Kal hung from his binding as the last round of his focused regeneration cycle finished. He had been interrupted several times by either Hemdal himself or one of the other Uton followers but Kal’s plan had worked.

With his wounds still open and weeping they dared not risk attempting to use their skill against him and simply gathered several blood samples from his wounds. Only the binder was willing to use their Thread Trace skill. Kal had fallen into a rage at the sight of them but he managed to just barely keep his will to his own and only made a token effort at resisting the skill.

Luckily for Kal, it was apparently quite difficult to acquire a skill capable of reading a person’s attributes or resource values. Leo had a skill that ‘as he explained it,’ allowed him to see the flow of resources through a person. It didn’t sound like an exact science to Kal but it had helped him tutor Kal for the time they had together.

Again Kal’s mind began to wander into darkness at just the thought of another person so Kal dragged his mind to his status to see his progress.

Kalum Lesta

Status

Class:

Slayer of Fate [Epic] [Anomalous]

Level:

77

Race:

Human?

Health:

453/4870

Stamina:

0/7440

Wrath:

0

Attributes

Strength:

733[-190] Containment

Agility:

275[-185] Containment

Endurance:

574[-170] Containment

Vitality:

292[-195] Containment

Intellect:

642

Perception:

507

Will:

1365

Wisdom:

614

Kal grinned and let out a self-satisfied growl by accident at the sight of his recovered attributes. The damage to his mental attributes had taken their toll and he already felt significantly more in control. His soul still poured its influence through his entire body but now he felt he had some small hope in staving off its effects for a time at least.

Despite his best efforts his health had risen slightly but Kal suspected it was purely from the act of healing his scarred muscles. It was a risk but with a quick glance Kal could see that cosmetically his body was still a scarred and bloody mess. The cosmetic wounds still hurt but the pain was easily ignored with the strength of his body almost back to normal. Kal had a terrible urge to simply try and tear himself free of his chains and he was almost sure he could pull it off now but he knew that without dealing with the arrays it was probably a stupid idea.

However, now that his mind was more in his control Kal was relatively certain they could also be dealt with. Healing his mental attribute damage had been risky, to say the least, and Kal was pretty sure that if he hadn't been half delirious when he attempted he wouldn’t have tried at all.

Looking over what he had done frayed his nerves badly enough. Kal had essentially copied the guide knots of Wrathful Regeneration but specifically for parts of his brain and well, just looking at them he could see they weren’t perfect. Kal was well aware that his soul's influence was insidious and it was very possible the discrepancies in the knots were on purpose. A subconscious decision from his darker side.

Right now if it meant he was able to break out of this prison and save Jayne he would do it again but Kal decided to abandon that line of thinking.

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For the first time since arriving, Kal looked about his cell with more or less lucid eyes and quickly noticed a few things he had failed to realize earlier. One was that surprisingly he was still wearing To Spit in God’s Eyes and his Amulet of Dimensional Storage. The amulet made partial sense in his mind. It was a bound item which he supposed meant no one could either take it from him or use it themselves without killing him but To Spit in God’s Eyes was different. It wasn’t bound and its description mentioned nothing of it being difficult to remove.

Kal had lost everything else, even Exterminator’s Regards was lost somewhere. He didn’t remember having it after wounding the Shadow Lord but he hoped his captors didn’t have it. He doubted they would have stored it nearby but at least he still had his amulet and whatever weapons he had left lying around in there. Curious Kal attempted to activate his amulet but as expected the irritating warning flashed in front of his eyes.

Warning: Your mana has been sealed.

Warning: Amulet of Dimensional Storage requires mana matching the signature of Kalume Lesta Slayer of Fate.

“It's never easy, is it?” Kal muttered aloud, his voice reverberating strangely on the walls of his cell. The sound made Kal inspect the dark walls of his cell and for the first time in quite some time, Kal used Identify on the stone.

Nullstone [Mythic]

???????

“Huh…” Kal remembered days when he walked through his father’s collection of stones. Back then Kal enjoyed looking through the variety of beautiful minerals and even sometimes gems. He had stopped caring about that sort of thing when he had started living alone because he had felt betrayed. Now, however, Kal knew at least logically that that wasn’t the case. A wave of sadness washed over him, but the walls writhed, and his anger flared up to burn the emotion away.

Kal breathed hard as he reigned his mind back under control and focused on his next step. Nullstone was nothing he had come across before and certainly not something his father had stashed away. Without a more specialized skill, he couldn’t get a description of the stone, but the name was enough for Kal to get an idea. Everything in the cell was designed to restrict his power, no doubt the stone was the same.

If he had to guess it probably dulled mana-based skills so it was probably unlikely his Flames of Wrath would do anything to the walls, not that he had access to that right now anyway but he suspected if a mage was able to break free of their cuffs they would be delayed by both the array and the stone.

“So… Cuffs, arrays, then the door. Simple enough,” Vocalizing his steps helped hold his mind in the present. The order of his breakout was up for debate, however. Even if he got the cuffs off, with the foreign mana pressing down on his core even if he killed several guards on his way out, he doubted his wrath would last long enough to use any of his skills for any length of time. The only one he would be able to use would be Flesh of Iron, but it was useful enough on its own that Kal decided he would prioritize it in any case.

The cuffs themselves were linked together with a long chain that laid across his back and shoulders while the shackles were beneath the tightly wrapped chains that were connected to the walls of nullstone. With his arms bound the way they were he couldn’t bring his strength to bear on the cuffs without first breaking the chains first. He would have tried the brute force method first and simply tried to break free, but he had to keep in mind Hemdal’s skill.

If breaking the chain of the cuffs was enough to allow him to activate skills again, he could at least use Eyes of the Slayer to sever it, but the skills activation speed made him wary. It had to have something to do with the vial of what Kal assumed was his blood. Hemdal’s class Sanguine Keeper must get significant benefits from having a sample of their target's blood. Kal doubted that was the only reason they had taken his blood, but it was probably the first thing Hemdal did with it.

Worse yet it wasn’t only his blood. Jayne’s had also been taken and the thought of it made Kal’s vision darken. Kal would just have to kill the prophet before he got the opportunity to use the blood. He doubted Hemdal was physically strong. Very few of the demons or people he had come across diversified their attributes very far, but his class sounded like it had to be at least rare and probably epic. So, Kal could assume the man had at least a similar amount of class and free attributes to spend. That left the main difference in power to their titles.

If Nyx was right and her six titles were uncommonly high Kal doubted, he had much to worry about there. People simply seemed so weak. Weaker than they should be. Or was he really that much of an outlier?

Without Eyes of the Slayer and no way to inspect the cuffs, Kal moved his attention to the array. Again, Eyes of the Slayer probably would have helped but at least he could still make out the arrays with relative clarity now that his perception was unhindered.

From the look of it, there were three circular arrays with diameters starting at ten feet and increasing by a foot each circle after the first. But of course, it wasn’t as simple as that. The arrays were standalone, each of them was connected in subtle ways. The first array was actually quite easy to recognize since he had created one much like it himself.

It was a mana exclusion array that both prevented atmospheric mana from entering the circle and expelled mana that was already present within. It was both bigger and more sophisticated than what he had managed to protect Nyx and Ander so before he went any further Kal tried his best to memorize the design though he likely wouldn’t use the whole thing. Several runes around its edge were linked to the next array which at first Kal thought was an anti-scrying array but he was only half correct.

The second array had several additional runes compared to the mana exclusion array and annoyingly Kal didn’t recognize half of them. Really, he only thought it was an anti-scrying array because the few runes he recognized were perception runes and similar directional runes to manipulate them. It was certainly possible he was completely wrong. Kal suspected it was this array that was preventing whatever it was that allowed him to discern the function of different runes and constructs unless, of course, it was skill-preventing cuffs.

“Looks like I'm doing it the hard way,” Kal sighed, still focusing on the runes. He would have to start poking at it eventually, but he didn’t want to put a foot in something he wasn’t ready for, that had already happened too much for his liking.

“What else could this array be for? Why are they linked?”

Kal kept up his scanning of the arrays for several hours only pausing when he felt his soul and anger rise up to hamper his thoughts. How he had recognized the third array as a dampening array so quickly when he had arrived earlier, he wasn’t quite sure. He didn’t recognize any of the runes besides directionals but with the containment effect on his physical stats, Kal was willing to assume he, or at least his soul, was correct.

Even after hours of scrutiny Kal couldn’t help but feel like he was missing something. Alone each of the arrays would have worked without any need to be connected as they were. Each array had its own individual mana gathering runes, so it wasn’t an issue of power requirements. Kal did his best to follow the linking of runes more carefully one final time, taking care to follow the intended flow of mana throughout and that was when he found the anomaly he had been searching for.

Not only were the arrays connected. They were connected in such a way that if any section of runes was bypassed or broken there was always at least one path for the mana to complete its circuit of the runes by first passing through the ‘anti-scrying’ array.

It wasn’t an anti-scrying array at all. It was an alarm and following the runes carefully Kal found something else. Four runes on the outer array pointed outwards as if to an array he could not see.

“Damn it…”