For a time, all that Benjamin and Miku discussed was summoning and demonology. She could tell him about any creature that he could describe, but that was it. She understood how they were actually summoned only incompletely by watching Lord Jarris and later Ethan. Demons, it would seem, were not given systems. That was a privilege for humans only.
Benjamin wondered why that was, but it was a purely theoretical question, so for now, he ignored it. Instead, he focused on Ethan’s system and learned as much as he could from it by reviewing each spell while his bound demon sat quietly on her hands and waited.
NAME: Ethan Ralphs
RACE: Human
CLASS: Summoner
LVL: 5
EXP: 14,247/16,000
BPs: 1
Mind
INTELLECT
12
WILL
7
MANIPULATE
14
Body
AGILITY
8
STRENGTH
10
APPEARANCE
8
Soul
ANIMA
12
SPIRIT
14
CHARM
13
RESOLVE: 59/59
HEALTH: 68/68
MANA: 88/96
STATUS EFFECTS:
Life Bound: -5 Wil, -50% mana cost to support summoned demons.
Mutilated: -5 App due to poorly healed wounds and other deprivation.
SKILLS
Magic (Runic):64
Knowledge (infernal): 37
Subterfuge: 33
Resist (Physical): 42
Dodge: 20
Team Work: 05
Diplomacy: 3
Leadership: 10
Awareness: 20
Resist (Social): 15
Survival: 15
Athletics: 10
ABILITIES
Diabolic: Summoned demons are 25% stronger.
Rift Walker: +30% distance per mana spent to open a rift.
Spell List:
Arcane Armor (4 Mana): Absorbs 10 damage per level before disappearing
Bloat Fly (5 mana/eye): Summon and control a bloat fly for up to an hour, spying on whatever you direct it to observe for up to an hour.
Distant Messenger (3 mana/message): Use a mirror to traverse space and deliver a short message to the recipient of your choosing as long as their location is generally known.
Illusion (lesser) (1 mana/minute): a convincing short range illusion that makes something look like something of similar size and shape.
Illusion (complex) (3 mana/minute): a convincing larger illusion with simple repeating animations and other adaptations to make it more seamless.
Incandescent Army (5 mana/flaming): Summon one or more flamlings for up to ten minutes to fight on your behalf. Resistant to physical attacks.
Noxious Hydra (8 mana/minute): Summon a large hydra capable of ripping even a determined foe limb from limb.
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Swarm of Devils (2 mana/per Asmodean fly): Summons 3 to 5 unintelligent Asmodean flies that fly to their target to murder it or die in the attempt.
Rift (lesser)(1 mana/mile): travel to a place you’ve been previously, up to 100 miles distant, with an accuracy of 5% of the distance traveled.
The first thing that Benjamin noted was that they only had two spells in common. Well, three, technically, he decided, noting that he did have swarm of devils, however briefly.
That didn’t really surprise him, of course. There were literally thousands of spells in the Rhulvin system, and he probably hadn’t even seen ten percent of them.
Still, he took the time to review each one and save a copy of the runic structure to study later. He’d seen lesser rift before, but he still wasn’t able to make the thing work. The summoning spells themselves interested him more right now, though. All four of them had a lot in common. Basically, the beginning and the ending of each spell were identical; it was only the thing in the middle they selected that changed.
A little trial and error and a lot of questioning eventually led him to the conclusion that the spell basically had three parts: the summoning, the selector, and the binding. Once he had that framework, it was pretty straightforward. Each creature did a different thing; most of them didn’t seem to have much more intelligence than an animal, and the bigger they were, the more mana they cost to sustain.
In many ways, it was a much simpler system of control than their mind-controlled helots. Benjamin thought it was that simplicity as much as the obvious power of the demons that the Rhulvin preferred them. After all, a human probably couldn’t rebel, but a demon didn’t even exist except for the short time you actually needed it. It was like having an app for every occasion.
There was no way to track time, but Benjamin was certain that he spent days digging into the ins and outs of his friend’s system and peppering his bound Rakshasa with questions about the nature of hell and summoning until finally, she answered, “Enough! You know everything I know about this already and more. Why not simply release us from this boredom so we can get to the fight?”
“Oh? Is that your true hell?” he asked. “Boredom?”
“I can endure anything longer than a mere human,” Miku laughed, “but you’re just going to kill me anyway, so I’d rather you just get on with it.”
“Well, you murdered me at least once and made me think you were holding my family hostage, so you’ll forgive me if your opinion of what you think needs to happen next is pretty low on my list of things to do.”
“At least let me change this scenery then,” she said, gesturing broadly. “We could be anywhere, but we were in a stuffy old room. I could show you the capital city or even—”
“No,” Benjamin interrupted. “The last thing you need is another chance to kill me. We’re here until I’m done, do you understand?”
After having more time to think about it, he realized just how dumb he’d been to let her reset the battlefield even this much. The next place she made for them might have nerve gas or no air at all. He couldn’t order her around if he couldn’t make her hear him, and he was sure that she’d had long enough to come up with the same thoughts.
Miku probably had ten different plans to escape now, and all she needed to do was find a way to get him to loosen her metaphorical bindings just a little bit, and she might find a way to gain control. He no longer hated her for it. It was her nature.
“I do,” she answered, “but I would like to know how much longer that could possibly be. What do you possibly have to gain here?”
“Gain?” he laughed. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?” she asked, looking at him in confusion.
“I’ll bet you just use this power of yours to torture your enemies, don’t you?” he asked, looking at her with disdain.
“Well, it also makes a wonderful place for me to entertain my masters…” she answered in a tone that was as seductive as possible as if she somehow had a shot at enticing him after all the terrible things she’d done. “Ethan and I spent many cold nights spending days at a time in here just—”
“Yeah, gross,” Benjamin said, quickly cutting that thought off before his imagination could get tangled up in her kinky shit. “I’m not interested in either of those functions. Surely your other master, Lord Jariss, used it for other purposes, though, didn’t he? He seems like a smart man. It seems like this would be an ideal place to study a new spell or prepare for a battle.”
“Why would a Rhulvin Summoner Lord care about time?” she smirked. “Do you really understand nothing? As long as they can switch from vessel to vessel with their phylactery, they are almost as immortal as I am!”
“Yeah, well, that’s where you and he and I are different, I guess,” he said with a shrug, “Now be quiet so I can focus on what I need to do. We’re going to be here a long time.”
Even though he seemed like he was mad that she’d scored some cheap points on him, in reality, he was grateful. Despite the fact that he’d decided that he wasn’t going to tell her anything, for a brief moment, he’d been about to lecture her on how time was the greatest gift that anyone could ask for.
She didn’t need to know that, though. She didn’t need to know that for the last year, the one thing he’d truly struggled to find was enough time to do everything he needed to do. Even with the fivefold time-dilating effect of his codex, his list of features he wanted to experiment with and test was always growing faster than the list of projects he’d actually developed.
It was just the way of the world, but if he was going to kill her anyway, he might as well take full advantage of this moment. After all, in the days they’d been in here, a second still hadn’t passed according to status, and according to his party display, no one had taken any damage or used a spell yet, so they were well and truly frozen in amber.
Benjamin had asked his Rakshasa if there were any negative side effects from staying in here too long, and she’d said there weren’t. While he wasn’t certain that was true, the fact that she wanted to leave as quickly as possible certainly implied it was; after all, if she could truthfully give him a good reason to leave, she would definitely have done so already.
As far as he was concerned, that meant he could do as much as he wanted for as long as he could stand it, and the only one who would suffer was his one-time fox girl. That was something Benjamin could definitely live with. While he would never have overtly tortured her like she’d planned to do to him, sitting there silently for months or years while he worked on his to-do list was about right for him.
From that point on, that was all Benjamin did. Well, not all. Even his eyes began to bleed eventually, but from that point on, his world shrank to the size of the screen that he wove spells on. All he did was code and nap, then code some more. Even random conversations with Miku became vanishingly rare as he began to fixate on goals only he could see.
To her, this was taking forever, but for him, it was taking five times forever. They would sit in silence for weeks and months at a time as he floated freely from project to project, exploring everything to his heart's content.
He couldn’t do a lot of testing because he had concerns about using too much mana in a single instant with time on freeze and boiling the blood in his veins, but testing could come later. For now, getting a spell to compile without any errors was good enough.
Even with that, though, his projects were endless. He figured out how to make his focus run 10% more efficiently by restructuring the way mana flowed into it to lessen the heat it was going to generate. He figured out ways to make Matt slightly stronger and Emma a little faster, but those were all side projects that he worked on when he needed to take his mind off something he struggled with.
In a world where he had no forums to look up answers and no games to distract himself, all he could do was switch projects. Eventually, all roads led back to one of two things, though. He either worked on trying to understand the mage’s phylacteries or on adapting their summoning in useful ways.
Neither of these were things he’d been able to spare much time for on the road between battles because they weren’t especially practical, but now he could dig in as deeply as he wanted, much to Miku’s dismay. If someone had told Benjamin he’d spent a year researching the protocols involved in both, he would have been surprised.
In a world where you didn’t eat or drink, and sleeping was a purely recreational activity, he would have bet that he spent at least two or three years, and possibly as many as five, just crawling through the runic code and looking for parts he could understand.
It was time well spent. He figured out how he could summon pretty much whatever he had a name for, provided he channeled the spell through someone or something else since he could no longer use spells that required 10 or, 20 or even 50 mana. They were out there, though.
More importantly, once he cracked the code on the Prince’s Phylactry, he had a much better idea of how his soul was damaged. The amulet seemed to do a fairly good job of indexing something so large and holistic, so, for the first time, he could see which sectors of his own soul were truly ruined by comparison. Some of them were seemingly burned out, but others seemed corrupted.
He decided that the former was damage that he’d done, and the latter was the result of Dahilia’s healing efforts with her Heart of the Wild. There were a few others that were partway between the two, and he wondered if those pieces were in the process of healing or failing. It was hard to say for sure.
The biggest realization out of all that wasn’t even the fact that he figured out how he could put his soul into one of these things if he wanted to. It probably wasn’t the right way, of course, but he figured out that he could manually copy some or all of his soul over to one of those amulets with a script file.
It would be an interesting test for later, of course, but far more interesting was the opposite idea. Could he take pieces of someone else’s soul and install them in the bad sectors to fix them? It seemed insane, not to mention a terrible idea, and yet, as he looked at the glowing runes on his screen, it kept coming back to him time and time again.
The benefits were obvious enough. He knew that. Even half the soul damage he currently had would make a world of difference. Would the risks be worth it, though?