Incoherent, flickering, repeating phantoms, all across the battlefield, wrought of ghostly non-matter in hues of pale blues and cyans. Most of them were barely even recognizable as people beyond their shapes. Those who still held vaguely person-like forms repeated the same motions over and over again, or simply remained in one place, hiding behind cover that wasn’t there, guarding against an enemy that would never come. The least coherent among them were just vaguely humanoid clouds of energy floating or twitching in place.
The Sword Phantom Scripture had described them just like this; Scattered Remnants, it had called them. Fragment, vestiges, frayed threads of fighting will.
Hundreds of them littered the battlefield, and they were merely the secondary subject of interest.
The Scripture had placed the utmost importance on their counterparts: Coherent Remnants. They were the Remnants of the vanishingly small handful who's fighting will had been so powerful it created an entirely new spiritual entity upon the person’s death.
She looked down into the ruins of the fort, and there among the broken bodies of her fellow doppelsoldaten, she beheld them, ghostly figures looking up at her in stoic silence. Beings of pure fighting spirit, absent will or agency of their own, waiting to be given purpose. Daemons born from the passing of dying warriors by any other name. Out of the doppelsoldaten who had fallen to guard this fort, three dozen had left behind a Coherent Remnant, and dozens more had left Scattered ones. Among them, five Tankmen stood, three of whom had somehow left behind Remnants that included their tank suits, battered and riddled with holes even in death. She knew not how it was possible, short of the pilots having developed a spiritual unity with their machines. She also had no way to know just how far the limits of this phenomenon could stretch, and she didn’t dare to make a guess.
Looking out over the field of battle, Zefaris picked out more and more Coherent Remnants, one after the next. She turned her gaze to Toza, and saw that he had left behind no remnant at all. His fighting will had utterly left him by the time he fell to her.
Out of the fallen Inquisitors’ number, every single one had left a Remnant of some kind, and a wholly disproportionate number of them had left Coherent Remnants, matching or possibly even superseding the ratio of the doppelsoldaten. The more she watched, the more she noticed subtle details; some Remnants, particularly Coherent ones, exuded the faintest weapon aura, as if a shred of the original’s prowess had imprinted on the remnant. She couldn’t distinguish between types, only sense it in the faintest possible sense.
That Inquisitor in particular drew her attention, and she saw him there, standing upright, the hollow eye sockets of his skeletal remnant staring at her from inside a ghostly gas mask. The Scripture didn’t give a special name to “Extra-Coherent Remnants”, but it was quite obvious that not all Coherent Remnants were equal.
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The hard part was yet to come.
The Sword Phantom Scripture centered around a method by which the remnant will of fallen warriors may be gathered together, compressed, moulded to form a spiritual construct at the practitioner’s command. Taking the first step on that path, assuming the practitioner already possessed the pre-requisite affinity for death, was to form a so-called Inner Phantom. As Zefaris understood it, the Inner Phantom was effectively a man-made daemon. The scripture described how an aspirant would need to experience life-or-death combat in the vicinity of others’ deaths in order to form anything beyond a basic foundation. It also mentioned that if she was reading this as an aspirant, she had likely already gone through that preliminary stage, and that the difficult part would be grasping her “Phantom Core” to begin building upon it. Once more it recommended doing so immediately after a life-or-death combat encounter, specifically “no more than half a day later”.
Of course, being a complete manual, the Scripture included guidelines on the actual process of finding the Phantom Core and forming it into an Inner Phantom. The formation part didn’t worry her, as it entailed taking Remnants into herself, it was finding and grasping the Phantom Core that was a cause for concern, demanding her to meditate on the moments when she came closest to the concept of Death, though not just the moments when she herself was closest to dying. During that time, she was to use an enclosed mantra and mental exercise to find “Phantom Threads” in these memories, pulling on them to eventually find where within her own soul the nascent Phantom Core was located. Sighing, she shut the scripture, sheathed it, and sat down. It would be unpleasant going back to quite a few of these memories, but she’d dealt with them by now..
The first time she saw an animal being butchered.
The first time she put a bullet in a deer’s head.
The moment when she slew the Leshy.
Her first live-fire exercise.
Her first actual battle.
On and on it went, a slideshow of vignettes from her long military career, most of them unremarkable in anything other than being close to death. Only a few of them stood out, and even fewer of them contained those strange strands on which she pulled to get closer to the Phantom Core.
Near-misses one after the next. Sniper duels. Being bombarded by some drugged-up cultivator that couldn’t handle the idea of mortals wielding firepower comparable to him.
Her first assignment as a doppelsoldat.
The Battle for Stonog, when inquisitors infiltrated far behind the lines and Zefaris was, herself, stuck behind Grekurian lines, trying to snipe them while a handful of tankmen engaged in close-range.
The battle where she had lost her eye. An insignificant battle in the grand scheme, the incident nothing more than a particularly close call.
Four different incidents with various mutants in the Exclusion Zone.
The first meeting with Zelsys.
Various points in the Dungeon: Her time in the simulated trench-maze. Her quick-draw standoff with that skeletal statue. Her duel with the subcore. The entirety of the final battle.
One thread after the next.
She knew where the Phantom Core was, but she nonetheless dreaded arriving there.