The Between was nominally classified as a Level One dimension which by all and every ranking indicated that the amount of danger was barely above a walk in the streets. That rating ensured that Users of Maverice could access the dimension without having to bypass the blanket ban on any Users traveling to dimensions of Level Two or greater. In principle I agreed with the rating and not just due to the ubiquitousness of portals. For Users, which constituted the vast majority of Maverice’s population, the various perception blockers turned the journey into a short blink, like stepping into a different room. On the other hand for Wielders the process was far more traumatic as the perception blockers could never quite handle the disquieting and overwhelming feeling of wrongness from the Between dimension given by the foreign mana, so antithetical to the normal background mana that it elicited a feeling of absolute disgust.
Before the days of perception blockers that now came standard with every portal those Wielders accessing the Between used to imbibe hallucinogenic substances before they undertook the journey to drain some of their toxic lucidity for the travel that they were to undertake. It was a luxury I couldn’t right now indulge in as my unprotected mind feverishly tried to make sense of the otherworldly shapes and sounds of the Between. Currents of wind or water or light or space or even more abstract concepts buoyed me through a spatial tunnel moving by some unknown logic that humans only understood enough to take slight advantage of it.
Through an otherworldly hue; far off in the distance there were colossal shadowy shapes that might have legs, or wings, or eyes, or teeth, or might just float through the void water endlessly on organs with no known worldly analogue. Each sighting was a dreadful blow to my cognition like a nightmare straight from the Abyssopelagic and I closed my eyes instinctively before remembering that there was no difference as thin eyelids provided no protection against the humming wavelengths that announced the existence of every scrap of foreign matter/energy and I instinctively rejected the screaming blurry hum that pounded against my brain until I felt like my very gray matter would self-destruct.
Alright, let’s try to prevent that then.
Trait Activated: Mechanical Mind
Objective 1: Leave Between
Objective 2: Defeat Mania Bloom
Objective 3: Shut Down Mechanical Mind
A portion of my mana disappeared and my brain instantly shifted gears twisting like a puzzle box until the shape and patterns deformed into a different structure entirely. I could taste salt on my tongue as I felt the vessel of my consciousness rearranging itself in a sign of neurologic plasticity that would indicate brain damage in most cases but not something quite as bad in my particular one. The dreadful all-encompassing, eldritch, otherworldly hum turned into mere descriptors of frequency, amplitude and wave form and my sensory organs became receivers that captured these unnecessary waves before declaring it junk data and discarding it. I opened my eyes and my visual receptors immediately scanned through all the colors of the spectra available to me before widening the scope to infrared and ultraviolet before rejecting any input outside of that immensely narrow spectrum. Automatically every pore of my body closed immediately rejecting the foreign mana of the land and I became a self-contained system as my olfactory receivers shut off, deemed temporarily unnecessary. Ultimately my five senses were curtailed, corralled and managed as if by the most inhuman factory manager.
To my new perceptions the unknowable elements were stripped and filtered from the world leaving behind a void tinged a certain color, let’s call it octarine. Incalculable distances away those massive shadows moved and shifted, sometimes bigger than a mountain and other times smaller than my fist; as if losing and gaining mass was a trivial endeavor and casting off entire dimensions of their being was no harder than changing clothes. There was a consistent strange music among the patterns that seemed to wind in and out of existence as if alive, if only by the barest definition, and I felt a strange danger that manifested only by one of the many half-senses that I did not curtail as thoroughly, as if were I to linger till the end of the song I would be devoured by the encore. Strange yet familiar vectors of space buoyed me towards my destination and I noticed a familiar blot of reality like a light in the woods. I locked onto that space and braced before I hit that blot head-on and burst through the Firmament allowing the familiar feeling of constant C drew me back into the world.
Objective 1: Completed
The scene that my receptors observed as I tore through the portal would not be out of place on some of the many battlefields that I had found myself on. The most immediately noticeable thing that I detected was that the entire structure beneath my feet had been tilted by between two and three degrees from the absolute levelness that all official buildings were required to observe. A particularly impressive feat considering that the police building was made of over half a million tons of metals and was easily in the top five most reinforced buildings in New Bremen.
The source of the damage was immediately apparent as walls made from Enderium steel and other super metals had holes punched through them from which vines, like squirming snakes emerging from a pit. The entire Police Station had become a target with an estimated two hundred vines of variable sizes tearing randomly through the structure, just in my vision alone.
By my reckoning the main node should still be in the basement, yeah I could practically taste the mana in the air rising from beneath. In all probability that was where the Lieutenant I briefly spoke to went; to confront the node of the vines. I would have done the same in his situation, but more successfully of course. Regretfully, I probably should have given him more information on Mania Blooms before he charged down to confront one, but then we were scraping paint from the clock in the first place.
My feet touched the ground and instantly a thin vine, the width of my arm, accelerated from languid flailing to frightful speeds and I raised my right arm feeling it lash against the mana there; briefly cracking the hard shell and wrapping around my arm. Unperturbed by the sudden violence I reached out with my left hand and simply grabbed the vine before squeezing the flesh causing it to rupture. I retracted my hand allowing the vine to writhe around as I inspected my palm. A thin red line indicated that the ruby thorns had actually managed to break the skin, a task not made easy by the shield of mana that surrounded me every second of every day.
If even a minor vine could damage me then the Bloom already possessed the strength of a Superior Mage at least. I hypothesized that it was a result of originally feeding the more powerful than usual Lord Sukumo; but this wasn’t a much researched subject unfortunately. Mania Blooms had been deployed only very late into the Rampage, right before the death of Anima and the overwhelming majority of studies were only focused on the method by which to destroy them. In this case their hardness was apparently overwhelmingly concentrated on the thorns with my analysis indicating that the vines possessed barely any magic shielding and a lack of strong resistance in the flesh; although the sheer volume of it might prove comparatively dauntying.
The flailing vine had stopped its retreat and I formed a shell of White Zurite in the form of an axe, sidestepping the lunge and chopping through the flesh leaving another arm’s length of plant matter on the floor. It was a good amount of damage but compared to the sheer number of vines well; an axe wouldn’t cut it, so to speak. I clapped my hands together and summoned White Zurite which covered the pair of limbs in a bulky set of white gloves covered in glowing red runes.
Experimentally I extended my index and middle finger before curling the remaining fingers into my palm and allowing my thumb to extend upwards as I calmly lined up the approaching vines.
Under most circumstances I would probably make some pithy statement but it would to be irrational to do so against an unthinking plant. Therefore why would I do so at the moment. My thoughts focused and light condensed around the tip of my index finger before refracting forward in a tightly controlled beam of only five centimeters in diameter that tore through the fleshy plant matter before smashing into chunks of concrete. That…was actually inadequate compared to what I was attempting. It seems that significant reserves of mine were still stagnant tanking my overall control. I couldn’t bend the beams like that. Quickly I reprioritized.
Objective 1: Resolve Stagnant Mana.
Option A: Vent stagnant mana by using high-powered spells
Option B: Remove active defenses allowing the attack of Mania Bloom to wear out stagnant mana.
Option C: Run mana circularisation exercises for a minimum of one hour and forty eight minutes.
Objective 2: Defeat Mania Bloom
Objective 3: Switch off Mechanical Mind
I judged that the most effective way to do so would be to expend great amounts of it by using powerful spells that were released directly from the body while steadily increasing the number of lasers that I fired. Another two vines sprouting from the floor locked onto my position and I destroyed them immediately with my laser, first targeting one and then the other. My Soul stirred before squeezing out more and more mana until my barrier was creaking beneath the flow as I shifted targets rapidly gunning down vine after vine until…
The building shifted rocking to the side slightly and I refocused on the massive swarm of thorns and vines below seeing the broken walls, ceiling and floors from which more and more vines emerged. That was dangerous. My primary objective that I had designated before even entering the altered state. I had casually drifted in priorities, not unexpected but quite unwelcome. There was no trait without at least a little danger. Managing that danger was part of becoming a good Superior Mage. For me that danger lay in the fact that I was a different person with different, possibly dangerous priorities, under Mechanical Mind.
Objective 1: Defeat Mania Bloom
Objective 2: Switch off Mechanical Mind
Still even without making it a priority it was necessary that I would increase my mana expenditure in order to more quickly recover. I was completely unable to fathom why my previous self still hadn’t done so before diving into such a dangerous situation. Sparing no more time for contemplation, I stomped down on the metal ground with all the force of a drill extracting mana from the planet, shattering the already hole-ridden floor and briefly pushing myself airborne before jumping downwards into the swarming hostiles below. I didn’t have the blueprints for the central police station in my mind, never have I looked into it; but judging from the feeling of the magic raging below, I estimate that there are still two more floors separating me from the core of the Bloom.
Beneath me, like a pit of Viperins, score upon score of vines writhed unnaturally. White Zurite formed in my fingers before the mass took on a more ruddy hue and coalesced into a familiar spherical shape. Ten scarlet marbles were flung into the mass of targets, some were intercepted by the swinging vines and some landed on the mass directly; it made no difference. Only by breaking the runes could the power of the formation be displayed. All ten spheres fragmented before my eyes; swelling with an enormous amount of energy before their reinforced shell obliterated itself, firing Zurite in every direction and shredding the surrounding foliage. A snap of my fingers and the spell was duplicated sending another ten spheres down to mop up the remnants lending more destruction to the area.
A split-second later I completed my fall and landed amongst the mound of floral corpses. Well not all corpses. For the second time today it felt like I was dodging snakes as wounded vines lashed out, expending their remaining energy in an attempt to drain some of mine. I was tempted to let them for a moment, drain more of the stagnant mana anyway, but I held true to my priority list, I had to urgently defeat the Bloom as soon as possible. More Red Zurite formed around me into a half-dozen circular blades and then I tapped my finger on the six injecting more mana and forcibly molding the edges of those blades into sawblades. One more flick of my fingers and they flew; spinning rapidly they descended into the mess of vines cleaving through them easily before they rapidly changed directions and chased down the other vines.
Mana Control 101 as long as your mana was originally injected into a spell you can maintain a level of control over the spell. Although as per usual it was subject to how much mana you injected, how long ago you performed the spell and how familiar you were with the spell and magic in general. The last one was the biggest impact to a certain extent. While it was a well-known technique very few basic mages managed to pull it off instead deciding to normally cast a new spell and waste their mana and mental energy.
I stopped my musing as a small seed the size of my fingernail fell to the ground as the last of the vines were destroyed and I instinctively blasted it to bits with my laser. That was a core, a distributed node of a Mania Bloom allowing the plant to extend its reach and commit havoc remotely. It was slightly astonishing just how tiny the nodes of Mania Blooms were under all those vines. I had to concede that Lord Anima created some truly dangerous works of art when they were properly motivated.
I placed my hands in my pockets as I walked down one of the corridors following the source of the vines to what I presumed would be the basement. Around me like, like Halve Hornets circling a NeverBlossom, my spinning blades flew out eviscerating the vines before they returned and began to siphon off my excess mana.
I rounded the corner before back stepping just as a globule of acid hit the spot where I stood previously; and I stepped forward again shooting a disapproving glare at the young mage who hadn’t apparently learnt trigger discipline yet. Still he and his companion had done well enough just surviving under pressure that I could forgive a small slip-up. I turned part of my attention towards the new batch of vines and my new tools lurched forward obeying my will and flying past the duo of mages before tearing into the vines behind them with uncaged ferocity.
“Which way to the basement,” I asked politely as I strode over to them and received suspicious glances. It was to be expected at the very least. I was a new face in the police station that showed up right as there was a Mania Bloom outbreak. Still at least the boy had the decency to look somewhat chagrined after nearly having hit me with acid.
“Sir, can you please identify yourself,” the girl said. In her right hand she had a standard police wand that she was definitely not raising, but was placed in such a way that she could use it at a moment’s notice. Good procedure I suppose, if a bit different from that of my home country. I felt a twinge of irritation that they were holding onto the procedure while the building was under siege, but I suppose for all they knew I could have summoned the Mania Bloom myself.
“Martin Victorin, Superior Mage with the Tower of Bremen,” I said in a clipped tone trying to power through this conversation with the minimal level of distraction. Both of them immediately snapped to attention at those words. “I’m here to stop the Mania Bloom.” While I was speaking to them my rush-job artefacts were making fruit salad out of the nearby vines, chopping ferociously at the vines as they tried to retreat while covering for the secondary node.
“The stairs to the basement are that way, Sir,” the boy said, immediately pointing in a direction. “Would you like me to show you the way?”
“Could you?” I asked for recreating spectacles of White Zurite and gave them the once-over. No domain, not even an aura, weak bodies and pitifully low mana pools. They didn’t resemble a heroic warrior, or a great beast; instead they felt vulnerable, human. If I brought them into a fight with a Mania Bloom they might not even get me there before they were crushed. That was important… I think. Realistically speaking their odds of survival weren’t that greater than if they left and any assistance they provided could lead to the quicker destruction of the Mania Bloom. I was about to accept before my objectives suddenly and apropos of nothing updated.
Objective 1: Defeat Mania Bloom
Side Objective: Prevent wasteful loss of life
Objective 2: Switch off Mechanical Mind
That was a hidden objective that I remember programming ages ago, a fallback in case I became too sociopathic while using Mechanical mind. Of course it was a flimsy safety net. Wasteful loss of life was entirely up for myself to interpret. Good, that means it checks out and the updated objective is based on my nascent decision. Can I prevent them from dying while fighting the Mania Bloom? Yes I could, but it would be a lot of unnecessary effort and a slip up may lead to them easily losing their lives.
“The building is unstable,” I pointed out. “Your Mana Barriers might not be able to survive a possible collapse. Just get out. Evacuate anybody else on your way out.” They nodded before a thought struck me. “Wait,” I said, grabbing two of my spinning blades, which had returned from cutting through another one of those weak secondary nodes, and imprinting one new compound rune on them that perfectly captured my intent. “These will give you some protection,” I stated as I spun them around and sent them to follow the duo. “Now get.”
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They spluttered thanks as they ran, but honestly I found myself uninterested as a tremor shook the entire building at that moment causing it to shudder and continue to tilt. Frankly I’m surprised that it hasn’t already collapsed due to the shear forces clashing below. Whoever created the runic fortifications for this building was undoubtedly a genius; it might have actually been me. Vines in front of me were cut to pieces automatically by my spinning blades, while vines that were to the side or behind me were simply avoided; all the time my mind lingered on just how this building was reinforced in the first place. My evaluation of the runic structure only stopped as the stairs that I was aiming for appeared before me.
Redirecting and refocusing my thoughts I dove down a staircase hitting the wall at the end with one leap and launching myself into the lower floor without even touching the stairs. I repeated the feat, twisting my body and launching myself down another level before I came to a stop in front of a metal door adorned with well-inscribed runes that clearly powered a fairly decent barrier. It appeared that this room had been placed on lockdown; not that it seemed to do anything against the fairly endless waves of vines tearing through the building. Even now as I stood looking at this formidably sturdy door the walls on either side of me started to crack as more vines began pouring through. On the other hand it was probably due to some form of interior shielding that this whole place has not collapsed yet. Just as I was contemplating the door runes while directing my blades to cut off the vines before they fully pierced through, I heard a thump and the door practically vibrated before the runes flickered indicating power expenditure.
Objective 1: Defeat Mania Bloom
Right, I could practically taste the mana through that door. If even a fraction of that boiling mass was aimed at the door itself then the entire doorway would just be gone. Judging from the fact that this hadn’t happened yet it must mean that not all of the mana belonged to the Bloom. Odds were that it was the lieutenant who I had spoken to briefly but never met in my day to day life.
I placed my hand against the door before frowning as I felt the runes fully engaged, increasing the difficulty of deactivation severalfold, but after thirty seconds of swift motions with my fingers tracing and erasing runes, I managed to, momentarily, deactivate the door and quickly step into the room before slamming it shut and reasserting the lockdown. Those precautions proved themselves necessary in the next second as I immediately had to leap to the left as a gray energy, distinct from any natural state of matter, flickered into existence in the spot where my right leg was before vanishing with the sound of displaced air.
“Destruction,” I whistled as I immediately recognized the strange eldritch energy, titled by those lacking practical knowledge as the strongest type of magic. The gray energy it shaped itself into squares, cracks and lines flickering between these shapes and moving unfettered by gravity or momentum and directed by nothing but the sheer will to destroy. Wherever it passed it was like an eraser brushed against the world; deleting matter, energy, magic and even the laws themselves; or at least it would have if it was wielded with a bit more expertise. An instant later I laid eyes on the wielder; an unnaturally beautiful tall, inhumanely pale man, with pointed bat-like ears, that turned towards me affixing me with a pair of red cross-shaped pupils distinctive of one kind of species.
“Vampire,” I said conversationally as I appraised the not-quite legendary creature in front of me. They were a definite minority in Maverice as the nation had one of the most progressive policies towards the bloodsuckers; namely not killing them on sight. Faster, tougher, stronger and much more long-lived than your average human; their mages took that power inherent in their race and combined it with their already powerful physique creating superhuman fighters; or that was supposed to be the theory at least. In practice, numbers count for a lot. If Archmages are one in a million then it doesn’t matter how strong your race is when their combined numbers don’t pass three figures.
“Stay back,” the vampire warned me as a gray smoke poured off him and I watched as pure destruction was transferred into a gaseous form that eroded anything into non-existence that approached him. Loathe as I would have normally been to admit it; it was a fairly high level technique providing some measure of defense employing the volatile destructive energies. And it was effective as he hadn’t been torn into pieces by the super weapon that was the Mania Bloom or if he had then he had already regenerated.
Facing off against the vampire was the aforementioned organism, shaped like a wave of vines ranging in thickness from twice my arm’s width to the thinness of a piece of thread; although not less dangerous for its delicacy. It was a relatively thin showing compared to Mania Blooms that I had seen in the past, probably as a result of having to endure in a comparatively narrow space. Where previously the thorns were sparse, now they covered the entirety of the thicker vine until there was not much left of the green flesh of the Mania Bloom; a carpet of red spikes above a floor of green flesh that made mincemeat of everything within its range. I was sure that if the room hadn’t been reinforced the entire building would have collapsed by now.
As a matter of fact the space where I stood, behind the vampire and the primary node was one of the few places that hadn’t been ravaged by the interplay of gray light or peppered with scarlet thorns that stuck out of the ground like brightly-coloured tombstones. I stepped forward so as to better observe before I paused. There was a slight smell, almost sweet on my nose; the familiar smell of poison.
Casually, I reached into my backpack and pulled out a miniature fan-like device before switching it on and strapping it to my belt. An air-purifier was something that I had kept ever since somebody, probably Dave, had left a jar of pickled Hask open outside the fridge, but mercifully I had never had a chance to use it until now. At once the sweet smell receded and I coughed once just getting most of the poison out of my system. It wasn’t in any way strong in the first place but in time would have caused a significant problem, at my current state.
“Be careful,” the vampire shouted as I stowed the air-purifier and I flipped two of the sawblades vertically, expanding them just in time to deflect the hail of thorns fired off in my direction. That move was tragically sub-optimal as the ruby thorns punched through my cheap zurite copies lodging in the magical mould and destabilizing the frame. I just had time to bring up another two sawblades before the first collapsed and then was forced to bring up the third pair a few seconds later as those two barely lasted any longer. Finally the hail of thorns ended and I grabbed the fading mana managing to recreate another two sawblades.
“Any weaknesses?” I asked the vampire as I idly threw the last two sawblades at the plant before pushing mana into the soles of my feet and dodging a return volley of about a dozen thorns with a bit of quick basic footwork and stepping one foot short of the gray flickering fog. I may as well help myself to this shield now that it was there. It wasn’t too effective as the vines reached out around the little circular spot that the vampire had claimed as his, but it at least meant that any frontal attacks on me would be his problem.
“Oh, you are the person from the communicator.” The vampire said, raising one perfectly coiffed eyebrow. “I only wish we could have our first proper meeting under better circumstances. It’s resistant to destruction, I’m afraid,” the vampire responded as the gray light surged forward, eating into the vines before it was smothered by the sheer mass and vitality of the wave after wave of Mania Bloom. “My destruction does not tend towards veganism it seems.”
“Don’t anthropomorphise your magic,” I stated dismissively. “This superweapon was created by Lord Anima,” I stated getting an immediate and unfortunate look of fear from the vampire that caused the Bloom to shiver and grow before he schooled his face impressively quickly. “From my recollection, it is part matter, part energy, part nightmare and part sentient emotion. Like all of Anima’s creations it appears outwardly somewhat normal and yet exists on a spectrum ranging from otherworldly to unfathomable. It has a semi-conceptual nature and maddeningly complex construction render it somewhat resistant towards destruction as you know doubt have already realized.”
Regrettably for the vampire one of the many, many problems with destruction magic was that it had to be targeted against a specific substance or group of substances. It was a sort of inbuilt safety lock from what I had observed preventing people from plunging themselves into non-existence. On the downside sufficiently complex spells and organisms can take the edge off of destruction’s bite and there were other spells to fool that targeting system. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the deadly reputation of that magic had as a result caused many, many countermeasures to be invented over the ages by mages who hated the idea of their unbreakable shields being broken.
“So what would work?” the vampire said, still walking forward before wave after wave of vine lashed towards him with the momentum of a foresty avalanche, forcing him to step back as the tide of the vines that were not fully disintegrated by the gray mist landed on his body. A burst of that gray light rolled forward before it was smothered by tons of vines. I summoned a few more tiny orbs of zurite before throwing the ball bearings at the vines and watched in annoyance as they shredded deeply into the new vines before more came to replace them like throwing a handful of coins into the waves.
“Enough firepower to bring the building down,” I stated blithely. “Or if I could restrain it and you could get to the main node.”
Or if I brought any of my kit to work today, was what I didn’t say. I truly regretted that my prior self did not even contemplate bringing any of my artefacts, but I had not needed to dust them out ever since I had started working as an engineer. A grimace crossed my face as I imagined what my dad would say to my unpreparedness. However, even in my bag the full collection would be unwieldy and I was not enough of a prepper to carry it around for the one day in the last decade it may be useful.
“Can we deplete its mana?” the vampire asked, sending wave after wave of destruction, inefficiently pressing against the inexhaustible foliage. The world was bleached gray as more and more of the room was erased from existence and I began to feel my eyes sting just from observing the unending well of entropy before me; at least until I put on my glasses again. It was quite a sight to see the intransient grayness battle against the inexhaustible vines.
“Not like that, we can’t,” I observed as the metal in the walls started to dissolve along with the floor and the air and very likely the ceiling judging by the shaking. “As long as there are secondary nodes outside inspiring fear then the Bloom will keep growing without restraint. The fact that the entire building looks about to fall doesn’t help the situation much.” As if my words proved prophetic the ceiling collapsed above the Mania Bloom and a tornado tore through the debris turning the space that the Mania Bloom occupied into a blender and I had to sway to the left so that a detached missile of thorns and vineflesh nearly smacked my eye.
“I’m ahead of you there,” a familiar voice came from my side and I didn’t bother turning as I watched as the tornado died down as soon as the Weasel left its radius a second before he would have been turned into a pincushion. “I’ve got most of the people out of the building." He stood crouching sideways on the wall, inspecting the raging plant. "So that’s a Mania Bloom. I’ve never fought one before,” he said as an appreciative whistle left his lips.
“Not many have,” I stated as I pointed my fingers around the edges of the gray mist before firing lasers rapidly at the mass. Even though the effect was miniscule there was a slight achievement and so I allowed the action to slowly drain my mana and adjust my targeting. Ah, it was miniscule but the lasers managed to bend by about five degrees now, which I couldn’t do earlier. I ducked behind the gray mist as a hail of thorns peppered the spot where I was standing. I almost managed to dodge all of them. A slight tingling in my arm and a crack in my mana barrier indicated where I had been just a hair to slow.
“Well if it’s a battle of attrition then you can’t do much better than three against one,” Weasel said before he leapt over the gray mist and launched himself back towards the mass of vines. I watched with interest as a vine lashed out at him with a force that could tear steel in half; and he disappeared right before the strike landed. An instant later he reappeared above the vine before kicking downwards with a light step that shredded the offending vine. Elegantly he stepped forward, disappearing once again as the spot he was previously in became unsuitable for corporeal life.
“Elementalisation,” I remarked out loud. It was a high level technique, and not one that could be invoked easily. I watched with a critical eye how he faded in and out of physicality while the vampire threw wave after wave of gray light that sank into the vines of the Bloom steadily erasing the superweapon. Their tactics were basic…no, their tactics were simple and yet honed. Far more refined than anything I could do at the moment.
Objective 1: Recover fully.
Objective 2: Defeat Mania Bloom
Side Objective: Prevent wasteful loss of life
Objective 3: Switch off Mechanical Mind
A surge of mana required my attention and I turned my focus towards the present threat. At first glance nothing seemed to have changed, but as I watched the air that had seemed so cutting seemed to pass through the vines and the same went for the gray light. I sharpened my senses focusing on the Bloom. Whatever it did, it was no longer corporeal. Wait, assuming the dramatic oversimplification of the Mania Bloom could be taken as fact, could it have shifted to one of its other natures. There’s absolutely no way that it could be taken as an energy being and so if my hypothesis holds true it has either been converted into an organism of pure emotion or pure dream; or a mix of either one.
I contemplated this as the Weasel overextended due to the ineffectiveness of his attacks, hovering in corporeality for an instant too long and was promptly smacked by the vine for his hubris; right in my direction. I stepped to the side, but I needn’t have bothered as he twisted himself mid-air and gained a foothold in the sky before dropping beside me again.
“It’s changed,” he said seriously. “Spells have stopped working.”
“No shit,” I replied, equally seriously observing the Bloom noting that it had dropped a hue and seemed to be leaning closer towards a bluish colour now. “Did you feel any fluctuations in your mental state when you touched the vines?”
“Not that I realized,” he started. “Hey, where are you going?” he followed up as I stepped around the gray mist. It was a redundant question. There was only one place that I could be heading towards. Without actually getting close to the Bloom I wouldn’t be able to confirm my hypothesis and besides I wanted to see just to what extent the rust had set in; a perfectly sensible precaution considering the circumstances.
A vine slammed down beside me a fraction of a second after I stepped to the side, casting a spell as I did so. The irreducibly simple spell the aforementioned Step, distilled in complexity by generation after generation until even beginners could learn, it was the one of the first basic spells that I had learned from my family, motions practiced before I had even got my magic; an ability that was absolutely murderous on the ankles but allowed for immense bursts of speed in a short range. I darted left and right before slamming my knuckles into the thorny mass ahead of me, feeling the red knives scratch through my mana barrier causing thin lines of red to appear on my fingers before my mana flowed to replace the barrier. On the other side those thorns cracked under the force of my punch before they instantly and illogically straightened themselves. That sold me on their nature.
“It’s made of dream,” I exposited as I stepped backwards just in time to avoid the spikes slamming down on the spot where I stood just a moment prior. As much as I wanted to practice the rest of the seven basic spells it would be counterproductive to do that towards a living dream. I reached into my bag before the world turned and nearly bit my tongue as a larger vine burst out from the mass, nailing me in the center of the chest and sending me flying backwards. At the last moment I used Contract and hardened my flesh preventing the vine from piercing straight through.
That moment of weightlessness disappeared as the world turned gray and an involuntary scream left my mouth. After an instant that felt like an age I passed through the gray mist and crashed down hard on the ground. For a moment I just lay there recalculating my approach, before I gritted my teeth as the full pain hit me, only for it to instantly disappear as it was swiftly filtered out by Mechanical Mind. That short dip in destruction energy had swiftly torn through my mana barriers swiftly, torn out patches of my skin leaving bloody flesh and ruined my good suit.
“Can you stand?” the vampire yelled trying to contract that dreadful gray energy, out but I didn’t deign to answer as I placed the soles of my feet on the ground using another one of the basic spells, Catch, I glued my feet to the tiles with mana before contracting my muscles using Twist and straightening myself in an instant. Reaching inside my bag from a position of relative safety I drew out a small bell before unhesitatingly striking down.
An oppressive toll sounded through the room causing the Weasel and the Vampire to both flinch from the intensity and struggle to instantly cover their ears, spells completely forgotten. The Bloom however had an altogether more potent reaction as it writhed and floundered silently, shaking and shuddering causing thorns to crack and vines to tear apart.
Unfortunately for the plant loud discordant sounds absolutely wrecked dream creatures. Something about auditory shocks disrupted those twisted caricatures drawn from mankind’s unconsciousness. If I had to venture a guess it would be because they are naturally out of alignment towards the baseline reality and the noises painfully forced them to interact with the real world. The actual truth was probably something more complex and less intuitive and absolutely not my area of expertise.
“What is that?” Weasel said landing next to me gritting his teeth as another wave of sound reverberated through the ruined morgue. As a Youkai he must be suffering under that din but not a single word of suffering came from his lips.
“An alarm bell,” I said, getting a look of disbelief. “I don’t always turn it to full volume,” I clarified seeing dumbfounded looks. Honestly, what did they expect? Did they think that I put myself into a coma every night? I struck the bell again to hasten the imminent death of the Mania Bloom. The vines flailed wildly but they were weakened now and their uncoordinated swings were slower, weaker, and more susceptible to the gray mist. The vast vitality dropped in seconds as the thing desperately tried to recover.
That same surge occurred again and I lowered the bell focusing on the shift this time. There was a subtle shift in hue as I focused this time and a corresponding change in the density and texture of the mana. The bloom had finally shrunk as its inexhaustible energy began to finally run dry.
“It is now once again basic matter, you can freely attack,” I stated returning the bell to the bag only to freeze as out of nowhere I suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder. Slowly I turned to see all five foot eleven of Kat standing behind me with an unreadable expression on her face that slowly morphed into a well-disguised fake smile. Behind her the door stood, still closed, but with a Kat shaped hole in the door.
“Then I shall gladly go wild then,” she said, pushing past me and slowly advancing towards the Mania Bloom. Her stealth has drastically improved since the Rampage ended it seems; the sign of better control over her magic. The Archmage of New Breton strolled through the ruined morgue with an air of casual confidence, cracking her knuckles as she went, and the gray mist and harsh wind automatically curved away from her path outside of the control of their wielders; the combined output of two superior mages not even managing to ripple her clothes.
“You will be my ninth,” Kat casually said as she raised her hand, clenching it into a fist. An invisible hand pressed down on a rubber sheet and the flailing vines were immediately frozen in place before they collapsed on themselves. In a few seconds the vines fell inwards wrapping themselves into a sphere that got tighter and tighter as the ruby thorns dug into emerald flesh causing streams of fluid to ooze from the shrinking sphere. Kat watched dispassionately as the superweapon struggled futilely until the massive room-spanning, multi-ton florabomination had contracted until it was only the size of my head before she struck out with her raised hand that casual punch vaporizing the remaining flesh of the Bloom.
Just like that, the dreaded Mania Bloom, the superweapon created by the Dark Lord Anima, that fought evenly against two Superior Mages and a Ninja, was defeated by Kat in a single blow that was so deceptively simple that I could see the Weasel and Vampire’s egos deflate before me. Yes, getting punched by Kat has never been fun, which was why I felt just the slightest feeling of anxiety when she turned towards me with an expression indicating that she was not happy in the slightest.