Earlier
The first thing she noticed when she regained consciousness was that she hurt more or less everywhere. The second thing she noticed, as her lungs reinflated with a great whirlwind gasp, was that the azoth in the air here was so thin as to be virtually nonexistent.
She staggered to her feet, vaguely aware of the sound of splintering wood as what was left of the wooden barn she’d crashed into disintegrated around her. It might as well have been made of mist for all the resistance it offered. The wreckage began to burn as she crawled free of it, ignited by the molten blood that still gushed from the great rent in her chest. The flames, fuelled by the rich azoth in her blood, blossomed into dozens of tiny fire-sprites, shaped as serpents or lizards or tiny humans no more than a few inches in height. They danced and darted merrily across the blackening timbers, spreading the flames that had birthed them and chattering excitedly in the language of fire. By dawn, they would all be dead of old age. She paid them no mind. She had more pressing concerns.
How far had she flown? No matter how far it was, her pursuers would surely follow. She breathed in again, drawing the azoth of the world into her meridians. The second breath confirmed her observation. It hadn’t just been the shock of impact — the ambient magical energy here was vanishingly sparse. Frowning, she pulled up her system display to check the region description.
Plantation of the West — Lv. 5-19
Wow. This place was crazy low-level. She’d never even heard of it. She had to be well past the southern frontier. With her level having stabilized at — let’s see — 36, she was overleveled enough that not only would she stand out like a bonfire in the aether to her pursuers, her presence here would actually start tripping alarm bells in Heaven. Atop that, her azoth respiration rate would be capped so harshly that she’d barely be able to use her skills. The azoth in her pool right now was all the azoth she had for the foreseeable future.
She took stock of her situation. [Titanic Vitality+], [Indomitable Vitality], [Scorn Death] and [Monstrous Regeneration] were keeping her alive, but the [Holy] damage that still seethed in the depths of her wounds stopped them from fully closing — to say nothing of the legion of other lingering debuffs and status conditions she’d accumulated. She was stable for now, as long as she didn’t do anything too strenuous, but keeping herself stable was slowly and inexorably draining her azoth. She needed a way to arrest that downward slide. If she could find somewhere with denser environmental azoth, or some other way to refill her pool, she could bring the full force of her recovery skills to bear on her injuries. Failing that, she could try to find a healer or medicine powerful enough to mend her injuries — though in an atrophied low-level backwater like this, she didn’t have high hopes.
And then there was the problem of being way overleveled for the region. Thankfully, that was a problem she did have an immediate solution for. As she moved, slowly and painfully, away from the burning barn, her body sublimated into primeval fire before coalescing again into a new form. Smaller, stubbier, walking on two legs rather than four. A form wrought in the hateful image of their conquerors, privilege and condescension and prison in one. A [Courtly Form], in which a petitioner would not embarrass the dignity of the halls of Heaven.
This was the start of the process, though, not the end of it. More skill activations followed. [Greater Suppress Aura]. [Secret Boss]. [Seal Level]. [Humble Guise]. [False Class]. By the time she reached the farmhouse, to any external observer she would appear to be nothing more than an ordinary, completely unremarkable [Human Bard] with a modest and region-appropriate level in the mid-teens.
Well, aside from the gruesome, bleeding canyon cleaved across her torso from shoulder to hip and the fact that she was completely naked.
It was in this state that the farmer and his wife, awakened by the noise of her crash-landing, saw her in the beam of their magelight wand as they emerged from their house.
She gave them her most charming smile. "Good evening! I don't suppose either of you could point me in the direction of the nearest town?"
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Talking with Neraru had gone well, but I was less optimistic about trying to have a conversation with Kizurra. I found him with Enshunna and Ninkur, sullenly shelling nuts. Ninkur sat cross-legged, nuts in one hand and a flint knife in the other. With quick, efficient turns of her wrist, she opened the nuts against the edge of the knife and tossed them to Kizurra and her daughter, who peeled the shells and stubborn pericarps away and dropped them into a clay pot filled with water. Kizurra was attacking the nuts with much more ferocity than Enshunna, but without any increase in efficiency. Indeed, each time he failed to smoothly free the meat in one piece, or pried at a nut so viciously that it flew from his hands, his irritation visibly grew.
“I need to borrow Kizurra for a bit,” I announced without preamble. “Do you need someone else to help with this, or will you be fine without him for a while?”
Ninkur’s mouth twitched but she didn’t immediately respond. “We’ll be fine, elder sister,” Enshunna said with a slightly tense, but still earnest-seeming, smile.
Kizurra’s face quickly journeyed through surprise, alarm, and then defensive resentment — a progression I was amply familiar with from my own teenage years whenever an adult had summoned me for a lecture. “Whatever,” he said, slouching towards the door with his hands shoved in his pockets.
I’d been trying to figure out how to tell him that we could have this conversation wherever: I was omnipresent, so the only variable was how much privacy he wanted. Thankfully, he seemed to have independently concluded the same thing as he made his way to an empty section of the caverns, dragging the heavy cloud of his bad mood in his wake.
“You seem pretty pissed off,” I said.
“The fuck do you know,” he said, snappish. “I’m-” His retort ended prematurely as he fumbled for some plausible counterclaim to make about his emotional state. Being that he very obviously was pissed off, he failed to find one. “Whatever,” he said instead.
I didn’t see any reason to pick at that, so I moved on. “Teekas said she already gave you a lecture about wandering off when I specifically sent you along with the foraging party to keep watch,” I said. “So I’m not going to make you sit through another one. I do want to know why you did that, though.”
Kizurra crossed his arms, posture closed-off and expression stony, and didn’t say anything.
“This isn’t a trap, man,” I said exasperatedly. “I’m not gonna yell at you for your answer, even if it’s embarrassing or it sounds stupid in retrospect or if I just don’t like it. I just want to know why this happened, what I didn’t explain well enough or what we understood differently, so that I can avoid it happening again.”
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Kizurra still didn’t respond at first, but one of his heels had begun drumming against the pavement as he tried to figure out how to answer. “I didn’t see or hear any humans around,” he said eventually. “It was quiet. They don’t usually go out at night without torches, so they’re easy to see coming. I figured that just standing around wasn’t very useful, and I might as well do something to help everyone not fucking starve to death. Or is that not actually a problem anymore?”
I sighed. “Okay. Did you ask Teekas first?”
He scowled. “Why would I? She’s not the boss of me. Hell, you’re not the boss of me.”
Rather than try and argue with a sulky teenager about whether I was the boss of him or not, I took a different approach. “Look, I’m not trying to get on your case about this. You were trying to do a good thing for the group. Hell, to the extent that it’s any of my business being proud of you, I’m proud of you. You only did one thing wrong.”
Kizurra’s face had cracked into a look of surprised vulnerability when I said I was proud of him, but he quickly restored his mask of sullen apathy. “And I’m sure you’re about to tell me what that is.”
“We’re a team, Kizurra,” I said by way of answer. “You’re right that I’m not the boss of you, nor is Teekas. This isn’t about you disobeying me, because I never expected obedience from you in the first place. What I do expect is that when we agree on a plan, I can rely on you to play your part within that plan.”
“I feel like that still just means that I’m supposed to obey you,” he said.
“No, it doesn’t. The plan is something we make as a team, and it can change. You are allowed to give your input, because you are a part of the team just like everyone else. It’s entirely possible that you were right — you didn’t need to be on guard duty, and would have been more useful gathering food. You just need to communicate that to whoever’s job it is to call the shots, which in this case was Teekas — not because she’s in charge, not because you need her permission, but because she can’t perform her function within the plan if she doesn’t have all the information.”
Kizurra scoffed. “Whatever. Like you care what I have to say.”
“I do care,” I said. “You are a valuable member of the team. Your creative thinking during the pipeleaf raid was a significant part of why everyone made it back in one piece. Kizurra, I want to rely on you. I want to give you more responsibilities, and more power to meet them. In fact, I had a specific job in mind for you, but I can’t give it to you until I know you won’t wander off and leave the rest of us up Shit Creek without a paddle.”
Distrust and wounded pride warred with the desire for validation across Kizurra’s acne-pocked face. Before long, the desire for validation won. “What’s the job?” he asked, trying to sound tough and aloof and not succeeding at all.
“Well, since you speak the most Ploetz and have our only ranged weapon, I was going to have you escort Pacifica to Nikolai’s Ford, to make sure she isn’t attacked or followed along the way.”
“Or that she doesn’t run off, I bet,” he said, pointedly.
“Or that she doesn’t run off, yes,” I said. “Do you see why I need to be able to trust you to stick to the plan on this one? Significant length of time acting unsupervised, lots of independent decision-making, high level of danger, you’ll need to work closely with Pacifica…”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” he said irritably. “You can trust me.”
“Can I?”
“Yes, you can fucking-” He threw up his hands in exasperation. “Fine! Whatever! Give me the job or don’t, I don’t give a shit.”
“Alright, it's yours. I won’t be ready to send you out for a few days, probably, so get with Pacifica in the meantime and see about brushing up on your Ploetz.”
Grumbling under his breath, Kizurra stomped off through the dungeon in search of the human girl.
“She’s asleep right now, you might want to wait!” I called after him helpfully.
“Nobody asked you!” he said, flipping me the finger over his shoulder.
Well, that went alright! I’d meant to ask him to apologize to Neraru as well, but there hadn’t been a good place to work it into the conversation. Maybe it was better if she approached Kizurra herself, anyway. It would be good practice for her, a good wake-up call for him, and I’d feel less like I was micromanaging my minions’ personal lives.
Setting that aside, I’d had an idea as I conjured another ingot of silver for Pacifica to test. Creating matter from nothing was a lot more expensive than reshaping existing matter. I’d been very fixated on ideas of “a door” that were familiar from my old life. Maybe I’d been too limited in my thinking.
At the end of the spike cave, where a narrow passage spiralled down into the labyrinth, I began to probe at the boundaries of what the system considered a permissible obstruction on the path to my core. First, I began to close the mouth of the fissure, an inch at a time. The stone slipped from my domain-grip and the familiar error message flashed when the passage was about three feet wide. I tried again, this time measuring the permissible height: the minimum there looked like five feet or so. So, for the system to consider something a “viable path” to my core, it had to be big enough that an adult human could move through it (though not necessarily comfortably). That made sense, I supposed, if the point of the rule was to make sure that adventurers could make it to my core and kill me.
I wanted to experiment further. Would a narrow but tall passage be acceptable? What about a wide, short gap? I had several choke points in my labyrinth where adventurers would have to crawl, squirm, or swim through tight confines — though, now that I thought about it, none of them were on the true path to the boss arena. Would that be a dead giveaway to adventurers that those routes didn’t lead to my core? Ugh, there were so many unknowns! I would kill to be able to just check a fan wiki and get hard numbers on this shit, but of course this isekai wasn’t so convenient.
I was getting distracted. There was a minimum size I was allowed for the path itself, but I’d been able to obstruct the path with doors. Was it that the doors were a separate object from the walls? I pulled a boulder from the walls of the spike cave, taller than a human, and rolled it in front of the passage. No error message. Alright… the boulder wasn’t a door in the conventional sense, but it could still be “opened” by rolling it away from the crack. How far could I push that parameter? I reshaped the boulder from something roughly spherical to a rectangular prism. Its flat underside sat flush with the ground. No error message, but they could still push this to the side or tip it over. I began sinking the pillar into a hole, shaped exactly to its dimensions: they’d either have to lift the pillar straight up out of its slot in order to move it, or break it. The slot went from a few inches deep to a foot; still no error message.
Fuck it, swing for the fences. I doubled the height of the pillar and sank it into the pit down to its waist. They weren’t getting that shit outta there without a crane.
No error message. I laughed out loud. “Oh, that’s jank as fuck!” I exclaimed to no one in particular. “That’s just stupid.” If blocking off my passages like this with only-technically-removable obstacles was allowed by the system, then the pathing restriction might as well not exist. Hm, could I…
I tried to pull out a shelf of stone over the pillar, to make it impossible to lift it from the hole, and that finally got me another no-viable-path warning. Okay, so there were limits, but I could get away with a lot more bullshit than I’d thought. I still had lots of work to do on my defenses, but this new discovery had me feeling a lot better about the situation.