“Finally!” Elio roared as Orykson appeared over a battlefield. Orykson resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He did appreciate snark, especially coming from those who didn’t have the power to challenge him, like his young ex-apprentice, but he didn’t like it right now.
Thinking of Malachi caused a faint twitch at the corner of Orykson’s mouth, a pleased smile. Despite the boy’s sappy words – and probably thoughts, though Orykson could not, nor wanted to, read those – he had some spark of a warrior in him.
When Orykson had received the report from Aerde about Malachi’s condition, he thought for a second that Meadow must be tricking him, or maybe one of her allies. She had too many among the wandering Occultists.
But then he’d gotten the excuse to go and see for himself, and looking at the sheer amount of spiritual damage had almost caused Orykson to not respond.
Right up until he used his analysis spells to look deeper at Malachi's spirit, as well as the new roots that had physically fused into Malachi’s chest.
Aerde had been completely right, as usual.
That had left him absolutely elated. He’d nearly been proud enough to hug the boy.
Sure, the bonds hadn't been what Orykson would have preferred, and with all the damage, the benefits weren't even finished congealing yet, but he could guess. This was just going to push Malachi even further afield from the optimal use of his powers.
But he'd still been quite pleased with the results overall.
“Orykson, I do not believe processing your emotions is the optimal choice at the moment,” Aerde said, and Orykson agreed. Together, they considered what the best course of action would be, calculating angles, patterns of attack, and identifying targets.
The sky swarmed with massive hornets, with the smallest easily the size of a dog, and the largest being able to challenge even the largest of oak trees for size. Most of them participating in the battle were third gate, but there were fourth, fifth, and even a couple of sixth gate wasps peppered throughout, as if one was picking out bits of specific vegetables within a stew.
And far beneath them, in a nest of paper tubes that made up a fortress of wasp-domination, the queen sent out her orders, using her pheromone to direct the battle, relocate mana from one child to another, and counter Elio’s magic.
The aged gemstone dragon was in his fully draconic form, and at his power and age, he had grown to the length of a redwood tree, and was considerably thicker around. Three pairs of glimmering wings caught the light, amplifying it and sending searing rays of fire from the sky, enhanced through his gemstone magic. He opened his mouth and unleashed a torrent of magic that was a riot of color, not unlike the northern auroras, but many times more... sparkly.
The power struck the fortress walls and washed over it, but the paper sparked and sizzled as the insect’s warding magic went to work, blocking off protection from every angle. The hive queen’s still incomplete title – which probably would have been ‘The Hive Queen’, as benal as that was – reinforced the magic of the walls, and seemed to give them endless mana, while Elio’s own half-formed title thundered through the power of his breath.
Orykson… found the entire scene rather dull. If he extended his power as the Analyst out, he could find every possible flaw in the wards and shatter them, then correct the spell form that Elio was using. The battle would be over in moments, with Orykson not having to spend more than a touch of ungated mana.
But that wouldn’t assist Elio in forming his title. That was a road that everyone had to walk on their own, expanding their clarity of focus and empowered resonance into the world around them.
He had found the process rather easy, and the moment he had ascended to seventh gate, his first title had simply fallen into place, with no effort needed on his part. He knew that the Sun and Moon Queens had been much the same.
But others took longer, like Ikki, who had never even been able to start forming a title, only to have it snap into place fifty years after he’d ascended to seventh gate.
Elio seemed to be taking the same path as the Kraken Liege, who had operated her – or his, or their, or other things besides, depending on the day – fleet for more than eighty years, slowly but surely grinding away at the creation of her title, bringing it from a bare stone all the way to the force it was today.
Orykson realized he was getting distracted when a sixth gate wasp’s stinger ripped through his stomach the third time. He glared at it and cast Dessicate Flesh, causing it to fall apart into fine, white powder.
“Aerde, do you have the targets?”
“I’ve had them, then the battle changed so much that I picked new ones, then I had to repeat that several more times while you were busy acting senile,” Aerde said. Orykson paused. Everyone was a critic today, it seemed.
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Orykson waved his hand and opened the bone vault. At least, he opened one of them. He did have a couple, sorted for various sizes and creatures. This vault was full of common animal bones designed to be used with Pinpoint Boneshard.
As he released them into the battlefield, he empowered the spell, then passed the magic off to his partner. Aerde set the points all across the battlefield, and Orykson’s magic spun through it. There was a roar of bone rushing through the air, then a wave of death energy erupted from the battle, as so many creatures died at once.
Orykson used a harvesting spell and pulled most of it into himself, restoring his lost mana, then funneling it upwards into his higher gates to help them recover as well. There was no sense in letting the power go to waste, and if that much death energy settled into the land, it would begin to spawn spirits far too quickly.
What he left he allowed to slip into the soil, where it could fertilize future plants alongside the bodies of the hornets. Even with her power reduced to almost nothing, he thought that Idyll should be able to handle such a simple task as improving decomposition.
“Thank… you…” Elio said, huffing as he used a blast of his gemstone breath to suppress a group of three Arcanist level wasps.
“Just doing my duty,” Orykson said, then flicked his other hand. Multiple Spatial Anchors formed around the castle of paper, their magic reaching out and connecting together to form a circle, which he poured more magic into.
“That, when activated, will teleport the entire castle and the queen into a spot in the unclaimed lands, eight hundred miles southwest of the City of Sin,” Orykson informed Elio. “It will only activate once you’ve been able to break the wards of the castle.”
It wouldn’t last forever, of course. The mana expense to create a teleportation platform of that size and scale would take far more than he was willing to give to such a simple task. But if Elio was able to use this to nudge along his burgeoning title, then it would be worth the expense, and if he simply overpowered the wards the old fashioned way, then that would be acceptable as well. Orykson liked situations where he won, no matter what route was taken.
Elio nodded his massive, serpentine head in agreement, and Orykson vanished, re-assigning himself to another task.
He and Aerde spun possibilities through the air, looking for things that might be able to assist Malachi and Kene with their hag situation.
Despite the fact that sounded simple, it really was not. Aerde was casting spells to locate magical items of a thousand different sorts, and applying just enough pressure to allow him to overcome any ancient wards that were still standing, without applying so much pressure that it would batter against the other world powers, and they would think of it as a spying attempt. Most of this was done by limiting the searches to unclaimed lands and lands in his territory, but even those limits brushed up against the wanderers, those who’d never integrated their titles into the land.
He knew that the other powers of the world and history had done research into the creation of artificial souls, soul surgery, and more, before – Most of their research had never panned out, of course. Souls were deep, complex. Orykson was still finding new facets, depths, and deep mysteries within even the most mundane of them to this day, and he’d had longer than most people to study them, as well as tools uniquely suited to the study.
But there had been research.
Tom had attempted to nullify entire souls at one point, Corpselight had been obsessed with the idea of stitching the souls of the dead into his army to make them as powerful as a person while being completely loyal to him, and Silver Tide had… Well, the Silver Tide had actually probably seen the most success, with his creation of a seventh gate soul-severing spell. It had been clunky, and unable to scratch Orykson’s defenses, but he’d commended the man for his accomplishment.
More importantly, Silver Tide had also crafted a powerful enchanted amulet that was capable of temporarily severing apart a pair of linked souls. Silver Tide had hoped to use it to briefly break the bond between the Sun and Moon Queens, then kill them and take over Elohi.
The Sun Queen had simply turned him to ash without needing the power of her wife, and then proceeded to destroy the amulet, as well as several of Silver Tide’s more heinous experiments. With the Spider’s webs of detection assisting her, she’d caught almost all of them.
But almost all was not the same as all of them.
There, located in unclaimed territory to the north-east of Kijani, hidden by spells that had begun to decay, was the research lab that contained the prototypes of the amulet Silver Tide had used. Too weak for anyone of real power to use, but it could be a start in separating the hag and the child.
Orykson and Aerde marked that down and continued searching.
There, on the shores of an island that had once been part of Greater Daocheng and technically still was, though almost no population remained. If they could fight their way through the sect master’s sanctum’s defenses – they had mostly faded by now – they could claim a jewel with a soul and mind trapped within that had become tortured by over a thousand years of complete solitude, with nothing to do at all. Now it was a gibbering mass of madness that the hag could eat, once they drained the gem nearly entirely of its mana reserves.
He paused.
No, his ex-apprentice was too much of a do-gooder. Malachi would probably insist on breaking the gemstone to allow the soul to move onto whatever came after life.
Even he didn’t know what came after death. Souls without a tether lasted moments, perhaps a minute, if one was lucky. Their imprints and cast offs, ghosts and shades, could linger more or less indefinitely, provided they had mana, but… Not the soul.
There wasn’t much that truly frightened Orykson these days. Even if the container in which his soul was stored, he had plans.
But that mystery did.
He shook his head. He was being far too emotional today. He blamed the conversation with his ex-apprentice for that.
He refocused, discarding the sect and looking for other options.
And there were many to sort through.
People, in his experience, tended to forget how long time truly was. Over the course of even the last century, many Occultists had risen up, fallen in battle, died in peace, died from failed ascension, or gone another many ways. Outside of that, there were still options: abandoned research labs that had never turned up research, false occultists endlessly seeking ways to fix their broken power, strange things from the depths of space that possessed odd powers.
There were many options for Malachi. The trouble was finding them. And with Aerde, the second greatest knowledge mage on all of Ddeaer, on his side, Orykson could find them.
And best of all… he knew that Meadow, despite her might and skill, could not.