Zeke knelt in the center of his meditation chamber, unsure how he was supposed to feel. After finally reaching the peak of the realm, he felt a little lost. Adding to that was the latest notification he’d received:
Due to outside forces, level one hundred skill choice has been suspended. Break your chains to unlock your options.
He’d fully expected that the cage erected by Oberon around his divine power would restrict him from using any new skills. However, he hadn’t anticipated that the very choice would be suspended until he sundered that cage. Moreover, he knew he could probably break it if he truly lent the task his full power. Yet, he also knew that doing so would put him back in the same situation that had necessitated his patron’s interference. In short, despite reaching the peak, he was no better off than he’d been at level ninety-nine, save for a few stat points.
“Don’t underestimate those,” Eveline advised, breaking his meditation. “Each point counts for more than –”
“I know, Eveline. I know.”
“Then why are you –”
“Because I’m frustrated!” he growled. “Do you know what it feels like to strive toward a specific goal, and then when you reach it, you’re told you need to keep going for another mile? Or two? It’s beyond frustrating.”
“I understand.”
He sensed that she didn’t. As much as Eveline had experienced – and she was a wealth of information – she couldn’t truly understand how he felt. For years now, he’d been working towards reaching the peak. Certainly, he’d known for a while that his time in the Eternal Realm wasn’t going to end when he passed the threshold and into level one hundred, but he had expected some reward. The Framework had trained him well when it came to that expectation.
In a way, he felt like a dog who’d been trained to anticipate a treat every time he did a trick. And now, when he’d done just that, he found no treat. It left him angry and annoyed in spite of knowing the reason behind the lack.
In the end, it was almost comforting in the confirmation of his humanity. He wasn’t a human – not for a long time – but he maintained the foibles of his species. But just because it reaffirmed his humanity, and at a time when that characteristic seemed thin on the ground, didn’t mean that he found it any easier to endure.
Regardless, Zeke knew it did no good to dwell on it. He just needed a little peace and quiet to wrap his mind around his emotions and get them under control. So, he tuned Eveline out and focused on inner peace.
In the past, he might have used that time to work on runecrafting, but with his Will trapped behind Oberon’s cage, that was impossible. So, for the first time in a long, long while, he just let his mind go blank.
And he hated it.
With every passing second, his thoughts headed in one of two directions. Either he found himself contemplating the future – the still ongoing war against the Imperium, his active quest to upgrade the tower with the Hall of Affinities, and the task to find his way back to Hell so he could descend to the next circle – or he focused on the past and his many mistakes.
It was not pleasant.
So, only an hour or so later, he pushed himself to his feet and left the meditation chamber. The manor was much the same as always, so after spending another few hours trying to rekindle his interest in baking pies – and finding that he still lacked the patience to make it work – he headed to the Pillar. Along the way, he saw Pudge and Sasha sharing a picnic, but other than that, his way was unremarkable.
Eventually, after descending to the Residential District, he reached his destination, though he couldn’t fail to notice the looks of awe thrown towards him along the way. It wasn’t just the kobolds, either. They’d always looked at him with reverence bordering on worship. What was surprising was how the others – beastkin, elves, and even humans – looked at him.
Back on Earth, he’d often fantasized about being idolized by adoring fans. It certainly wasn’t the reason he’d worked so hard in his pursuit of baseball excellence, but it was definitely something he’d thought about. To hear tens of thousands of people cheering for him definitely held significant appeal. However, to feel that adoration first-hand was distinctly uncomfortable.
“You should get used to it. You know that, right?” Eveline pointed out.
“What do you mean? They’ll acclimate to my presence.”
“Oh, you’re not ignoring me anymore, I see. You know how hurtful that can be?”
Zeke sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just dealing with some stuff.”
“And I’m trying to help. You would do well to remember that,” she advised.
“So, you want to be my therapist, now?” he asked.
“Not at all, but I’ll play the role I’m assigned by your need,” she stated. “But I’d rather just be a friend. You need that, I think.”
“I have plenty of friends.”
“Most of which you rarely even speak to. You isolate yourself because you know you’re different,” she said. “It’s not conscious. You probably don’t think about it at all. But it’s there, all the same.”
“And that’s a mistake, I take it,” he said. However, while he wanted to, he couldn’t really argue with that assessment. More often than not, he preferred to be alone. The others clearly cared about him, but he’d slowly drifted away from his closest companions. He rarely even spoke to Pudge, much less any of the others. Perhaps that was a character flaw, but it was possible that Eveline was right.
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“Not really. Maybe. I don’t know,” she admitted. “My point is that nobody can go through life by themselves. It’s too much weight to carry on your own.”
“Maybe I should just open up more. Spend time with my friends,” he said inwardly as he climbed the Pillar.
“It probably won’t work,” Eveline said. “I’ve known some people who’ve reached the peak. They…drift away from everyone else. Slowly but surely, they isolate. It’s probably worse for you because of your power.”
“Not you, though, right? You were at the peak.”
“I’m different.”
“Better, you mean?”
“No. I was always isolated, Ezekiel. I had people around me, just like you. But most of them were there because they wanted something from me. That’s normal in Hell. Alliances aren’t uncommon. Demons are no strangers to loyalty, as odd as that might sound. However, that’s usually based on the hierarchy of power. The moment someone slips – even a little – those once-loyal subjects pounce,” Eveline said. “The only thing keeping them in check is the notion of consequence.”
“You mean biting off more than they can chew?” Zeke wondered.
“I mean that while they’re gorging themselves on the bodies of their former masters – metaphorically, of course – there’s always someone else waiting to pounce,” she explained. “Often, the only thing keeping the enemy at bay are alliances based on mutual enemies.”
“I see.”
“My point, Ezekiel, is that what you’re feeling right now is not going to end. It’s going to get worse and worse until you descend,” she stated. “After that…I’m not certain what will happen. The Ethereal Realm is one of gods, and I know very little of what you should expect.”
Neither did Zeke. When he thought of the next realm, he had difficulty imagining what it might entail. Were there people who’d been born in that realm? Or were they all ascendants? Logic said that it was the former, but Zeke had discovered that sometimes, logic wasn’t really in control of reality. So, making predictions was probably a good way to end up disappointed.
Finally, he reached his ultimate destination, and he found Silik, Kianma, and, of all people, Tucker huddled around a table.
“Ak-toh,” Silik and Kianma said, rising. Tucker maintained his seat, with his feat propped on the table as he leaned back in his chair. He did tip his hat, though.
“Tell me what’s going on with the war,” he ordered. Then, he added, “And hello, I guess.”
After that, Silik and Kianma explained that when he’d pulled the armies back, they’d been on the verge of entering the Imperium heartlands, which contained the region associated with the original kingdom from which it had spawned.
“What was it called?”
“Can’t remember, honestly,” Tucker said. “I heard it a time or two, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? It won’t be there once we’re done with it.”
“That is true,” Silik agreed.
“How much further will we have to go before we conquer the whole Imperium?” Zeke asked.
“There are ten major cities, nearly twenty smaller towns, and dozens of hamlets we’ll need to take before we get to the capitol. Once it falls, the war will be over. All except the clean-up. There might be a few hold-outs, but for the most part, they’ll be done,” Tucker stated.
“How much distance is that?”
“About fifteen hundred miles,” Tucker answered.
Zeke shook his head. The world truly was enormous. But then again, it probably needed to be.
“Are there any significant speed bumps along the way?” he asked. The two kobolds looked at each other in confusion, which reminded Zeke that the concept of speed bumps probably wasn’t universal.
“All ten of the major cities house at least a million people,” Tucker said. “They are significant population centers, and they’re probably going to be defended as such.”
Zeke sighed. He knew it wasn’t time to engage in strategy discussions. By his count, it was in the middle of the night for the tower’s odd thirty-six hour cycle, which was based on the one the kobolds had used underground. Which begged the question of why the three of them had been meeting.
When he asked, Tucker explained, “I need test subjects. I think I’m on the right track in helping the kobolds overcome some of their deficiencies, but I can’t know for sure until we engage in testing. The good thing is that they reproduce so quickly that once I figure it out, we’ll see results very, very quickly. A few years at most. Maybe a couple of decades to wipe out all traces of generational handicaps.”
“Damn,” Zeke said. It sounded like a long time, but on the scale of the Eternal Realm, where people tended to live much longer than they would have on Earth, it was practically the blink of an eye. “What exactly are you trying to do?”
“Oh. Nothing much,” Tucker said smugly. “Just rewriting their genetic code. No big deal.”
“Rewriting their –”
“I’m kidding, of course. But not really. It’s complicated. If you think about our attunements – especially when it concerns monsters – it comes down to, for lack of a better term, genetics. It’s not that. It’s deeper than DNA. It’s magic. But to avoid giving you a seven hour lecture that you won’t even understand, let’s call it magical DNA. So, in sapient races like humans, you’re genetically predisposed toward one thing or another. You can overcome that with practice and constant exposure,” he explained. “But for monsters, it's hardcoded into their very being. So, to overcome that, we have to rewire some things through absolute saturation. For instance, if we want to give a human being a shadow attunement, we just need to find an appropriate natural treasure and expose that person to it until they slowly build up an attunement. How long that takes depends on the person, but theoretically, it’s always possible. Even if it takes a thousand years. But if we tried the same thing with a monster, it wouldn’t matter how long we tried. It would never work because that energy can’t get past their…ah…monsterhood.
“To get past that, we have alchemy. I don’t think I need to tell you that potions aren’t just chemical mixtures, right? There’s magic in there that force the body – or mind – to absorb certain things, which prompts a reaction. So, if we administer the right potions to a monster, we can force changes in their magical DNA because those potions get past the barriers that raw natural treasures would fail to overcome,” Tucker explained.
“Wouldn’t that work with people, too?” Zeke asked. “Not that the kobolds aren’t people…”
“Right. But if you were to try this with a human being, you’d melt them. Not an exaggeration, either. You would literally melt them. Any potion powerful enough to change a person’s attunement would absolutely overwhelm their natural defenses and kill them,” Tucker explained. “Chalk it up to natural differences.”
“And this is what you’re doing with the kobolds?” Zeke asked.
“Not exactly. I haven’t quite figured it out. The best I can do right now – and this is what I did with the Kirrans – is to make their natural attunements more malleable. It brings them closer to what you’d expect with a human, which lets their young develop different attunements. For them, it meant that they could branch out into more classes, which I think will be similar with the kobolds. I wouldn’t say this around Athis – because he’d probably rip my arms off if I did – but kirrans and kobolds almost assuredly share ancestry. They’re both monsters, at their core. Smart monsters who’ve achieved sapience, but monsters nonetheless. I intend to change that.”
Zeke asked, “Will it weaken them?”
Tucker answered, “Probably. At least collectively. But it also gives them freedom to be what they want to be. And I think that’s way more important than easy power. Don’t you?”
Zeke nodded, but he couldn’t help but wonder if that wasn’t why the kobolds had proved to be such an effective fighting force. And if they changed, would that weaken his position as well?
It was food for thought.