Chapter 64 - Do for Others
The heavy stone door slammed shut behind me, plunging the cylindrical prison of eternal torture into strange, high-contrast black and white, where the majority of the room was pitch black, shadow on glossy stone. Meanwhile, the pale beam of pure, terrible maelstrom light, even as thin as it was, dominated the room just by being there, so bright to my human eyes that almost nothing could be seen within except for the faint hint of Ephelir’s slab.
Finally, I was here. No turning back now. I did feel the urge to do so, however. Despite the door being closed and sealed, I could almost feel them all waiting for me on the other side. Jassin, Garret, and Kolash would be in the front, stoic, ready to… well, they’d be ready to end me if I came out of the room corrupted. Kolash had insisted upon that.
My friends would be behind them, Sissa and Samila standing side by side, hands together. Sissa had ‘duty and mercied’ me, before I stepped into the prison. That was nice. I could feel its golden warmth in my limbs, keeping them fresh and limber. Samila, on the other hand, just sent me in with a promise.
“Live through this, and we’ll talk,” she’d whispered. Strangely, that seemed to energize me as much as Sissa’s magic did.
Meanwhile, Geddon would have Trix on his shoulder as he busied himself looking over the phylacteries. The big man would keep Trix’s mind off the tension they all probably felt.
As for me, I was a wreck on the inside, getting progressively worse as time wore on.
I swallowed nervously, suddenly finding the room to be quite chilly and entirely too still. My shaky breaths echoed off the bare stone and bounced around the room, so loud in the silence, it was impossible to believe Ephelir could not hear me. If he did, however, he made no indication. As always he was still on his plinth bed, restrained and tortured for eternity. I waited, cautiously, watching and listening.
Nothing.
Eventually, I got up the courage to move. The soles of my boots *clopped* on the hard stone, loud enough to be mistaken for gunshots.
I didn’t walk toward my opponent. Instead, I slid left, skirting the outer edge of the room, a good 50 feet away from the edge of the light.
One. Two. Three long steps.
First position.
I summoned the pieces of my first turret, a traditional slug thrower with the power dialed up for maximum penetration. No telling how thick a level ??? Exotic’s skin was.
My trembling hands fought me as I tried to fit all the little pieces together. The metal clacked together like alarm bells in the still air.
Don’t think about it. Just do it. Be in the moment, get it done, and then we can have a good meltdown later.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it, though. Where I was right now, what I was doing… was it right? I was increasingly unsure. The stakes were so high, but not just for me… that I could handle. I’d gone into situations before where I was ready to trade my life for someone else’s. Hell, from the outside looking in, I probably looked like I had a death wish, I did it so often nowadays.
Except before, when I’d nearly thrown my life away on a half-cooked plan, I at least had some fathomable goal, an immediate tangible result of my actions. I would risk myself freely so that others could live just a little longer. It was an easy trade: me for them. One I was okay with.
So, what made this different? What made my duel with an unkillable creature of vast power so terrifying?
Scale.
I was doing this to save an entire planet. Countless people: families, merchants, kings, queens, dragons, animals, trees, and carnivorous plants were all counting on me. If I did the math, which I tried very hard not to do, it would likely come out to be in the ballpark of billions of living things that were counting on a positive outcome in the next few moments.
The human mind wasn’t made to grapple with those kinds of numbers. Not really. They were more abstract than real to most. Except, I was starting to understand and that terrified me.
Until now, I’d been doing little things that I hoped would make a big impact. Save a life here, build a little something there, hope it worked out for the best. Do enough little things, and suddenly, the big, unmanageable thing isn’t so big and unmanageable anymore.
But the scale of this was so much bigger. It had always been so, but I’d made it a point to never think about just how big. It would have broken me.
Worse, my mind in particular, could not quite put my life on the other end of that scale. I saw the equation: all of them, Ralqir’s people, on one side, me on the other, and I reflexively rejected it. It didn’t feel right. There was no possible way Ryan Kotes could have the power to do something so big. Not the crippled kid from the Outers. He could never be worthy of having that kind of impact on anything. Not possible. There had to have been some mistake.
With my mind rejecting my place in all this, it was all too easy to start doubting myself. This was my theory and my plan. No one had handed it to me. I hadn’t read it in a book. No divine being descended from the heavens and told me this was the way things were.
This was just me, fumbling in the dark. If I was wrong, I’d be throwing my life away for nothing, or, if Constance was feeling extremely generous today, murdering my fellow human whose only crime was being human.
But here I was.
Now that I was here, doing it, that doubt was starting to be a physically crippling thing.
The magazine for the turret jiggled into place, and the release lever was forced down with a clack.
I let my eyes unfocus and drifted into that state of mind where I saw my aura. It was thick in here, all packed into one room like it was. I wasn’t sure what the walls were made of, but my aura wasn’t getting anywhere outside of them. My aura also wasn’t getting into the pillar of light, I observed, as my little smokey-blue motes wafted through the room toward the blazing light of the maelstrom and disintegrated as soon as they crossed from black to white.
That was okay. I had accounted for this. I got on my tiptoes and set about aiming the turret manually. I looked down the barrel and aligned it just so, only to notice that all of Ephelir’s numerous eyes were open and focused on me.
My stomach lurched.
How long had he been watching?
Slowly, I backed away from the turret and took three more steps around the rim of the room where I summoned the pieces for my next emplacement, another ballistic one. Again, I started to put them all together, but I felt him watching me now.
I hunched over my work, trembling fingers working over the mechanisms I’d shaped and fiddled with a hundred times. Ephelir’s gaze was a constant pressure weighing me down.
Finally, the tension got to me.
“So, Ralqir, huh? What a place,” I remarked lamely, the volume of my voice squelched by the tightness of my throat.
Ephelir did not answer. I couldn’t even hear him breathing, which was funny, because I could even hear my breaths echo around the room. I imagined him laying there, pale skinned, oddly proportioned, asymmetrical musculature, and a horrifically mutated mouth.
The words seemed to help me in the nerves department, though. Somehow, the breaking of the silence, finally, had made things a bit more bearable. This turret was already going together much more smoothly than the last.
I cleared my throat and started again. “It’s got all this history, Ralqir, and I can’t really wrap my brain around it. Just years and years of people doing people things. Strange stuff. You know what I mean?” I contemplated.
I checked over my shoulder to see if there was any change. Nothing. He was still staring at me, though.
“Maybe not,” I shrugged. “I don’t really know where you’re from. Earth? Post-Exodus? The timeline seems right. Well, you’ll be happy to know that Exodus worked. I come from a little ball of rock called Proxis 3. Pretty young as far as human colonies go. We don’t have the kind of history I’m talking about. Not like this place. Proxis isn’t exactly the outermost system mankind saw fit to seed, but we’re contenders for the top ten. That means we only thawed and settled in our particular corner of the galaxy about ten or fifteen generations ago. It might sound like a lot, but it’s not. Our world is brand new, empty in a lot of ways. We have to sort of borrow history and culture from Earth to really feel connected to each other.”
The next turret was a laser variant. Easier to put together at least. My hands were steadier now, not having the oppressive silence bearing down on me.
“Ralqir, though. It’s got this unbroken chain of stories that goes all the way back to… I have no idea. It’s long, I’m sure. The place feels old, lived in, unlike anything I’ve ever known. It’s weird. I feel like I should have a history, something to connect to my home, but I don’t have that. I have Earth’s. Yours.”
Turret set, I retraced my steps back to the stone door then began to set up that side of the room. Ballistic, ballistic, laser. Symmetrical. Symmetry was nice. The way they were all facing would keep them from shooting each other and myself.
The ballistic turrets would be set up to fire upon the center plinth, away from me where ricochets wouldn’t be a problem, and the laser turrets would be on mirror angles spraying from the sides since their attacks didn’t hurt non-organic material and didn’t ricochet. Fire was out of the question. The last thing I wanted right now was to fight a whole fire for oxygen, especially if things got weird.
“Makes you wonder why the System sent us here in the first place. I mean, why here of all places? It’s not like we have a connection to this place. Why not an asteroid composed of ferrous metals or something?” I considered, turning toward him, the only person in the world that probably knew what I was going through if his mind was still intact. He gave no indication that it was.
Two more emplacements went by in silence. Finally, when the last turret was up and running, pointed in the right direction, I retraced my steps once more to approach the column of light from the side that had the stone door.
I closed in slowly, step by step. The air around me thickened, and the echoes died unnaturally quickly. Then the smell hit me again, that sweet, bitter, tar rot that filled my nose and forced its way down into my mouth. Disgusting. Horrible. Familiar.
It was definitely the smell I’d experienced on my first day as an Exotic. The smell of corruption, my own corruption, the System’s.
My confidence got a boost from that. I was doing the right thing. My theory was sound, or at least better than anything else we had.
Ephelir’s many eyes saw through me, into me. There was no malice that I could detect, but there was intensity. So much intensity. Ephelir wanted something. He wanted, but he said nothing, did nothing.
Perhaps he couldn’t, not while he was in his prison.
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The black tendrils of goo squirmed out of Ephelir’s body, bursting from the translucent skin to evaporate into mist, and I found that the most disturbing of all, the back and forth of corruption and being cleansed.
I coughed, fighting the urge to vomit.
“If we were to assume the System is benign, maybe it sent us here because of the people as sort of ambassadors,” I continued. “I wouldn’t have minded that, coming here and getting to know people. Making friends. Showing them how humanity does things.”
Summoning a piece of mendau wood and consuming it, I made sure my mana was topped off and then some.
“Except that didn’t happen for us, did it?” I asked my fellow human. “We came here and… changed everything. Not for the better either. We made a mess of things, didn’t we? It’s not necessarily our fault. I get that. But what if the System sent us here to- I don’t know. What if it’s not benign? I don’t just mean the void corruption. That’s obviously something new. I mean the System itself. Who made it? No one knows. What is its purpose? No one knows that either. Why is it so damned determined to inflict us upon other universes?”
No answer, not that I was expecting one. He laid there, burning, healing, and burning again.
“If there’s anything human left of you, Ephelir,” I whispered, having a hard time with this part. “If there’s anything left, and you’ve just been biding your time, waiting for a sympathetic ear to talk to, say something now.”
Nothing.
I sniffed, at once mourning what was once a living thing and steeling myself to take the next step. “That’s what I thought. If there’s any part of you that remembers you’re still human, I just want you to know that I’m going to fix this. You and I are not going to be the end of this world. It sucks. It’s not like I want to take on this burden, but…” I sighed. “There’s no one else. So, I guess it has to be me.”
Finally, a breath rattled in my fellow human’s throat, and its vertically oriented lips flowered open to expose crooked fangs, too many to count. Disturbing to say the least.
"So, here's my theory,” I went on. “You want to kill me. You’re scourge now, and you want me dead like the rest of them. But if that's the case, why the challenge? That didn’t make any sense to me. Why not just do the thing? Why not just kill me with your mind or your aura or whatever you’ve got.”
I turned my back on him then, pacing back toward my semi-circle of turrets. He didn’t strike. No mind blasts or serrated tentacles or anything.
Turning back, I narrowed my eyes at him and came back to look him in the eyes. “I think... that's all you've got. When it comes down to it, you’re an Animator, a non-combat class. The challenge. It's the only way for you to strike out at me. It almost worked too, just because of the power difference between the two of us. I nearly died. You're so far above me on the power scale, you can kill me with a simple challenge. Terrible idea to fight you.”
I leaned in, just far enough that I could almost feel the maelstrom tickling the ends of my hair.
“I think you showed me too much of your hand, though. What I realized is this: The System is a machine. One thing you have to know about machines is that well designed ones don't have useless parts. Who would put the time into designing something like that? I'm new to this Exotic thing, but challenging someone has to have a function outside of a formal fight. It can't be useless. That got me wondering. I wonder if challenges are a way to settle differences or train outside of killing each other. You challenge someone, set the stakes, and get something out of it, a System enforced bet.”
With a thought, a menu popped up in my vision.
Issue Challenge to Ephelir (Level ???). Stakes: ?
Choose:
Currency
Item
Territory
Oath
Experience
Death
I chose Death as the only stake. That’s what we were both after, right?
Challenge issued to Ephelir (Level ???). Stakes: Death
Declined.
Then that budding pressure in the air increased tenfold, and the world around me started to blur as-
Ephelir (Level ???) has amended the challenge.
Stakes: Experience, Death.
Do you accept? Y/N
The exact same stakes as his last challenge, but this time I didn’t pass out. Why? My higher level? Maybe.
What did he have to gain by betting experience, though? Why was experience so important to him? My level wasn’t anything special, not to something like Ephelir. It would be a drop in the bucket. What was it-
Oh, you clever son of a bitch.
I tried amending the challenge myself, back to just Death, but it was instantly rejected. Again. Then again. All the while, Ephelir stared at me.
He wasn’t budging. He also had me over a barrel. I needed this. I needed to close the insertion points to save this place, and Ephelir had literally no other aims than to try to hurt me.
“I know what you’re doing,” I murmured, trying and failing to keep the anger out of my tone.
Ephelir’s eyes vibrated, pupils pulsing in what I assumed was excitement. I was spending too much time talking to this thing. Did it look… pleased?
“Fine,” I relented, preparing myself for anything. “Give me all the experience you like. I’m going to use it to make sure the scourge never troubles this place again, and I’m going to do it as a human being, Ephelir. If you are still in there, I’m doing this for you too.”
With that, I stepped away, retreating back to my firing line as I accepted the challenge.
Challenge begins in 5 seconds.
Begin.
I was well away from the plinth by the time the challenge began. After a slow exhalation, I mentally triggered the activation of all the turrets at once.
The room exploded into light and sound.
Over the course of a minute, give or take, 3,700 rounds of supersonic lead combined with unknown hundreds or thousands of laser hits scoured the scourge-touched human on the plinth. Purple laser light blinded me while the sound boomed off of the walls and shook the air.
My turrets spewed their payloads into the light, piercing the scourge’s body. The lasers chewed its flesh. At this range, not many of them missed, and they ground through it like chainsaws. The plinth glowed and smoked, as Ephelir’s insides were turned to outsides and his mutated flesh splashed onto the floor before charring to ash. The entire Bera maelstrom, focused and refined by years of research and development by the Dark Lord, blasted the monster’s now exposed internals.
Then it was over. The ballistic turret’s barrels glowed red hot in the relative dark where they stood. Acrid smoke slithered up from ventilation holes in the laser turrets’s flash housing.
Yet, Ephelir laid there on his plinth, more or less. Pieces of him. Pieces that still twitched and writhed together.
Before my very eyes, I saw it regenerating, putting itself back together much as I did when I was hurt, only this was much more thorough. Its disparate pieces practically crawled toward one another, knit itself anew, sinew by sinew, after being burst open like a roasted pig. Its tendons grew, snapped together, and its muscles bubbled and seethed up from its bones. The last to reform were its eyes, wet and energetic as they formed, opened and sought me out once more.
Fucking A.
I had nothing left. This thing had taken my best shot and chose not to die. Now it was his turn to attack.
We traded blows. Mine was a powerful first strike, one that hurt him but didn’t kill him. One I could not do again. His body was too strong.
Ephelir’s strike, on the other hand,was to my soul.
Ephelir has yielded.
Ryan Kotes is victorious. Experience gained: 0.1% of opponent’s total experience. 16,889,079 experience total.
Level up!
You are now level 19.
Max HP +10
Max MP +10
+1 attribute point.
Achievements awarded this level:
Duelist: You were judged victorious in a challenge this level. Experience from all other sources increased by 20% for next level.
[ERROR:SOURCE_CONFLICT:ACH_DUELIST:UNEXPECTED_NEMESIS_TAG]
Resolving…
Resolved:
Achievement awarded: Demon Slayer: You have defeated an evil beyond mortal comprehension, a true Nemesis. Randomly chosen combat ability depth increased. You have been noticed.
Rift Hunter: You gained 51% of your experience this level from Nemesis tagged foes. [+1 to all attributes]
Doing Your Part: Some of your creations have been used against agents of the Scourge. [+200% experience awarded for new designs next level]
Level up!
You are now level 20.
Max HP +10
Max MP +10
+1 attribute point.
Achievements awarded this level:
Duelist: You were judged victorious in a challenge this level. Experience from all other sources increased by 20% for next level.
[ERROR:SOURCE_CONFLICT:ACH_DUELIST:UNEXPECTED_NEMESIS_TAG]
Resolving…
Resolved:
Achievement awarded: Demon Slayer: You have defeated an evil beyond mortal comprehension, a true Nemesis. Randomly chosen combat ability depth increased. You have been noticed.
Rift Hunter: You gained 51% of your experience this level from Nemesis tagged foes. [+1 to all attributes]
Reversal: You gained 100% of your experience this level from Nemesis tagged foes. [+3 to highest attribute]
All Natural: You have spent 80% of this level with full mana. [+1 body]
Level up!
You are now level 21.
Max HP +10
Max MP +10
+1 attribute point.
Achievements awarded this level:
Duelist: You were judged victorious in a challenge this level. Experience from all other sources increased by 20% for next level.
[ERROR:SOURCE_CONFLICT:ACH_DUELIST:UNEXPECTED_NEMESIS_TAG]
Resolving…
Resolved:
Achievement awarded: Demon Slayer: You have defeated an evil beyond mortal comprehension, a true Nemesis. Randomly chosen combat ability depth increased. You have been seen.
Rift Hunter: You gained 51% of your experience this level from Nemesis tagged foes. [+1 to all attributes]
Reversal: You gained 100% of your experience this level from Nemesis tagged foes. [+3 to highest attribute]
All Natural: You have spent 80% of this level with full mana. [+1 body]
Level up!
You are now level 22.
Max HP +10
Max MP +10
+1 attribute point.
Achievements awarded this level:
Duelist: You were judged victorious in a challenge this level. Experience from all other sources increased by 20% for next level.
[ERROR:SOURCE_CONFLICT:ACH_DUELIST:UNEXPECTED_NEMESIS_TAG]
Resolving…
Resolved:
Achievement awarded: Demon Slayer: You have defeated an evil beyond mortal comprehension, a true Nemesis. Randomly chosen combat ability depth increased. You have been marked.
Rift Hunter: You gained 51% of your experience this level from Nemesis tagged foes. [+1 to all attributes]
All Natural: You have spent 80% of this level with full mana. [+1 body]
Level up!
You are now level 23.
Max HP +10
Max MP +10
+1 attribute point.
Achievements awarded this level:
Duelist: You were judged victorious in a challenge this level. Experience from all other sources increased by 20% for next level.
[ERROR:SOURCE_CONFLICT:ACH_DUELIST:UNEXPECTED_NEMESIS_TAG]
Resolving…
Resolved:
Achievement awarded: Demon Slayer: You have defeated an evil beyond mortal comprehension, a true Nemesis. Randomly chosen combat ability depth increased. You have been branded.
Rift Hunter: You gained 51% of your experience this level from Nemesis tagged foes. [+1 to all attributes]
Reversal: You gained 100% of your experience this level from Nemesis tagged foes. [+3 to highest attribute]
All Natural: You have spent 80% of this level with full mana. [+1 body]
Ecstasy. Rippling waves of absolutely terrible, wonderful, dirty, choking, smothering ecstasy. I trembled as it slithered over me, through me, overwhelmed me with absolute wonder and eclipsed my entire concept of pleasure. It crawled through my insides, opened up my brain and clawed at my synapses until I collapsed to the floor and gave up on anything other than feeling it.
The son of a bitch had outmaneuvered me, because he didn’t think like a human. He was scourge. He didn’t necessarily want to live. He just wanted me dead. Barring that, he wanted me infected.
And that’s exactly what he had done by conceding our duel.
Depth increasing. Stand by....
Depth increasing. Stand by....
Depth increasing. Stand by....
Depth increasing. Stand by....
Depth increasing. Stand by....
In my fading vision, as the stream of notifications scrolled through my mind, I saw the only other human being on Ralqir finally lose his thousand year battle with the maelstrom. Death took him, and his body was rendered to ash.
My conscious mind decided that enough was enough and hit the off switch but not before the thick, coppery taste of blood rushed to fill my mouth.