Limit brake 0 :97% à Limit Brake 1 :02%
Control Bullets 0: 98%à Control Bullets 1:09%
Aura of Ruin 0:83%à Aura of Ruin 1:00%
Soul/body disconnect has progressed to 12%
Soul/body disconnect has surpassed the first threshold; conditional nausea has developed. Condition trigger; rapid ability usage.
The moment Seras opened her eyes she doubled over in pain, not that it did much. The pain wasn’t in her stomach, it wasn’t in her head, it wasn’t in her muscles. It was everywhere at once, and nowhere. It was a pain that defied words. No, a pain beyond words.
Even the word pain was not enough for what she felt.
And this was on 12% of what she’d face before the condition killed her.
She wasn’t sure how long she was curled up, only that when she could think straight a hand was on her back trying to comfort her.
Seras looked up and squinted at Athena, “how long?” she croaked.
“A few hours. Nothing’s changed.”
That was good news, and bad news. Good because nothing attacked them, Bad because it meant they would have to leave this tunnel to find a way out.
“Fuck, give me a few more minutes.” Seras said as she leaned back against the cave wall.
The girl glanced to Seras’ arm while rubbing her own, “if it weren’t for the arm I could offer to take on your pain.”
Seras frowned. That’s right, during the battle she had been able to use her essence ability to give Seras a brief reprieve. She wondered how that worked.
Essence abilities weren’t arbitrary effects. They were ways of using mana, the body, and other esoteric things to create unique effects. Shape and reinforce metal both worked by having Seras’ magic infuse the metal, shape metal worked like a field of magic that made metal more plastic and bend to her will, while reinforce metal created a mana lattice to help support the structure that was there.
There was always a ‘how’ to the ‘what’, it was just that the concepts and methods at play were incredibly complex and hard to map. There were theories that the first magic rituals began as a way of recreating essence powers, the most commonly known one being harvesting rituals.
But hers was a pain that was soul deep, and the impregnability of the soul was a well-established and immutable fact of magic.
Maybe it was because the root of her problem was a disconnect between the rank of her body and her magic matrix. The magic matrix was known to be linked to the soul in several key ways.
Seras was musing over the potential revelations of Athena’s power as a way to district herself from the pain. The pain was always there, but since it was soul deep there was a way to push it towards the back of her subconscious. The pain existed, but without observation it wasn’t a distraction, but once observed it would be like it was always observed.
It reminded her of that old analogy about quantum mechanics, Hamilton’s turtle. Presumably if a turtle tucked its legs into its shell it would look just like an empty shell from above, thus one had to assume that a potential shell would or would not have a turtle inside, both potentials existing until you turned it over a observed the state of the turtle.
It was a clunky metaphor, but a useful one for early quantum physicists.
Seras reached a point where she didn’t feel like she’d stumble if she stood and decided that more time wouldn’t help anything. “Alright, we need to start moving now. No more waiting.”
Athena looked concerned for Seras, “Are you sure, I remember what just a little of that pain felt like?”
Seras grimaced as the pain stopped being a background noise and roared to the forefront of her thoughts, “just, just don’t mention it. Its harder to ignore if you bring it up,” she said wearily.
In reality Seras would have loved to just lay back and go to sleep, but even sleep wasn’t an escape.
Athena nodded, and Seras made sure she brought the rifle with them as they finally left the dead-end cave under the Omeda camp.
This section of the labyrinth was coated in unnervingly lush plant life. Plush moss carpeting, ivy covered walls, and the occasionally glowing yellow lilies. It twisted left and right like some sort of snake, until abruptly there would be a steep slope they had to slide down.
Were it not for her ‘street view’ map from Stranger in a Strange world, Seres would have wondered if they were even making good progress. With it she could track how far they had walked compared to how much actual distance they were from their starting point; she could even compare it to their place on the surface. She hadn’t been able to do that before when she first arrived on Pallimustus, but given that she had arrived in an Astral space deep below the surface with no idea how to orient herself it was an understandable fault.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
As they moved Seras was scanning their surroundings, while also mentally thumbing through the book on Magitech Bannack had given her. The more she read the more she wondered at why the researchers here on Pallimustus hadn’t further developed their own branch of Magi-tech.
Sure, they had magic to match many of her world’s modern marvels, but the complete lack of understanding in basic physics astounded her in some ways. They could store full images and sound in recording crystals, but not through the capture of light but through the environmental magic and aura impressions. What it stored wasn’t data on color or light, but the imprint of everything around it. It didn’t know color through wavelengths of light, it just knew the color. It was bizarrely backwards way of recording images to Seras’ sensibilities, but really drove home just how magic had shifted the development on Pallimustus.
Her understanding of light said that it was both a particle and a wavelength. But according to what she was reading it was also an expression of magic, a whole third state form.
Water was just the combo of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. But here it was more, it was one of the substances that could form quintessence. Water quintessence was just one of many kinds of quintessence, like earth quintessence, dog quintessence, or myriad. But while there was a water quintessence both Seras and the author of this book noted a lack of hydrogen quintessence, or oxygen quintessence. Despite the existence of other elemental quintessence like iron and copper.
Was it just that the conditions weren’t right for it to form, or was there really none at all?
Seras wished she could open her net connection and find the answer online. But even if it was known she couldn’t just have the knowledge that easily. Her net connection racial trait required divine permission.
She was lost in thought when a hand bared her path and drew her full attention. Athena had stuck her hand out and was holding Seras back.
“What?” she whispered from the side of her mouth.
“Don’t know, but I think it’s a monster, I can a long shape snaking along the wall.” She whispered back.
Seras followed Athena’s eyes to a spot on the wall that looked now different from the rest of the wall. But she didn’t disregard her warning, instead Seras summoned knife into her hand, summoning it so the blade was between her fingers. She eyed a spot that she felt was too angular to be more ivy and threw the knife.
She heard an enraged hiss and saw the vines shuffle as a monster rose up
The monster was a long python with verdant green scales, with sprigs of what looked like ivy leaved poking out from its skin. Its jaw opened as it went straight for Seras.
Iron rank brush python
Seras’ aimed her pistol upwards and latched onto the serpent with control bullets, not that she could miss point blank.
Bang
BANG
BANG!
One bullet got it straight on, and a thick syrupy blood sprouted out of a hole in its side. One bullet ricocheted off its scales. And the third put another hole in it.
But the loud bangs of the gun and the bleeding wounds didn’t stop the snake. It was coming for her, so she decided to meet it halfway. With her biomechanically perfected reflexes she struck out just as fast as the python, solid metal knuckles and a revolver smacked into the monster’s head with blinding speed. It was so brutally fast that it dazed the serpent for one moment, all she needed.
By the time it noticed the gun barrel just below its head it was already too late.
BANG!
The fourth shot went straight through its head, and it fell limp a second later.
Seras turned to look towards Athena, a quip already on her tongue. She was just in time to see the second Brush Python barrel into Athena and slam her to the ground where it could better wrap around her. Seras heard the grinding of bones and crack of a rib before she could finish turning around.
She raised her revolver and charged forwards, but a powerful whip of the serpent’s tail sent her reeling. Half of its body was curled around Athena, whose face was contorting in pain and rapidly turning purple, unable to scream. The lower half was coiled up defensively around its kill, coils guarding its head and preventing Seras from getting closer.
She gritted her teeth and fired twice into its flank. Both shots landing on the thickest part of its body, but doing little to put down the massive monster.
Seras tried to pull back on the pin holding the barrel in place, but her broken arm refused to respond. Without pulling the pin back Seras wouldn’t be able to remove the spent shells, nor reload the weapon.
She was cursing the fact she didn’t get a magic bullet making power like Komeru or Rohan had for arrows, and was about to send her gun back to her storage space to instead draw a knife, when a thought struck her.
In that moment as adrenaline was coursing through her brain Seras had a thought. She could summon things into her hand, she could even decide how she was holding something, could she recall the bullet cassings while they were still in the revolver? And could she just summon new bullets back into the chambers of the revolver?
Seras hesitated for only a second, in the end she gave into her instincs and tried to use her spatial abilities to reload her revolver. Blue sparks flew from her hand, but Seras felt the slight weight change as the gun was reloaded. She brought the gun up to her eyes and saw that the bullets were all ficing the right direction.
She heard another crack and turned her attention back to the monster and took aim.
This time she did something different. Instead of just focusing on a point on the monsters scales Seras imagined seeing through its flesh and focus on its vertebra.
BANG!
Another bloody hole, but it looked shallow even to her.
She fired again. Still too shallow, the iron ranked monster’s muscles were keeping the bullet from going to deep.
Blue lines spread from Seras’ hands and over the gun as she used Reinforce Metal.
BANG!
Deeper this time. But not enough.
She fired again, and again, and again. All the while receiving notifications for her aura of Ruin. By the time she was out of bullets again she had stacked up enough instances of her aura affliction that Athena was able to fight back and get down deep gasps of air.
Seras reloaded her weapon with the same trick fired six more shots.
This time on the fifth shot something was severed in the monsters body, and its lower half went limp.
Reloading as Seras ran forward, the monster tried to snack her back again, but it didn’t realize that its lower body no longer worked.
It began to uncoil from Athena, but with half its body now dead weight it wasn’t fast enough. Seras put the gun to its head and pulled the trigger.
The Brush Python went limp. And Athena began to squirm under its dead coils as she got away from the monster. Seras grabbed a coil and pulled it away enough for Athena to crawl out and lean against the tunnel wall.
She was panting hard as she fought to re-oxygenate her blood, her face slowly losing its bloated purple look.
Seras dismissed her gun and summoned a small vail of red liquid. “Here, its cheap and tastes like ass, but should held with the ribs.” She said as she tipped the healing potion down Athena’s lips.
She greedily sucked it up and nearly regurgitated everything.
Seras leaned down and lifted the girl’s shirt and grimaced at the mottled purple splotches of bruising all over her stomach. Seras was just starting to regret only having weak health potions when she saw the bruises shrink before her very eyes. She even saw a rib ripple and slide back into place.
Must be the self-healing Athena mentioned.
“Ah, could you stop staring?” Athena said, her voice soft and shaky.
Seras looked up and saw that her face had turned a whole different color, and Seras realized she might be embarrassing the poor women. “Right sorry, nice abs by the way. That’s impressive given that they aren’t plastic.”
Seras let go of her shirt and stood back up, staring at the two dead monsters. Both nearly four to five meters long. While she had been a bit distracted Seras was still unnerved by how easily they had hidden from her. Their aura masking and natural camouflage was impressive.
She then thought back on the fight and thought about what she could have down differently. For one realizing she could insta-reload her guns this whole time was a game changer. All that time she spent reloading her rifle, hell she would need to change the way she designed weapons in the future.
There were synergies in her power set Seras had been missing out on. Instant reload was one, but bullet hardening matched with control bullets were another. All on top of her aura of Ruin slowly weakening big monsters that took several bullets to put down. She wondered if there were others she was missing out on.
More importantly was that there were whole abilities she was just forgetting to use. Limit breaker was a boon, a condition she applied to herself that let her resist rank suppression. One that she forgot to use in the battle with Omeda. An ability she had gotten before her aura power but had lagged behind in development.
She was just too used to her old way of fighting. A mindset she needed to break if she wanted to survive in this world.