passive bonus? If she could figure out what it was, and disable that...
Jakos smirked at her, and Misa suddenly felt the force of gravity triple; she almost stumbled as every piece of equipment she was using suddenly felt three times as heavy. Vex let out a yelp as he copse, thrown off-bnce by the sudden change.
Misa stayed upright, but it was a near thing. She gritted her teeth.
"I hope you have some tricks up your sleeve," Jakos said doubtfully. "Or this is going to be a short fight."
Misa almost scoffed, and called upon [Me, Myself and I].
In an instant, a half-dozen copies of her surrounded Jakos. He raised an eyebrow, impressed. "Well. I wasn''t expecting an illusionist. You seemed much more of a physical fighter. But illusions won''t do you much good against me, especially when I already know where you are."
He dashed at her. Misa didn''t move.
One of her clones stepped in his way; Jakos didn''t stop, assuming it was just an illusion, and in that fraction of a second that copy mmed her mace directly into his stomach, pitting his own momentum against him. The metallic ng told her it hadn''t hit him as hard as she''d hoped, but it still knocked the air out of him
And Vex, the beautiful lizard, followed up with a spell of his own. He''d taken advantage of his position on the ground to trace a glyph against the street without being seen, and now three entirely different elemental attacks speared out of the air.
Blistering fire seared the ground beneath Jakos'' feet. An arc of lightning speared towards him, cracking the air with a blinding sh and an explosion powerful enough that the shockwave would have thrown Misa back, if not for the increased gravity holding her down. A tight sphere of water descended, wrapping itself around Jakos'' head and staying there.
Misa could see the logic behind his attacks, but she stayed tense. a tinum wouldn''t be taken down that easily.
Sure enough, the gravitational pull doubled, and Misa gritted her teeth as she had to deal with equipment that was suddenly six times heavier. The water around Jakos'' head bubbled violently as he sted it apart with a roar, the water trembling for a moment and then exploding under the force.
She didn''t wait. Three of her clones followed up, two firing arrows of restrict and weaken, and the third one running in with her mace. The arrows missed as Jakos twirled between them, but she''d been prepared a fourth and fifth copy grapped the arrows as it shot past, and darted in to stab Jakos directly with them.
The orc''s eyes were wild with the pleasure of battle, and Misa couldn''t help but grin slightly in response. He kicked one of her out of the way, and spun and ducked beneath the other in a sudden feat of flexibility; the third he took head-on, bashing his own skull against her mace and then tackling her in the stomach.
That clone dissipated almost immediately. Vex was already preparing a new spell, his eyes furrowed in concentration, and Misa considered and discarded her options one by one.
But one thing still bothered her. She was so simr to Jakos. She liked fighting, she liked challenging herself they weren''t all that different, in the end. Something about that thought pulled at her.
She liked fighting, but she was different, because she fought for a cause.
[ You have taken another step on the Path of the Endless. ]
[ New Epic-Grade Skill acquired: [The Flow of the Battle]. ]
186 - Book 3: Chapter 51: Battle Flow
186 - Book 3: Chapter 51: Battle Flow
The skill took effect almost immediately. Misa felt the world slow down around her, like everything was falling into focus; around her was only Vex, Jakos, and herself.
And her remaining clones, of course. There were five of them, spread out in a circle around Jakos, two of them keeping close to Vex in case the lizard needed to be protected he was still vulnerablepared to her.
Jakos moved, and so did she.
It was a dance. Jakos''s eyes lit up with ferocious glee when he realized how much Misa''s movements had changed her style had always been defensive, because she foughtrgely to steal attention away from others while Vex picked them off with magic. Now she wielded offense and defense in equal measure, and the fight narrowed to just the two of them.
Jakos didn''t even nce at Vex. It was through unspoken agreement that they decided that the lizardkin would neither interfere nor be interfered with; he would be a spectator in the battle. Misa, Jakos had judged, was a worthy opponent even on her own. Vex''s assistance would guarantee her victory, but wouldn''t give him the fun that he wanted with the fight.
He levied a punch at her, and she ducked underneath smoothly; her mace cracked into his stomach once, and she whirled underneath his arm in the same motion so that his followup kick hit nothing but air. She twisted, bringing her leg up to kick him in the small of the back.
It was like punching and kicking steel but she was strong enough to bend steel at this point. Jakos stumbled forward, then ducked into a roll as another copy of Misa tried to swing a punch at his head. That one he caught beneath the chin mid-roll, forcing the clone to stumble back but not quite doing enough damage to dissipate her.
[The Flow of the Battle] allowed her to read everything Jakos was doing almost perfectly it was not unlike what she had been trying to do with her own Endless Echoes, though that method was much more finicky and hard to pull off in the middle of a battle. Changing what she''d done fractions of a second back and acquiring information that way sounded good on paper, but was hard to focus on during a fight.
Fortunately, the clones from [Me, Myself and I] helped they could handle all the extra processing needed.
Which meant she could figure out what skills her opponent had that they were hiding from her.
She stepped a few feet back from Jarok a second before he activated a skill of some sort, sting the air around him with a buzzing shockwave of electricity; ignoring his expression of surprise, she followed up with an arrow from just outside his range, imbuing it with the concept of a lightning rod.
A faint smirk touched her lips, but she didn''t let it distract her, plunging back into the fight. Jakos was clearly surprised and thrown by the fact that she''d dodged whatever that electrical shockwave was, and so he was a little hesitant to use it again but the next time she cornered him and he needed to create distance, she saw him reach for the skill.
Just as nned. He expected her to dodge out of the way, just like she had before. Instead, she punched him in the face.
The lightning rod concept activated, and the electricity he tried to generate bounced back into him, expanding only millimeters from his skin before rebounding and frying him. Jakos let out a cry of shock, and Misa followed it up with another three punches, putting all the force she could muster into each if she tried anything less, Jakos would recover and punish her for it, no doubt.
She stepped back to duck underneath the next swing, and then to the side away from the awkward kick he tried to follow up with. Jakos was flustered now he was getting less precise with his attacks, relying more and more on instinct. His instinct was still good it was enough to overwhelm any other physical fighter but with [The Flow of the Battle] pushing things in her favor...
He didn''t have a chance.
He saw it too. Jakos tilted his head slightly, took a step back from her, and then held both of his hands up in a grin. "I yield," he said, suddenly sounding much more friendly. "You''re a damn good fighter, you know that? Where''d you learn all those moves?"
"Literally right in the middle of that fight," Misa said dryly.
"The system can be unfair sometimes," Jakos chuckled. "I haven''t gotten a cool new move from the stupid thing in years. What''s the point of it if it isn''t giving me new skills?"
"It made you strong enough to do that?" Misa jerked a thumb over to the hole in the wall that Jakos had smashed through. There was, thankfully, no one inside the move could have caused grievous injury if there had been.
"I mean, I guess." Jakos wrinkled his nose, then bounced on his feet. "We should fight more. I bet I can get new skills if we fight more. I haven''t been challenged like that for a while."
"If you want to fight more you''re going to have to quit the Elyran military ande join the Adventurer''s Guild. Then I''ll fight you as much as you want," Misa joked.
She wasn''t expecting Jakos to light up. "Deal," he said.
Huh.
Behind her, Vex blinked, then sighed. "I have so many questions," he muttered.
But Jakos didn''t seem to hear him. He was already remarkably enthusiastically babbling all of Elyra''s ns to them. He didn''t actually know much, but he did know who he was supposed to capture; it was the cksmith that had recently been restored, the one that had been lost to Rustbite.
Victor. Ingress'' father. Vex lit up; they must''ve figured out a cure using the glyphs.
"When can we fight, by the way?" Jakos asked eagerly.
"Probably sometime after we save the universe?" Misa answered, smirking. Jakos nodded.
"Right, right. That does sound important," Jakos said. Vex sighed.
"Let''s head back. Helix is going to get a heart attack for us staying out this long as it is."
I heard that.
"I know."
Derivan knew something was wrong almost the moment they stepped through the portal.
Both Shift and Patch were reporting things that didn''t match at all with what he was looking at. Shift often felt like little strings in space that he could push and pull, forcing them to vibrate at different frequencies and opening up paths to different timelines using it to teleport was difficult because he had to path his way to a different timeline and then back again.
More crucially, he had what was functionally the ability to sense the different positions of objects with Shift, because objects themselves existed at a slightly different frequencypared to the air.
That mental map of the area around them didn''t match what he was looking at at all.
With Patch, he could sense the system itself and how it was attached to people. That, too, looked wrong. Illyr was standing in front of them, but Patch reported no apparent system there; instead, it was a little to the left.
Derivan kept his gaze carefully focused on the illusion, and reached out telepathically to Sev. We''re in an illusion.
Sev''s hand tightened on his staff. I figured.
Illyr was a lizardkin tall and imposing, though Derivan had no idea if that was his true appearance at all. He wreathed himself in a cloak like it was a shield, and glowered down at the two of them.
"You want something for me." It was a statement, not a question.
"We''d like for you not to capture the rebels like you were sent out to do, yes," Sev said dryly. "Any chance we can work out a deal?"
"No." The answer was short and immediate. "I have my duties, and I will fulfill them."
"The stakes here are much higher than your duties." Sev''s tone was serious. Derivan paid attention to what the lizardkin was doing outside the illusion he could sense someone moving around, but he didn''t seem to be gearing up to attack them or anything.
Yet.
"I would be nothing without my duty," Illyr said. "And so I apologize for what I must do."
"Illyr" Sev began. Derivan noticed something strange through Patch the system around the cleric shifting and undting in some way, centered around his brain. Sev winced and clutched at his head, but it was nothing Illyr was doing, as far as Derivan could tell.
He''s familiar, Sev whispered to him through their link. I don''t understand why he''s so familiar. I''ve never seen him before.
Derivan couldn''t spare the attention to think about it. The ground around them was shifting, the buildings picking themselves up and walking forward; for all that this was an illusion for all that Derivan knew that the buildings hadn''t moved, that they weren''t truly there at all they felt real. The wall next to him pressed against his armor and physically shifted him, even though nothing was truly pressing against him.
He knew with certainty that he would be crushed, if he allowed it.
Derivan grabbed a hold of Sev, who seemed to be half-disabled he didn''t know if Sev was seeing something different from him, but it didn''t seem likely and moved quickly. He kept a fair distance away from Illyr, trying not to make it obvious that he was following the man and could sense where he was. He tried to make it look like he was just dodging the buildings.
At the same time, he prepared a spell.
Grace and Intensity hadn''t seen a lot of use after he acquired the stats. He still didn''t know which one he''d gotten from whom, but he''d discovered the effects of each stat during his downtime in Vex''s bonus room. They were simple, but effective. Grace made him more fluid, more physically flexible; it operated together with Slime in a way that gave him almost full control of himself physically. He suspected at a high enough level he''d be able to outright shapeshift.
Intensity, on the other hand, gave him a force of presence. It made him harder to move, harder to influence, and harder to change. It was, thankfully, active rather than passive a trait he could turn on and off at will. He couldn''t imagine what problems he''d have if it were always on.
Now, he used them both.
Grace let him flicker between buildings with only a small space between them, even while carrying Sev; he was cautious at first, in case the cleric was experiencing a different illusion he didn''t want to crush his friend against a wall he couldn''t see but it was increasingly clear that Illyr could only maintain a single illusion of thisplexity at a time.
Intensity let him increase his presence when he needed to, and allowed him to go through buildings instead of between them. When it was active, he could ignore the buildings entirely and move through them as if they didn''t exist his presence overwrote that of the illusion, and by extension Sev''s as well, since he was carrying him.
Entire sections of Elyra uprooted themselves and crashed against him. He had to roll through a window, duck beneath a street, and swing around a horizontalmppost just to keep up and he had to do all this while holding on to Sev.
Fortunately, Sev dragged himself out of whatever was going on in his mind after a few minutes of this. "Are we still close?" he demanded.
I''ve been keeping us close. Derivan said. He is about a street away, to our right.
"Can you get us there?"
Derivan didn''t answer. Instead, he diverted his route, activating Intensity and smashing through what few walls remained between them and Illyr; Illyr stopped in his tracks as Derivan appeared in front of him, staring directly at his invisible presence.
"You can sense me," Illyr said, narrowing his eyes. The invisibility and the other Illyr, which Derivan had been ignoring faded.
Sev took a deep breath and ignored the conversation. "I know who you are, Sylix."
The illusion cracked and fell apart like it was little more than ss. The real streets of Elyra showed up in front of them, empty of people.
Illyr stared at Sev, something like fear showing in his eyes for the first time.
"How do you know that name?"
187 - Book 3: Chapter 52: History
187 - Book 3: Chapter 52: History
"Because I know you," Sev said. "I met you before. I adventured with you. We were friends."
Derivan shifted, and then gently put him down on the ground. Sev took a step forward, not yetpletely understanding the memories he''d just unlocked, but working his way through them. There were so many things that were wrong with those memories...
...but there was one thing that was important, and that was the night he had spoken to Illyr in his own tent. They were curled up together, side by side, Illyr''s head resting on his shoulder.
"I''m sorry," Illyr said. "I''m too old to be running to people in the middle of the night."
"Bah," Sev said with augh and a friendly nudge to Illyr''s shoulder. "We all have our own shit to deal with basically all the time. Not your fault yours is worse than most people''s. You got a nightmare, I''m here for you. What are friends for, right?"
"Right." Illyr sighed. "I never really understood that until you and the others."
"Not your fault either." Sev was silent for a moment. "But I''m here if you want to talk about it."
"I don''t know." Illyr fidgeted, the normally stoic lizard apparently finding it difficult to find the words. It took a full three minutes before he spoke again. "I wasn''t always Illyr."
"You''ve hinted at your mysterious past before," Sev said, with a hint of a smile, and Illyr grimaced.
"...Illyr is just a name I picked," he said. "My real name is Sylix. Illyr was my brother at the orphanage. He died. I killed him it was an ident. I didn''t know what I was doing, I swear. I was testing my illusions it just happened it wasn''t supposed to kill him you have to understand, I didn''t know what I could do, I really didn''t"
The words came out in a rush, like he didn''t want to say them and forced them out anyway; the lizardkin pulled away slightly and hugged his knees to his chest, looking for all the world like a child in need offort.
Sev hesitated slightly. He reached out, but Illyr Sylix? flinched away at the brush of his fingers, and he sighed and sat himself down in front of the lizardkin.
He was so young. Barely neen years old, and still haunted by the past.
"I believe you," Sev said simply.
"What?" Sylix looked up at him, red-rimmed eyes visible even through the scales.
"I believe you," Sev said again. "You wouldn''t kill anyone on purpose. You wouldn''t even hurt a fly. Is this why you''re so afraid to use your illusions?"
"I... yes." Sylix looked down at the ground. "We were just ying. It wasn''t supposed to be a dangerous illusion at all. Just, Illyr was so much younger than me, and he hadn''t seen snow before, and I wanted him to see the snow... he got cold so fast and it didn''t stop when I turned off the illusions..."
Sylix buried his face between his knees. "They can keep the illusions if they want to," he said quietly, half to himself. "Even if I turn it off, if they want to believe it enough... it keeps going. And I can''t turn it off. And it didn''t matter how many coats I put on him or how many illusions of fires I gave him, he just kept getting colder and colder, and I couldn''t..."
Sev hugged his friend.
He didn''t say anything. What could he say? He wouldn''t believe ''it''s not your fault''. A dozen titudes wouldn''t save his brother.
Sometimes, the best thing you could do was just be there for a friend.
"I think there''s still some soup outside," Sev said. "Do you want to get some? Some warm soup will do you good, and then we can talk about it."
"Yeah... yeah, I think that''s a good idea." Sylix managed a small smile. "Thanks"
The memory cut off there. Sev had the strange feeling that there was something off with the memory, but the major details were correct; Illyr-or-Sylix had lived a life as an orphan in an orphanage, with only his younger brother as apanion and then, when trying to show his brother the magic of winter, he''d identally killed him.
A skill that could continue even after you turned it off was cruel.
"What are you talking about?" Illyr''s voice was cold. He sounded so different from the Illyr in his memories; this version of him was older by almost ten years, it looked like. He seemed colder. He seemed like someone who had never made any friends, who had toe to terms with what had happened to his brother by himself.
Sev didn''t even know what he was supposed to call him. Sylix? Illyr?
"We were friends," Sev said. He didn''t even know if this was the best thing to say Sylix looked like he was getting increasingly angry, but he''d already started down this path. He could only hope what he had to say would calm him down. "We met when you were trying to find a job in the Elyran Guild, but no one would take you in. I said I''d let you join me. There was a fight that day between an orc and a lizardkin, and you split them up with barely any effort."
"I recall the fight," Sylix said, his voice still cold. "But I did not meet you."
He said it as a fact, too. Sev remembered that day so clearly, all of a sudden everything up to inviting Illyr to join him, and the faces of two other people he no longer recognized but was pretty sure were also his friends...
The timeline didn''t add up. He couldn''t have done this. He remembered where he was on that day he was halfway hiking through the Outskirts.
Why did he also remember this?
Because you''ve done it all before.
The answer was a startling whisper in his own mind.
"You didn''t," Sev agreed, his mouth dry. "But we did meet in another time. Another ce."
"I don''t believe you."
"You don''t have to." Sev didn''t fully understand where he was going with this but something in him resonated. Small memories surfaced, things he''d never actually done, moments that he''d never actually had.
Aneryn, too, the shadow elemental that died in the shade of a tree just across from the Festival. Xothok, the bandit that led the team against him.
Misa. Vex.
He''d met them all before.
"Put me in that illusion." The words escaped him before he understood them. Sylix paused, startled, and then his eyes narrowed in a mixture of anger and confusion and some indiscernible, third thing; something like fear and panic rolled together into one.
"You don''t know what you''re asking me to do." Sylix''s voice was tight, controlled.
"Elyra wants you to capture me, right?" Sev kept his gaze and his words even. "I won''t die. I can heal myself."
"You''ll never feel warm again."
"I will. Because I know how that illusion works, Sylix, and I know how to break out of it."
Sev told himself he wasn''t nervous.
They''d worked on controlling it. They''d worked on understanding exactly what it was that made Sylix''s illusions tick, back when he''d finally told them what happened; he was afraid to use his most powerful illusions because of the way they stuck to their victims. It seemed that even this version of him the one that had been picked up by Elyra, that used his skills for Elyra''s benefit and leveraged his illusions for the sole purpose of carrying out their orders
He was still afraid.
Elyra had never done anything to help him with his skills. [Winter Fantasy], the illusion that had killed his brother they no doubt thought it would be an asset to them. But Sev had seen what Sylix was capable of when he really understood his own illusions, and what they''d seen just now the warping buildings that threatened to crush them that was nowhere near his limit.
He hadn''t grown. He''d been stuck, and the only thing Elyra offered him was eptance. They were the only people that wanted him; of course he''d gone with them.
Sev felt the air turn cold. He saw the shimmer in the sky as clouds began to form, and snowkes dance across the wind. A thinyer of snow began to build up on the streets, along with the phantom lights of Christmas...
An old Earth tradition. Sylix''s strongest illusions drew upon their victims to give them what they wanted. For Sev, it was a small piece of home he no longer remembered.
"Are you happy now?" Sylix asked, his voice bitter. "Is this the point you wanted to prove?"
It was cold. Sev drew his robes around himself, shivering, and cast a small divine spell of warmth; it curled down around him and vanished, just as it did the first time he''d tried that, back when they were friends.
"I wanted to prove that you can be more than a soldier," Sev said quietly. "And that you are not a killer."
That had been Sylix''s main contention that his skills were only good for killing; that his illusions could no real good. It made sense that he had ended up as a soldier, even if he hated every second of it. It was the only ce that would ept him.
Sev took onest nce at the winter wondend that surrounded him. It was genuinely beautiful. Butterflies made of snow-crystal fluttered around in the sky; shadows stood behind windows, having warm Christmas dinners. He knew those things were true, because the illusion delivered that information to him, giving him a feeling of warmth andfort that was easy to get lost in even as his real body began to freeze.
He was standing knee-deep in snow.
But he wasn''t, really.
The key to [Winter Fantasy] and any one of Sylix''s more advanced illusions was that they weren''t really meant asbat illusions at all; they would be rather cruel, if that were the case. Sylix had created it because he had wanted to create art, to bring a moment of joy to his brother, and poor Illyr had been drawn in so deeply that he had wanted it tost forever.
Most of Sylix''s victims did, really. But they weren''t meant to.
Because when Sylix had made that illusion for the first time, he''d had one image fixed in his mind, and they''d neverpleted it.
Sev reached down to the ground, packing the snow into a snowball. He threw it towards Illyr without much fanfare at all, and watched as the ball of snow hit him in the head.
"Boop," he said simply.
The illusion faded away, and Sylix stared at him, his mouth agape.
188 - Book 3: Chapter 53: Allies
188 - Book 3: Chapter 53: Allies
Sev had a lot to deal with concerning whatever he''d just figured out about his memories but Sylix was sitting on the ground, holding his head, and Sev felt a little responsible for that.
"Are you alright?" he asked. He cared, he really did, but he didn''t know how to deal with this. The way his memories were scrambled didn''t help. He would have helped past-Sylix in a different way, gathering him into his arms and allowing the lizardkin to cry into his shoulder.
Something told him this Sylix wouldn''t appreciate that.
"No!" Sylix snapped, and Sev didn''t me him. "You just told me I could have saved him if I if we had just "
He broke off into a sob, burying his face into his arms. Sev sighed. He sat himself down next to the lizardkin, keeping a respectful distance; Sylix wasn''t nearly as close to him this time around, and he was pretty sure Sylix was actually older than him, too. What that meant Sev wasn''t sure.
But Sylix had been through a lot. That remained the same, across realities, across whatever it was had changed.
"I''m sorry," Sev said. He didn''t meet Sylix''s eyes. "Maybe the way I did it was a little cruel."
Sylix shook his head. He didn''t respond for a long moment, but when he did, it was quiet, his voice strained from the crying. "...I wouldn''t have believed you if you hadn''t done it like that."
"I know."
It had been a long time since they hadst spoken. A long, long time, if he understood his own memories correctly, and he wasn''t sure he did. But there was a part of him that understood who this lizardkin was, and that part of him told him that the Sylix sitting in front of him was no different from the Sylix he''d known, once upon a time.
The only difference was that this version of Sylix had never grown up. Years of service to a military had done nothing for the more emotional side of him; he''d never really found any friends, never really found any value in any aspect of himself other than the part that killed.
But he''d never stopped wanting to.
"You should sign up for a spot with the Adventurer''s Guild," Sev said. "They''d be happy to have someone like you."
Sylixughed, but it was a bitterugh. "You think Elyra would let me go without consequences?"
"Would they be able to stop you?"
Sylix was silent at that.
The truth was that they couldn''t Sev was certain. As much a master of illusions as he was, Sylix could escape just about any situation if he wanted to. Wisfield wouldn''t be able to find him even with their ability to read minds; Sylix had, after all, been working with the nobles for years. He no doubt had ways around their abilities already.
"I need time to think about it," Sylix finally said. Sev inclined his head slightly, and didn''t protest when Sylix faded from sight.
It was sudden, but it wasn''t unexpected. Sylix retreated from conversations like that frequently, even the more well-adjusted version of him that Sev knew; he ran out of energy quickly when talking to others, and simply retreated when he was out of it.
In fact, if his memories were right, Sev knew exactly where Sylix had gone. He''d be at the top of the west Elyran clocktower, looking out over the city.
He wouldn''t go looking for him, though. If Sylix wanted to find them, he would.
Derivan approached him hesitantly. "You are certain he will not go after the rebels still?" he asked.
"He won''t," Sev said. "Where do your senses say he''s headed?"
"West." Derivan said. "Wrong direction."
"Then he''s not going to capture them. He''s a lot of things, but for all that he''s an illusionist and tricks people in battle... He''s really bad at actually lying. Maybe that''s why he''s an illusionist."
"Hm." Derivan didn''t say anything for a moment; he seemed to consider his words carefully, and then he decided to broach the topic. "Sev, your memories..."
"They''reing back," Sev confirmed. He sighed. "...I don''t know if that''s a good thing. I''m still not sure what''s going on."
"We should inform the others."
"Yeah."
Gathering back within the jewelry store was, thankfully, a simple matter. Helix''s reaction was not.
"You recruited them?" Helix sounded absolutely scandalized. Jakos was standing in a corner of the shop, picking his nose, and Misa had her arms folded and an eyebrow raised at Helix.
"What would you rather we do?" she asked.
"I mean, don''t get me wrong, I''m not angry, but... do you know how illegal it is to recruit a kingdom''s tinum?" Helix asked. "It''s basically a war crime! And everyone tries to do it anyway, and no one seeds!"
Misa gave Helix a t look, and even Vex looked puzzled. "Helix, you''re part of a rebellion intent on overthrowing the Elyran government," Vex said. "I think we''ve thrown legality out of the window a long time ago."
Helix folded his arms across his chest. "Yeah, well..."
He deted a little. "How did you manage to recruit him?"
"She''s a good fighter." Jakos jerked a thumb towards Misa. "She promised me a duel."
Helix rubbed his temples. "Of course she did," he muttered. "You know, not too long ago I would''ve liked fighting too..."
"Do you want to?" Jakos immediately looked eager.
"No," Helix replied tly. "You''d kick my ass. Mybat spells don''t match up to a tinum."
"Bah," Jakos said. "Misa isn''t tinum either, and she did just fine."
"All three of my brother''s friends are abnormal for their level," Helix said dryly. He shook his head and tried to move on. "More importantly, we need to figure out what to do next. Whatever Wisfield''s done has basicallypletely halted our attempts to evacuate the city we''re attacked on sight. I don''t even know how they''re identifying us."
"Same way they''re controlling everyone," Sev said. "The Elyran zeitgeist knows, and so does everyone that''s a part of it. The only way we''re going to stop all this is by getting to the source, and the source is with Wisfield."
"Are we breaking into the Wisfield estate, then?" Jakos asked. He was leaning against the wall of the shop, tossing a dagger around in his hand; where he''d gotten the dagger no one knew. "That sounds fun! I know all the best routes."
"Are the best routes the ones that keep us hidden, or the ones that have the most fighting?" Misa asked.
"The ones that have the most fighting, obviously."
Misa sighed. "Can you please take us to the worst routes."
"You guys aren''t any fun." Jakos pouted. "I guess it wouldn''t be much of a challenge, anyway. Fine."
"We can''t portal in directly?" Misa asked, and Derivan shook his head.
"If we knew where to go within the estate, we could," he said. "But we will need to search. I can get us close, but Jakos'' guidance will still be crucial."
"I guess that makes sense," Misa grumbled.
Sev hesitated. Derivan was giving him a look, like he was waiting for him to say something and he knew he should. But he didn''t understand what was in his own head yet. Small pieces of memories wereing back, but none of it was anything he expected.
He still didn''t remember anything of Earth. Instead, he remembered more and more bits and pieces of people that he''d never met ces that he''d never been.
He didn''t understand.
"There''s something I need to talk about," Sev started, and then sighed. "But... maybe not yet. I don''t understand it myself just yet. Give me a bit of time to figure it out, and then we''ll talk about it."
"Wanna give us a quick overview?" Misa asked. "You know, just so this doesn''te back to bite us in the ass."
Sev snorted. Misa was grinning at him, a small, knowing grin, and he couldn''t help but grin back. "I''m remembering," he said. "But none of my memories make any sense. It''s all stuff that I''m pretty sure never happened stuff that couldn''t have happened. I remember ces that I don''t think exist. So... yeah."
"Huh," Misa said. "Anything important?"
"If there were, I would''ve said already," Sev said dryly, but he cast his mind through his memories to be sure. "Nothing. Just what I remembered with Sylix, and you already know how that turned out."
"Just checking." Misa grinned. "Don''t want you to remember something crucial at thest minute, like you secretly knowing who this half-formed Elyran demigod is or something."
"Oh my gods," Sev said. "I know who the Elyran demigod is."
Misa stared at him. "...Do you really?"
"No, but I''ve been waiting to make that joke for the past five hours."
The fact that the Wisfield estate was thisrge was, in Sev''s opinion, disgusting. It took them less time to wander through the streets of Elyra itself, though that was inrge part because the streets were organized. The Wisfield estate was an absolute maze of rooms and corridors and nonsensical entrances, some of which were located in the ceiling.
There was a part of Sev that felt that this was absolutely overboard, and another part of him that wanted to get a castle that was something like this.
The way you were supposed to navigate because Sev had pointed out early on that anyone trying to make their way through this ce would bepletely lost was by using the mindstones that Wisfield left scattered all over the ce. Approved guests could touch the mindstones and receive a set of directions towards their destination.
It seemed far too convoluted for the purposes of having a guest over, but evidently it worked for security, because they didn''t encounter a single security guard. Part of that was Jakos leading them along the "worst routes", but the other part of that was just that they didn''t employ that many guards.
Whatever the case, they were getting close. Sev knew that because he could feel the strength of control he had over the divine domain decreasing every so often, he had to pull the radius of his own control in closer around himself. The influence of this god was stronger here, and while that was dangerous, it also gave them a direction to go in.
Even if they did have to pack in closer and closer.
It was obvious, though, when they finally found the spot. The familiar doors of the Vault loomed over them, high over their heads, and Misa stared at it, her face pale.
"I thought they couldn''t open this," she said.
"I thought they couldn''t, either." Vex stared up at the doors. "...You should open them. It doesn''t make sense. The Vault was just one thing, right? There aren''t multiple versions of it. It''s stable across all Shifts, all realities. It shouldn''t even be here."
"It is," Derivan confirmed.
"So how did they get it here? How did they get in?"
The Novel will be updated first on this website. Come back and
continue reading tomorrow, everyone!