In the end, he decided that Mister Frankrein was the right person to talk to. He was an aging greybeard who instructed his cohort in advanced soul topology and had led several seminars on the system integration of summoned humans. Though Agardian usually skipped his classes, the man was as smart as he was unimportant, which was the ideal intersection as far as the Prince was concerned.
When he approached the old master after class, the man looked startled, and said, “is there something I can help you with mister Rhul?”
“Indeed,” Guardian agreed. “I have a small question about an …oddity I’m experiencing. With my Phylactry.”
“I… ah… see,” the man said hesitantly. “House Ruhl has many fine system priests. Surely, one of them can—”
“No,” the Prince said flatly. “The last people I want to include in this are my family.”
“I’d be happy to take a look then, but these things are not without risks…” mister Frankriein said hesitantly.
Agardian ignored that and opened his system up to the man, at least enough so that the man could take a look. This man was too old and soft to try anything, and he’d been at the heart of things long enough to know the penalty for failure.
That was how the Prince mollified himself while the man dug around looking for answers. The two of them spent the next few minutes in awkward silence while the Prince’s teacher tried to understand what might have been broken. He even used a few of the stranger diagnostic spells that the sages had access to to do it but didn’t seem to find anything definitive.
Finally, when he found no easy answer, the old man resorted to questions to try to pin down the cause. Had the Prince been hurt badly recently? Had his phylactery suffered any damage? Had he shared any unorthodox connections with his peers?
The answer was no, of course, even to the last one. Though soul sharing and other more dangerous pursuits were a popular form of narcotic experience among his friends, the Prince had no wish for such things. He didn’t want other people inside his head.
“Well, it’s hard to say then; it’s definitely hung up on something,” the teacher agreed. At this point your choices are probably to either download your copy from there or replace it with a new one.
“Download a copy?” Prince Agardian asked. “Why would I do that? I’m fine, aren’t I?”
“Well… You seem fine,” the Teacher agreed, “But in many cases like this, the system of the user is the problem. It would be far less dangerous if you simply downloaded the older known good copy of yourself first and…”
His words trailed off as he observed the horror on the Prince’s face at the idea. The idea of other people being restored from backups was all well and good, but him? He was terrified that he wouldn’t survive the experience. To the Prince, it felt almost like suicide.
A chill went down his spine as he recalled his brother Evesar. He’d been a bright young man until a few years ago when he’d decided to switch bodies to a new slave that he’d found that was highly compatible after he’d been disfigured in a train accident.
Something had happened in that, though, and he hadn’t come through it intact. Instead, Agardian had been forced to watch their house executioner perform a mercy killing on the young man when he opened his eyes and proved to be little more than a drooling vegetable. The same fate had met the next three bodies that they'd tried to revive the young man in, to no avail.
Prince Agardian’s paranoia hadn’t left him since, and though his father had gone on to have other children and add to the constantly growing list of heirs, Agardian had always been concerned about foul play and the idea that he could be next.
If I attempt to restore myself from backup right now the same thing could happen to me, he realized. He looked from one button to the other on his system interface and back again before his gaze returned to his instructor.
Is he in on it? The Prince asked himself as he studied the man.
“You think I should restore from my backup image?” the Prince asked, his knuckles whitening as he balled his hands into fists. “Instead of trying to force a new image upload? Wouldn’t that prove the same thing but with less risk?”
“Well, you don’t want to replace that copy until you have a new Phylactry,” the old man nodded, “While not without risk, the easiest way to verify that everything is correct would be to use the most recent true copy you have. After all, the copy reads as normal; it's your current version that—”
Prince Agardian had heard enough. He proceeded to do exactly the opposite of what he was advised. A glitching interface, risky advice… it was all too convenient. Someone wanted him to obediently walk to his doom, and he was less than interested, so instead, he pushed the command for the wipe and full backup update instead.
As he did so, a shriek of defiance rang out in his head. “No! What are you doing! Stop this at once!”
The voice was his own, well - it was Prince Agardian’s anyway. It was only when he realized that Benjamin realized he’d been lost inside the mind of someone else these last few weeks.
Suddenly he knew what that number was climbing, and why it was horrifying. Thirty Two percent. That meant that in addition to the damaged area’s this ghost had eaten almost a quarter of his being in effort to return itself to life.
The thought filled him with rage as he watched the phylactery updating as it should. In only a handful of seconds, the full copy of the Prince that had existed was replaced with the mutilated part-Benjamin-and-part-Agardian copy.
“You sought to replace me, and now you yourself are replaced! You can copy no more than you already have. I have overwritten you!” Benjamin taunted, disguising his relief that he’d escaped a fate worse than death by only the thinnest of margins.
The professor looked at him in shock, trying to understand what was happening, but he wasn’t real. He was just a memory, and he was already fading. Instead, he was replaced by a thin apparition of the Prince.
“You think a mongrel like you can ever defeat a pure blood like me?” the haughty man growled.
“I think that even if you weren’t the smaller part of y soul, you wouldn’t stand a chance!” Benjamin shouted, surprised by the amount of anger that was pouring out of him, as he balled up his fists and stepped forward to punch the Prince in the mouth.
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He’d expected to feel the sharp, stinging pain of his fist contacting the other man’s face. That didn’t happen, though. Instead, at the moment of contact, they fused.
Benjamin had a moment to feel both of their surprise at that, but then they were warring with each other. They were neither Benjamin nor Agardian now. They were two desperate voices in the hurricane that was their broken, twisted soul.
The status display might have read 99.7% complete, and the soul damage debuffs might have finally disappeared, but none of that mattered. Right now, all that mattered was who would come out on top.
For the first few minutes, despite everything he said, Benjamin was losing. He was simply caught off guard by the fury that his opponent fought with. The Prince had become pure outrage over the loss of his copy, and as a result, Benjamin steadily lost ground. Though he didn’t have the mental bandwidth to pull up an indicator, he was sure that, at least for a moment, that man’s intrusion into his very core reached dangerously close to fifty percent before he pushed back.
This mind and body could only ever belong to one of them, though. So. they each attempted to bury each other in their own sufferings. Benjamin taught Agardian what it was like to starve and to have your childhood stolen by an alien system. The Prince, in turn, taught him what it was like to be tortured by a demanding father who always expected more and nearly died of an overdose after consuming too many narcotic potions.
None of it was enough to make the other give in. No matter how terrible a personal pain was, there was always someone else who had suffered worse. Benjamin could shred the Prince with slivers of scintillating songbirds, but the Prince could bathe him in soul fire or show him exactly how painful flesh sculpting could be when one pursued the perfect body.
That world swirled around the two of them as they wrestled and clawed and fought for control. They weren’t two different people, though.
They were an amorphous mass of limbs, and when they ran out of other slings and arrows, they assaulted each other that way in a terrible bout of inhuman violence that constantly twisted and morphed.
It would have made more sense for two Siamese twins to try to murder each other. Despite that, though, the two polar opposites fought and struggled while the world swirled around them in a broken maelstrom of locations.
The soaring central spire became the snow capped peak of Mount Whitney. This, in turn, shattered into the mountain range of a city that was the capital, only to continue decaying and collapsing until it was only the garbage strewn streets and infinite strip malls of downtown Burbank. Each of them fought for their home turf advantage as they struggled to impose their will on the other to no avail.
One minute, they were in a lecture hall at Benjamin’s university, and the next, they were back in Prince Agardian’s academy. Event bled into event and location into location, to no avail. At least not until Benjamin tried to change his flesh into something distinct and different.
Until that moment, they shared everything, but he quickly realized that there was still one vital difference between them. Only one of them had been touched by the fae.
Even as more and more of Agardian’s hands appeared and wrapped around Benjamin’s throat, he seized that seed deep inside himself and willed it to sprout. It did exactly that, growing out of his gasping mouth even as the over version of himself tried to choke the life out of him.
“No, you don’t!” the Prince yelled. “I won’t let you escape me!”
For a moment, Benjamin remembered the face of Lord Varris’s apprentice as he choked to death on those awful red flowers that the Arboreal Throne’s arrow had sprouted. The sapling that was growing out of his throat at the speed of a deranged time-lapse movie wasn’t choking Benjamin, though. It was letting him breathe.
Even as his jaw cracked, and his flesh began to melt and decompose, he breathed through each new leaf as the tree grew taller, moment by moment. That by itself was enough to weaken Prince Agardian’s grasping hands. They were strong, but not nearly strong enough to choke the life out of an ever widening tree.
That was the wedge that finally split them apart into two separate individuals once more. The Prince had to let go when Benjamin’s roots began to penetrate him, and the man’s skin began to rot because it was still attached to Benjamin’s necrotic flesh.
That was enough to make the world around them end. One second, they had been caught halfway between two worlds as they fought on the lesser towers looming over San Francisco below them, and the next, the world was consumed by green-yellow fire as the Prince dragged them outside of existence and into the pits of hell itself.
Even as Benjamin’s leaves and branches began to burn, he ignored them, using the wooden way inside himself to travel back to Aavernia to escape the Prince’s attacks. The other man followed, of course. He had to. None of these battlegrounds were real places. They were just knowledge and experiences vying with each other for supremacy.
While they were merged together they knew everything the other knew, in theory. That’s what had made the conflict an unwinable morass. However, now that they’d pulled apart they fell back on their own individual experiences once more. That was when Benjamin knew he was going to win.
Though he couldn’t hope to remember everything he’d forgotten about the Prince, he knew that the man was not the most apt pupil. While he might know something of demonic summoning and rune magic, he knew almost nothing of the wider world and the strange creatures that dwelt within it.
Benjamin didn’t have that problem. He knew enough about the demonic creatures his opponent wielded to counter them, but he wasn’t limited to them. Instead, he could always find a new tool to deal with them. The Prince started small, with packs of flame beasts and swarms of Asmodean flies. Benjamin countered with the lesser elemental that he’d fought so long ago, switching between fire and ice as necessary to maintain the optimal advantage against each creature in turn.
When those monsters fell, his favorite dragon burst into existence and razed the whole battlefield with fire and brutality. Not even the flames could burn down the endless Sea of Grass. The Prince had no idea that the roads that crisscrossed it were for safe travel as much as to restrain the place like one might tie down a giant when it sleeps. So, no matter how fast it flew, it had no way to reach Benjamin across the infinite landscape or to catch every band of centaurs that raided the thing again and again with their powerful arrows.
He was not the tactician that had tamed those places. That much was clear. Though it took a thousand lives and ten thousand arrows his dragon eventually fell from the sky and landed in a heap on the scorched earth. That in turn blossomed with a thousand flowers as their roots tied down the abomination so it could not rise again.
There were other monsters after that, but when the Prince so causally tossed away his trump card, certain that it was invulnerable, Benjamin knew that he’d won. Ice giants, flaming hydras, and ghost jellyfish were dangerous, but not as dangerous as packs of wolven or the endless waves of rebellion that Benjamin commanded.
Battle by battle, he regained control of his mind, and after their endless epoch of conflict, when his alter ego was battered and broken and pinned to the ground by elven magics, Benjamin finally stomped over there as the giant treant he’d become and devoured the man whole.
It wasn’t difficult. The hardest part was stomaching that this man would forever be a small part of him. But that was a choice that Benjamin had made at the start of all of this. He had chosen to devour the spiritual heart of his enemy in return for a measure of his strength, and he would have to live with that.
Still, as his imaginary world, for one, slowly unraveled and returned to the basic system interface he’d grown so used to, he could see that much of the terrible damage he’d done to his soul up until now had been repaired. Now, the light green and the dark green of his two halves blended together like some post-modern yin-yang symbol.
Some small part of Benjamin knew that he could fix much of the damage that had been done by all of this when he got out by simply recopying pieces of himself from the backup he’d made previously. He wouldn’t do that, though. He knew he wouldn’t
In the grand scheme of things, he still felt like himself, and any further editing might alter that delicate balance. Besides, he had many of the answers he’d been searching for up until now, and if his deal with the devil ended up with him becoming at least partially a devil himself… well, that was expected.
He seemed to recall becoming a monster after you stared at one long enough, but as with most things, it evaporated as soon as he focused on it. Maybe I can restore myself when all this is done, he thought idly. He certainly couldn’t do it now. For what came next, they would need a monster, and that was not a role he would foist onto one of his friends.