The cat tried to jump Erick on the water-choked path between buildings.
Erick had not seen the critter when he stepped out of the previous building, but the cat had been waiting for him, and Erick had been ready to counter.
The cat leapt out of the broken trunk of some burned-out tree, aiming right for his chest. Erick stepped backward and smashed down with his rod, cracking the cat in the skull and sending it slightly off its original trajectory, and himself up and away. Erick landed on his feet, easily recovering from the surprise of the weight difference between the two of them. The cat landed on its feet, its tail raised in furry fury as it meyowled at Erick, its talons more velociraptor-sized than housecat-sized at that particular moment, its mouth open up all the way to the base of its neck.
It darted off, into the shadows at the base of the burned-out tree—
You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 2/13!
MP up! +50 mana production per day!
Erick held up his slightly-bent and scratched-to-hell rod, and saw a few things happen almost simultaneously. First, mana popped into existence inside of himself, and then flowed into the rod. And then the rod straightened, regaining much of its luster.
“Status, rod,” Erick said.
Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 50/300
“Ah. Shit.” Erick frowned. “It was completely depleted by hitting that cat, wasn’t it.”
… At least he knew it couldn’t be destroyed in that way. Good to know!
“Full status.”
- -
Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)
MP per day: 365
Meta-Irons: 400, 0 in storage
Meta-Diamonds: 1/10, 0 in storage
Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 99/100
Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 51/300
Unused Meta-Diamonds: [Murky]
- -
Erick had vaguely desired a [Meditation] metamond and the accompanying metiron, but now he needed one. This low regen was tolerable for a while, but not long term. And yet… That would be complicated, wouldn’t it? As Erick walked toward the next building, he thought of what a [Meditation] metamond would even look like.
He couldn’t just manually meditate, for Erick tried that, and it failed, so he needed a [Meditation], for sure.
“But [Meditation] isn’t an Elemental construct…” Erick muttered to himself as he pushed aside the broken door to what appeared to be a building full of lecture halls, and stepped inside the front hallway. “[Meditation] isn’t even a Force construct. It’s a way of looking at the world and dilating one’s soul through the mind… Somewhat.”
Erick considered the problem of [Meditation] and made his way into the next building.
Three of the four amphitheater-like lecture halls were filled with lights, while the fourth one was part of the destroyed part of the building, so there was nothing there. Of the illuminated rooms, each of them held a 3-meter cube of blue light down in the lecture pit. Erick picked a room and went down the amphitheater walkway, toward the cube—
Writing appeared on the cube before Erick reached it.
Break the cube to fight a monster of dubious origins.
Erick went up and tapped the cube with his rod.
The cube shattered like a mana construct and a flying spiderwasp the size of a person rolled into the air, spread its wings wide, and came right for Erick with its trio of stingers. Erick swatted the damned thing out of the air and then kept smashing down on it when it wouldn’t die immediately. Soon, though, it died. His rod had bent again by the end of it, though.
MP up! +25 mana production per day!
The rod straightened again.
And Erick allowed himself a shiver. “Fucking spiders and wasps now? Gods above.” Erick shivered again. “ ‘Dubious origins’ my ass. What the fuck…”
Erick went to the next room.
Break the cube to fight a monster of abyssal origins.
Erick broke the cube.
A tentacled thing oozed across the floor, slapping the ground with its ooze-covered limbs, its main body a collection of open maws that snapped and bit at the air. Octopuses were a lot better than spider wasps.
“Smashy smashy,” Erick said, and then proceeded to do just that.
The messed-up octopus was a lot more resilient than most other animals Erick had encountered here in the Glittering Depths, save for that cat, of course. Erick guessed that the octopus was part ooze.
It still died.
MP up! +25 mana production per day!
“Not too bad. The rod even survived this fight mostly intact. Wonder what the next room contains.”
Break the cube to fight a monster of forceful origins.
Erick tapped the container with the rod and the container broke into motes of light.
A cloud spilled out of the broken blue mana and then proceeded to shoot Erick with [Force Bolt]s.
Fighting an immaterial cloud was difficult.
Erick’s clothes ended up with a lot more holes in them than he would have liked, and he was bleeding a bit from where [Force Beam]s caught him at a bad angle, but the fight ended with Erick as the victor. Erick eventually managed this improbable feat by striking parts of the cloud’s body away from the main structure.
MP up! +25 mana production per day!
Special fight option unlocked.
A chime echoed from the hallway outside of the lecture hall. Erick could already mana sense what had changed, but he didn’t actually see what had changed until he went to the bombed-out lecture hall. There, in the bottom of that darkened space, half filled with water and half with rubble, with lights flickering above, sat a blue sphere about two meters across.
Erick approached.
Break the sphere to fight a monster of special origins.
Erick’s rod was down to 36 mana out of 300, so he was rather sure that if a monster similar to the black cat should appear that he would not be able to kill it…
He took his chances and tapped the sphere with the rod. Blue light fluttered away, briefly revealing a normal man of brown skin, amber eyes, and a familiar face. A face that Ashes had seen every single day at the guardhouse, and had laughed alongside since they were kids.
“Markie?!” Ashes exclaimed.
And then Markie’s clothes peeled away, his hands turned into claws, his eyes ignited with a golden flame that spread across his body like lava appearing between cracks in stone, and he attacked.
- - - -
George whispered to himself, “Holy shit how the damn did that happen.”
Quince looked over at him. “… What?”
“I’m busy!” George rapidly began moving through menus, pulling up event diagrams to see where Ashes would have heard that name before. He pulled up everything he could, and yet... “… Shit?”
Quince scowled, got up off his chair, and went to see George. “What,” he demanded.
George showed him the event diagrams, and made the screen with Ashes larger. As Ashes fought with Markie, George explained what he could see, “Events conspired to create a story, which is normal with all the plotlines. Ashes Woodfield is on the guardsman plot. All the names in all plots are randomized, so even if he knew the plotlines from talking to other delvers, he would not know the names of the characters.” George jammed his finger at the spawn diagram, right at the space where the name for the current mob on the screen was. “This one is ‘Markie’. And Ashes called out that name when the mob spawned.”
Quince stared at the screen with the fight. Ashes was on the defensive, trying to understand what was happening in front of him, even asking the monster why he was here. Ashes would receive no answers, though, because the creature was a fake thing. George had already arrived at an alarming hypothesis. He waited to see if Quince felt the same way.
“… He has a core,” Quince said.
George nodded slowly. “Yes. He has to. His mana has leaked into the dungeon, the dungeon latched on, and produced a result which only he would truly know. Depending on how much mana he leaks into the dungeon…” George didn’t want to continue, so he fell silent.
Quince trilled his fingers through several screens, popping them and causing more to pop up with each tap. “… I don’t see a core anywhere.”
“He must have a Domain, too. He can still use his magic here, at least a little. This explains why he spent so long inside that mana container. He was genuinely relaxing. Like monsters do inside high mana environments.”
George had one more thing to say, about the color of Ashes’ mana. That iridescent white glow was not unique in the world at all, but it mostly occurred with Benevolence Dragons. Others also had that color of white, but... The simplest explanation was probably correct.
They had a dragon in their dungeon.
George began, “And his mana is white—”
“Stop talking,” Quince said.
George stopped.
Quince frowned a little, then he made a decision. “… Whatever magic he has hiding his core should be exposed in the next floor, and Greensoil demands to know when cored people come through and especially when... dragons…” Quince paled a fraction, but he maintained decorum, as he always did. He ordered, “We have a duty to this Second Script and to Atunir that is larger than Greensoil’s demands, so we’ll hide him. Stop watching so closely in case the inquisitors should come around for an inspection. Scrub the logs. Step away from him as much as you can. Hands-off, eyes-off. We have no proof he has a core, and Atunir willing… He’s good enough to keep that hidden.”
George whispered, “I could increase his chances for an illusion item to drop.”
“… No. That’ll be noticed. If it happens, it happens, but we won’t interfere that much. The dungeon might line that up for him anyway.” Quince said, “Get to work on the rest.”
And so George did.
- - - -
Ashes stood over the corpse of Markie, but not the Markie he had known all his life. This Markie was a monster. The Markie that Ashes knew never had bones at those horrible angles, only half of which were due to Ashes’ weapon strikes. This Markie’s wrists were triple-jointed, and—
Erick blinked out a dampness in his eyes as he sniffled.
He stared down at the body below him, wondering how this whole scenario had happened.
He stared down at the broken corpse at his feet, at the broken arms, and at the bones protruding from shoulders and elbows and other joints. Most of that damage was not from him at all. This looked like a monsterfication; like what would happen to any normal person who was unable to expel mana shards from their body. Those mana shards would always collect somewhere in a person, and then make their way to the heart, where they would consume the person’s soul and grow like a tumor, like a rad.
Markie had been monsterized—
Erick took a step back.
… And then he took a step forward again, and dove into the past, to mana sense—
- - - -
Ashes stood over the corpse of his oldest friend, in the middle of a lecture hall on campus.
After a terrible moment filled with sorrow, Ashes took a step back, and began to analyze the situation. He was a guard of Iben, and he had a duty to understand what had happened before him, and why… Why had he been targeted? Because he had been targeted. There was no doubt about that.
He was here, at the school, and a monster like this should happen to be released upon him? To go right to him?
Maybe this was his fault. Ashes had planned to wait a week after seeing Sofie before he started asking questions.
He had started early, after only 5 days, because Markie and Sofie had left without warning on day 4, over three days ago, without telling anyone at all that they were leaving. The week’s dinner had been a somber affair, too, with Sofie breaking out the big meals and the very good plates, for everyone knew that Markie and Sofie were leaving, but Ashes had to pretend that they were not. Markie and Sofie were gone the next day.
And now, Markie lay dead at Ashes’s feet, having become a monster that needed to be put down.
Ashes had an appointment with the administrator of finance today, inside the man’s lecture hall, which is why Ashes was here, at this specific time. That appointment was one of many such appointments Ashes had had over the last few days, to ask questions of various people about Wizards and crystals and permanent magics, and about Sofie and Markie’s whereabouts, and about a bunch of other topics to throw off any potential trail.
Ashes studied Markie’s body. Those bone growths. Those teeth. The body was mangled from the confrontation, but nothing about Markie was orderly. Everything that was growing from him was growing in odd directions. That meant rapid monsterization over the course of a few hours.
Had Markie stepped into a mana stream? That would have caused monsterization like this.
But there were no more major mana streams on Insten. Not since Riam capped all the major mana rivers with their Siphons. Monsters themselves were becoming vanishingly rare, too, which wasn’t exactly a bad thing, but all the sacred beasts and spirit beasts were vanishing, too, which was less than great. Those Siphons were the cause of the Emptying, too…
Had Markie assaulted a Siphon?
… And then come here on his own?
No. That was an absurd suggestion. The nearest Siphon was a quarter of a plane away. There would have had to be a trail of bodies for Markie to end up here, and even with cannibals focusing on people nearest to them, to eat them first… No. The more Ashes even considered that possibility, the more he realized how impossible it was.
Markie had become a monster here. Somewhere close.
Or he had been monsterized and released locally. And very close.
… The Resistance wouldn’t do this to people who wanted to go to them, as Sofie had seemed to want to do… Maybe. The Resistance was largely underground and political right now. Sure, they broke into places and stole shit and tried to upset a lot of people. But there wasn’t open war. Not yet. The Resistance hadn’t actually killed anyone on purpose, as far as Ashes knew. There were a few widely known cases of deaths being blamed on the Resistance, but…
Riam purposefully killed people all the time.
As for cannibals…
Cannibals sometimes went after people they cared about the most, so in that way, it was not too surprising that Markie went after Ashes. The location of the attack was… Strange. But Ashes didn’t know enough to make any judgments on that right now.
Would Riam set loose a cannibal, to find… conspirators for the resistance?
… Ashes had trouble reconciling that ephemeral thought with what he knew to be true, as a guard. He hadn’t heard of any cannibal attacks recently, or at least none in Iben. But was that true? There had been a rash of murders north of the Arcanaeum, but that was well outside of Ashes’s district.
Either way, he would need to take this up with the captain. This was a cannibal attack and those must all be reported to the guard, so that the guard can track—
“Guard Ashes Woodfield, I presume?”
Ashes turned around, and every lingering bit of normalcy suddenly vanished from his life, as though it hadn’t already vanished when Markie and Sofie left. But now… Now, Ashes knew what an Emptying truly felt like.
It was a squadron of adjudicators, all dressed in sleek black and grey and gold. The enforcers of Riam. They had fanned out from the student’s entrance, at the top of the lecture hall. A woman of pale skin, bright red lips, and brilliant gold eyes, was the leader. She stared at him like he was an insect.
With a hateful grin, the woman spoke again, “Did you know that Markie Greenbelt was a rebel?”
Ashes flinched as though struck. “What? Markie wasn’t a rebel!”
Ashes surprised even himself at the vehemence in his tone.
The woman’s grin faltered. “Hmm. That’s a ‘no’, I suppose. A pity.” She gestured to her people, then toward the body below. “Clean it up.”
Ashes regained some of his wherewithal. He stepped over the body. “You don’t need to get involved here. I have ended the cannibal and I will be taking him home and burying him in the family plot.”
The woman smiled, once again hateful. “Please do resist, darling.”
… Ashes stepped away from the body.
They bundled Markie into a bag and took him away.
Finally, the lead adjudicator smiled again, then whispered to Ashes, “I hear you’re asking about mana crystals, so a friendly warning: Don’t go experimenting with that which is best left to others, dear Ashes. It leads to death in many different ways.”
Ashes felt his body heat as a spark of rage took hold. “Thank you for the advice, ma’am.”
The woman grinned, then took her time walking away, looking like a cat who had gotten all the cream. She turned around once more, her eyes flashing gold.
Ashes heard a purr.
- - - -
The purr continued as Erick pulled back into himself.
There, standing on the night-cloaked rubble where an exterior wall should have been, stood the black cat. Its eyes gleamed gold as its tail swished back and forth. It smiled. And then it —she— vanished into the rubble under her paws, the mana void of her existence rapidly vanishing beyond Erick’s senses, into the deeper night.
Erick breathed deep.
The cat was gone for now, but Erick would get to that cat soon enough, because he had to kill that thing. Erick had no real way to connect the cat to the ‘adjudicator’ in the memory, but he was sure they were the same. Somehow, someway, they were the same…
Erick snapped back to himself, in a different, more solid way.
This dungeon was just a dungeon, right?
It wasn’t a real memory… Right?
Erick shook his head. Even if it was a memory, everything about this place was already dead and long, long gone. Nothing Erick did could change any outcomes here, for the Old Cosmology was unmade in the Sundering. All of this story had been unmade, and Erick had merely stumbled into the part of that old story which naturally fit the choices Erick had already made inside this dungeon. And Erick had pursued ‘Ashes’s’ story, too, so of course more of that story had revealed itself to him.
Erick put Ashes, Markie, Sofie, and the adjudicators out of his mind.
He looked at the words floating above ‘Markie’s’ body.
Choose one:
Attack. Defense. Utility.
Erick had a weapon and some self-healing, and he was a big proponent of utility, so he said, “Utility.”
Markie’s body broke into motes of mana and became a necklace, hovering in the air in front of Erick. It was a simple thing of meta-iron chain, with a larger central piece that looked like hands clasping hands, surrounding a golden gem. The item floated gently toward Erick, and Erick raised a hand to catch the falling jewelry.
The necklace touched his skin, and words appeared.
You have cleared the lecture halls (Special)!
MP up! +175 mana production per day!
- -
Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)
MP per day: 615
Meta-Irons: 450, 0 in storage
Meta-Diamonds: 2/10, 0 in storage
Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 99/100
Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 126/300
Necklace of [Meditation], 50/50
Unused Meta-Diamonds: [Murky]
- -
“Oh. Meditation, eh…” Erick whispered to himself as he ran a finger across the clasping hands of the necklace, and the golden gem they contained. He put it on. Nothing happened. And then Erick said, “[Meditation].”
The golden gem activated and the world seemed warmer. Like a friend was there beside him, helping to guide him on the path forward; helping the mana move through him, and into every one of his items.
“How strange,” Erick muttered to himself.
Speak of [Meditation], and it should appear.
… Erick was on the path of the mage, anyway, so this wasn’t too unexpected.
As Erick’s various items filled with mana, he thought about what had just happened, trying to understand it from any angle he could grasp. Eventually, his various items were once again topped off with mana, and a few moments later, the golden gem quieted, its glow faltering in the gloom. Erick still hadn’t sussed out what had happened back there, with ‘Markie’, but he had a few ideas.
Dungeons were spaces in the Dark. Dungeons were subject to a great many different forces that were more primeval than the ones on Veird where magic itself was (mostly) fully controlled by Rozeta and the Script. The only true exception to this fact was when individuals with a great lot of personal mana production came into the picture. Meaning Wizards. But also dragons. More than a few people these days were so enamored with dungeons that they delved all that they could, and those forays into the Dark had gained them a great lot of personal mana production, too. Those people joined dragons and even a few archmages on the list of people with their own personal mana production that was large enough to upset the local environment. They were still far, far away from a Wizard’s natural production, though.
A normal person might have 10 mana per day. A dragon? 5000. A very good delver? 3000-7500.
A Wizard? 100,000 to a million. Erick was currently at around 5.5 million on an off day. 10-12 million on a busy day.
So this mutation of the dungeon was his fault, somehow.
… Erick put the nuances of his current situation out of his mind, hefted his fully-powered Rod of the Guardian in his grip, and stepped out of the wrecked lecture hall, across the rubble, into the night. He made his way across stepping stones made of broken walls, headed toward the next building.
Erick stepped back onto proper land and the cat attacked, snarling and slashing and full of fangs. Erick called out [Meditation] and sent the cat slamming into the ground at his feet, cracking its skull but failing to do any real damage to the feline. The Rod of the Guardian glowed brightly as it absorbed more mana from him, for it had gained several large gouges on its surface and was rapidly healing those wounds, even though the cat had not attacked the rod at all.
As those gouges healed, the cat slashed at Erick’s legs with claws too large for its body, and Erick nearly broke his rod over the cat’s skull. The rod gained even more gouges, even though cat claws hadn’t gotten anywhere near it.
The cat tried to slink away after three such exchanges, but Erick rushed at it and brought it back around for another three hits, his gem necklace glowing bright gold, as his bracelet glowed bright blue.
The unwounded cat finally decided it had had enough, and turned to shadows to get away.
“COWARD!” Erick shouted.
The cat did not come back.
You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 3/13!
MP up! +50 mana production per day!
Erick sighed out, into the night.
And then he went into the next building.
It was a cafeteria.
It was filled with bodies that had not been there until Erick had stepped through the doors. Some of the corpses had great big bites taken out of them, or large claw marks. Most, however, had distended jaws filled with razor teeth, and human-sized bites taken out of necks and legs and arms, or they sported burn marks, or large lacerations as from [Force Beam]s, or pock marks from Bolt spells. Erick instantly identified every single way in which all 87 people in that room had died, for he had seen it all before.
They had died screaming and in fear.
He guessed what was going to happen next, and a part of him welcomed the coming carnage.
Right on cue, words appeared.
The dead rise. Kill as many as you can and be rewarded for your efforts.
Erick’s new necklace flashed gold as he tickled it with his aura, manually flicking the [Meditation] into an active state. As the dead stirred to life, some rising on arms since their legs had been cut out from under them, some rising on legs but with an arm or both missing, Erick limbered up.
They came for him.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
And Erick started swinging.
Ten minutes later, Erick came out of the building covered in blood that was not his, with another 100 mana to his Status, and holding a small book. Once the last zombie had died, words had appeared, and a Tome of Spell Creation had fallen into his hands. This book actually had words inside of it, unlike all the other books Erick had found. He had already read some of those words, but mostly he had thought about what had happened back there.
For now, though, it was time to go back to the first building he had cleared, to make a new magic inside that spell creation lab, and to revive his Rod of the Guardian. Maybe then he would go on a proper hunt to kill that damned cat.
- -
Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)
MP per day: 765
- -
Erick had stuck around after the carnage long enough to [Witness] the past of the cafeteria…
But it was just another horror that may or may not have been true, and the scene had taken Erick a good half an hour to work through, since only some of that scene happened in the cafeteria itself. The [Witness] had started with Ashes confronting his captain in the guardhouse about cannibal sightings. The captain had given Ashes the runaround, and when Ashes pressed the issue, he finally got a very stern order to stay away from it all, and not to write anything down in any records.
And then the scene had moved along, to Ashes going back to the Arcanaeum, to join an open meeting of students concerned with the cannibal problem happening just north of campus. Some fliers had gone up around campus, asking people to come to talk in the cafeteria. No one knew who put the fliers up, but Ashes had to find out, no matter what.
Ashes had to know about Markie and Sofie.
The meeting had been a trap.
- - - -
Ashes walked through campus, headed toward the designated location.
Night had fallen, and campus security was nowhere to be found anywhere at all, but especially not at the cafeteria, where the posters had said to come to ‘Speak about the horrors of Riam!’. Ashes had expected to need to show his badge when he stepped on campus, or at least to show his hand-in-hand necklace that was his blood-bound oath of office. But. No. He just walked into the campus, like he wasn’t supposed to be able to do, walking past empty guard stations, and followed the crowd, toward the cafeteria.
A lot of students had good enough sense to not get anywhere near the meeting at all.
Ashes saw dorm room windows shut and the wardlights off, and more than a few kids staring out between blinds, their eyes open on the night, on lookout for danger. Those were the smart ones. Or cowardly. Ashes wasn’t sure yet.
A lot of students were angry enough to get together and see if they could do anything. That cannibal appearing last week, when Ashes had been on campus, had managed to kill two students before it got to Ashes. Those deaths, and four more as Ashes had found out, had been the last weight for a lot of the kids here. They wanted answers, and they were going to get together and force the administration to talk.
A lot of kids saw Ashes walk through campus and instantly knew who he was; he was the guard who had put the cannibal down. Some of them asked if he was going to talk tonight.
“No. I’m here for answers, too,” Ashes said to the two kids who spoke to him, “And you two shouldn’t be inside that meeting at all. It’s dangerous.”
The larger kid, an 18 year old first-year based on the insignia on his coat, puffed up, and said, “My family lost the farm to Riam two years ago. I know the problem here. I just want to see if other people finally know the problem, too.”
Ashes thought it idiotic for him to wear his affiliations on the outside, so he said, “You need to take off that pin and put it somewhere else. Don’t go to meetings like this and make yourself easily identified.”
The kid huffed a disbelieving laugh. “We’re not resistance! We’re just talking about shit that needs not be shit anymore.”
The smaller guy, with no identifiable markers, good boots, and who looked ready to run, said, “We know it's dangerous. But we all live here. We’re never-leavers, and we know it’s dangerous.”
… This event was happening in the middle of campus, so they were probably safe.
But Ashes didn’t believe that at all. He couldn’t just force the kids to turn around and go the fuck home, though. If something should happen, he wished the kids luck. Hopefully nothing would happen, but...
Ashes got into the meeting just fine.
There were no faculty anywhere. No security. Nothing.
The pit in Ashes’s stomach seemed to grow.
There were about a hundred kids. Maybe 125. Everyone was talking about all the rumors and facts they knew, most of them working in small groups, some in larger groups. The crowd was getting heated.
The meeting time started, and nothing official looked to be happening. No one got on stage. No one spoke up. And that was too much.
Some angry girl got up on stage, and yelled, “If the organizers ain’t gonna start, then I am! We want answers! Our faculty won’t give them to us, so it’s time to take matters into our own hands! We’re going to write letters to the capital, and we’re going to speak to our noble leaders, so let’s organize this now! Ideally, we can either get the capital to respond with inquisitors, because all of us know that the guardcaptains ain’t doing their jobs! None of them are willing to talk about cannibals at all!”
“Yeah!” “YES!” “Absolutely!”
The audience surged with emotion, and the air charged with mana. That was what every single one of them wanted to hear. A simple, actionable plan—
Someone yelled, their voice too loud to be mundane, “Talking don’t work! We gotta hurt people! Kill the Riamites!”
The girl on stage instantly raged, “WHO THE FUCK SAID THAT! WHO SAID THAT! We ain’t no rebels! We do this right! WHO THE FUCK SAID THAT!”
The crowd could do nothing but look around, trying to find the source of the voice, as the girl on stage rightfully raged. They would find nothing, though. Ashes already saw the script playing out before he got into this room, and now, the play was happening, with none of the actors knowing they were being played. A few students on the edge of the crowd, and a few in the center, suddenly realized what was going on, too, but they were either too used to non-violence, or they were too surrounded to move.
Ashes quietly saw three people try to leave through an open side door, but they hit something standing behind the door, where Ashes could not see. Those students slowly backed back into the room, their eyes full of terror—
An adjudicator in black and gold followed them into the room, and then shut the door behind them.
Every single door to the cafeteria gained an adjudicator—
Someone screamed, and panic rapidly took hold. The girl on stage shouted about how they were going to do things legally—
Power washed across the room.
Silence.
And then a feminine voice, “My, my, my! Such naughty little children, getting up to such revolutionary thoughts. Perhaps it's time to revoke RAU’s right-to-teach.”
The girl on stage was furious. She tried to yell out counterclaims, and she flexed the air with her power, but aside from a bubble of force that was quickly squashed back into the girl, there was no resistance at all to the power of the woman adjudicator.
The shadows near the stage flexed next, and the woman with the gold eyes stepped out onto the stage, her voice filled with clarity, “Resistance will be lawfully executed. Now be good children and line up to be taken away to jail, or to the Siphon. Your choice.”
One kid resisted.
He was killed on the spot.
Panic ensued. More murder happened.
And then it devolved from there. Instead of a few kills quieting all the rest, the crowd surged with as much violence as it could manage. It was not enough.
Ashes would have stepped in and sided with the students, but the woman with the gold eyes had slipped through the shadows, to stand next to him, there in the back of the room. She had put a hand on his shoulder, and then wrapped her arms around one of his, and told him simply to stand down or they would ‘adjudicate’ his garrison and town square, too.
“Or you could take up that rod and try to strike me down right now, Ashes, and throw your lot in with these kids,” said the cat-like woman. “I don’t believe you’re actually with the resistance, which is a bit sad for me, but what’s the life of one more guard added to the pile? Not much. I’ve already killed so many, including Markie and his horrible wife Sofie.”
Ashes felt rage unfurl inside of his soul and expand to fill every single part of his entire existence.
And yet, he did nothing. All he could do was watch the carnage in front of him, and steel himself against the evil hanging onto his arm.
“… What? No fight?” asked the hateful woman, as she dug her claws into his arm. “I was sure that would get you to try something.”
“I’m no fool, ma’am.”
And none of this was normal.
Ashes dealt with people trying to filch coins from farmers, or people getting into animated fights over the price of whiteroot. Not murder. Not cannibals. Not the end result of horrible politics. Ashes only knew how to fight because every guard was required to know how to fight, and he had gotten into several scrapes over his life. He had even seen dead people before, and he had killed two men in the line of duty, when they were in the process of killing a third. Ashes knew what death looked like.
But this was the first time he had ever seen a student uprising and a massacre.
He knew what he wanted to do, but he also knew that he couldn’t—
“It occurs to me you don’t even know my name.” The adjudicator purred, “Please, call me Fyuri. I have a feeling I’ll be taking you in for questioning soon enough, as soon as you stop being such a little mouse.”
“… I’m no fool, ma’am. These kids were all traitors.” Ashes lied to save his skin, “I heard that one yell out for…” Ashes couldn’t finish the lie. He had tried to lie. He had failed.
That attempt had been enough for Fyuri to grin. “Well now. That’s interesting, too. Iben won’t look the same when Riam is done with it, so it is rather smart of you to jump ship as soon as you can. Say, little guard? You want a job?”
“I’ll take the paperwork and see what the pay is like before committing here and now.”
Fyuri laughed, and then she snapped at one of her lessers to go get Ashes an application.
As Ashes took the paperwork, he hated himself for not fighting against her right then and there, but this battle was bigger than just him, and his need for revenge. This was much larger than the already-dead students inside the cafeteria. This was a battle for the very soul of Insten.
It was a battle he would win.
After the initial horror was over, Ashes scrubbed the arm Fyuri held many times.
- - - -
Erick closed the Spell Tome and set it on the lab table in front of him.
The little book had two possible uses, and it explained those uses well.
The primary use was to be consumed as a magical item; to be used to make a spell. To do that, the user would open the book, and then pour some metamonds of all types onto the blank pages in the middle. Then, some menus would pop up and a person could select what spell they wanted from the components they had placed on the spell tome. Excess metamonds would be discarded from the spell creation. This function consumed the tome.
Simple. Effective. That primary use was how one passed the major test of Floor One.
The secondary use was as an instruction book, to teach the reader how to use the large cubic container at the back of the meta-diamond lab, to achieve the same thing as the primary use of the tome, but without consuming the spell tome. The drawback to this method is that one would need to supply all the mana necessary in order to increase the density inside the mana container all the way into a solid state.
Using the mana-diamond chamber would not consume the spell tome.
Erick opted for option #2.
To work with mana crystallization was to work with mana density, and Erick already knew a lot about what was written in the spell tome.
The density of mana in its ‘ocean’ state was considered ‘1’ on the mana density scale, which was not an easy thing to measure at all. Mana was easily compressible and expansive, and also 4th dimensional, so that ‘1’ was under very specific circumstances; sea-level, 24 degrees temperature (Celsius, but actually called Yols), and with minimal disturbance. ‘Minimal disturbance’ was near impossible, though, because of the whole ‘fourth dimension’ thing.
Anyway.
The lower-end density of a mana crystal was about 1.05, depending on the specific element, but the minimal density for a mana crystal got up to 9 to 12 for some Elements, like Air. Elemental Stone was rather darned easy to turn into a crystal, requiring the minimal 1.05-times density in order to crystallize.
Once crystallized, though, the mana density of a crystal could go way, way up.
So Erick didn’t need to bring the density too much higher than 1 to start a crystal, but he would require a lot in order to make a good crystal, and for certain elements, he would require a lot to even start the crystallization process.
Elemental Benevolence could crystallize at around a 2, and could get much, much denser than that; like stuffing a never-ending flow of clowns into a car.
Since the current density of the current manasphere was .8, being at 80% of the normal density of 1, Erick guessed that the cubic room required... at least 200 mana to get back up to 1, and then a lot more to actually make it all the way to a crystallization phase.
Luckily! Erick had a [Meditation] necklace. His mana problems were nearly solved with just that one item, and some frugality on his part.
To finish floor one, all Erick had to do was to use the Spell Tome and whatever random shit he wanted to pile in there, in order to generate a spell, any spell at all, and that would be enough. But Erick wanted to go a lot further than a simple [Bolt] spell. He was pretty sure that he could do a lot more than that, too.
His first hope was that if he simply put enough of his ‘dungeon mana’ into the air, that it could make a gem. And then he could do something with that. Perhaps. Other than that, there were 6 half-gems here in the lab, one for each Primary Element, and he had [Murky], too. He could break those and make them into something new, using the mana cube chamber. And he had 10 more buildings of RAU remaining. There were probably some fun things out there, just waiting to be won.
Even if these first experiments didn’t work, Erick just wanted to play around with mana crystals, which is something he had only done a few times, and not much at that, when his attempts to become a Full Wizard fell flat. He had a nation to run, after all.
There had been some time for spell creation, but mana crystals had been a branch of magic that didn’t have much tangible use, since mana didn’t really crystallize on Veird without a lot of effort. This was because of the Script.
… Erick thought, once again, about [Onward], and him ‘not really being there’ as a reason he failed to become a Full Wizard. But the Script's restrictions on freely created mana crystals was also a possible excuse.
Eh.
Erick grabbed the small containers of broken metamonds and a few tools to break them up, and happily went to the vault, where he set them to the edge of the room, as far away from the center as he could. Then he took off his bracelet and set that down, away from the actual focusing parts of the chamber. The necklace would stay on, but Erick took the thing and turned it around, so the gem was on his back, instead of on his chest; it would still work like that, but it would be a bit further away from the experimental center of the chamber, and it should be fine.
That exact center of the chamber was where the magic happened, and Erick wanted to keep his important magic pieces away from it.
And then Erick shut the door, and grinned.
He turned on [Meditation] with a flicker of his aura, and the gem began to glow on his back. Erick flicked his aura through the Rod of the Guardian, too. Erick began to rapidly regain mana, and the rod sucked that mana away, before it promptly spilled white light into the chamber, gradually raising the level of mana in the room. Erick relaxed. And waited. He only had 765 mana regen per hour while using [Meditation], so aside from the initial spill of mana into the air from making his rod release that mana, it would take some time for the chamber to reach full. And then his rod would be taking away half that mana until it equalized with the pressure in the room.
Eventually, after maybe half an hour, the manasphere rapidly ticked up to ‘1’ on the mana density scale.
And that’s where the density stayed for ten more minutes, as the concentric rings on the floor, walls, and ceiling began to appear, and as ripples in the manasphere began to coalesce, like pillars slowly forming between each of the opposing concentric circles.
Eventually, those three pillars slowly formed a cross beam area in the center of the small room.
Erick maintained his [Meditation] and the flow of mana from himself, to the rod, to the room.
Another half hour later, something changed.
“Finally,” Erick said, staring at the intersection of the three mana pillars.
The white light in the room had begun to flicker at that intersection, as the underlying mana began to flex and shift, as though it was thick water. The switch from that, to more, happened faster than Erick had been ready for it. Almost right away, the innate condensing power of the cube, whatever that might be, was enough to cause a condensation in the center. A drop of brilliant white liquid mana rapidly formed, and then condensed into a spherical gem.
The mana density of the room rapidly faded back to lesser levels. The room was still rather packed with mana, but all of the action happening inside the pillar intersections was gone; reduced into a single, white gem, filled with fractals.
It floated there.
“… Ah. Hmm.”
Erick had expected to need to put some of the gem shards into the liquid mana, or to break them and release their elements into the room. But no? The room and enough mana, on its own, was enough to cause a condensation into a crystal?
Well of course it was. Erick hadn’t expected it to work so fast, though.
Erick wasn’t sure what to really do right now. He had no ‘extra’ metirons to use with the Benevolence bead.
… He stuck the ball-end of his fully-charged rod into the center of the room—
The white gem zipped into the rod, like it was metal falling upon a magnet, and then buried itself inside the metal. The gem rapidly moved all the way through the length of metiron, all the way to the hilt, where it popped out of the metal and held there just above the grip. Metairon wrapped around the gem, securing it in place.
A rapid series of words appeared.
Congratulations!
You have created a meta-diamond, and inserted it into an item!
MP up! +1000 mana production per day!
Meta-diamond: [Benediction]
You have completed the major task for the first floor!
Find the floor boss, and make your way through them, to the next level!
Followed promptly by:
You have revived a depleted magical item!
Rod of the Guardian (depleted) ~/300–> Rod of Benediction ~/500
MP up! +500 mana production per day!
That was all fantastic!
… But.
Erick looked down at his new ‘rod’. It was exactly the same shape as before, but the ball-end had turned into a bunch of open wings, and even more wings had unfurled down the length of the rod.
… This was not a weapon. This was a wand.
“Not sure about this specific creation.”
Erick scrunched his face. He had not expected the transformation, nor had he expected the Rod of the Guardian to even accept the Benevolence bead at all. The rod seemed like it would have wanted some sort of… Electrical, stunning enchantment. Or something more violent. Not... Whatever he had made for it. Wasn’t it only supposed to be able to accept whatever meta-diamonds actually fit with it?
This winged transformation was not a ‘fit’ at all.
[Benediction] was not a violent thing at all… But Erick was using Veird-understandings of that spell. Maybe in the dungeon [Benediction] meant something else? Erick hefted the weapon in his hands, thinking. [Benediction], of all flavors, was normally a divine-class Buffing Magic, meant to generally empower those who use it, generally with doubled damage or a generalized damage reduction. Specific gods empowered people differently. A goddess like Zephyrspray, the goddess of travel and luck, would make a [Benediction] that granted the caster extra speed and luck.
When a god granted [Benediction], it was like granting a person perfect buffing magic, that would never harm the wielder like normal buffing magic always did. But people could make a [Benediction of Fire], or a [Benediction of Air], or whatever, and achieve the same sort of empowerment outside of divine forces. ‘Benediction’ was generally divine in nature, but it was actually just a classification of buffing spell; a ‘perfect’ buff spell that didn’t harm anyone with extra downtime, or whatever, after the spell ran out.
And here now was a [Benediction] created using Erick’s generalized Benevolence-flavored mana. But then again, he was using dungeon mana to do this; not his own, not really. So the dungeon’s mana was buffing-Benevolence flavored?
Which was kinda fun to think about.
And not actually ideal at all. Not for his weapon.
The thing looked rather flimsy right now, but maybe it wasn’t? … No. It was flimsy. But what was worse, was what if Erick struck an enemy with the rod and it empowered them? That would just be… really bad.
Actually. Erick tested that out.
He held up the weapon, and said, “[Benediction].”
The business end of the weapon glowed, and Erick chuckled a little bit, as he could already see what was going to happen. And then he tapped his leg with the feathery end, and felt a buff settle into his body. Everything suddenly felt a whole lot damned easier to him, from breathing, to moving, to everything.
It was a very good buff. Very good. Erick had trouble understanding just how good because he had no [Identify] metamond, nor did he have any blue boxes to give him clues. But he could already tell it was a great buffing spell. It seemed like it would last a long time, too.
And this wasn’t going to work at all. A rod that empowered what he hit? Even if he could hit himself with the effect, this was just a bad, sub-optimal arrangement. If the rod would have empowered Erick automatically, and kept its original weapon shape? Now that could have been workable.
This feathery thing?
No thank you.
No offense meant, Ophiel.
Erick sighed as he chuckled, and flicked [Meditation] back on. Soon he was pouring mana back into the room, and at a much, much faster rate than before, and trying to pull the gem out of the rod as soon as the rod became a little looser. Soon, mana began to slosh in the center of the room like a floating liquid, but the gem still wasn’t coming out of the rod.
So Erick resorted to some extreme measures, as outlined in the spell tome.
He grabbed one of the little hammers he had brought into the room with him, when he thought he would be using those hammers to smash the already-broken gems. A few strikes upon the white gem in the rod of benediction and the white gem shattered, and then promptly dissolved into so much extra mana.
Rod of Benediction ~/500 –> Rod of the Guardian (depleted) ~/300
The rod ‘healed’ itself back into its original length of steel, with a ball-end business end.
White mana instantly coalesced back into the center of the room, ready to reform a crystal, but this time Erick was ready for it.
With the mana density of the room so high, his aura easily expanded past his skin, into the room, into the collection of mana densely churning in the center of the room. Using his aura directly, Erick stopped the full condensation back into a gem. Then he reached over to the Air and Light broken gems, sitting on the ground. With a hammer, he smashed both of those remnant gems, and the dust of both came apart in the mana density of the room, each of them turning into a splash of mana, flavoring the room with brilliance and with wind.
That brilliant wind collected on the concentric-ring pillars, then flowed into the center of the room, where Erick manually molded the resulting gem into something more akin to what a Benevolence Dragon did when they were angry.
Working in mana crystals was quite similar to working with a manacycler; that toy that Tenebrae had shown off that could be used as a whistle, alongside an expression of mana, to create a [Force Bolt], or a [Force Wall]. Erick hadn’t done much of this kinda work, but he had done enough soul work and mana work and all other kinds of enchanting to be able to figure out the Shaping required of a single gem, which was mostly a matter of imbuing his intent into the crystal.
As Erick pulled back his aura, the gem finally flowed together.
The resultant gem was brilliant white and crackled with inner lightning.
Erick smiled as the gem hovered there.
He glanced up at the air.
… He waited?
… It was taking a while for the dungeon to say anything?
Ah.
Erick stuck the depleted Rod of the Guardian into the center of the cube, the length of glowing white metal seeming to ripple as it touched that mana dense space near the gem—
Once again, the gem slipped into the rod’s ball-end, to slip through the center of the rod, to pop out right above the metal grip.
You have joined a meta-diamond to a meta-iron!
You have revived a depleted magical item!
Rod of the Guardian (depleted) ~/300–> Rod of the Lightning Guardian ~/1000
Erick hefted the rod in his hands, and smiled as he flicked his aura through the item. Once again, the head of the rod lit with power, but it was a crackling, dangerous sort of power. It was perfect.
“No gains for making an even better weapon than before, eh?” Erick asked the dungeon.
Milestone MP ups only occur once, and at the dungeon’s discretion.
“Fair enough.”
Erick proceeded to make a few more gems, because he could, even if he didn’t have any metirons to put them in. He rapidly ran out of extra resources, though, even if all of his gems began with a dungeon-Benevolence starter. He did not use [Murky] in his experiments, though. The expression of power within [Murky] was complex, for it had at least 4 different Elements therein and some Particle Magic, too, in order to create real matter, and that would be hard to work with. Erick was absolutely sure he could make something good out of it, but [Murky] could wait until Erick found some actual good use for it.
He needed some metirons, now, which he would probably find if he killed enough shit around here.
- -
Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)
MP per day: 2,265
Meta-Irons: 1150, 0 in storage
Meta-Diamonds: 3/10, 0 in storage
Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 99/100
Rod of the Lightning Guardian, 509/1000
Necklace of [Meditation], 49/50
Unused Meta-Diamonds: [Murky], [Benediction], [Flaming Ooze], [Shadow Bolt]
- -
[Benediction] would come in handy later, as soon as Erick found something to stick it in, or maybe when he was willing to risk his [Self Rejuvenation] in an experiment to make that item better. [Shadow Bolt] was just because he had the Shadow gem and he had to use it. [Flaming Ooze] would work well in a wand-type weapon, as soon as he found a metairon like that. It wasn’t [Fireball], but when the mana density in the air became a void instead of an ocean, a touch-type napalm-like spell would be a lot better crowd control than an indiscriminate explosion that would puff away into broken mana faster than one could blink.
There were a lot of positive things to say about napalm when it came to warfare against monsters.
As for the rod...
Erick hefted his rod, and marveled, a little, at the thick, yet flat celtic-like knot work that adorned the very top of the ball-end, and which the hilt had transformed into. The whole thing evoked the idea of lightning and blackened trees, and from Erick’s small tests of the weapon on himself, it worked exactly like he expected it to.
It had taken him five minutes to heal the lightning burn he had done to his own leg.
With one final check on himself and his gear, Erick exited the cubic room. Mana burst out of the space like uncontained fog, a moment before Erick burst out of the room like a man on a mission. The spell-creation lab remained lit behind him, remaining usable, which was great, but Erick did not expect to need to return unless he absolutely had to.
As Erick left the hallway behind, he happily said, “That cat is in for quite a shock.”
- - - -
Erick found the cat sitting on a broken stoop, leading up to the next building. The building itself looked to be administration. The cat’s tail swished behind it, and its eyes got wider as Erick got closer, before narrowing down equally fast, to take in all that it saw. It mostly looked at the rod in Erick’s hand, and its tail stopped wagging.
It stared at him, eye to eye, waiting for Erick to get closer, and for the battle to start.
Erick stopped twenty meters away. He called out, “Is your name Fyuri?”
The cat froze in complete non-comprehension—
Suddenly, every single hair on the cat’s body seemed to rise as its eyes went super wide in complete, unexpected surprise. It bolted, running away into the shadows as fast as it possibly could, hissing just before it got out of sight.
You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 4/13!
MP up! +50 mana production per day!
“… Well okay then.”
Erick went inside the administration building, killed four different zombie-amalgamations of the administrators, and then he looted three complete metamonds and a wand-shaped metairon. All of that went onto his Status, and since Erick had a good reason to go back to the mana cube lab, Erick decided to go back to the mana cube room to fix it all up, into proper, working power.
Before that, though, Erick took some time to [Witness] history.
Ashes was working for the Adjudicators now. He called himself a spy, but he had no Resistance contacts. It was the only way to stay alive, and to put himself between the people of Iben, to protect his fellow countrymen from Riam.
Or at least that’s what he told himself.
He could not protect the administration of RAU from Fyuri and her Adjudicators, as Fyuri took mana crystals and stabbed them into the hearts of those people, turning them into monsters right before Ashes’ eyes.
Erick spent some extra time than strictly necessary, inside the mana cube, just to relax a little.
An hour after going into the cube, Erick came out. He felt had done a lot with floor one. But had he done enough? Yeah. He had done enough. He could hunt down quite a lot more monsters and whatnot, and he probably should go looking for an [Identify], and a bunch of other utility spells, hidden inside RAU. But for now, Erick stuck the tip of his new wand into his mouth, and activated the magic therein.
A thick, warm gruel trickled out of the tip of the wand, making Erick think quite a lot about that fabled [Conjure Food and Water] spell, but different. The metamond Erick had found in Administration and then stuck into a wand he had also found there was sustenance, and not much more. It sort of tasted like oats, if one wanted to be charitable, but it was really just warm slop which was… Fine. He supposed.
The manner in which Erick imbibed the food was, perhaps, a bit degrading, but whatever. That was neither here nor there. What was here and now, was that it was damned weird for this spell to be here. This spell had almost turned Atunir Dark, which had directly caused the Fall of Quintlan, which had directly led to Rozeta Restricting [Create Food and Water] and stripping it from everyone except for her Registrars.
It was weird for this spell to be inside Atunir’s dungeon, even if the name wasn’t exactly the same, and even if the effect wasn’t the same, either.
Perhaps the story behind [Create Food and Water] was more complicated than Erick was led to believe. He had never asked Atunir directly about any of that. Maybe he should?
Anyway.
Finally eating something and drinking something did a lot for Erick’s mental state, since he hadn’t done either in the last several hours. After getting his fill, Erick went hunting for that cat, and for more loot.
He was rather sure he needed to kill that damned cat to proceed to floor 2.
- - - -
Erick approached building #5, ready for a fight.
… And the cat was not there.
… Erick stepped inside the building—
Words appeared.
You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 5/13!
MP up! +50 mana production per day!
You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 6/13!
MP up! +50 mana production per day!
. . .
You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 11/13!
MP up! +50 mana production per day!
You have cleared a part of The Arcanaeum of an unknown threat! 12/13!
MP up! +50 mana production per day!
Red lightning shot across the sky like the rending of night into crimson day, followed by a world-rumbling quake. The rumble did not stop. Buildings fell. The roar magnified and turned into the exploding bellow of a great beast.
Red lighting crashed down into the coliseum in the back of the arcanaeum.
Words appeared, rimmed in red light.
Challenge the Beast of Destruction!
Make your way to the second floor!
Red lightning flickered within the coliseum, sending up shadows of black tails and claws and eyes into the sky, onto swirling clouds of mana that drained down, down, down, into the red space beyond Erick’s sight. The earthquakes slowed, and then stopped.
Water began to drain from everywhere, and red glows illuminated the deeper parts here and there. The meta-item creation lab suddenly collapsed behind Erick, along with a few other arcanaeum buildings. Erick leapt back from the one he had almost entered fully, and not too soon, for it teetered and slipped backward, crashing, sending a cloud of debris Erick’s way.
He hurried to get behind a low wall, just in time for the dust to wash over him.
As the dust settled and Erick poked back out from behind the wall, a horrible yowling echoed across the city.
“… Well okay then,” Erick said, as he faced the coliseum. “... I guess I’m ready for that? And I didn't need to use the Spell Tome?” Erick had left the tome back in the metamond lab. It was probably buried under a thousand tons of building. “… Eh. Status.”
- -
Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)
MP per day: 2,965
Meta-Irons: 1350, 0 in storage
Meta-Diamonds: 4/10, 0 in storage
Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 99/100
Rod of the Lightning Guardian, 1000/1000
Necklace of [Meditation], 49/50
Wand of [Drinking Food], 156/200
Unused Meta-Diamonds: [Murky], [Benediction], [Flaming Ooze], [Shadow Bolt], [Paper Control], [Memorize].
- -