Amethyst and his team of portal technicians, had just pulled off the largest combat based operation in the history of their Realm Travelers Branch.
The group now celebrated amongst themselves. The least trafficked area inside the building was also a high profile room at the center of the realm travelers branch.
Within the room were portals to all the higher realms that Maelstrom had access and or political connection to. Since Amethyst had taken over the branch he’d only seen a single portal used inside the room and it had been recently, two lost boys trying to find a way home after an incident the two young men didn’t seem to want to describe from what the staff gathered, bought tickets and left. All interactions short and to the point.
Amethyst was excited about the potential of what they’d pulled off on a much grander scale. His only problem was the devices the youngster Xani had developed, were far beyond his runic understanding. He’d originally laughed to himself when the young woman had given him a handful of them to play with, but after a single analyzation of the coin-sized technology, Amethyst knew why she’d offered them so easily.
The work was well beyond what their current database felt they could replicate. Their AI requested several incredibly pricy system-based upgrades that made him and his teams head spin, and the group settled on a period of learning.
“Should we do something?” asked one of the administration team. Amethyst couldn’t remember the woman’s name, but always felt her warm brown eyes and long brown hair brought a sense of calm to his immediate workplace, so tried to engage when he now saw concern on her normally pleasant features.
“What could we do?” The woman took a sip from her drink and looked away, and he began to wonder If she’d even speak back up surrounded by constant chatter as they were.
“Should we help the young man, for all we know he could be dead, and yet we celebrate a minor accomplishment that he gave us access too in the first place, how is this right?”
“Help him how? What could we do?” asked Amethyst not giving the woman a moment to back down, as she’d sparked his interest. She seemed shy, but Amethyst couldn’t believe that anyone else in the room had considered what he had, and couldn’t help himself.
“What do you mean what can we do? As far as I’m concerned this young man just showed us a new horizon, a better question is what can’t we do?” Amethyst was shocked and he opened his mouth to speak, but only managed a smile. A smile he saw mirrored on the faces of many near to where they stood.
“So what would you have us do, open a random set of portals inside a mountain of trash,” asked Amethyst sarcastically, but the woman only rolled her eyes.
“Ambassador and Toro have been trying to map out Carter’s location with hacked satellite imagery,” said the woman pointing at a group of men and woman clustered around a station-table, before she pointed at his own tablet and finished.
"And I’m absolutely sure it is because you have had the same general coordinate readout on your screen for most of the day, boss. At this point, they’re probably just waiting for you to speak up.” Amethyst looked around and saw their conversation had drawn the attention of the majority of those gathered, all of who turned their heads, nodding as the chatter died and the whispers grew.
“Seriously?”
“Yes,” yelled a man Amethyst recognized as Toro from across the cavernous room.
“We got two areas we think he could be, you should put your money on me. Toro is a sparking idiot!”
Amethyst looked over at his conversation partner and mouthed, put your money on me, before she laughed and answered his potentially various unasked questions.
“Betting pool, two heat signatures, Ambassador says it's the larger one, Toro says it's the smaller,” offered the brown haired woman.
“Which do you think it is?” asked Amethyst as he set his drink down on a nearby table, waving her along as he worked his way through the crowd.
“Umm yeah, actually I think it's the larger one too oddly enough. Just a gut feeling though, no evidence.”
“So what is the danger of using two portals at once and checking both locations?” asked Amethyst. From what those gathered felt there was no danger beside what they’d seen of the giant robot which was now seemingly far away from where either portal would be opened.
“So… who wants to try and use one of these teleport tokens as a gateway conduit?” Amethyst pulled free one of the tokens, and two men raised their hands immediately, Amethyst chuckling as he pulled free a second token. Hoping entirely that he wasn’t about to risk losing two very valuable devices in one fell swoop.
What they’d achieved, or helped Arson to achieve was incredible for multiple reasons. To say that the Realm Travelers Branch couldn’t make two large gateways from one place to another would be completely incorrect, this was something easily achievable for the agency.
What was impressive was the lack of sandstone pillars, inscribed end to end with runes the size of alphabet characters on flatscreens; the pillars themselves in some cases taller than two story buildings.
This quality alone made it impossible for them to produce a viable portal for what ends they’d achieved earlier that day. Many things had been tried to circumvent the issues with the pillars needed for modern day gateway production, and the only exclusion to the need for such instruments as far as Amethyst knew, was his own brother’s natural born abilities, and now these tokens.
Two runic engineers started to spin ambient mana in the air into patterns at the center of the room, and pedestals were brought in for the tokens to be set on at the center of their runic constructions.
The tokens were set into place, and Toro argued with Ambassador about how crazy he was for assuming that Arson was a giant ball of growing heat inside a trash heap. Toro unaware of Arson’s mana makeup being the literal cause of their very own department's mana grid malfunction earlier that season, while Ambassador and many of the others there had not only witnessed what happened, but had been paid a healthy amount of credits not to speak about what had occurred.
“Bas, you're a psycho. You're telling me you're really going to let him open a portal in the sparking center of a sun? Does that make sense to anyone else here, seriously?” Toro looked between Ambassador and Amethyst, seriously worried about what they may be about to portal into. It was a dump, and nuclear waste had once been as big an issue for Maelstrom as the ancient race of titanic robots many there now knew was not extinct. Though local government didn’t stop the recording of critical and cataclysmic threats to the realm, they did suffocate the sharing of the footage on global scales, making the footage available only to officials with clearance for such information. Or those who could pay.
“What Toro, think you’ll lose now? What happened to "it's just a dump"? Now magically we have a nuclear dump. What next? We gonna see an ember sparking dragon,” said Ambassador with a laugh. Toro simply pointed at the nearby satellite imagery, a giant robot being worked on slowly by what seemed like hundreds of its smaller kin displayed, most of those gathered glancing over before Toro spoke up again.
“Wouldn’t surprise me. We just threw a wolf the size of a small building at a robot the size of a slightly larger building…”
Amethyst finally looked at his conversation partner once more asking her name, and receiving a warm smile and the name, Rory in return.
“Well, Rory, what do you think about a couple of test runs?”
“No risk, no reward is what I always say.”
…
Arson slept underneath literal tons of trash. His only access to air being the tunnel his body carved through the mountain of trash he’d been knocked into.
Hungry for mana his body had started to draw on everything it could nearby. Some items even physically pulled through waste and garbage to position themselves closer to his body as he drank mana from the environment and into his pores.
His entire chest had split open, showing the extra layering of bones and muscles Arson’s body was filled with. His blood created hands the size of his fingernails in almost a dozen locations across his chest. His life force hard at work, physically pulling his separated chest cavity back together.
Arson’s healing was normally so abundant in its access to mana that these hands weren’t normally seen at work. However, with the limited mana in Arson’s immediate area, they could be seen as they pushed dirt free of his insides, burning toxins with touch alone.
One of the small hands even dug through the nearby sections of trash, gasps heard from people who could now see Arson’s body, as a horizontal portal opening up above him revealed one of the many hands pulling free a mana stone shard from underneath an old shirt.
No one spoke as the small hand shook off the dirt and detritus, before it pulsed with a flash of energy, and the shard slowly shrank until it disappeared.
Silent stares looked down on the young man. Shocked by what was happening but a few yards from them all; light streaming from the portal opened above Arson’s body. The hole he was in gave the impression of a coffin to those gathered around the portal mouth, and made it easy to ignore the other portal’s own dark emptiness.
“Did his blood just eat a mana stone…?”
It wasn’t until the shard was completely gone that the hand slowly turned, shifting upward. The individuals all gained the same sensation of being watched when the fingers stretched outward slightly, before it lunged like a snake, wrapping its grip around the edge of the portal.
A man screamed as more of the hands formed and shot toward the portals edges and began their work. Amethyst realized it had been him that had screamed, looking around in embarrassment for only an instant.
Amethyst had seen many things in his life, but what occurred next was a first for the man. Thirteen hands now the size of golf balls drank in power from the mana grid Amethyst team used to create the portal. While they grew in size Arson’s wound started to visibly close, the hole starting from his belly button leading to his neckline being repaired far more quickly now.
Amethyst felt he watched living versions of the sticky hands children often played with when he was a child, cling to the portal and nearly close the dimensional doorway with the surge of energy Arson’s body drank in, only for things to escalate even further.
What in the sparks!
Eight more hands could be seen emerging from Arson’s chest, spiraling vacuums of ambient mana at the palms of the hands, all now reaching well into the air of the room. The pressure of gravity where they all stood around the portal mouths intensified. Some were pushed to their knees, others knocked over.
This all occurred in a few breaths before streams of dense mana was pulled from every open gateway held inside this area of the Realm Travelers Branch. Amethyst momentarily felt as if he was being forced to watch an explosion of power in reverse. Tendrils of mana from various realms all throughout creation, heeding Arson's call for power from places he’d both been and or hadn’t explored yet.
“What the sparks is going on?” yelled Rory with a look at Amethyst for answers. The walls shook, and the hands grew larger, taking more of what Arson needed. The scale was impressive for those who watched while it happened, but as far as a unbalancing of power, or Arson’s needs resulting in too much mana being drawn from the realms, what was happening would be considered to be negligible. He could increase how much he took by hundreds of times and still nothing would be shaken or pushed off course.
With one exception. A massive robotic hand reached through the second portal in the room, attracted to the convergence of mana of various types being eaten veraciously but a few yards from itself.
More screams could be heard as the arm started to knock things within the space around. Amethyst wanted to gain control of the situation, but by the time his first employees were grabbed, Amethyst knew he was in trouble.
Maiden’s muddy waters, boy, wake up!
Amethyst couldn’t believe that he’d found himself mentally wanting help from the same young man that had just even recently, filled him with insecurities he’d been unaware he’d been capable of feeling.
“Carter, get up!” Amethyst didn’t consider himself a brave man, but felt obligated to rise and push toward the young man.
“Carter!”
Arson’s eyes snapped open and a vortex of golden white blood was sucked back into his chest through a hole no larger than the young man’s reconstructed belly button, flooding the small unclosed section yet to be healed between the center of his pectorals.
He roared as he jerked upright, his punch meeting the robots own. The giant arm large enough to almost touch the ceiling from where Arson lay, came like a hammer after reaching far above those gathered, aimed directly toward him.
The backhand Arson barely managed, was surprisingly to Arson, enough to not only knock the arm aside, but caused the arm to be shredded by the rim of the portal it reached through. Arson flipped to his feet while the robotic arm flailed in an attempt to gain control of the severed limb, and Arson dove toward it.
With a roar, Arson tackled the arm, the edge of the portal slicing through the giant robotic limb completely. The spray of oil and mechanical lubricants was minor before a second long arm was sent through.
Didn’t learn your lesson, huh!
The second arm reached for Arson with an open hand that threatened to grab him. He reached for Sky but nothing came from his spacial inventory when he tried to summon the weapon..
The moment of pause and mental registry that he didn’t have his weapon was enough to send his building rage to a new level.
“Where is Sky!” Arson roared the words as he was wrapped up by the hand. Anastasia’s face spiraling to life while Arson struggled to lift his arms.
“You are not talking to me like that, are you…”
“Anna!” Arson’s anger grew. Both his arms smashing upward and around the wrist of the robot, bending the thumb and middle fingers completely backward with an incredible burst of strength. His hands to either side of the monstrous limb as he clamped down and heaved backward as hard as he could, shearing the arm clean off with the use of the portals edge. The second severed limb tossed aside as Arson felt heat build in his chest unlike anything he’d ever felt before.
“Come on!” The robot’s head came through, and gravity distorted a pressure cannon housed and fully charged at the center of its face. The heat in his chest grew to the point that Arson felt he would vomit, and did…
Mana lightning poured out of Arson’s throat in a violent burst of deep blue, red, orange and green. The robot fired the pressure cannon, and the tide of mana lightning was split for a breath, only for the wave of energy Arson expelled to wash over the portal completely.
Sections of the head exploded, other portions disintegrated or turned to ash, the robotic skull beneath revealed as layer by layer metals and minerals were destroyed down to a molecular level. Atoms exploding only to be eaten by mana and absorbed by Arson.
A volatile core of power was shown after the pressure cannon fell from the robots face. The light grew in power even as Arson’s own violent breath of mana lightning ended, and he knew it would most likely explode; the majority of the delicate energy distribution systems destroyed or missing.
A blink showed Arson that just behind himself the first arm he’d taken from the robot still had its hand locked in a fist.
Moving in a flash, he turned. Grabbed the arm at the shoulder, and lifted with all his might, roaring the entire time he struggled.
“Everyone down!” Arson slammed the hammer down, uncaring of any around himself. A violent anger pushing him toward a rampage unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
Amethyst’s warning was the only thing that stopped those stuck frozen in fear of the situation. The fist slammed down and if the portal hadn’t been open the explosion that was triggered would have washed away all who stood near. Instead, both portals were washed away in an instant, snuffed out like headlights on vehicles during head on collisions.
The room went silent for only a mere moment before Arson roared again. Only this time, the painful roar was accompanied by mana lightning so powerful it bursted through Arson’s chest while he pointed his mouth up toward the roof.
The beam of mana tore through the air, the ceiling and into the sky above, unhindered. Anything in its path taken from existence as it was, only to fill Arson’s body in the end as mana and natural energies as minerals.
Even as he roared he felt a bliss fill him. His chest torn open, spitting bolts of chaotic energy in a short area all around himself. The holes the size of his own palm regenerated in an instant only to be blown away again with the next bolt.
What is this feeling?
His seal glowed brightly, burning his skin, and all he felt was blood pumping warmth and a calm that washed away his fears.
His rage grew and he let it wash over him. His name was yelled, and was not heard. By the time he stopped his roar and looked around himself all of the employees of the Realm Travelers Branch had distanced themselves to a far more safe location.
Arson found the laughter he now heard odd, until he realized it was him laughing. When he spoke next he was surprised as the air around him thrummed.
“I need a portal.” Arson began to walk toward the group. His normal observant nature not alerting him to the fear being felt by those he approached. His internal danger sense even ignored the sign of the group readying themselves to fight if necessary to escape alive.
“You were just found with a hole the size of—“
“Give me a portal…” Bones rippled down Arson’s back, and his blood pumped as his excitement grew with every breath he took.
“Carter, we should take time and—“
“Now!” Amethyst looked at the others around him, feeling responsible for everyone there. He looked at the group and pulled another token from his own spacial inventory.
“Yes, sir,” said Amethyst. The group quickly creating another portal, Arson staring down the station table with the holograms the group had left up to watch the goings on of the sight of their last operation. The robot still being worked on by a seeming anthill of single minded technicians within Arson’s home.
The portal opened in the center of the room and Arson rushed toward the swirl of golden light. Only pausing with his own hand on the edge of the portal when Amethyst spoke to him once more before he left.
“The young woman named Xani hasn’t been found either, young master Carter!” Arson gave a nod, but didn’t look back. Luckily for Arson the man spoke up, as until he’d heard those words, his mind had been drowned in a state of revenge and malice, now slightly drained in its growing momentum by the man's words.
Without further hesitation Arson jumped through the portal and toward the army below, a roar leaving his chest as he fell through the night sky.
Amethyst looked around at his people once more, all faces relieved with the exception of one young man, who stared at another young man who looked around sheepishly. The disgruntled of the two looked toward Amethyst and spoke loud enough for all to hear.
“I sparking told you Toro is an idiot…”