Being a true sub space bound to a physical object, the vault space was separate from Felix’s Soul Space such that he didn’t have direct control over it. What he did have however, was complete control over everything entering and exiting the vault space. Considering the lack of spatial knowledge in Azura as a whole, Felix was fairly confident it was the only way to get into the vault space too.
While nothing Felix had encountered during his time as a Damned had been much of a threat to him at all, the vault he had stolen from the Storm Sect theoretically held the most dangerous items. So, he started by sending in a swarm of his Seeing Eye Constructs.
His connection to them was hindered through the subspace barrier containing the space but, they didn’t need a connection anymore. Each one of them had a small capacity of storage space within them along with some amount of computational capability. Connected all together, they could do all the tasks Mark was doing for them, at least for a short period of time.
They still needed to return and Mark was still needed to stitch together everything they had scanned into a single cohesive picture but, it was still an improvement. Especially now that Felix was encountering actual Anima wards which, given their tiny size, was often enough to distort the weak signal the constructs sent and received.
With only minimal memory and compute, even collectively, the constructs shouldn’t have spent more than a few minutes in the vault facility mapping out the entrance. So, when 5 minuted passed, Felix began wondering what had happened. When 15 passed, he knew something had gone wrong.
Pulling the bound crystal out of his Soul Space, Felix placed it on the table in front of him and activated his Persona. Kerix had already been watching him during the heists so he was already aware of Felix’s Persona and, he seemed to be asleep.
In his Persona, Felix activated his Soul Cloak which provided him with an additional layer of spiritual protection while his Persona’s body and health pool provided him with an additional layer of physical protection.
Then, he took one last look at Kerix and the room around him before deciding no one was going to walk in on him, or more specifically Kerix and even if they did, there was no chance they knew what the crystal was. He left a few constructs attached to the network of Mark nodes throughout the city, just in case, but he also realized how pointless that was as he entered the vault facility.
The vault space was both exactly what Felix expected and nothing like he expected.
It looked like someone had taken any of the other vault facilities with their thick concrete like walls and floors forming a grid of vaults and shoved it into a sub space. The vaults were slightly bigger on average but not by much. The wards looked more complex but, it was hard to tell.
While the vault facility architecturally and structurally was completely recognizable, it had since been warped and taken over.
The first thing Felix noticed, was the Ambient Anima which was completely infested by something that immediately tried to take control of his body and infect his mind and drive him insane and make him laugh and make him experience immeasurable pain and countless other things.
It was both a huge array of different wisps of will trying to do influence him in different ways and at the same time, it was like it was a single entity somehow.
The lobby seemed to be largely unaffected by what had happened but the effect was more than enough that all of Felix’s Seeing Eye Constructs would have been affected. He wasn’t exactly sure how, until a swarm of black flew at his face.
His Seeing Eye Constructs were never meant for combat so their bodies were weak and they flew slowly and yet, somehow whatever was controlling them, had made them an actual threat. Not only were they flying far faster than they should have been capable of, but Felix immediately realized with his Matter Senses that their bodies were far stronger.
He Instinct Cast a Mana Barrier to protect himself and prepared a Force Spell to crush them but as soon as the Mana Barrier appeared, it began to deteriorate. Much like in his matches against River Ryko when he was cheating, Felix’s Mana forming the barrier was infected by willful Anima to the point where he began losing control over it.
The core of the barrier, a small area in the middle lasted long enough to block a large portion of the swarm but Felix was still forced to leap to the side to avoid the rest.
As he did so, he used the Devouring Aura of his Persona to push back the pervasive effect of the Ambient Anima and simultaneously cast multiple Fire Balls to destroy the swarm.
That took way more effort than it should have… I have a feeling that’s going to be a common theme in here.
Proceeding through the lobby, Felix made his way towards one of the shafts at the back of the building and looked upwards. The first floor and the shaft leading up to it looked untouched but beyond that, the building had warped and without somehow punching through it, he had no way of getting to the upper floors. He also wasn’t willing to risk pulling Nova or any of his Residents out of his Soul Space because even her upgraded Soul didn’t stand a chance in the building.
At most, she could have survived the lobby for a short period.
Flying up to the first floor above the lobby, Felix looked down the hallway and found that not a single one of the vaults that he could see, were shut.
Well, that explains some things.
As soon as he landed on the floor, as he was taking in the hall and all the open vaults, a mummified hand raced its way across the ground towards him. It used its fingers as legs and moved faster than Felix expected possible given how short the fingers were.
The hand moving by itself wasn’t particularly scary or worrisome. The worrisome part of the hand racing towards him, was the Aura it surrounding it. The hand exuded an Aura that would have driven most people insane as it yanked and tore at Felix’s Soul from every side simultaneously. Promising him power to try and sway the Anima of his Soul and simultaneously pulling on it more literally.
Though it wasn’t quite enough to harm Felix, at least in the first few seconds of him encountering it. The Aura was strong enough that given time, it would have an effect on him. It wouldn’t penetrate his Core Soular System or affect his Core Soul but it would slowly erode everything else around it.
As the hand leapt into the air and reached for Felix’s face, he grabbed hold of it with his Soul Tendrils, catching it before it reached him. Then he began to pull and tear at its Soul but he wasn’t strong enough, even with all his Soul Tendrils working together.
While he could just shove the hand into his Core Soul and it might have died there even with the body protecting the Soul, that wasn’t a viable solution for everything he encountered. It was also a strong possibility he encountered something on the higher floors, considering the strength of the pervasive Aura in the building, that he couldn’t just kill with his Core Soul, even if he managed to extract its Soul.
That meant, he needed some other kind of weapon to fight them with.
Luckily, he had spent multiple dekads slowly crafting himself a Spirit Avatar from Anima harvested from the ros he was stealing. Felix still wanted to work on it and add a bit of polish but it was his best option and good enough for the time being.
For the first time outside of practice and training, Felix projected out his Spirit Avatar.
It completely surrounded his body in Anima and formed a perfect, indistinct sphere, pushing the hand back a few meters. Then, two other spheres appeared and rotated around in a perfect arc, smashing the hand between them and shattering the bound Soul within.
Felix immediately absorbed the remnants of the Hand’s Spirit into the core of his Spirit Avatar then continued on down the hall way.
There were just a couple other items on the entirety of the first floor, a bag and a pipe of some kind. Felix dispatched them in a similar manner to the hand, by crushing them between two free floating spheres, before moving on. He quickly found a corner of the first floor where the ceiling had degraded enough that he could make it through due to a particularly strong acid that was nearly sentient.
His Spirit Avatar protected him long enough for him to get through at which point he ignored the Acid because it was too annoying chasing down a liquid.
The second floor of the vault facility had deteriorated even more than the first and many of the walls between the vaults had been broken open and in some of them, lay the remains of whatever had once been held within.
All that remained, were the items that had managed to survive.
Turning the corner and leaving the Acid behind, a large eye ball the size of Felix’s head with a triangular pupil floated in the middle of the next hall while a spear with a red hot tip flipped upwards as he appeared.
The spear immediately launched itself at Felix while the eye focused in on him with a rotating pupil before it released a massive beam of necrotic energy. A light blue-grey planet spun around Felix’s core body and smashed the spear into the ground before it reached him while a hole opened up in the Core of Felix’s Avatar revealing a window of Oblivion.
The similar necrotic energy was completely absorbed by the Oblivion just before the window closed and a red planet swung around, subsuming the eyeball before shrinking itself down slowly.
Lifting up off the sphere, the light blue-grey planet gave it just a moment to move, which wasn’t enough for it to escape, before it smashed down again and again repeatedly until the shaft of the spear finally snapped in two. At the same time, the floating eye ball was crushed as goop poured out and was released by the planet. It finally gave in and burst, the useless matter trickling to the ground as the Spirit that had been bound within was absorbed.
The light blue-grey planet along with the red one faded slightly from existence as they fell back into their orbits around the Core of Felix’s Avatar.
The Residents in Azura had collected and sifted through all the information they could find on Spirit Avatar’s which, was more than Felix was expecting. Some of the Residents that had infiltrated the families and sects weren’t just waiters and waitresses but rather, some of them were recruits.
Much of the information the families and sects kept for their own was his to peruse and though there were some secret techniques to do with crafting bestial Avatars or coordinating their martial arts, Felix wasn’t interested in any of them. Rather, a few patterns emerged from all the information they had gathered.
The most credible advice all centered around being true to the self. If the Avatar was something that didn’t represent the person using it, they wouldn’t be able to fully harness it. There seemed to be some variance but it was much like a Conviction, the more connected the Soul was to the Avatar, the more powerful and easier to control it would be.
For Felix, the information was useful but also confusing. He didn’t really know what represented him best. He had many questions about his past, though he didn’t think not knowing his past affected his ability to know who he was too much. He knew how he and his Soul reacted to various events and he was pretty sure that was enough.
What he didn’t know, was what form to pick.
He still considered himself human. Most of the experiences he remembered and many of his instincts were still based on his being a human. He also could have completely changed his body long ago, like Erolan, but he had avoided doing so as he still felt some kind of attachment to being a human.
At the same time, a humanoid Avatar felt wrong to Felix for some reason. While he didn’t want to change his body to appear or function any differently, he was more than just human. His Mind, Body and Soul had been altered well beyond that point.
He had thought about a comical Wizard form, a Book, a black cloaked Grim Reaper and even just a mass of Soul Tendrils.
Ultimately, he settled on projecting out the contents of his Core Soular System, or at least a representation of it because, he couldn’t think of anything else that better represented him. When Kerix was talking about Titan though, he mentioned something similar: ‘realize who you are and become that.’ Ever since then, Felix had begun to doubt his Spirit Avatar because realistically, he didn’t want to become a star system.
It just didn’t feel right. For the time being though, he was happy with what he had landed on, even if he was confident he hadn’t found its final form.
Smashing his way through floors, planets of Anima each formed from heavily refined concepts orbited around him, smashing into and obliterating various objects as he moved.
The first floor resembled the vault facility he had been working in for the last few dekads.
The second floor was similar but slowly falling apart.
The third was completely torn asunder with chunks of the wall floating in the middle of the hall.
By the fifth floor, the chunks of wall floating throughout the room were being split apart and reassembled before Felix’s very eyes, right before they launched themselves at him. Not all of them though, some of them attacked, others actually defended him. Many of the pieces of the building didn’t care either way and a few were just curious, approaching and brushing up against him.
Two more floors and the crumbled remains of the walls, floor and ceiling formed beasts and creatures, some possible and others not.
By that point, the floors and ceilings no longer existed and all the floors were connected into one open chamber. The ruined remains of the building however, were reconfigured. At first they formed simple rooms, that floated through the air with nothing attached to them. Then, they began to form the corners of entire buildings, though never what Felix was expecting.
There were bars with drinks and stools and even patrons, formed from the warded stone of the facility. There were stores with glass window fronts and mannequins, posed in various outfits. There were offices, schools, kitchens, alchemy labs and even server rooms, with stone computers.
Considering he hadn’t seen anything with that level of technology in the multiverse or even in the realms, he knew that the memory had to have come from somewhere else.
Despite all the floors being connected into one massive chamber there was still a gradual progression as he ascended. He couldn’t just fly straight up as the pieces of rooms and buildings grew larger until they subsumed almost half the footprint of the building and he was forced to walk through them.
They weren’t just dioramas of places either as the people formed from stone within them began to move, acting out common and repetitive actions. At a bar, a stone man took the last sip of his beer then placed his glass back on the bar. Then, he took the last sip of his beer again, and placed the glass on the bar.
A mother rocked her child in a way that seemed sweet at first but grew creepy when she didn’t vary her movement in the slightest over the course of a minute.
Felix was glad there was nothing attacking him anymore and his Spirit Avatar remained in its mostly inactive state, with the orbiting planets close to his body and the entire thing transparent and phased slightly out of existence. At the same time though, moving through the vault facility was getting eery and he was starting to miss random items just attacking him. That was simpler and easier to understand.
This, even feeling out the Ambient Anima around him, was just odd. The collection of willful Anima moving around and possessing objects with various personalities were still there but now, they were coordinated. In the school, he felt everything he would expect from a classroom of children. Joy, laughter, annoyance, confusion, embarrassment and a whole slurry of other uncontrolled emotions.
None of the willful wisps of Anima acted out though. The stone pencils didn’t float through the air, the chalk brushes didn’t attack anyone and even the people who did move, followed the script.
Finally finding the exit from the shadowbox of a grade school, a door that opened when the recess bell rang, Felix flew up another floor and suddenly what he was seeing began to click.
The room was a simple bedroom with a large bed in one corner, a desk and dresser on the opposite wall, a closet and a fan hanging from the ceiling. There weren’t any posters or much of anything lying around, other than a small pile of clothes that Felix often didn’t clean up in his childhood.
Though he didn’t immediately recognize it because it wasn’t any of the schools he had attended, the school he had walked through was from a television show he had seen a long time ago. The bar was the same, along with everyone in it.
Climbing out the window of the bedroom, Felix passed through hundreds of his memories. Houses he had lived in, parks he had played in, his schools, dorms and entire neighborhoods. Even obscure and unimportant memories like his own visualizations of books he had read, places from television shows and movies.
Then, as the shadowboxes of memories began to span the entire footprint of the building, he stopped recognizing places. He flew out the top of his Wizard’s Tower in his Pocket Home into what looked like a large clearing in a forest. In the center of the clearing was a mostly grey mask with gold leaves along the top edge, despite being made entirely from the same stone as everything else.
It wasn’t a special item in that it wasn’t real but it was special in that it was important to the memory and so it was given more attention for whatever reason.
The memory though, wasn’t Felix’s as far as he could tell.
On the opposite side of the clearing, a thin and young looking man stood next to a fully armored person and were clearly discussing something. They weren’t just repeating the same actions over and over again either, they were playing out a full conversation without words. Then, after a minute of discussion, the armored man stepped into the clearing and the mask began to rise from the ground.
Before anything happened though, the memory shattered and all the stone forming it returned to dust.
As it did, it revealed another scene, this time Felix was standing in a throne room with a king, a queen, a prince, a number of guards, a man with a quill and a book, a jester, musicians and some man in a robe, bowing before the king.
Almost everyone in the room remained motionless, though breathing, as the man bowing before the king spoke. Felix caught none of it as the lips didn’t move in any language he knew and he wasn’t sure they moved in any language at all. The man wasn’t even human or humanoid but it was hard to discern anything when he was made of a single colored stone.
The scene around him shifted a dozen more times, some of them seemingly significant and others rather mundane.
Felix assumed he was witnessing the memories of someone or some Soul trapped in the vault facility until, he found himself in a room he recognized. The meeting chambers of the Nealian Soul Cult, the room he had walked into when he had recklessly taken dreamer drugs in the realms.
The memories he was seeing were his. Or they belonged to whoever he had been before. The Wanderer, he suspected.
Inside the room, now that Felix could see more of it, there were exactly 16 individuals all wearing robes that completely obscured their bodies and faces. They all stood around a table on which lay a young girl, bound and unconscious.
Felix wasn’t exactly sure what he was watching but he was patient as they all began silently chanting and circling the body. Then, one of them carefully began shallowly carving runes all over her body. Finally, they all reached out and grabbed the air next to her body, then struggled to lift up and into the air.
Nothing happened with the stone but all of them seemed elated from their body language so he assumed whatever they had done was successful.
Then, the scene shattered and Felix instantly flew upwards as much as he could before another scene appeared around him.
This time, he was in a bar once more and he watched as two men, both human this time, talked over their drinks in a booth. The scene shifted almost immediately to them standing in a field, then shortly thereafter to the same two men standing in a massive chamber that was filled with hundreds of boards, all covered in equations.
For whatever reason, Felix was shown the entire relationship of the two men until finally, one of them left.
The scenes continued to follow that person as they moved from place to place with no apparent pattern to their actions. Finally, much of what he was seeing began to click when the man flew off a planet into space, then through space and into The Endless Hunger.
With a barrier that wasn’t represented by the stone completely blocking out The Endless Hunger that also wasn’t represented by the stone, the man soared through the space around the universe.
Then, something went wrong. He was attacked. The stone didn’t show what it was but Felix could feel it, as he could the Endless Hunger, a facsimile of the real thing on the Ambient Anima. It was a Creature of the Hunger though Felix had no idea how strong.
All he saw, was the man he had been following struggling in the fight and getting injured before running away at which point, the entire scene dissolved.
Instead of another scene though, Felix was placed on a completely flat platform that spanned the entire width of the building. In the center of the floor, there was a pedestal holding a promise that if he just gave in, he would be able to see it all.
Physically, the pedestal held a ring that looked to be made of thousands of glass strands braided together, like completely translucent hairs that were frozen in time.
Walking over to it, Felix took the ring and slipped it onto his finger without hesitation.
As soon as he did, the building began to crumble as items, remnants, spirits and willful shreds of Anima that had once been held in check, forced to play out memories, were suddenly freed.
The single massive chamber the top of the facility had become was no longer blocked by any rooms or floors the ring had created leaving open space for giant stone six eyed devil cat beasts to roam.
Felix fully manifested his Spirit Avatar and took on the pair of stone creatures first, smashing into each of them with different effects before returning the planets to orbit and rotating in other planets.
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The beasts were oddly resilient though and managed to free themselves after the first hits, leaping towards the core of his Avatar from either side.
Both of them were immediately knocked out of the air by more orbiting planets as Felix dropped down deeper into the fray.
Recovering from being hit, the cat thing to Felix’s left sunk its claws into one of the only walls remaining, the outer wall, and began skittering downwards, using the leverage the solid surface provided to dodge out of the way. Just before it closed the distance enough to leap again, it was smacked in the head by a broom that was flying the opposite orientation than Felix expected a flying broom to fly.
The broom began to vigorously clean the beast’s face and slowly tear away the stone from its body.
The beast on the other side never recovered after Felix hit it because it was immediately thrown into a suit of armor that closed around it with a crunching noise.
A large twisting and knotted horn sounded out, vibrating the Anima instead of the air and a massive fish made almost entirely of whiskers flew by. Before it made it across the room, a jug smacked it over the head and shattered, only to reveal and even larger jug, somehow. It continued to smash the fish but Felix didn’t stick around to find out how big the jug could become.
He had already wasted enough time in the vault and talking with Kerix.
Now that people had seen him, now that everyone knew what was happening and that it wasn’t a family or sect robbing everyone important in the city, they had to move fast.
The only reason he took the time to go through the vault facility they had stolen, was that he was hoping to find something he could use to gain power quickly. The ring on his finger had shown him his own memories and tried to use them to draw him in to put the ring on. He hadn’t known what it would do once he had but he was most confident in his Soul and Mind so he didn’t expect it would be able to do much.
Once it was on his finger, it stopped enticing him and seemed to lay dormant, just after fixing itself in place and making it impossible to remove.
Popping back out of the vault facility and leaving behind a massive mess he would deal with later, Felix stowed the crystal bound with the vault and found the room was exactly the way he had left it.
Oh oh oh ah yes. Keep goi-
Was that the ring?
Affirmative. Though the thoughts have all been source-less, it is not a stretch to assume their source in this case.
Felix looked over at a sleeping, and apparently dreaming, Kerix and sighed before leaving the room.
Filter all the thoughts from the ring and organize them. Surface them when useful.
Affirmative.
Just before flying off, Felix turned back around and poked Kerix awake.
“Uh… What? What’s going on?”
“Could you t-”
“Why do you look like a… star system?”
Felix looked down at himself then completely deactivated his Spirit Avatar, “Sorry, Spirit Avatar.”
“You decided to… make your Spirit Avatar a star system?” Kerix looked at him with a funny look before snorting and shaking his head, “Not the weirdest I’ve seen in the realms.”
“It’s supposed to be something that represents me, is close to who I am, right?”
“Uh… yeah, kind of. Ask the Acharaya.”
“Right. I’ll add it to the list.” Felix rolled his eyes and held out the orb, “Can you look at this?”
“What is it?”
“Soul Vault is what they were calling it on the outside. It came from in here and I haven’t been able to open it.”
Kerix took the Soul Vault from Felix’s hand and scrutinized it for a moment, turning it over in his hand before he nodded and handed it back, “Spirit Vault is close enough. This is an early version of something Rokrunor developed a long time ago, before the big lizard split the realms in two. It’s one of the things that’s made them famous but, no one carries them around anymore. Each one has a specific pattern you need to use to unlock it…” Kerix shrugged, “Or something like that. Without it, it’d be a real pain in the ass to open.”
Felix sighed, “Alright, thanks. I’ve got a few more things to deal with in the city then we can leave.”
Kerix nodded slowly then rolled back into a sleeping position, “You mean more places to rob? Just be careful, I’m not always watching and I don’t want to have to save your ass again.”
You didn’t say wouldn’t. Although, definitely not going to count on him considering how wrapped up he seems to be in his dreams.
As Kerix returned to his dreams, Felix flew off towards the Gera Family facility.
Initially, Felix had been worried about being recognized as people had seen him in and around the Storm Sect when it was hit. Whether or not they knew it was him, he was on the list of suspects.
His Residents had assured him though that it didn’t matter and he should fly out over the city anyways to their meeting point. As soon as he left the quiet and tranquil Ryko estate, he knew why they had assured him.
The entire city had been plunged into chaos.
Buildings had holes in them, people were running and screaming while others fought openly in the streets. It was like the entire place had boiled over and with no one to police the city, there was nothing stopping them from doing whatever they wanted.
Felix was honestly surprised it hadn’t happened before but one of his Residents, through Mark, corrected him as he had the thought. It had happened before, many times throughout Azura’s history, it just hadn’t happened in a while.
Flying over the Gera Family Compound, he saw another bastion of peace in the city, like the Ryko family compound. The Gera Family Compound was a series of large estates, like mansions all sharing a common front yard. It was also surrounded by a wall which, was keeping out the chaos in the city.
Landing on the far side, outside the wall of the compound, Felix met with a small collection of his Residents and a massive crowd of Mortalbane, Storm Sect and Ano Family.
As soon as he landed, someone in the crowd stepped forwards and pointed at him, cocking their head, “Hey, weren’t you there, in the vault facility when it was being attacked?”
Or did I meet him in one of the delves? Her voice sounded out in Felix’s mind.
“No. I recognize you from a delve a while back though.” Felix responded as casually as possible.
She nodded immediately, “Ah, my bad.”
I assume, given how it seems to have affixed itself to my finger, the ring isn’t helping me, is it?
Affirmative. That was one of about a million thoughts you’ve received since landing.
How did you know that was her thought?
We are organizing them by clarity and intonation, cross referencing that against your Anima Senses and distance to various surrounding minds.
Cool. Keep doing that.
Affirmative.
Turning to his Residents next to the crowd, Felix turned to the wall of the Gera family building and knelt down, perfectly replicating the choreography his Residents had designed. Synchronously, they all moved and danced, adding Mana and drawing out a ritual on the ground and wall.
As they did, a group of Gera family guards noticed them and began mounting a defense on the wall.
Ballistae with Anima infused bolts targeted them but Felix’s Residents mentally told him to stand down.
He trusted them and continued the ritual as the bolt was loaded and fired directly at him. Before it reached him though, a handful of Storm Sect members from the crowd leapt next to him, careful not to interfere with the ritual, and protected him with their Spirit Avatars.
Motalbane joined in and began retaliating as much as they could given the warded wall between them and the guards.
How much longer?
Just a half minute more.
Felix sighed, already having long since prepared the necessary Mana and Spell Form for the Aether Tunnel. He continued putting on the performance though as the two groups fought above and around him, protecting him from everything as he pretended to be doing something.
Once the choreography was complete, Felix finally opened the Aether Tunnel from the center of their fake ritual deep into the core of the Gera family compound.
As soon as it was open, Felix was almost knocked over by the crowd that poured through.
He managed to pull himself free from the onslaught of eager people and stand aside as the guards atop the wall watched in shock.
It took them a few seconds to finally mobilize and rush back into the compound to try and stop the people but the damage was done. They were smart enough to know it was futile, at least most of them according to their thoughts.
Felix only had to keep the Aether Tunnel open for a few minutes before the warded wall flickered out. It was the first task they had given the crowd, lying and telling them they couldn’t keep the Aether Tunnel open forever.
Once the wall was just a useless physical wall, Felix closed the Tunnel and the crowd simply leapt over, the second half of them pouring in in an instant.
Alone, Felix and some of the Residents he had been working with moved around the wall and opened another Aether Tunnel, this one pointed somewhere else entirely. Stepping through and closing it behind them, Felix and his Residents split up.
The vault was only a few seconds flight from where they landed and Felix began tearing down the wards on the door. The Gera Family vault was one of the few in the city that had Spatial Warding on it as well as Anima and physical wards. It wasn’t that they were secretly great enchanters either, it was the result of an old and secret alliance with Rokrunor who specialized in vaults which, was the reason they were the last on the heist list.
The wards on the vault were more annoying than Felix had anticipated. Not only were they redundant but there were both Anima and Mana wards covering everything. They relied on having a surface to exist though so, Felix pulled his Secret weapon out of his Soul Space, his very bored familiar.
Nova happily dove at the wall and began burrowing through faster than Felix ever could have and in less than a minute, she had poked a small hole through the wall. As soon as she did, chaotic Aether and Anima rushed towards the hole and out of the vault. Felix used his Aura and will power to hold it back then, directed Nova through her senses to manually dismantle all the wards within the vault and the vault door.
Thankfully, he didn’t have to worry about the Gera Family or the guards at all because his Residents had specifically planned things so they wouldn’t be near the vault, a scheduling mixup. If and when they got an alarm or notification that the vault was breached, there was a crowd of thousands that had been directed between him and them that they would have to get through.
Finally breaking the seal, Felix opened the door and pulled Nova back into his Soul Space, despite her complaints.
He was immediately glad he did and instantly activated his Persona, despite the dangers of having it recognized, along with its Soul Cloak as the entire estate around him, dissolved in an instant. Suddenly there was nothing between him and the outside world except a cloud of pure death as his body was slowly torn apart, atom by atom.
Activating his Spirit Avatar to provide a bit more protection, Felix pushed himself forwards one step at a time until finally, he reached the two thick bands in the room and grabbed hold of them.
They were each a few inches thick, made of some unknown material. One was a bright white gold that glowed and the other, a dark purple and blue. As soon as he pushed his arms inside of them, the two bands cinched down on his wrists, fusing themselves to his body.
The cloud of pure death around him began to fade as instead of the room, the deep Aether and Anima poured directly into his body.
He didn’t have the time or free willpower to stabilize what was coming out of the bracers so he simply directed them both back into the Kryptos Respository in his Soul Space for the time being. With an outlet for the bands, they were much easier to deal with but, they still tore through his arms as they moved through his Soul.
On one side, the chaotic Mana, as dense as matter, from deep in the Aether tore through his physical body, destroying most of his arm before he directed it into his Soul Space and the open Kryptos Repository within. With it directed, he was only missing the inside half of his arm, hollowing it out, as he, with the Blood Ring’s help, repaired it just as fast as the bracer destroyed it.
On the other side, the wisps of intent from deep within the Anima poured into his Soul, re-configuring the matter of his arm into complete randomness while also poking holes throughout his Soul. Once it was directed, he pieced his Soul Barrier back together over his skin and just contained everything else within it for the time being.
Then, he pulled an item out of his Soul Space and activated it to open an Aether Tunnel back out of the building, as he didn’t have the focus to open one himself.
The bands weren’t the only treasure hidden on the estate but they were the most significant and the only ones Felix really cared about. Everything else of import that belonged to the family, were hidden away in the vaults of Rokrunor, due to their familial connection. The bands were used to power much of the facility though, which was why they were there instead.
The last place in the city worth robbing was Rokrunor.
There was also the House of Promises but they just held massive amounts of ros which, still paled in comparison to Rokrunor. If Felix had more time and if the heists had gone according to plan, they would have hit the House too, much to Aela and Kether’s chagrin. As it was though, they decided to cut it out of the plan and skip right to the most important target.
Despite the complete chaos that had consumed the city, the Rokrunor facilities were largely ignored. Not only were they generally respected and held much of the cities wealth within their vaults, meaning everyone had something to lose by messing with them, but they were also by far the most secure.
They had created the wards on the Gera Family vault and were one of the few factions in the city that had any knowledge of anything Spatial. They had also, long ago, created the Soul Vault which Felix still had yet to open.
Assuming they still had a similar level of knowledge and skill as when they had created the Soul Vault, there was no chance Felix could break into the vaults. The vaults were larger, permanent structures which meant they would completely eclipse the Soul Vault in level of protection.
Initially, they had planned on slowly draining their wealth with a competing bank that the Wanderer’s Lab had already started on. Now, there was no time for that and they were going to have to come up with something else entirely.
With his Residents all working together within his heavily time dilated mind, it wasn’t like he was completely winging it but, there were still many unknowns, like where any of the vaults actually were.
What they did know, was that the ros refinery was the core of the Rokrunor operations.
They also had managerial offices throughout the city but his Residents were confident those were nothing more than they seemed. Given their knowledge and the Soul Vault though, there was no guarantee.
Luckily, with the way the city had devolved into looting, the Rokrunor security protocols kicked in which mandated all employees above a certain level seek refuge within the refinery. Given that, Felix and his Residents were comfortable making the gamble that there was nothing important in the empty managerial buildings that had been abandoned.
He had a number of Residents poring through them anyways in case there was something interesting amongst the records that had been left behind but they weren’t expecting much.
Not everyone was on board with the fighting and looting in the city and a large portion of the population escaped which meant all the known rifts leading out of the city and back into other realms were packed. Felix’s Residents had found a few that weren’t registered and so he took one of those which led back three realms. Then, he flew his way back up to the 2498th realm, the realm before Azura and the one housing the Rokrunor ros mint.
The realm he had arrived on was almost completely empty and remained unaffected by the events within the city. Moving up to the 2498th though, Felix was expecting the fighting to leak out. Instead, the realms other than the 2499th with Azura, were completely untouched.
There were people moving through them but there was no chaotic fighting and looting like in the streets of Azura.
Given that, it made sense to Felix why Rokrunor was happy being so close to the city when chaos broke out within.
Despite the people migrating away from the city, the Rokrunor mint was completely quiet as whether or not someone wanted to withdraw their wealth, the building was closed for security reasons. Unfortunately, that meant it was going to make it nearly impossible for Felix to sneak in.
While Felix nor his Residents had known about the ring in the Storm Sect vault facility, they had known about the bands he had just stolen from the Gera Family.
It would have taken Nova hours, if not days, to get through the ceiling of the Rokrunor mint embedded within the ground. His new bands however, were a lot more destructive.
Standing on top of the massive flattened area of the realm, the ceiling of the Rokrunor mint, Felix reached down and redirected the band on his right wrist, letting it obliterate his hand in the process. He healed himself and fought back just enough so that it wouldn’t stop as the Aether poured onto the building below him.
It wasn’t quite as fast as the Gera Estate that had simple vanished as there wasn’t a huge buildup of Aether but it was far faster than if he and Nova had worked together. The material of the ceiling simply began to dissolve, changing state from matter to Mana like it was made of ice and he was pouring boiling water onto it.
He specifically didn’t use the Aether he had built up in the Kryptos Repository because he was saving that for later when he needed to be faster. As it was, he wasn’t even sure if they knew he was there yet.
Once he had gotten through nearly a meter of material, Felix let his other hand dissolve in the Aether and tore apart the Soul in his hand so that the other band could pour into the material beneath him as well. As they mixed, the Mana became less like a cloud of Acid as the Anima shaped and manipulated the Aether and Mana from the building dissolving.
The Mana formed tiny creatures, thousands of bugs that ate at the building, Fire, Lightning, Force and every form of energy Mana could produce. It also formed tiny fragments of Spells, most of which Felix had never seen before. It felt a bit like he was looking into the Curse of Desire and it was showing him knowledge he could have if he just gave in.
It was less purposeful though and the fragments weren’t nearly big enough for Felix to get anything from them.
The interaction between the two didn’t affect their ability to tear through the building though and in seconds, he was through the ceiling, both material and wards, Mana Enchantments and Anima Enchantments.
Dropping into the building, the flashing lights and loud alarm noise immediately told him that they knew he was there so, he chose a random direction and started flying, handless. He didn’t bother redirecting the band and repairing his hands so as he ran, a trail of chaotic Anima and Aether poured out into the hall, slowly dissolving everything around him.
It wasn’t concentrated enough to destroy everything or anything quickly but it was enough to strip the walls and some of the wards on and within them.
As he ran and the wall dissolved behind him, the layout of the building slowly revealed itself to him as his senses began penetrating the damaging walls and floors. He still didn’t have the spare focus or will power to open any Aether Tunnels himself but, he had a few items to make up for that in the meantime. Those items were limited though so he didn’t use any immediately.
Felix only managed to map out a tiny section of one floor of the massive facility when he first encountered a guard. It wasn’t a human guard though and instead, a Metal Elemental rolled towards him in the shape of a ball.
Lifting his arms up towards it, Felix poured Aether and Anima onto the floor before leaping out of the way at the last moment.
As the Elemental rolled through the hall where he had been standing, it began to dissolve, its outer layer slowly disappearing, like it was being boiled away invisibly.
It stretched itself out of its ball form and stood with four arms and legs, appearing more like a Construct than a creature as it slammed and jabbed in Felix’s direction. It’s spiked arm was far faster than he was though so he used one of his Tunneling items to open a Tunnel behind him and let the arm push him through it.
It penetrated halfway through his chest before launching him through at which point he closed the Tunnel and continued running. He didn’t have the regeneration necessary to fix his chest at the moment as all of it was going to wards his hands but he had enough focus to manually seal the area for the time being.
Whatever damage he took to his Persona would simply disappear when he reverted back to his original body at which point the bands would also fall off. He could put them back on immediately but he wasn’t sure he could handle them on his real body without the Blood Ring healing him constantly.
So, he had to destroy as much of the building as he could while he still had his Persona active.
He had 20 total Aether Tunnel items and used ten of them escaping various swathes of Elementals. Surprisingly, it was just Elementals he was dealing with and he hadn’t encountered a real person anywhere inside the building.
He also had no idea what he was looking for as the layout was endlessly confusing. He only had bits and pieces revealed all over the map and his brain, Mark and the Residents were all working as fast as they could to try and find some kind of pattern but there just didn’t seem to be one.
Every time he tunneled, he made sure he was opening it somewhere he knew there wasn’t a wall so he didn’t waste the item and, he pointed them as far downwards as he could.
In his frantic dash through the building, teleporting from end to end, he only once found an existing path from the floor he was on to a lower floor. Given he had to be able to sense the destination first, he was only moving down one floor at a time so, by the time he had run through half of his items, he hadn’t made it nearly as far into the building as he would have liked.
He didn’t want to waste the items and the Elementals were too frequent for him to stop and just burrow downwards so, he pulled the Kryptos Repository out of his inventory, activated his Spirit Avatar outside of his body along with the Soul Cloak, and opened the Repository to the combined pockets he had used to siphon from the bands.
Felix was instantly reverted from his Persona to his real body and as his senses adjusted, he realized he was falling, and the sky was bright. The two bands he had stolen from the Gera family along with the ring that read minds were falling next to him and he grabbed both bands, shoving them into the Kryptos repository without equipping them for the time being. The Mind reading ring, he immediately equipped onto his real body, given the value he had already gotten from it.
His Spirit Avatar was also gone and as he tried to reactivate it, he realized it wasn’t just gone, it was gone. It had been completely wiped out and looking down at the Devourer Rings he had equipped long ago, both of them were cracked. They seemed somewhat functional in that Felix was able to drain both but they were damaged enough that he wasn’t going to risk using them again so he removed them from his fingers and placed them in the Kryptos Repository as well, to be safe.
Looking around, not only was the sky revealed above him but multiple kilometers of the building in every direction was just gone.
If I had known it would be that bad, I wouldn’t have stuck around… Why was that so much worse than opening the Gera vault?
Pressure. Mark answered simply.
Right… The Gera Vault was limited in size, like a submarine with a hole poked in it. Only so much water is going to fill it. Combining a bunch of pockets in the Kryptos Repository is like the biggest submarine ever… Well, hopefully nothing is too badly damaged.
Finally taking control over his trajectory, Felix soared downwards into the refinery, past hundreds of floors that made him glad he had used the Kryptos Repository stored Aether and Anima.
Below him, he finally saw something that made sense, a massive open area filled with machines. On one side, the machines were rather small and there were many of them. On the other, there was a single massive machine and in between them, a gradient of size and quantity.
He and his Residents were confident the smaller machines were for refining smaller denominations of ros while the machines on the other side, were for larger denominations that were used far less frequently.
He also saw the first people he had encountered in the entire building, staring up at him in shock as half of the massive building above them had simply vanished.
Without a Spirit Avatar to protect him, a Persona to give him a second chance at life, Spells capable of doing much to anyone and any knowledge of the building itself, Felix felt an inkling of understanding as to what Grim meant. At the same time, he wouldn’t have done anything differently even if he could because the amount of joy and exhilaration he experienced diving into the unknown with no plan, was unmatched.
Just before he landed in the refinery, a map appeared in Felix’s vision of the building around them.
The ring has gathered enough memories from the people on this floor.
Felix chuckled at the incredible boon the ring that was trying to drive him insane was as he used an Aether Tunnel item to move himself across the building without landing at all. On the other side of the Tunnel, his map immediately began to fill out as more people fell within the range of his ring and he started running, saving the Tunnels to escape or save himself time when necessary.
With all the memories pouring in, do we have any idea why the building is laid out like a labyrinth?
None yet. It appears none of them know what the building is or why it is the way it is as many of them often ponder similar questions.
Damn. What about the vaults?
They do not appear to be on this level and no one here seems to know where they are.
Are there floors below us?
There are. Their contents are largely unknown.
Without any better direction to go in, Felix chose a path that wasn’t revealed and just headed in that direction. He continued to follow that pattern, revealing more of the map as his ring read the memories of those in the area until he found a path that no one seemed to know anything about.
Heading down the hall, there were no other nearby rooms and the hall was completely straight, a stark contrast to the rest of the labyrinthine building.
Felix was both expecting and hoping to find a vault as he wasn’t sure what else would be at the end of the hall but he realized he was wrong as the hall began to shift. Instead of the solid and nearly black material that made up the rest of the facility, the hall transitioned into a silvery metal with Mana filled channels running through them.
It reminded him of the realm where he had created the Fractal Mana Form embedded within his Core Soul and looked completely out of place.
The hall finally ended in a large open room made of the same silvery metal lined with Mana channels. There was nothing else to the room, no other entrances or exits Felix could see.
Any ideas?
We are working on mapping the channels however initial assessments indicate their structure extends far beyond the range of your senses. We are only aware of a small portion of the channels.
It took a few minutes for Mark and Felix’s mind to map things out far enough that a small portion of the building lit up in his vision.
Walking over to it, Felix pushed a small amount of Mana into the area causing the wall in front of him to split and slide open. On the other side of it, lay a hallway with rooms on either side. Flying down the hall, Felix saw workshops and labs on either side, all entirely empty save for the tools that were built into the rooms.
Some of them had tables, some had vices others had articulating arms to hold things in place.
It looked to Felix like either the building was abandoned or more like it was new and had never been used before.
As he moved, more of the building entered the range of his senses and the Mana circuitry began filling out. As it did though, the mechanics of what was happening in the building didn’t get any clearer. Opening more doors and moving through the new area though, they began to realize it was confusing, because it was all controlled elsewhere via a computer, a person or some other control mechanism.
They tried to follow the Mana circuitry to the source but they couldn’t exactly pick where the doorways were and the walls were annoying even for Nova to punch through.
Felix spent nearly an hour in the new area, far longer than he wanted to especially once he realized there was nothing there. Eventually he gave up and used an Aether Tunnel to return to the Rokrunor ros refinery because the longer he waited, the more time they had to mount a defense.
Luckily an hour wasn’t long enough to deal with half of the refinery vanishing so, Felix was able to run down another hall that remained unknown on his map.
That one led to a slimy cave that winded and branched out in every direction.
Mr. Felix. One of the Residents in his mind grabbed his attention.
What?
I believe this slimy cave is one of the dungeons in the 2474th realm. At least, it matches the description perfectly.
Wait… That can’t be… right?
I just… it… seems like it might be.
How can you be sure this isn’t just some other slimy green tunnel?
The layout perfectly matches the maps I’ve seen made of the area, minus the connection to the ros refinery.
That… seems like an unlikely coincidence… So that means… the ros refinery is attached to a bunch of dungeons… Why? Also… where are the vaults?
Knowing the slimy green caves were a dungeon that had been mapped and explored, Felix turned around fast enough that he didn’t feel it was necessary to use an Aether Tunnel. Heading back into the refinery, there were no guards grouped up at the dungeon entrance so he happily flew back into the winding halls.
Finally, after discovering another 5 dungeons, he found a way to the next floor down where, he found even more dungeons. Instead of being at the end of halls though, each dungeon was simply another door in the hall, like they simply replaced the offices that had been there.
He looked into them all but didn’t step into them at first until, he found one that stood out from the others.
The dungeon looked like it was located in the desert with sandstone walls and looked identical to all the others except, that Felix could feel immediately, it had been modified to have much stronger Anima wards.
Are they using the dungeons as vaults then? How does that make any sense if dungeon delvers are actively searching dungeons, especially necro-delvers? Also… What is this place that’s connected to dungeons on other realms?
The Residents are entertaining the idea that it is not that this facility is connected to dungeons on other realms but rather that the other realms are connected to dungeons that originate in this facility.
Okay, what does that mean though? What does it change?
The current theory, though with low confidence, is that this facility, either once or currently, creates realms and the dungeons are unfinished realms.
That… huh.