Chapter 367: Inner Sanctum |
Etja had explained the idea of ‘pure’ mana to me briefly in the past and had even solved a couple of problems with it, but I was still taken aback. I’d imagined something like a crystal clean lake; a power that was dormant and unpolluted. What I realized in that moment was that the clear lake image wasn’t conceptualizing something pure so much as something that had been distilled.
Pure mana was the opposite. It wasn’t refined, but closer to a primordial expression, like it had yet to be tamed and corralled into a pen. It felt wild, the type of thing that most would have to control with an iron fist, but Etja simply moved with the mana, guiding it to where she needed it to be. It felt like she was engaging with another sentient being as much as she was wielding a primal force of the universe.
The pure mana swept through her, powering the most juiced-up spell combo I’d ever felt from her. The weaves in the armor we’d lent her were annihilated as all nearby mana was disrupted. The weaves on all my own gear were strained, and I had to drag Savant away from the mage once I realized Gracorvus was no longer responding to me, just to get the semi-mundane woman clear of such concentrated magic. Even Grotto swayed drunkenly in the air before zipping back from Etja at full speed.
The wall-sized slate flickered and died, followed by all the rest. All light in the room surged, then blinked out like a fuse had been tripped. Etja’s body shone brilliantly as she lay on the ground, keeping the room even brighter than it had been before. Holes on each of her four palms swallowed her armor as she Disintegrated it. The ground beneath her was next, creating an ever growing crater in which she floated.
The plate embedded in her neck, housing the runes that seemed to govern the structure and functioning of her mind, shuddered as the connections all around it were destroyed. Etja’s Disintegrate ate through her own artificial spine and dislodged the plate entirely from her body. Then, all the pure mana collapsed into a singular use of Incorporate, and I could feel an echo of Orexis as the avatar-befouled plate disappeared into the same void from which the mana had sprung.
If removing a single one of those runes had been what Savant called “very unhealthy” for Etja, I expected that removing them all would create even more problems. Fortunately, the mage had a solution.
Etja floated up from the ground, the material comprising her spine rematerializing and taking the glittering form of Prismatite. New runes formed along its length, ones that were familiar expressions of the weaves I knew, but which shared the endless three-dimensional complexity of the ones Orexis had imbued into her. Etja’s soul worked alongside what remained of the pure mana to recreate the now-missing structures, filling in gaps with a natural expression of her underlying soul. It was like watching a symphony write itself, but these runes weren’t the notation as much as they were an expression of the transient sounds comprising the song itself. Etja’s ‘mind’ wasn’t a purely physical structure any more than my own was. Not now, at least.
The craftsmanship that had brought her into existence may have once served as a hard limit on how the mage could think or what she could become, but those barriers had been left behind a long time ago. What I saw in that moment wasn’t a profound change, nor was it particularly sudden, but it was Etja’s soul remodeling her corporeal form in its own image, accommodating changes that had already been made on a spiritual level. It took out some trash Orexis had left behind while it was at it, freeing her of yet another unwanted connection to her progenitors.
Etja’s eyes were ablaze with glittering blue as she spun to face me. A flowing gossamer dress replaced the armor she’d erased, draping across her body with such casual grace that runway supermodels would have abandoned their careers in shame upon seeing her, knowing they’d never encapsulate even a fraction of this woman’s glamour.
“Heya!” She gave me a sleepy wave with two hands. Then she rubbed at her eyes before looking around again, her brow creasing in confusion. “Why is it so dark in here?”
Savant was the first to respond since she’d already been speaking, narrating her analysis of the entire event in real time. “You broke down all the complex mana structures within a few feet of you before beginning to make changes to your body and the raw power with which you did that had the knock-on effect of destroying all non-shielded mana constructs in a much larger area.”
“Oh?” said Etja, looking curiously at the Geulon woman. “I broke all the lights?”
“You did.” Savant nodded and kept talking. Etja’s expression of curiosity grew as the United dove into her next topic without pause or any kind of transition. “You’re the most beautiful person I have ever seen and I’m wondering how I didn’t realize it sooner, I should introduce myself, my name’s Savant and I’m also wondering whether you’re romantically involved with anyone and I’m hoping you’ll say no since that will allow me to start formulating the best way to ask whether we can spend some time together to see if we like spending time together and if that proves to be the case I would go on to recommend we spend more time together moving forward.
“Now I’m feeling very anxious about saying all that out loud but just so you know I don’t really have any control over that so if anything I said or say in the future makes you uncomfortable please feel free to ignore it I won’t be offended.”
“Nice to meet you, Savant. I’m Etja! Maybe we can talk about all that other stuff when we’re somewhere nicer and you aren’t hurt really bad. That chair Arlo made for you looks neat, but it doesn’t look very comfy. Mind if I help?”
“That would be welcome, yes, thank you,” said Savant. Etja took hold of her with Siphon, making the woman weightless before gently lifting her up from my shambled together hover chair. I reclaimed the plates of Gracorvus, assembling them back into a shield to hover alongside me.
Etja floated over to inspect the woman’s stump, then began changing the dressing with clean cloth from her inventory. “My Charisma’s also really high and while I’m pretty sure I didn’t accidentally Mesmerize you, we should be extra super certain of that before we start talking about tricky emotional subjects.” She smiled at Savant, and the Geulon smiled back, utterly enamored.
“Etja,” I said, interrupting the pair’s delicate back and forth with about as much tact as a sledgehammer. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that we’ve got you back since there’s no time for it. We’re in the midst of a small crisis. I’ll have to catch you up on things while we fly towards our next objective. Also, here’s all your armor back.” I went into my inventory and pulled out the gear Grotto had stripped from her.
Etja happily accepted the Prismatite-infused Zng carbonweave set, and her gossamer dress adjusted to become a body suit before she equipped it. She was once again dressed in blue, wearing an appropriately tilted and oversized wizard’s hat, meaning that all was right with the world. The process only took a few seconds.
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She then nodded and gestured for me to lead onwards, keeping one ear open to everything Savant was saying the entire time. We made our way to the closest wormhole platform while I filled Etja in on what she’d missed and while she removed most of the blood stains from Savant’s skin and clothes with a highly controlled use of Disintegrate. She also removed the tourniquet I’d made, keeping the woman’s arteries sealed through more magical means, and worked a variety of tailoring tools in the air around her to produce a fitted covering for the woman’s injury. By the time we made it to our first stop, Savant looked more like someone in recovery, rather than somebody who’d been rushed straight from the scene of a disaster to triage.
“...and we thought that the rune would be inviolable since it contained Deific magicks,” I explained to Etja as I addressed the System prompt on the wormhole platform, “but you bypassed that problem by ignoring the rune and disintegrating everything around the rune instead. Your spine wasn’t Deific, after all, and once the plate was loose you swallowed it up into whatever non-space you’ve got rattling around inside of you where all that pure mana’s been living.”
The wormhole finished forming and I ushered us through. “It’s like if you found an invincible door,” I continued, “so instead of trying to break it down you just demolished the walls around it. After that, you could carry the door away. Then you replaced what was missing through a combination of abilities, like replicating materials you’ve incorporated and using astoundingly complex mana shaping to replace the runes.”
“Silk!” said Etja.
“Silk?”
“I used silk thread to form the runes. It’s needlework. I learned it from Nuralie while we worked on Tailoring together. Once the silk thread was in place, I dissolved it piece by piece and replaced it with mana thread.”
“That’s less mind-boggling but still incredible.”
“It should be more boggling,” said Savant, “since she grew the thread from her own hair before controlling it all with her gravity magic and I know people say silky smooth as a turn of phrase but in Etja’s case it’s a literal thing even though her hair is a synthetic mix of materials but silk is among them along with a very resilient type of glass.”
Grotto was riding on my shoulder and Savant was riding Etja’s gravity waves as we soared through the innermost areas of the forest. Since this was a part of the Labyrinth everyone was presumably meant to access at some point, it wasn’t a Dungeon and had no particular skill requirement. Instead, it had atmosphere.
The sky overhead remained a menacing flow of impossibly fast storm clouds, but their paths arced around a point that drew ever closer; the eye of a continent-spanning storm that we were quickly approaching. The sky had always felt like an omen, and whatever it heralded was close, but the mood was more profoundly affected by a change in the plant life.
The vegetation wasn’t as dense as I’d seen it in some other parts of the forest, but the plants here were robust and heavy, covered in thorns and spines. It was a jungle of gargantuan succulents, their bruise-colored flesh and leaves converging onto thick petal arrangements adorned in the red, white, and purple tones of poisonous fruit.
The smell was sweet, but made my gut recoil nonetheless. It had the same appeal as a leaky jug of antifreeze, or maybe an abductor’s chloroform-soaked rag. It all grew up between deep crevices and across the faces of cliffs and jagged crags. Despite having more room to maneuver as we flew, the plants seemed to lean in towards us, creating a claustrophobic tunnel covered in barbs and glistening spikes.
Accompanying it was the feeling that this place was sacrosanct, that we were unwelcome in these hallowed grounds. As we flew towards the center, the ground became littered with boulders, cracked, broken, and scattered, worn with time and overgrown by the toxic plantlife. It was like a sacred mountain had been scattered and cursed.
Etja kept Savant protected within a bubble formed from her Nullify and Repulsion spells, generating a low-mana environment for her to exist within. The heart of the forest was so rich with mana that an ordinary person would have had an easier time surviving somewhere the air had been replaced with mustard gas.
As I glanced over to check on the woman, I was confronted with the question of what we should do with her. We were on our way to kill or drive off her allies, which I doubted she would appreciate despite how little allegiance she had shown them. She was no hostage, but I didn’t know how to respond if the United demanded her return. I was realizing that I didn’t want to hand her over, not when I was getting the sense that she’d been taken advantage of.
That line of thought was further complicated by what she wanted. If she didn’t want to rejoin the United, then protecting someone so fragile in this kind of environment would already be a burden. Protecting her while fighting was a problem.
According to Grotto, the average mundane person had a health value below 10, meaning I could kill Savant by turning around too fast and bumping her in the wrong place with my elbow. She couldn’t even take a glancing blow from the class of enemies we fought.
Then, what if she did want to rejoin the United? I wasn’t sure that I could respect that. It would be one thing if she were some random person, but this woman’s power was an incredible asset. It was something I would do well to deprive the enemy of, although I didn’t know if I could be that cold about it.
I had enough heartless bastards on the payroll already.
[Savant, what will you do when we must kill those you came here with?]
Even Etja sent the Core a dirty look after that sudden conversational bomb drop. Of course, I’d just been wondering the same thing myself.
“You like to make a lot of absolute statements because that forces you to focus on a single task, but it also locks you into an outcome that has not been predetermined so that when the outcome actually happens you look smart for having predicted it but that’s only because you forced yourself to make it happen so you could avoid cognitive dissonance.”
[You are avoiding–]
“So when you kill them, I am likely to repeat this statement or a paraphrased version of it to illustrate that point more clearly because there will definitely have been alternatives you could have chosen along the way but you will have been too tunnel-visioned to notice them and so me reminding you of this thing that I am saying right now and pointing out the alternatives you missed will illustrate that I was correct. Am correct. Will have been correct?”
[That is not-]
“And I will do this because you value your smartness and when you discover that I helped you improve your thinking you will want to keep me around and that stops you from killing me so that’s probably what I’ll do when you kill the others. Oh, and I’ll probably be sad too, depending on who it is. It’s not like I’m close to very many people, though.”
I was beginning to think Savant had a deep-seated need for companionship that was going unfulfilled.
There was no need to respond to that. Etja kept the woman company as she continued to analyze her confusing circumstances. While we weren’t the villains that she’d been expecting, everything she’d heard about us was technically true. I had been resolving every encounter with a member of Brae’ach’s group via lethal means, and it wasn’t like they were coming after me. Charl had been in Closetland through happenstance, teleported in with the rest of Krimsim. Otherwise, they were trying to keep us from interfering with their plans in the forest and the Labyrinth. From a certain perspective, we were the invaders.
Assuming there were more United like Savant, I wasn’t comfortable adopting an ‘ask questions later’ kind of attitude towards them, but I also wasn’t going to risk the party by being naive. These people weren’t here for peaceful reasons, however much they may have been manipulated into playing their part. If mercy were an option, I’d take it.
Hopefully, they’d give me that option.