Kiresula pushed the [Holy Guard], trying to reclaim whatever that approaching broken magic was. It was not fast enough. The blob of broken magic exploded against the shield, pushing both back, onto their backsides.
Kedsel cussed and screamed: “What was that?!”
Struggling to her feet, rubbing her backside, Kiresula responded: “A spell of some kind. I would have thought [Throwback], but in syn… in broken magic.”
The [Holy Guard] grunted as she was standing up, guarding herself and thus also Kiresula. “Can you do the light thing again, yannow, behind us?”
There was a grunt in the affirmative, then a sharp flood of light.
Kedsel shouted: “I’m running ahead, clear my path!”
Kiresula responded sharply: “Trying!”
She ran forward while Kiresula struggled to keep up and Serenity the synthic magic out of the way. As she ran to the wooden construction, her shield in front of her, the goblins threw all kinds of crap at her, which she blocked with her shield. In that moment, [Sunlight] blinded the goblins. Kedsel used the confusion to ram the wooden construction. It creaked and shuddered, but remained intact. She tried to stab the goblins with a dagger.
Kiresula too grabbed her dagger, infused it with magic and when the magic hit her, slashed at the goblins that tried to blindly throw things at the group or tried to stab with their spears. She was rather clumsy at this, given that suddenly her stats had been elevated to vaguely that of a level one person and she was not used to it. So often her actions were more erratic than planned. One of these more erratic dodges ended with her dagger embedded in the wooden construction. As she dragged it out of it, a trickle of water started flowing through the hole and onto the aqueduct floor. She stabbed into that construction in order to cause enough water to flow to hopefully skip a fight she was seriously outclassed in, especially as some goblins learned to aim better. She ran to and fro and stabbed, keeping Serenity up to regain each little bit of Seren that she could get to keep [Sunlight] going.
Kedsel saw what she was doing, and screamed: “Get yourself back, I wanna try something!”
Kiresula moved into a decent distance, almost directly under her [Sunlight] spell, covering her eyes against the blinding light from above with one hand.
Kedsel also moved back about as much, then put her shield forward and rammed the construction. There was a terrible bang, then a creaking, then cracking of wood, then the construction started the lean towards the two.
As the construction started to lean forward, Kiresula hastily ran to the edge of the aqueduct, fell onto her knees doing so, stumbled up and barely was able to hold on to the low railing, that she so far always deemed decorative.
Kedsel screamed at her as she drifted past, but the rush of the water made it unintelligible. After the [Holy Guard], the goblin-infested structure drifted past. She was hit by the greenskins with some kind of club or wooden beam and screamed in agony. Had her legs not been nestled into the decorative railing from both sides, she feared that she would have been dragged downstream with them. She remained on the railing for a while, waiting for the pain to subside and her senses to return. When she opened her eyes again, she saw the flowing aqueduct. And in its middle, an arrow of synthic magic leading forwards.
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She crawled forward on the railing, always threading her hands and legs through its decorative holes and keeping her body mostly on the water side, not the side that was above the void. Slowly, the simple movement forward was accompanied by additional perception. She saw the synthic magic being shaped into arrows forward. While she lacked a perception of regular magic, the way the clouds dissipated into a form like an arrow, but with a very rough border, looking as if the edges had been blasted away by tiny magical implosions, it seemed as if the dungeon was blasting regular magic into a shape to lead her.
Kiresula moved faster. The dungeon wanted her to go to a specific location and she wasn’t about to say no to it. She continued moving, unaware of the place of the others. As she slowly felt better, she re-cast the sunlight spell closer to her current location. She assumed that the others would see a hole in the regular magic in the shape of an arrow just as she saw the synthic arrow, so the message wasn’t really all that unsubtle. And the movement of the light should have told them. She eventually reached the other side. The aqueduct ended in a black… something. It felt kinda like stone or metal, but was so dark, that the sunlight spell did nothing to it. It also has the same warmth to it that reminded of wood. The material seemed to eat light. She touched it to get a feeling for it. The water seemed to originate from a hole that was as wide as the aqueduct and as high as two of her fingers on top of each other. This could not have been what she came here for. She tried not to be swept away by the water as she rose to her feet and tried to feel the black wall somewhat higher. She closed her eyes, moved her head to and fro to try to hear something but the raging waves.
As her right hand reached about waist height, she found a hole. It was wide and so high that she could not even find the top. The material was still insanely smooth, but about a hand span in, the same knee-height railing as the aqueduct existed, even though both sides seemed to be solid ground. She once again used it to move forward, now slowly and carefully. She felt the guardrail and the passageway move upwards, then steeply downwards. At the same time, it curved towards the right more and more like a snail’s house. It was hard to feel how much time passed. Kiresula knew that she was supposed to feel afraid, scared or something, but she just felt in pain and miserable. She felt exhausted, as if the goblins’ weapons had sapped her life force as they hit her. She felt synthic magic in a weird, shapeless blob looking more like a bush in winter than like whatever it was supposed to feel like, but could not see what caused this. Then, after the curse, she saw a light, partly looking like glowing stone, the size of her head, a dungeon core, but with lines of something glitchy looking going through it. It looked like it would shatter into a million pieces if someone would even breathe at it.
“K-percent sign-star-x-backslash-pipe-open bracket?” The core spoke.
It took Kiresula a moment to realise that this was her glitched name. “You can say Kiresula, that’s easier. You led me here because of the glitchiness that affects you? Because of the broken magic?”
The dungeon core sighed: “I did. It is taking over and I am losing control. You wield it. You control it. The pain is getting worse. I can’t…” the dungeon core fell quiet and dimmed slightly.
“I am not sure what I can do, but it might be very painful as well. Please tell me if I should stop.” She put her hand on the place where she perceived a bit of synthic magic and reclaimed it aggressively. She was able to metaphorically slurp up the magic around the structure just fine, but the core itself repelled all attempts to change the magical composition. Kiresula cussed. “May I touch you? Maybe that might work to use a magic reclamation technique.”
The core paused for a moment then asked: “Is ‘reclamation’ the same as ‘recovery’?”
Kiresula sucked in air, looked upwards at nothing in particular and only a few moments later talked: “Kinda… The difference is the focus. Recovery focuses on getting your own magic points to max as fast as possible. Magic reclamation tries to get ambient magic under a specific threshold as fast as possible.”
There was a pause, then the voice was almost inaudible: “Reclamation… me… try…”
Kiresula understood this as a yes and touched the dungeon core and tried her Serenity technique. That was when everything became dark.