Chapter 1075: Taming the Wall - 10th Chamber - Flow Change |
The interior space held the silence of something that had been running constantly and was starting to understand it was about to stop.
Selthia stood still for a moment and then began accumulating power.
The interior space responded, the purple at the margins moving toward the center with the momentum of energy that had the full field behind it.
Then the field stopped accumulating to go in her direction and continued toward the center with her input; toward her feet, in fact, in the way that happened when a system designed to amplify started pushing from the wrong end.
The purple that should have kept expanding around had stopped.
A few seconds passed...
Then it even started retreating, not fast, but in the wrong direction for Selthia, and the more power she accumulated for the attack she was building the faster it retreated, as if the system that should have been amplifying her with excess to spare was now running in reverse at her own expense.
Selthia let the accumulated power drop when she saw that.
She stood still for a moment. Then she smiled, and this one was different from the earlier ones, smaller, it was the smile of someone who had just realized she had lost in a way that, in retrospect, had a certain elegance.
Mayo didn’t use those exact words but used something functionally equivalent, because Mayo had the specific ability to find the funny angle in any situation including this one, which was that her beast was carrying Liora while Liora sent every remaining piece of spirit fire she had after the fusion toward one section of the tenth chamber’s ceiling, and the heat this produced was the kind of heat Mayo would have preferred to experience with considerably more distance between herself and the source.
"Could your love display be any more intense?" Mayo said.
"Shut up." Liora didn’t take her eyes off the point Ren had asked her to attack before entering the system, the section where the runes were densest and the overlaid ones could be erased if the correct type of energy arrived with enough sustained concentration.
Spirit fire was exactly that type of energy because it acted on the ethereal mana component before the physical material, and the runes were mana even when written in stone.
"It just looks more like marital worry and anger than technique," Mayo said. "Although... those might be the same thing right now."
"Mayo. Shut. Up!"
The spirit fire burned several degrees hotter.
Hikari landed beside them with the Firefly shining at half intensity, her way of communicating that everything was in order without saying so.
"The first nine chambers’ runes are nearly all gone," she said. "Shizu’s group is on the false ones breaking the walls. Umi’s group has Ren covered below and his readings are normal." A pause. "The crystal started gaining the first few millimeters of purification."
Liora didn’t respond, but the fire leaving her body stabilized and concentrated into a more efficient point in a way that had less to do with the report and more to do with the specific relief of hearing it.
Mayo watched the heat ripple around her in a more focused direction away from her general location and decided the next witticism could wait.
Inside, Selthia sat down on the floor of the space.
The smile was still there, smaller than before, genuine in a way the earlier ones hadn’t been.
"I won’t be helping you," she said. "In case you were wondering... Now that I understand that using power to fight you reverses the process, I won’t do it myself." She half-shrugged. "It’s pointless to burn energy that way."
"I thought you wanted to enjoy deflecting my attacks," Ren said.
"Don’t be an irritating winner... Don’t make me angrier." A pause with something almost theatrical in it. "Since I’m giving you this victory gracefully, the minimum you can do is to be a gentleman about it."
Ren smiled.
"You’re right... I won’t do it anymore." He paused. "I’ll push the process myself, then."
He breathed slowly. Then he took a spatial jump with the energy he had been conserving, energy that no longer needed conserving because there would be more than enough of it now, landing in the most purple area of the space, where the corruption was densest and the center of the system had the most concentration available to work with.
Under his feet the purple began moving with the same logic as it had at the margins, but now those margins were retreating.
Lines of purple climbed up from the floor to his ankles, then higher.
"I expected you to use that method," Selthia said, with genuine satisfaction in her voice. "You’ve become very good at working with the energy you used to reject so strongly."
Ren didn’t respond.
He began releasing energy outward from the point where he stood, converting the corruption into something different before expelling it, the process he had learned not in theory but in the practice of the last several years and that he could now direct by reading how the flow was organizing itself.
The radiation that came out had the luminous quality produced by something that had been corrupted and no longer was, a light that was different from the light of regular mana because it had passed through something and come back changed.
Outside, in the physical world of the tenth chamber, the crystal of the Mantis in the nucleus Ren had delivered began brightening with white light, gradually, the purification moving from the central point outward.
"It’s a waste," Selthia said.
Not with anger. With the genuine resignation of someone watching energy used in a way they found deeply suboptimal. "That amount of energy could accomplish many things."
Ren looked at her. She was sitting at the edge of the space, not attacking, not accumulating, with the posture of someone who had arrived at the position where talking without obstructing was the only option that didn’t accelerate her own defeat.
Since she was cooperating in the most minimal possible sense because it kept him near long enough to have someone to talk to. Still desperate for interaction even now...
"What kind of things?" Ren finally said, indulging her.
Selthia looked at him with the expression of someone receiving a question they hadn’t expected.
"Productive things, I mean," Ren added.
She took a moment. Then she laughed, and it was the laugh she had when something genuinely amused her.
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