Chapter 366: Sleepy Sage Advice (and a scheduling update) |
Grotto bullied the Littans while Shog stalked the Labyrinth under Savant’s guidance. I did a round of check-ins with Two of Crowns, finding everyone on Ishi’s team alive, if not entirely well. I followed up with my own party afterward. Although I knew their general status from my interface and aura interactions, I didn’t have the full scope of their situation.
Varrin and Xim had stuck together and were a veritable force of nature tearing through the forest. Xim burned down hordes with ease while Varrin concentrated on the elites. Our cleric healed and cleansed, and the big guy gave them both a nigh-endless well of stamina. Their solution to every problem was generally to murder or terrorize it into submission, but that wasn’t much of a downside in the current environment. Luckily they hadn’t been faced with any questions that couldn’t be answered with a good smashing.
Nuralie was the exact opposite, moving alone and unnoticed. If she couldn’t disable, deconstruct, or melt her way through an obstacle, then she could phase past it instead. She’d killed one United to assist a trio of Littans but had otherwise stayed out of combat entirely. Those Littans hadn’t even seen their savior since Nuralie’s stealth had reached a level where she could literally hide from people’s thoughts. The Davahn they were engaged with had gone from tearing them to pieces to having all of his muscles rot and fall off his bones in a handful of seconds. She hadn’t bothered to stop and explain, and I could only assume many prayers were given to Yara for her timely intervention.
Meanwhile, Shog had become a nightmarish emulation of the most gruesome traits possessed by all three of those Folly members. He approached groups of enemies unseen and took them apart with just as much creativity as any slasher movie villain. He used those first kills to torment survivors from the shadows until they were incapable of rational thought, then butchered them one by one with cold, brutal efficiency.
Regardless of what the Littans he’d arrived to rescue might think, Shog was no sadist. He was mostly an uncaring predator, true, but he didn’t seem to glean any enjoyment out of how gruesome his work was. He played up the grotesquery when it would shock his foes into making a mistake, but the moment such theatre was no longer necessary he moved on from it without a second thought. While Shog’s hunting methods definitely made a mess, the man never played with his food.
Once the c’thon had joined up with the Littans and all the surviving imperials had been given their evacuation route, the rest of us had a decision to make.
It wasn’t a difficult decision, and it’s one that was made unanimously after I’d put it to a vote.
“Arlo: Fortune’s Folly is staying behind. We’re going to advance to the center of this Labyrinth and put an end to the United’s occupation. Plus, it wouldn’t be very nice of me to portal into New Krimsim along with the rest of you while two avatars are on my tail. I’d hate to break the place right after it’s been built.”
“Tavio: What about the Labyrinth’s destruction? There is no time left to battle with Brae’ach’s forces.”
“Tavio: So you are assuming it is a place that will not be exploding.”
“Arlo: Pretty much. That also seems to be where the United are gathering. We’ve got some limited ability to look at what’s there, and I’m seeing a whole lotta Charl along with some other non-Delvers. Also, I think I figured out where all the animals went.”
“Tavio: The center?”
“Arlo: I think they were in the center of the forest, but I’m pretty sure they’ve been mass migrating into the Chasm we’re supposed to reach.”
“Tavio: If Charl controls a meaningful fraction of the forest’s creatures, it would be millions of mana monsters. Not only is that an army, it could very well be the most powerful army on the planet.”
“Arlo: Yeah, and we’re going to want to know where he’s taking it.”
“Tavio: Do you need us to stay? We can–”
“Arlo: Thanks, but I think you’ll do more good back in the empire. Your people need a safe place to recover, and after leading them there you can report back to General Tyvus. If things go the way I want them to, then I’ll be able to sneak your people into the Chasm via Closetland. Until then, let your people recover and see if you can’t drum up some reinforcements. We’re probably going to need them.”
“Tavio: I see. It goes against my instincts to retreat from this, but perhaps my station can bring more force to bear than I can alone. Very well, Arlo. May Sumrann sow the seeds of your victory and smile upon its harvest.”
“Arlo: Did you just give me a stack of Blessed over a psychic comm network?”
“Tavio: The gods are with you, Arlo, even if I am not.”
With that solid gold exit line, the Littan exited the mental chat to finish extracting his people. The surviving soldiers had all made it into the Colossal Weapons Dungeon without any further tragedy, although there was nearly a friendly fire incident when two Littans noticed Shog appearing with his group. Thankfully, Tavio disabled the two confused men before Shog needed to, so nobody needed replacement limbs. Nobody new, that is.
Moments later, Lieutenant Nokomi would use her Gate spell to pull everyone back outside the Labyrinth’s perimeter. While I’m sure that was a powerful, heart-touching moment as the beleaguered soldiers found their way to safety, it wasn’t one I was going to witness. Instead, I returned to Etja alongside Grotto and Savant.
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“We’ve got about three minutes to figure out how to wake Etja back up,” I said. “Otherwise, we’ll have to keep moving and figure it out later.”
[I presume your plans include the United you have adopted? This woman represents a significant operational risk, and now that she is stable I see no reason why you should feel obligated to grant her further assistance.]
Savant pointed at the exposed plate on the back of Etja’s neck. “The third rune from the right is only receiving partial mana flow and that’s a rune that encompasses the concept of ‘the mind.’ It has a whole lot of sub-meanings nested inside of it and, oh wow, it just keeps going and going.” Savant leaned forward in the hover chair I’d made from my shield, eyes fixed on the rune in question. “This makes me feel the way I feel when Brae’ach talks using what he calls ‘the Word’, which is part of how he shaped some of us into United but this isn’t anything Brae’ach created, although it feels very hungry.”
“I was wondering whether you could make sense of these,” I said.
“I can sense the truth of them which is probably better although not in a way that makes me very many friends, like if we were trying to share our interests it would be tough because the way I see the runes is really different from how you see them, there are shapes and things but I don’t have Subjective Sense so it’s not as though I can really know how you conceive of them and I’m told that my own experience is kind of alien, which makes it difficult to relate to people or to have people relate to me.”
That would have sounded like an insecurity spiral coming from anyone else, but for Savant I was learning it was just the kind of background thoughts that everybody has. At least, that I thought everybody has. I certainly wasn’t insecure, so if I occasionally went down that rabbit hole then everyone else must as well, right?
I cleared my throat, symbolically clearing my head of the thought. “Orexis made it.” I swallowed the awkwardness of talking over her continued parade of heartfelt confessions about her occasional feelings of loneliness. “If I’m hearing you right, it sounds like these mana weaves have some Deific properties.”
[If Deific magicks are involved then I do not know where to begin rectifying something like this.]
“Do you know how to fix it, Savant?”
“That depends on what you mean by ‘fix it’ since I know there’s a smaller rune in there for ‘control’ and that it’s manipulating the mana flow to different parts of the mind rune and the whole reason it’s in there is so it can do stuff like this but I don’t have any way to take it out.”
“You mean, it’s in there to do things like knocking Etja unconscious against her will?”
“Right, one of the interesting things about True Sense is that it lets you detect falsehoods and most forms of control involve some sort of deception. Here, the blocker is lying to your friend about how unconscious she is, although that’s an oversimplification it’s lying about a lot of things in really nuanced ways but I think that’s a notable distinction from something that causes a physiological reaction and because of how magic super people work it’s probably more reliable to not use things that have an effect on the body and to prefer things that just convince the person to do what you want them to do and that is really fascinating to think about.”
I tried to wrap my head around all of that. “Um, so we just need to take it out?”
[If it truly is Deific then you would need similar means to extract it.]
“Could I, say, teleport it out?”
“I wouldn’t do that, it’s interconnected to the larger rune and while I can’t know the truth of a hypothetical future, when I imagine removing it I also imagine that something very unhealthy will happen to your friend, and I’ve learned to trust those intuitions since they’re built on very strong foundations so ideally you would come up with a different option.”
I looked down at Etja, peering into her soul to see if it gave me any guidance. Time was ticking and I was about to force us to get back to being mobile, but hesitated as an idea came to me.
It seemed like such a silly solution that I figured it had no chance of working. It took almost nothing to try, though, so I gave it a shot.
Savant had said that the rune was lying to Etja. A few years beforehand Xim had gone on at length about how my Revelation of the Eye’s Reveal should be able to reveal lies, but it had never quite worked that way for me. Also, we’d been discussing it in the context of mimics and mimics didn’t lie so much as become the actual thing they wanted to be. They were just also a mimic.
Regardless, the revelation didn’t outright banish falsehoods or anything, but I could use it to reveal the truth as I knew it. If I could see an invisible person, then my allies could as well, regardless of whether they had any inherent ability to see invisible people. I kept the revelation in a state where I was sharing a small amount of my perception to everyone in my party on a constant basis. It was a level that was both helpful while also being non-intrusive. There were situations, though, where a more heavy handed dose was needed.
I doubted I could undo whatever Orexis had built into Etja, but if I showed Etja that her condition was a lie being told to her by Orexis, then maybe it wouldn’t matter. I pushed on the connection I shared with Etja through Reveal, gradually increasing the intensity until she was getting a full dose of the Arlo operating system. I met some resistance, but it was closer to a reflexive defense than one that was genuine. Etja was extremely familiar with my soul, intimately so given how often we wove them together to do combined spell casting. She knew me and knew I wasn’t there to harm her. The defenses dropped, allowing me to Reveal to her what I knew about her condition.
“Have you ever had a dream, Etja, that you were so sure was real?”
I felt the connection impart what I wanted. I also knew immediately that I couldn’t use this method to undo what Orexis had done any more than I could persuade someone to ignore the effects of anesthesia. Plus, while revelations were generally connected to the divine and could be quite potent, their effects weren’t Deific with a capital D. They couldn’t override the will of a divine being by manipulating the fabric of reality out from under them.
My doubts were well-founded, and I couldn’t affect what Orexis had done here. However, the second part of my earlier statement was also proven true.
It didn’t matter.
A torrent of mana raged out into Etja’s body, its source unseen. So far as I could tell, it erupted from out of nowhere at all. For a moment I was confused, considering that it might have been an attack, but her soul danced in time with the mana as it swept through her. I felt her mystic fingerprints all over the power, her control of it was whimsical in the way that was only possible for a consummate professional.
At the same time, I felt an eerie similarity to Cerulean and the web of mana threads the elder dragon had spread throughout my kingdom. I knew Etja had spent time in the dragon’s Dungeon, but hadn’t realized quite how much she'd gained from the experience.
It sure as fuck hadn’t just been skill levels.