Chapter 172 - Thinning down the ranks
One down, Vern thought as he focused on controlling the stability of the air surrounding the whole room. He had to dissipate it very slowly. The man had screamed a tonne, and letting those yelps escape would throw a wrench in the rest of his plan.
After a while of deliberately widening the holes in the net of stability cast around the room, he sighed. Soon after, he picked up the mirror amulet and found himself a window to room 212.
"Ooof!" he let out a cold breath. This was worse than he thought. He'd tried to aim for the legs with the chandelier, but the man had noticed it just a second too early, and in a bid to escape, he'd instead made things worse.
His perception hadn't shown just how grotesque the result was, but the amulet's sight made it more than clear.
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After staring at the aftermath intently for a bit, he took a deep breath and sighed again, "Observation is really no game." It had the power to change lives. End them, too.
Fortunately for him, the man wasn't exactly dead, and while some form of sympathy began surfacing in his mind, he quashed it in no time. He didn't need to justify this whole situation to himself again and again.
There would be time for reflection, and it wasn't right now. Not that he needed much justification to continue fucking up these mind killers. None of them were noble humans.
He quickly did a rough job of stabilizing the man's wounds with his flawed structural healing and left him there in a pool of his own blood. He couldn't extract the chandelier from the man's body while sitting here, so he just de-stressed the metal a little to stop the bleeding.
Hmm, beyond that, I'll need to keep an eye on this guy, too. If he wakes up and starts screaming, I'll need to quickly set up a zone of silence around him. This chain of events also helped him realize that doing so had the effect of making it hard to breathe.
A useful trick.
Blocking Wilfred's incessant attempts to escape the room to prove his innocence or something, he moved on from this whole situation. Which one should I go for next?
It didn't take him long to choose the one who was actively erasing memories right this instant in 104. The other one was sitting by himself in the bar, so it should be fine to make him wait a little. And I'll probably have to do something different for that one.
There were no chandeliers by the drink's bar, nor was it a good idea to use his visions amidst the crowd. He'd just started dabbling with sound control and other tactics. He could safely work it out for one person, but the complexity would go up exponentially if he had to do that for a space as large as the whole reception and bar at the front.
On top of that, all that was needed for the two guards outside to detect an abnormality was to look inside. He couldn't exactly conjure an illusion for them, and locking them out was probably just a temporary solution that would culminate with him having to face those two at the same time.
And one of them is their leader. He could very well be a third shade observer, and not just that, he also has that cage-like artifact on him. Ughh… he groaned. Handling the one sitting in the bar correctly was very important, and he couldn't rush it without a better setup.
Shaking his head, he turned his attention back towards the one in room 104. The two fuzzy figures were very close to each other. So, he couldn't differentiate between them. Yes, he could maybe make his manipulations more precise by pairing this up with a direct connection to the amulet, but it had diminishing returns.
Splitting his focus between his perception and the mirror window was already quite taxing for his mind, but adding to that the complexity of actually envisioning changes made it an inefficient mess.
He would either fail to envision proper cause and effect—inviting a backlash, or it would take so long for him to work it out, that it would be rendered useless by the targets changing their positions in the meantime.
Fortunately or unfortunately, by the time he was done thinking through this conundrum, the figures detached from each other, and his question lost its base.
Alright. He zoned out any distractions and analyzed the room thoroughly. He had the same options as last time, for which he was thankful. It would be a tad more risky because there was another tenant in the room next door, which he didn't want to alert, but it shouldn't be too hard.
Regardless, he didn't mind repeating his successes. He'd take uneventful and boring repetition over more memories being lost any day.
So he focused his attention on the wardrobe as well as the chandelier once again. Lining them up, he began hacking away at their joints and fulcrums with minor pulses of Instability Inducement.
He could do it all in one shot, but the man was taking his sweet time mumbling something unintelligible in front of what was probably another memory-wiped tenant. The last one wore gloves for no reason, whereas this one liked to talk to himself? He didn't know, all these guys were weird.
Vern waited for the monologue to finish as he prepared everything almost to the tipping point—at a balance that could be disturbed with a single thought. The more he bided his time, the more he became anxious about what was going on.
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Right when he felt like it would probably be worth it to enter Mirror Amulet just to listen to what the heck he was mumbling, the man moved, and Vern focused.
One step, two, three…
Instability Inducement.
Using the same strategy as before, he observed the gray stable legs of the antique longcase clock and pushed them to the darkest shade of black. The heavier wardrobe from last time was on the other side of the room, unfortunately.
Vibrations sprung from his point of impact, and suddenly, the silhouette of the clock fell right towards the man's figure. He heard no sounds or cries but tried to infer as much as possible through his perception—which wasn't any worse.
However, the very next moment, he furrowed his brows. As the clock's upper half was about to slam into the man's torso, the figure suddenly swerved, barely positioning its shoulder to brace for the impact.
This one's a little fast, Vern mumbled, furrowing his brows. The figure didn't take the hit very gracefully but still managed to escape getting crushed by the heavy thing entirely.
Hmm, I can't use the exact same sequence as last time. He'll probably end up avoiding it.
Vern searched his options and rapidly calculated a new direction as the man threw the towering clock to one side and looked around in disbelief. After another few seconds of mumbling to himself, he walked off.
All at once… Vern decided.
The moment the figure crossed past the clock to continue with their thing, Vern did it.
The whole room suddenly took a much darker shade as the air within became stable and infinitely harder to breathe, followed by an explosion of glass on the lamps and most mirrors around the room.
The figure of the man looked around in distress and tried to shout something, only to be suppressed. Rushing towards the exit, he resorted to bracing his arms over his head in a useless bid to shield against the flying chunks of sharp glass.
Having overloaded the man's senses, Vern intently observed his footsteps and calculated exactly when he'd get under the chandelier. One step, two, three, four…
Break! he commanded mentally, and instead of the chandelier, the stability of the floorboard right underneath the man took a nosedive. The moment the figure stepped on it, the wood splintered and shattered, launching his one leg straight down into the crawlspace between the floor and ground—a stability mechanism for buildings on these pseudo-islands.
The man instantly lost all his balance, and small shards of glass punctured his skin as he fell face first on the ground due to the momentum, one leg sticking through the floor. This is what he needed. No matter how agile, it wasn't going to help now.
Now! Vern exclaimed, unable to help his hand, which involuntarily tried to push the mental image of the chandelier downwards. Surprisingly, he felt like that action made the process easier as his indirect spear of judgment descended right towards the man's helpless silhouette, impaling it through and through. Maybe it worked better because it helps with the imagination?
However, he quickly lost that train of thought as his perception struggled to recreate the situation while also controlling the air's stability. After a while, it cleared up, and he heaved a sigh of relief. Not agile enough, I guess.
The man was lying limp on the floor, his thighs crushed by the tip of the chandelier. Those things were heavy, and combined with the tall ceilings of each floor, their force was no joke.
That was another man down with almost none the wiser. He'd turned the situation chaotic to avoid him from realizing the overt traps Vern had set, and it worked wonders.
This repetition of success only reinforced his theory that these raiders couldn't perceive anything through the walls like himself. If they could, merely suppressing the sound shouldn't have been enough. But, not even one of them had any reaction to their comrades losing consciousness one after another. That said a lot about their limitations.
After doing the cleanup of slowly releasing the sounds as well as poorly stabilizing any wounds once again, he slumped back in his chair and wiped the cold sweat on his forehead.
Taking deep breaths, he tried to calm his galloping heart. It was too much stimulation for him. Fear and thrill were taking turns wrecking him, and he needed a second to catch his breath.
Hahh, that takes care of half of them. Hand on his heart, he went through these encounters in his mind once again, and it helped him ground things back into reality.
Fuck! I'm really doing this! he screamed internally.
He'd used his perception quite a bit until now, but nothing felt as real as this. In Steamscript relay station, he was just a small fry in the fight of essential gods, and then in the mirror realm, things were half-real and phantoms of dead, whereas the confluence was mostly deceit and lies.
This, however? This was true power. Real world application of everything he'd learned, and it was working far better than he could've ever imagined.
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Soon, however, the reality of the situation dawned on him, and he shook his head, Why am I thinking like it's over?
The worst was yet to come. And the amount of sacrifices he'd made to get to this point wasn't small. At the very least, ten or so people had their memories frazzled already. They weren't his responsibility, but it was still his duty as a fellow human being to stop this tragedy if he had the means to do something about it.
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"Hahh…" He took a deep breath and stood up. For good measure, he linked himself to Axiom's singularity for longer than a couple of seconds to ensure this wasn't some elaborate illusion.
It didn't seem like it—at least according to his meager understanding of how it all worked.
That's when one of the marked entities in his perception suddenly moved. It was the first guy he'd incapacitated in his own room. He began wriggling around in the wires once again, and Vern watched him intently for a while before realizing it wasn't much of a concern.
The man couldn't do much at all. However, he still went ahead and made the air stable around the man in an attempt to lull him back to 'sleep.'
Once that was done, he focused his attention back on the guy at the bar. Since there were too many figures and not enough vibrational feedback, it was hard to gauge what he was doing.
So, Vern pulled out the amulet and used it another time to peek at the exact situation.
The man was warily looking around, tapping his feet on the ground repeatedly as his body seemed tense and taut. Vern narrowed his eyes, Did he realize something's off?
It was possible. If nothing, his comrades shouldn't be taking this long in each room, and not seeing them for a while could've made him uneasy?
Yeah, I need to be quick.
As he previously analyzed, he would need to try a different tactic for this guy if he didn't want to botch up the execution of the latter half of this insider job. Or he'd have to fight the rest of the raiders together—one of whom had a particular artifact.
What exactly, though? he brainstormed, discarding one idea after another as he scribbled on his notepad. Before long, he murmured, "Hmm, I will have to try something riskier here."