Chapter 79 - Confront my Doubts

The scourge’s next move, it turned out, was to get super pissy about things. Sure, it had probed at the outer edges of the light perimeter for a while, sending ones and twos as close to the ‘glow’ zone’ as possible without catching fire, but after it had mapped out what was safe and what wasn’t it chose to scurry away and hide. At least the ones that lived did that, those the turrets didn’t cut down before they could run.

That didn’t mean the scourge were sitting idly, though. The amount of howling and screeching I received when I got up on the walls to work on one of the turrets or launch the odd State Change fire starter into a pile of corpses was, quite frankly, disconcerting. It wasn’t so much the amount of hate I was getting from the mob of evil dead things. I was used to that and at shorter distances. What bothered me was more the tenor.

From all my previous interactions with them, the horde was capable of pretty much one emotion when it came to me: rage. At least they were up until now. With the change to our circumstances and a good barrier between us, I was seeing a new side to them. Individual monsters scraped the bark off of trees, clawed at the rocks and sometimes each other. They seemed directionless, almost, violently so, like their anger at having their prey right there with no direct path to him was eating them up inside.

It warmed my metal heart to see.

I’d reeled in the range on the turrets after the sun wall went up. No use in spending the ammo or generating the heat if the scourge weren’t going to get through the barrier anyway. Instead, I busied myself preparing for the worst while enjoying the relative peace over a bracing cup of awful red Ralqir tea.

There was significant degradation on the barrels, actions, and spring of the most active turrets as well as less than ideal power issues in the propulsion cubes. The power thing was the easiest to fix with just a little time juicing up the Automated parts, although a long term solution would probably require an entire overhaul of the design. I was wasting too much power and generating too much heat with every shot. It wasn’t a lot, mind you, but in the course of a thousand shots, certain parts of the machines got too hot to safely touch. In ten thousand, they were in danger of meltdown.

The next model needed to be more efficient if I really wanted to fire and forget these bad boys.

While I had the guns disassembled, I thought about giving them self-charging batteries, of course, but I wasn’t particularly comfortable with building weapons that needed to be fired or risk being turned into a bomb, given that I was sleeping next to them. The self destruct feature might be useful in keeping my weapons out of enemy hands sometime in the future, though. That was worth something.

The metal degradation was annoying but expected. These parts of the turret were under stress from heat and pressure constantly when the thing was in use, not to mention moisture from all the fog and morning dew. Plus they’d been in use for… eight days straight now?

I was lucky my machines were performing as well as they did. Despite them looking and acting like sophisticated implements of war, they were essentially a primitive and pale imitation of the real kinetic firearm back home. I was sure there were a lot of things I could have built into the design to keep it from eventually failing like this, but I’d never bothered to learn more than surface level stuff about guns. I was an engine guy, a computer guy, and that was enough to keep a boy busy in the Outers. Well… More like I’d been ‘convinced’ to ‘leave the warrior stuff to the warriors,’ like I was supposed to, and it was coming back to bite me.

I did know about moisture, heat and pressure, though, what it did to engines specifically. There were ways to mitigate those things, especially if a large part of the machine was exposed to moving air like my turrets were.

“Your new design looks… interesting,” Trix mumbled from beside me around a mouthful of some kind of cheese. This was one of the rare but increasingly frequent times he took to stretch his legs outside of his sniper’s nest nowadays. With our drop in aggressive scourge raids, he had been taking more and more breaks, choosing to help with cooking or changing bandages instead of constantly looking through the lens of his glamor spell. It had done wonders for his mood, being able to cook again. He truly enjoyed making others happy with the things he made.

Just now, though, he was picking at a ring of fingernail sized fan blades meant to fit into a housing that would go at the “front” of my new gun cooling idea. A couple different iterations sat on my workbench as well, rounded with a hollow part at the front and back like an atmo thruster or one of the old Earth jet engines.

He was right about the look. The new design was weird. Where my guns were all clean lines and robotic arms before, now there was an alien, egg shaped growth attached to the barrel immediately next to the action. I used a finger to Shape weld another tiny prong of copper onto the heat sink sleeve I was making.

“Yeah, well I’m just slapping a solution on a problem I already have,” I replied. “If I had the time, I’d redesign the whole thing to be one piece, but right now we’re stuck with aftermarket mods for the current guns. Right now, I’ll be perfectly happy if the fan spins up and blows air. If that works, then maybe we’ll talk about aesthetics.”

I punctuated my sentence with a Devouring Grasp that consumed a log the size of my forearm and reduced it to a cloud of orange vapor, re-applying the Engine status to my character sheet. My mana ticked out of the double digits again, and the mana migraine I’d been courting faded into the background once more.

I’d gotten a C grade affinity with mendau wood earlier in the day, and I liked the extra mana I was getting from it. It also came with a jump in the percentage of Hunger mana that the mendau supposedly had, which I was less of a fan of. Controlling that mana was hard, almost as hard as it had been my first day on Ralqir (thanks Tempered Channels).

It was annoying but useful in some ways too. It was hard to use the foreign mana I was getting from the wood, but their widely different temperaments made it easier to distinguish between types of mana inside of me. The stuff that bent to my will up to and including back flips and advanced calculus when I asked was ‘my’ mana, while the rabid squirrels I had to ply with treats and keep at arms length with a stool was the ‘Hunger’ variety. Before gaining higher affinity, I’d just assumed the two were mixed like soup, and I was stuck with the mixture until I’d used it all. Now, with more Hunger to work with, I was becoming able to tease out the good from the bad, which felt good. The practice helped me get another level in mana manipulation, bringing that value up to four.

“So, what are the monsters up to, Trix? Still sulking?” I asked as I hunched over the bristling heatsink.

Trix sniffed disdainfully. “After the attempted incursion last night, they appear to have learned about the disadvantageous nature of narrow valleys. Now, they seem to be content with continuous psychological warfare. The sounds they make are truly disturbing, not to mention how they’ve taken up clawing the trees and rocks. Also, to clarify, I wasn’t trying to disparage your uh- Well, maybe I was. A little. This new shape is strange and off putting, but that is not what I wanted to talk about,” Trix said, shuffling his feet as his ears flattened uncomfortably. He leaned in, getting up on his tiptoes to get nearer to my ear.

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“This appears to be a long term solution to a short term problem,” he whispered.

I looked over at him and raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, according to our schedule, we should be finding a way to get you home within three days, and that is at the maximum. Our dragon…” Trix paused to shake his head in disbelief. “Funny how I can say that so casually now… our dragon is set to arrive in four, and you are to be in your own universe by then for your own safety and ours. Is that not the plan?”

Looking down at my half-welded outer casing, I swallowed, wishing in that moment I had more awful tea. “Yeah. That’s the plan.”

“Would it not be more prudent to work on how to get you to the ruins in one piece then?” He asked.

That was a completely rational question, one that I didn’t have a great answer to.

“I’m working on that. I have several plans,” I hedged.

Trix tilted his head skeptically. The whiskers on his nose did a curious dance that reminded me of Garret and his mustache.

“Some ideas,” I added, defensively. “A few.”

His little fox eyes got bigger and bigger until they were all I saw, big pools of brown and black like warm chocolate before bed. His fur looked so soft. So adorable-

“Okay! Okay! I don’t know yet. I see what you’re doing,” I admitted, swatting him away as I fought to tear my eyes from his. I may have also taken the opportunity to give his fur a little pat. It really was soft.

Trix dropped the glamor and brushed the fur I’d mussed back into place, but he didn’t seem ready to drop the subject. He looked down at the floor contemplatively, taping a finger on his chin, and after several tense moments of staring he figured out what to say. “Ryan, you know none of us blame you for the happenings as of late. This isn’t your fault.”

That came out of nowhere. Also, it was super wrong. I was obviously to blame. Hell, who else was there to blame? Wasn’t a guy allowed to blame himself for causing the apocalypse? Constance, Trix was right. The heatsinks looked like tumors.

“Of course I’m not to blame.” I lied, sounding too defensive by half. I dove back into the heatsink, pouring myself into it to separate the prongs a bit more. Probably not something I needed to do, but it was better than letting my mind go down the ‘self flagellation’ rabbit hole again.

Trix held up his hands in surrender. “Of course. Of course. As I said, you are not to blame. I am just saying, you may be an outsider by birth, but-” he sighed, and hunched his shoulders as if he was afraid someone was going to hit him. “You’re an outsider, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t welcome.”

My mouth felt dry. I grasped with my non-Shaping hand for the empty cup next to me and tried to drain the last few drops of tea out of the bottom. Nothing. Instead, I just stared into the empty cup uncomfortably.

“Yeah. I understand,” I replied. “You guys have been wonderful to me. Best friends I’ve made in… I don’t know.”

Trix cleared his throat. “That’s- That’s not- I just want you to know that if you’re having second thoughts about leaving, you are not the only one.”

Something fluttered in the pit of my stomach sending a tiny thrill through my body. However, the rational part of my mind smashed the thought I was having with a very big hammer.

That was impossible, dangerous thinking.

It pained me to say it, but it had to be said. “Trix, I can’t stay. I’m… poisoning you. Just my being here is destroying your home.”

The little fox shook his head. “Changing our home, Ryan. Changing it,” Trix corrected. “Not all change is bad. It may seem bad at the time, horrible even, like a forest fire, but afterward, life goes on. Sometimes, the fire is even needed to keep the forest healthy. We of Ralqir have had much practice weathering such things.”

I rubbed tiredly at my eyes with the heels of my hands. “But does it always involve this many dead people, Trix?” I asked.

Trix gave the vulpa version of a frown but bowed slightly in acknowledgement. “I don’t diminish the cost we have paid. I lament the loss of all these people, and I hope we limit this cataclysm with our actions here. However, this crisis is only the latest in a chain of many and not even the worst.”

He put a clawed hand on my newly restored forearm. “It is also the craft of many hands, none your own. Do not ascribe guilt to yourself when you had no part in making things as they are. I can see the conflict in your words and actions. Do not let these feelings of guilt guide you down a path you do not want to walk.”

“For the hundredth time, it’s not guilt,” I argued. “Besides, my feelings don’t matter, Trix. What matters is you. All of you. It’s easy to see I’m not supposed to be here.”

“Of course your feelings matter, Ryan.” He gave my arm a firm squeeze, a strange gesture for someone so small. “With or without you, Ralqir will find a way forward. We- Well, most of us… would just rather do it with you.”

Such a naked admission. Of course it came from Trix the Honest. He and, by extension, the others accepted me, even though I was dangerous. They wanted me to stay. They were practically inviting me to stay, though none of us knew what that would do in the long term. Despite that, they were willing to take that risk.

An image of a pet rock popped into my head. Rounded edges. A child’s black and white paint giving it goofy, offset eyes. Only I, the pet rock in this metaphor, was pure plutonium.

Did they not think it through? Did they not see what I meant to this place? Maybe they did. Maybe they did, and they still wanted me. They were willing to live with the poison I was bringing with me.

That was too much. I short circuited, dropping my saturation I was trying to achieve with the metal and staring into the middle distance vaguely in the direction of my workbench.

After I didn’t talk for some time, Trix let go of my arm and wandered off after gingerly returning the fan blade to the little pile on the corner of my bench.

I didn’t exactly see him go, but I felt it.

It was tempting, actually, to think of myself as a complete outsider. Blameless.

I wasn’t here by choice, and things happened that were beyond my control. It was tempting to look at Ralqir as just the victim of a natural disaster. All this… evil… just happened, like a storm or an earthquake. If not because of me, it would have been because of someone else, or maybe it would have taken the form of another thing, years later when the scourge reached critical mass a bit further down the road.

I knew better than that, though. Didn’t I? Humans weren’t meant to be here. It wasn’t just my insertion point that was poisoning this place. It was me.

A breach of natural law.

The wretchwyrm had said that, just before trying to- I didn’t know what. Kill me? Use me? That felt right. It was going to use me like the Dark Lord had used Ephelir. To what end, I didn’t know.

Regardless, I’d been here for under a year, and I’d already set off an apocalypse and then, to fix that, changed warfare forever. What else would I do to these people if I stayed? If I made a life here, what else would I change? Who else would try to use me?

You have done and you will continue to do to us as long as you live.

Closing my eyes, I reached inward and pulled myself close, all of me. I withdrew my presence from Ralqir and brought it inside of myself, cycling it the way Jassin had taught me, through my body and spirit. It felt like I was stretching, though I was doing the opposite, working a muscle that was woefully undeveloped, and it hurt. The hurt felt right.

Did the world seem better this way, without me? More pure? Less chaotic? The monsters were still there. I could hear them. Then there were the burning questions underneath the problem of the monsters. Even without me, what was the scourge? What would it do once I’d gone? Would it leave these people in peace? What was it, really, when it wasn’t wearing dead things like sweaters?

On my stool, staring at my workbench as the afternoon sun passed by, the world went on without me for a time, while I waited for some kind of sign.