“...Huh.” Damon looked between Caeden and the truly absurdly large sword that his Soul Anchor had become to kill the Magma Titan. “I suppose that works. This might not be nearly as hard as I thought it was going to be.”
Caeden sighed. “Yeah, I wish.”
A wave recalled his Soul Anchor, it’s form shifting to the default. A red-edged short sword with a steely fuller and grip. Symbols leaking rainbow light ran down the entire blade. Motes of purple and gold drifted from the edge whenever Caeden moved.
“Every time I shift my Soul Anchor’s form, it costs me some shroud, and some forms are more costly than others. I’m still figuring out why certain forms cost more, but the version I just used was the single most expensive one I’ve ever had it take. It’s made from an alloy of Reverium and Ultium, two materials that don’t even exist in the Starry Sea. they form under the influence of energies other than Ki. It was then engraved, which is a technique similar to infusion, but also fundamentally different. Expanding it like that ate almost a fourth of my reserves for One Body, One Blade.”
“You just used a fourth of your shroud for your first attack? Why?” Damon’s voice held a note of condemnation, which Caeden felt was reasonable.
“Because, I needed to test a few things. For one, I wanted to know if I could instantly take out the Magma Titan if I needed to in a pinch.” Caeden waved toward the cooling mountain beneath them. “Turns out, I can. Secondly, I wanted to see if I could make a weapon that could destroy the Heartstone.”
Damon raised an eyebrow. “And?”
“Nope.” Caeden frowned down at the mountain, his eyes leaking rainbow light. “It’s already reforming. I don’t know if its because I don’t have a full grasp of my abilities or if it's actually impossible, but I lack the ability to interfere in non-physical phenomena. And the Heartstone is at least partly spiritual in nature. I could see it. Destroying the Heartstone’s physical vessel would just start the cycle again. And it's so resilient, it’s almost easier to deal with the Magma Titan instead.”
“Well, that’s unfortunate.” Damon glared at the mountain as well. By that point, he could feel the Ki in the area rapidly draining into a single point within its depths. The Heartstone was already reforming. “SInce you used so much, I suppose I’ll deal with the next revival. We can alternate so as not to overtax ourselves.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Caeden sat down on his flying sword. “This is going to turn into a frustrating slog very fast. I just hope everyone else is having an easier time dealing with the founder. He should be a pushover, having just gained his shroud.”
{}
Erik stared into the shrapnel-strewn hole in the bed-like ethertech chamber that the founder had used to make himself a shroud. The empty chamber.
“Where the fuck did he go?”
{}
Founder huffed out a restrained breath as he sprinted down the secret tunnel. He’d actually forgotten he’d installed this emergency exit in his reliquary. Of course, tunnels like it were riddled across his base, just in case any number of things went wrong. Projects malfunctioned or exploded, having multiple exits was prudent. Plus, he’d hurt a lot of people. In the off chance that they took exception to it and managed to find him, having means of escape was a welcome addition.
He couldn’t believe the shrouded had somehow found a way around the suppression field, but not the false aura that blocked their senses. He’d engineered a device in that vein at the same time he invented false auras, allowing him to use his senses when they could not. If they had overcome that hurdle, they could have seen through his tunnels immediately.
His foresight had come through for him. Especially having a map of all the tunnels in the computer system of the base, locked to his biological signature. A concept that the people of this universe should have no reference for. The shrouded had locks that could be bound to a particular shroud, but not ones that were tied to a specific body.
The information Founder had from the Outsider that now constituted part of his soul had saved him many times, and it seems it had done so again.
And he was once more on track to complete his final objective. Founder was fully aware that he had very little chance of winning a direct physical confrontation with any of the shrouded that had come here for his head. He was relatively certain that the Magma Titan would eventually wear them down and drown them in lava, but that would be of no use to him if he was dead.
Part of him was willing to leave. Literally, get a terminal and have the hijacked CMS portal him to somewhere else entirely. This base held the total culmination of everything he’d built over the decades, but he could build again. Plus, success with his shroud experiment meant that a little training could see his lifespan practically explode. He was in no rush.
At the same time, the larger part of him was intensely unwilling. His enemies had appeared at his door with little warning. There was no telling if this whole series of events wouldn’t just repeat itself again, only with him a far less prepared position. Unfortunately, when it came to shrouds, he just couldn’t guarantee that they couldn’t track him.
More than that, this island was the culmination of his whole life. If he could not win a battle here, he wasn’t sure he could live with the shame. He was the single most brilliant being to grace this shitty universe, and he would not be run out of his own home, the heart of his power.
And then there was the third factor.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Stepping out of the tunnel, Founder looked around his backup workshop. Or, it would be more accurate to call it his terminal workshop. The final destination, when he was certain that the end was near. His plans were almost complete.
The space was much smaller than the massive expanse of his normal workspace. But it didn’t need to be any bigger than a single-family home. He wasn’t working on any of his larger projects here, as this was a mostly theoretical workshop.
A massive bank of ethertech computers covered an entire wall, and Founder wasted no time in bringing them to life. A few commands had another wall light up with golden light, only for a metal circle with sharp edges to pass through the portal.
It was, of course, the portal device that his invaders had used. And, if he was honest, probably how they’d followed Founder here. With his new Fate shroud, he could see a link between the rainbow-eyed man and this hoop. No doubt he could track it down, considering the link.
In a funny way, Founder almost couldn’t believe his luck in opponents. One of them was a failed experiment containing a shroud fragment connected to causality, allowing him to finally complete his ideal shroud. The other had somehow managed to create portals that Founder was almost certain linked to a place outside this universe.
It was a perfect recipe to complete his two main projects. He’d already finalized one, and that gave him the final piece to complete the other.
Founder was enthralled by the extra senses provided by his shroud. Working on Ki-related topics as an unshrouded was a tedious process that involved a lot of trial and error. Simply trying to confirm what domain a particular ether crystal drew from was a nightmare and a half.
Now, his shroud interpreted the Ki within, finding the linked domain in an instant. What could possibly be weeks of work reduced to an instant. And it was this ability that he turned toward the portal device. He’d hoped that using his new shroud would allow him to make sense of the object that had previously stumped him.
The progress was enormous. Most of Founder’s difficulty in parsing the design of the portal was based on two factors. The first and simplest being that he didn’t know where the portal was supposed to go. Was it linked to another portal, or could it open to a specific set of coordinates? That factor was enough of an uncertainty that he’d spent most of his time trying to narrow down on one possibility or the other, since this facet of the portal’s design would influence the rest of how it was made.
The second factor was far more complicated and ten times as infuriating. Across the entire Starry Sea, basically all ethertech had a common element. That was, him. Founder, or his Outsider predecessor, had founded the concept of ethertech, and all designs were wholly or partly derived from the design fundamentals that he’d established for himself.
When Founder looked at any piece of ethertech, he could gain a near-instant grasp of its fundamental principles, because they were his principles. Discovering the function of ethetech was essentially the same for him as looking at a painting by an artist copying his style.
That was entirely absent for this portal device. Somehow, that rainbow-eyed man had managed to form his own system of creating ethertech almost entirely divorced from Founder’s. How that was possible, he didn’t know. Just being around Founder’s ethertech should have been enough to have some influence while the man was learning the craft, but it was as if he’d learned how to make ethertech in another dimension considering how little it had to do with Founder’s own designs.
Trying to plumb the portal’s secrets was a non-starter until he figured out the principles of this new ethertech system, which was akin to learning a new language. Even worse, Founder had no point of comparison. He had to pick apart individual functions and compare them to his designs piece by piece to even start ‘translating’.
All of that, too, was swept away in the face of his shroud. The ability to literally feel the underlying intent of every part made understanding the function of the portal childsplay. Once more, Founder was filled with derision and scorn for the people of this universe. Shrouds were godly abilities, even at their base functions. They could form the bedrock of a utopia, a perfect society with no scarcity, where no one ever went hungry and the sciences propelled them to travel the infinite multiverse.
Instead, they fought like starving dogs over a bone, scrabbling against one another with hardly a thought. It was disgusting, and his time here had done much to reduce Founder’s faith in humanity in general. It seems they couldn’t be trusted with power as a species, if this was the result.
“Oh, what’s this?” Founder was drawn from his idle thoughts as his senses struck upon an interesting facet of the portal. “So it really does travel beyond this universe, but only to the domain layer. And it seems the link comes from the object being forged at its destination. Hmm.”
That was a disappointing revelation. Founder had been hoping that this portal had access to another universe, so he could reverse-engineer that tech. But instead it hopped planar layers instead of dimensional ones. He couldn’t access somewhere else on the Material Plane with this portal.
“But still,” he mused. “The idea of using the material’s origin…I could use that.”
Struck with an actionable plan, Founder leaped across his hidden workshop. He had so much to do, and not a lot of time to do it.
{}
The Magma Titan collapsed, its body losing cohesion as the final core that constituted its motive force, its will, was shattered by a half-melted ghost. In contrast to Caeden’s insta-kill, Damon had taken over ten minutes to stop the living volcano. Of course, he’d actually been pacing himself, using the least amount of shroud possible to bring it down.
They were still in the learning phase. Neither Caeden nor Damon knew much about Magma Titans in general, especially since there was little available to learn in the CA or even other countries. The Magma Titan’s ability to infinitely revive itself was well known, and seen as a non-starter among shrouded. Continents that were revealed to have one were either left alone, or the Magma Titan was somehow killed and thrown into Starry Sea.
The only known solution was a bit of stretch for Caeden and Damon to pull off. No nation, to their knowledge, had pushed out as far from the Pillar as they currently were, so any Magma Titan that had been encountered up to this point had a much longer revival time. General practice was to kill the Titan and chuck its core into the sea.
That wouldn’t work as well here, since this continent was immensely more vast than something closer to the Pillar, and the Ki density was so much higher, ramping up the revival speed to untenable levels. Monsters naturally feared the Starry Sea, so if the Magma Titan revived near it, it’d likely run away. That made the prospect of getting the Heartstone into the Ki-sucking waters a rough prospect. And that wasn’t even mentioning the fact that they didn’t even know which direction the closest shore was, or what they’d encounter in the way.
So they were left waiting for Caeden to unlock the trove of knowledge leaking into his mind, and hoping a useful solution was contained within.