Chapter LXX (70) - The Clone
“Trespasser or companion?” the ghostly woman asked, her voice warbling. Her mouth hung open after speaking, showing off the scribbled darkness of her insides.
“Companion,” Aoi said instantly.
“Of whom?”
That gave Aoi pause. She looked back to Kizu for guidance. He put his hands up, this was her expertise, not his.
“The…great necromancer who passed through here?” Aoi asked more than said.
The ghost pondered her words for a moment.
“No,” she said, sounding sad.
The temperature dropped. Ice began to spread across the cave floor. She raised her arms towards them.
Aoi immediately began rapidly flipping through the first grimoire volume, already muttering incantations.
Kizu shouldered his way in front of Aoi, posing for a fight with Sojan in hand. He rapidly scanned the cavern, searching for a strategy. He doubted he’d be able to tear Aoi away for a retreat, he needed to find a way to subdue the ghost until Aoi finished figuring out a binding spell like she had with the skeletons.
He decided to try out a trick he picked up from Sene’s last combat fight. He created four illusionary versions of himself while simultaneously jumping to the side. Two of his illusions then aggressively attacked the ghost, wielding copies of Sojan. Kizu added the illusionary sparks of lightning to the empty hand of one of his incorporeal doppelgangers.
Meanwhile, he went in from behind to stab the ghost with Sojan held in a reverse grip. But, just as he was about to make contact, the ghost wheeled around on him, completely ignoring the illusionary attackers as they passed through her harmlessly. Instead, she reached out and gripped Kizu with a dozen different invisible hands. She lifted him off the ground, then she flung him at the wall.
Kizu slammed into the stone, seeing stars and gasping for breath as he tumbled down to the ground. But the ghost wasn’t finished with him. It swooped in on him, mouth open in a hideously silent scream with the darkness from within her open mouth consuming his vision.
It was as if someone had taken a quill to his eyeballs and begun madly scratching at them in a patternless swirl. Panicking, he raised Sojan and blindly swiped in front of him.
To his surprise, he actually hit something. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the ghost, but rather his own hand. He didn’t remember raising it. He stared at it through the ever-growing darkness. He struggled to maintain control of his hand. Immense pressure weighed down on his arm, pushing Sojan down towards his flesh. Blood dribbled down his fingers.
“Seriously?” Sojan said in his mind as the eye on the knife’s hilt narrowed at him. “Don’t you remember from last time? Incorporeal creatures are a no-go. A terrible body choice. Sure, I can slice them if I already have blood in me, but I can’t control something that I can’t drink the blood of. It’s pretty simple. I don’t think there’s a single living creature on the planet inepter at stabbing things than you. It’s such a simple process, but somehow you keep doing it all wrong.”
“How?” Kizu asked, barely choking out the question.
He felt the blade’s annoyance. But it understood.
“Put me through your arm,” it demanded.
Not seeing any other option, Kizu stopped pressing against the mounting pressure and let it stab the blade into his forearm, it felt as if an invisible hand guided the blade as it punctured through the skin. The cold metal scraped against his bone.
His vision immediately cleared up.
“Since you’re so bad at stabbing things, you’re lucky it helped you impale yourself,” Sojan said through Kizu’s own voice. “You probably would have messed it up. And it doesn’t yet realize that nobody rivals my possession skills. I am undefeatable!”
With his vision cleared, Kizu scanned the area for a way out. Behind the ghost, he spotted a small metal door, only reaching his waist in height and hidden from above by a craggy overhang.
“We need to get behind that door,” Kizu said, struggling for control over his body. Sojan reluctantly let him take reins of the body, silently taking on a role of protector as he crushed more possession probes sent by the ghost.
Kizu jumped to Aoi’s side. She seemed to be struggling with words, her eyes blackening. He grabbed her shoulder. Then he looked at the wall behind the ghost, from this angle the door was once again hidden. There was the serious risk of burying himself alive under stone. He jumped into the wall.
A moment later, he crashed onto a wooden table. Sojan slipped out of his arm as he rolled off the wooden surface and scattered its contents everywhere.
“What just happened?” Aoi said, blinking rapidly and rubbing her eyes. “Where did the ghost go?”
He took a few deep breaths, steadying himself, then Kizu looked around the room as he got back to his feet.
“I believe we found your necromancer’s laboratory.”
“What are you talking about? You got us away? How can you see anything?”
Realizing Aoi’s scrying orb was still back outside with the ghost, Kizu lit up his fist with flames. He noticed as he did so, that Sojan had clotted up the wounds on his arm while exiting. It would still scar, but at least he wasn’t bleeding profusely everywhere. He raised his flaming fist like a torch, illuminating the area.
“Careful with that!” Aoi cried out, pushing him away from the room’s contents.
“If the stuff in here could be destroyed by elements, I’m pretty certain it would have rotted away a couple centuries ago,” he grumbled. But he still took another step back for her.
He watched as she scurried around the laboratory, gathering up notes off the ground. She quickly scanned each note before sticking in her ever-growing pile, the grin on her face never faltering.
Still keeping his distance, Kizu decided to examine the objects in the room with more scrutiny. Jars containing pickled body parts lined the shelves. At the end of the room, large objects were covered by dusty sheets. But magic radiated from beneath the fabric. It was powerful enough that he didn’t even need to enhance his spellsense to detect it. He let his flame splutter down to a fraction of the size as he stepped toward the hidden objects. Lifting the sheet, he peered underneath.
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A gnome’s body floated inside a large vat, suspended in a sickly yellowish liquid. A completely hairless naked male, his body shriveled slightly but still very much intact. Kizu stared at it in disturbed awe, believing it to be a dead specimen pickled like the other body parts on the shelves. Then its hand twitched slightly.
“What’s this?” Aoi asked, Kizu looked over his shoulder to see her picking up Sojan from where the blade had fallen earlier. The eye on the hilt remained open, but Sojan said nothing.
“My knife.” Kizu held his hand out. Then he glanced back at the body. A new solution formed in his mind.
She handed him Sojan hilt first, then noticed the vat behind him. Aoi cocked her head. “And what’s that?”
“You’re the necromancy expert.” Kizu stepped aside.
Aoi ripped the sheet off the vat, a cloud of dust sending them both into a fit of coughing.
“This is amazing,” Aoi said in awe after she recovered. She tapped the glass. “I’ve read about the theory of this sort of thing, but to see it put into practice…unbelievable.”
“It’s an undead?” Kizu asked. “A long term corpse preservation method?”
“Almost. But not quite. This is a necromantic clone.”
Kizu had never heard of anything like that, and he said as much.
“It’s rare. It’s the creation of an empty body identical to that of the necromancer. The idea is that when the necromancer dies, the soul instead goes into this vessel rather than an unknown afterlife. The thing is, almost any necromancer who can accomplish this much already is well on the way to lichdom. A phylactery isn’t all that different from this. Because of this, I have never heard of a soul mage actually putting the theories into practice to create a clone.”
“What would happen if we opened the vat up?” Kizu asked.
Aoi considered. “I don’t think it would die,” she finally said. “Not at first, at least. But it probably would after a while. It’s just a vessel without a soul. I don’t think it would be able to move or eat or anything.”
“But it still has blood in it?” Kizu asked.
“Yes, it should have identical blood to that of the necromancer when he created it. Otherwise, the necromancer would have to completely restart training. That would be a pretty major defect with the design.”
Kizu made up his mind. He stabbed Sojan at the glass case with all his strength.
The glass deflected the blade, barely leaving a scratch. The ricochet rattled Kizu’s arm, and he flexed and unflexed his grip.
“What are you doing!” Aoi yelled at him.
“Well, I expected to break through and for the soulless body to flop out.”
“And what? Cover the entire room in fluids?”
Kizu glanced behind him where there were still scattered papers strewn about. He supposed he should have given this strategy a bit more thought. Good thing it hadn’t worked.
Instead, Kizu found a sconce with an old torch and lit it up, snuffing out the flame in his hand. Then he climbed on top of the vat and used Sojan to pry the lid open. When he finally popped it off, he ignored Aoi’s protests and reached down into the yellow ichor from above. It was gooey, like tree sap, but he pushed his arms through it and to the body suspended within.
Heaving the body, he managed to get the gnome’s torso out and splay its arms over the edge of the vat. It hung there, limp. But Kizu saw it breathing in the air, likely for the first time in its existence. He brought his hand to its neck, searching for a pulse, and felt the blood pounding steadily beneath the skin.
“Can you understand me?” he asked it. But received no response.
Taking the lack of reaction as confirmation, Kizu then jabbed Sojan into the clone’s back. The blade slid right into place in the spinal cord, as if a perfect sheath.
Aoi jolted as if struck by lightning by his audacious action and obviously was about to start yelling at him again for destroying a piece of necrotic work.
But then the eyes flickered open. A smile split from the gnome’s lips.
“Now this is what I’ve been looking for.” Sojan pulled himself out of the vat the rest of the way and fell to the ground. Then stretched his arms, as if a cat awakening from a long nap, before he stood up and started leg stretches.
“What-” Aoi started, but Sojan cut her off.
“Finally. An actual body. Not a bad find at all. And the blood in this thing is juicy.”
“So, this works then?” Kizu asked.
“More than that. Whatever you did to this body is excellent. I don’t have to waste a shred of energy fighting back another consciousness. No soul in sight.”
“What is this?” Aoi said. “How did you activate the necromancer’s clone?”
“Hello,” Sojan said, turning toward her. He smiled devilishly. “Normally, I would ask you to stab something, but for once that’s already been taken care of. My name is Sojan.”
“How long will that body hold up?” Kizu asked.
Sojan looked pensive for a few seconds. “I believe I can keep this heart going for a long time. The body produces just slightly less than I consume. Having no other consciousness helps my efficiency. However, if I were to use any of the blood’s skills, I would be at a net loss. If I drink blood regularly from other sources, I can keep it up for a long time. But if I do that, it will muddle this blood’s efficiency.”
“You can use the necromancer’s spells?” Aoi said, brightening. She showed no abashedness while circling around the naked gnome’s body as she examined it. “So, you’re a portable soul in the form of a dagger? Are you artificially built? Or were you put there from somewhere else?”
Sojan yawned and flicked off a chunk of the yellow gunk from his shoulder. “Does it matter?”
“What do you mean?” Aoi looked outraged. “Of course it matters! I’ve heard of possession before, but nothing like this. This is breakthrough material! Soul mages around the world would cut off their limbs for such an opportunity.”
“A waste of blood,” Sojan said. “Instead, they should give it to me.”
“But you can use the necromancer’s spells?” Kizu asked, curious.
“Of course,” he replied flippantly. “You saw me use that Bloodlord’s spells back in the World Dungeon. But I would only be able to use about three of the highest-level spells before completely running dry. This body isn’t exactly a massive storage tank for blood.”
“What did you just say about a Bloodlord?” Aoi said, butting back in. Then she blinked and seemed to process what he had just said and redirected. “Actually, never mind that, can you teach me? Teach me the necromancer’s spells.”
Sojan scratched his bald head. “Nope.”
Aoi significantly deflated. But she recovered quickly as she continued to badger him with questions about his enchantments and the body.
Kizu zoned them out as he moved on to the other vats and removed the sheets covering them. These ones were smaller than the one that had held Sojan, but inside Kizu found other creatures, and parts of creatures, suspended in the same yellow ichor. Some of the specimens looked scaly, a bit like a Tainted, but to an entirely different degree. While Tainted had a few visible scales, these creatures instead had few places with visible skin. Even their heads were of a different structure. As if someone crammed a human’s skull into the mold of a lizard’s. Thankfully, the creatures looked as placid as Sojan’s new body had. Kizu suspected them to be soulless as well.
But the last tank held the most peculiar body part. A massive, reptilian foot, larger than Kizu’s entire torso.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked, while examining one of the claws jutting out from a toe.
“I’m not certain,” Aoi said, approaching it. “I think that this one wasn’t grown here though. It’s not like the others. You can see signs of a past life on it. Like, look at the calluses underneath.”
So, the necromancer probably slayed the creature and brought it back with him. It seemed like a reasonable conclusion. Judging by the foot, the creature looked too big to fit into the World Dungeon though. Kizu wondered if it came from off-island, or if it had been an ancient resident here.
“Are you planning on returning to The Great Labyrinth Sekai?” Sojan asked. “Is that why you finally decided to wake me up and fulfill your obligation?”
“No,” Kizu answered. “Why?”
“Oh. Funny coincidence.”
Kizu walked over to stand beside the nude gnome. Looking over his shoulder, Kizu saw what he stared at. Sure enough, there was a door behind a black curtain. Another entrance into the World Dungeon.