---Mitigation---
After the first calamity disappeared, the danger the sea represented became clearer to most. Many many groups attempted to sanction and block off the sea to little effect.
A line of defenders surrounded the duplicitous mist at all manners of the day – blocking all who came from entering.
And yet challengers still found their way inside. They broke past the human barrier with force or speed. They snuck past the guards with cloaking devices or burrowed under the earth in secret tunnels. Many came and went without any knowing how they had gotten in.
The sea wanted to be freely available. It rebelled against its isolation as if it had a mind of its own.
When a wall was built, the mist moved – making itself easier to enter by seeping over the barrier. When a thick protective dome was built over the mist, it melted its way through overnight.
When a more cohesive barrier was built, the sea opened up alternative entrances. When attempts were made to affect the mist itself they failed.
The sea…
The sea wished to be used. The sea would not be hidden away. Would not be policed. The surroundings grew more and more dangerous as time went on – part of the trial almost appearing to be entering the trial with all the attempts humans made to control access and all the abominations slinking around the surroundings.
Not even a social barrier could isolate the sea. No matter how many horror stories they tried to spread nothing would stop the truly determined.
Besides its undermining of every safety measure humanity put in place, the sea itself never attacked. The world wonder itself never seemed to kill directly even if its dismantling of the walls proved it could. Those successful in their challenge assured others the sea itself was fair – death was never a goal for the trial, only a consequence. If you challenged the sea and attempted to refine something the sea would never push for your death. It manifested the trial in several ways, but always the main difficulty was always willpower based. In fact – many claimed the only way to die was to give up.
That was obviously survivorship bias – if you pushed too far you could probably die without giving up… but rumors spread, and challengers continued to appear each claiming the ones blocking access were trying to monopolize the power of the sea themselves.
And abominations continued to be created, monster after monster.
----------------------------------------
--- That’s not how magic works ---
“That’s not how sound works! That’s not how anything works – polarizing sound doesn’t work mathematically Maddy, you’re obviously able to do something but it can’t be that.” Richard moaned for the umpteenth time.
Mana was beyond annoying. It ran off similar rules to aether and yet obscured every single aspect of itself from everyone including its own users. There was power in black boxes but an equal amount of ignorance, and ignorance led to the same sort of voodoo as bloodletting to cure hysteria and lobotomys to cure mental illness.
“Let’s put a stop to this and try something different. Magic versus science. We can both “teleport” something and then compare – from what I can tell, you’re binding matter to a transmission medium or perhapse phasing matter into a transmission medium. That medium allows you to roll both power and information along soundwaves – you’re not actually binding anything to sound like you describe. No, its not the same as binding stuff to light…yes, they are completely different! Okay, quick lesson. Sound isn’t a particle it’s a displacement of a medium. Light is a wave yes but its also a particle – you took physics right? You can bind stuff to it by attaching aether manipulated atoms to photons – you can also attach matter to electricity by attaching aether manipulated atoms to electrons but those need two very different techniques because photons and electrons are very different types of particles…no there’s no sound particles, are you making fun of me now? Oh you are…nice heh. Anyways. Let’s try seeing if a competition helps whatever weird rules the system is using to mess with us.” Richard finished beginning to put together a light painter and setting up targets they could aim for.
Mana was beyond annoying because of how arbitrary it seemed. Any time Maddy attempted to enhance or even just alter his machines either nothing happened or they broke. Anytime he tried to study any of the weird mana constructs she made, either he couldn’t see anything, or he broke them. Mostly he just broke them – with countless effects she claimed were supposed to happen simply failing in his presence. There was no conceivable reason why a piece of paper with regular ink could create an effect – the obvious answer felt like some sort of corrupted aether construct in skillspace or similar… but trying to find or observe that extra dimensional machine ripped it away like cobwebs.
The two sides broke each other in an incredibly annoying way.
The worst part was in the single way they didn’t break each other – conflict. If observing a magical barrier broke it, anyone of a scientific mind could just look at Jess’s dome and cause it to fail. If these so called “spells” stopped working when you tried to figure them out, then it should be easy to disable projectiles or similar…and yet it wasn’t.
It was only when they tried to collaborate that things broke apart as thoroughly as they did – and there was no fucking reason Richard could see for that to happen. Even if they had a different internal engine, two complementary effects should contribute to each other. Right? If you stuck a magic flashlight right beside a regular flashlight and shone both lights at the same spot it should get brighter. Light was light! Even if they weren’t touching, there should still be some synergy – right? That just made sense!
Why then did they break each other just by existing in the same place?
Why then did the so called “magic” that Maddy performed work off such arbitrary self imposed rules? Maybe it broke because aether or mana was leaking in a way he couldn’t measure and fouling up the machinery of the opposing side? They just needed a better way of insulating each side? Maybe the rules weren’t self imposed but something her frequence of aether imposed on her mind? Sort of a “mana: this is how I work” -> “Maddy: this is how I made it work” sort of thing?
But no...
If mana and aether were breaking each other through proximity they should be able to synergise from a distance – and! More importantly they should break each other in all situations not just some.
If they were breaking each other at a distance as completely as they seemed to be doing, worse effects should be appearing in every squirmish. And they were. It seemed technology did seem to go on the fritz in battles against mages – and mages couldn’t seem to do some of the crazier things they claimed were possible while fighting…but despite that they still seemed to hold up enough to try and kill each other.
And Maddy had strange theories for why he broke stuff. According to her, anything Richard looked at contained his domain and when creating an effect she had to directly fight his domain with her own just to make anything happen. So Richard's perception was what broke things? Was there a way of blocking whatever part of his perception broke things?
It was fucking annoying. Had Richard mentioned that yet?
The only reason Richard could see for it working the way it did was if they were actively being sabotaged. He tried to come up with multiple theories and work out the solution with a scientific process but he kept coming back to the simple idea of sabotage. It was the only solution he felt made any real sense. The only way this could make sense was for R – the bastard – and or the system itself to be breaking complementary effects and leaving conflicting ones.
Why?
And how could they get around this?
----------------------------------------
---Jess---
Jess’s refinement was simple. She refined her barriers once, her defensive stats and body once, and finally her domain once.
Three refinements on the upper end of her sanity. Three to match the pattern magic seemed to like and three to prove she could to both herself and any who might question her.
By this point her creation mana was so tightly bound to her protection concept, they were one and the same. Her body defense was almost a passive magic she could barely control – but by refining it, the synergy with her protection concept blended it into something higher. Similarly her domain could be seen as a way of improving the way she protected things by boosting more metaphorical ways of protection than simply making a physical wall.
Together they all interacted in a way that let her almost share her protection with those she loved. A simple ring of her own creation could wrap her domain around her best friends – and then she could improve their defense from a distance – her domain almost sharing her defensive stats through the link the item made, as well as improving every part of her ability to arrive and defend them in person.
She treated the trial the same way she had treated every trial – by throwing herself into it and then screaming 'it sucked' at the top of her lungs when she was done.
Jess could feel this boost and knew she had more than tripled her strength but she didn’t feel up to doing much more than that. Besides. She had a dungeon to try – one that had been done for days if not weeks by this point. Traveling back to their home base she entered the dungeon alone and full of confidence.
…
As far as dungeons went, this one was relatively straightforward in concept. Jess wanted to improve her protection. This dungeon made her protect things. It didn’t have any politics or weird ethical morality bullshit. Nice and simple – taking Jess’s personal preferences into account it was almost like the dungeon was made for her.
I mean it was, but the way it set itself up included stuff she hadn’t directly asked for.
Eventually she wanted to protect all of the potential children of the world and this dungeon seemed to have picked up on that – theming itself appropriately.
Similar to the way the sea of refinement seemed to be able to extract parts of her. Jess found a part of her conceptually removed and extracted. She could block it easily enough unlike the sea, but accepting the magic was the only way she was allowed to enter.
Her heart appeared in her hands – conceptually seeming to condense every single bit of vulnerability in her body mind and soul into a fake organ. Jess was immensely aware that even if she could survive a stab to her heart normally, a single puncture of this external heart would be her downfall. If anything happened to this heart she would die.
It was as simple as that.
By the time she reached the “starting point” of the first floor her heart had become a baby. A precious crying and vulnerable creature that deserved none of the danger of the world. She knew intellectually the baby was fake and yet it felt so real. She felt so attached to this little person the idea that this was her heart began to fade.
And the dungeon threatened her child’s safety – shooting arrows and spewing poison mist towards Jess and her charge. She had to protect her child – Jess covered the baby in her domain, moulding her golden armour into a sealed pouch on her chest and began to push through the rain of attacks. The baby needed to breathe and yet the air itself was full of poison. She needed to destroy the poisonous smoke with a sheet of void mana and yet allow fresh oxygen to enter the pouch. The floor became electrified – bolts of lightning arcing between tiny metal rods. No letting her armour conduct those bolts. No letting the hypnotic light put them to sleep. No letting the impacts rattle her baby’s tiny little head.
Slowly the poisonous smoke disappeared and was replaced by an insidious invisible poison instead.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The temperature fluctuated dropping to dangerously low levels and then flared up to near boiling.
Still Jess protected her heart through it all – even blocking the more conceptual attacks in the later sections. She felt glancing blows across her domain as the walls tried to separate her baby with every step and the sound of flutes tried to invert her into protecting the attacks and destroying the precious baby. Magic could do whatever weird stuff it wanted on its own but as soon as it tried to break her protection it had to deal with her domain – forcing it to attack her armour instead.
She might have struggled a bit with this floor before refining but now it felt almost laughably easy. She was overleveled. Would this dungeon even help her improve in the way she needed to improve?
That confidence faded as she entered the second floor and felt her baby being ripped from her grasp.
Before her eyes – almost in taunting glee – the baby was shredded into thousands of pieces. Her heart was reduced to bloody pulp and Jess nearly lost herself to shock and anger.
Her baby!
The sand reformed soon enough – each chunk splitting and growing once again becoming a sea of children. 1000 young being’s instead of one. Her vulnerability was spread out a bit more this time – Jess knew a certain number of children could in fact die without killing her but that was unacceptable. None of the children should die! Each with names and personalities and lives that couldn’t be snuffed out before they had a chance! As Jess looked around herself she realized what this floor was about and groaned. She was in a village – a few hundred little houses surrounded by the flimsiest looking wooden fence she had ever seen.
Empty. Without any other adults to help her and surrounded by tiny people that needed protection.
…
Days began to pass with monsters slinking out of the forest and attempting to eat her children. Individually everything was less dangerous than the first floor and yet…her children kept trying to escape. It was all a game to them and the little scamps kept trying to kill themselves on anything they could find. Jess had to prevent them from falling down wells just as often as she had to fend off bog hags and cinderbears.
Her domain’s ability to have her destroy space and almost teleport her to help block attacks had a heavy workout – she needed to be everywhere at once and it was only by giving every single child a golden bracelet that her domain could extend as far as she wished.
She replaced the fence with a golden one – preventing her children from leaving the village and warning her of dangers that entered the ring. It was exhausting to maintain considering how large the village was – but it was worth it. It turned the impossible task into one that was annoyingly difficult.
Jess had to keep count of her children frequently – again and again as the precocious beings failed to listen or fell asleep in weird areas. The village was annoyingly full of dangers – who left sharp swords and spears where children could stab themselves?
Jess had to keep watch – because monsters came out at night even more often than the day, and countless snivelling beasts wanted a bite of the vulnerable beings in her care.
She had to feed her children – because no food arrived and protecting them involved not letting them starve. Jess could hunt in the forest for food but that involved either bringing a crowd of victims with her or leaving them on their own and she found herself dashing back to defend against danger so often she barely had time to affect them.
Jess had never been able to conjure food with her creation mana – nothing about golden protection barriers had ever screamed food and she had never gained a concept with ties to anything edible…but as days passed and food was harder to come by, Jess found herself focusing on how “sustenance for a starving child is protection”.
Sooner rather than later her magic adapted – golden bars of nutrition forming before her as her idea of protection bent and reformed. Without an illusion affinity to colour everything like Maddy could, there was little she could do for variance…but survival was enough, even if it made the children grumpy and prone to tantrums.
…
The second floor lasted three weeks. It continuously ramped up in difficulty till, by the end some of the widescale attacks were as bad as the first floor. The last day was a constant storm. Acid rain threatened to burn her previous children and bolts of red lightning sought to snuff each of them out, but by that point something had changed. Jess’s domain had almost sunk into the village itself – the fence she had conjured around it marking a boundary towards the space that was under her protection. This village and everything in it was what she was protecting and focusing on that let Jess conjure the largest dome she had ever made – almost a kilometer in diameter, the barrier wrapped around everything she was protecting and blocked hoards of monsters and environmental effects.
Finally it was done. The trial ended and her children joined together – briefly shooting Jess with a bolt of panic as all her precious people appeared to melt and reform into a heart once again.
The final floor…was different. Unlike before, the vulnerability was gone. It was almost like she had passed the entire dungeon’s test and was being given a bonus exam. First, with a warm sort of wash of power her heart was returned to her – slowly but surely re-entering her body and carrying something new with it. Jess felt the crystalized concept it had used slowly enter her body finally settling deep within her chest.
This then was the main reward of the dungeon. This crystalized application of vulnerability. That ability to extract a creature's ability to be harmed – to pull all the weakness out and center it into a single location.
It was specialized and set. Jess could reject it and there was a chance she could rip it apart to get at the power within…but doing that was sure to break the power it was offering itself.
It felt incredibly dense and strange. Like it was unfinished – a puzzle with half its pieces missing.
And then with a single pump a box appeared.
The third floor. An eternity of reality.
Your goal can be completed in a few steps and yet requires a constant burden to finish.
Absolute candidate, your title is under attack! Your partial mantle “Absolute protector of children” cannot solidify while those who could subvert your power exist. Neutralize every creature or character that threatens the dream you hold dear. When all who’s domains may attack through your skill or break your desired protection are eliminated, your mantel will be complete.
----------------------------------------
Quest: A protection for the young.
Description: Discover a way to complete your mantel. Either grow your ability to protect beyond what you currently have. Alter the state of the world to the point your protection will remain unthreatened. Weaken your wish to allow others to trample on it. Or cripple/kill/remove all who may break your protection from existing in your shared realm.
Reward: Main mantel reward will apply your protection to all humans born within your shared realm automatically, while providing tools to influence how said protection may be removed. Default will be upon reaching 9 years of age. Protection will stifle growth, reducing danger and potential for achievements as well as blocking the ability to break skills.
----------------------------------------
---Troy---
Troy’s refinement was a bit different and yet he ended up in the same place as most. As someone with a specialized body, all of his stats and focus had arrayed his insides in a non standard manner.
His stomach was his core. The weakness of his body and yet also his strength as that is where his mana was formed.
Like a dragon, his mana swirled about his stomach and pulled up his throat. If it encountered food his void mana broke it down – eliminating any dangers before it reached his vulnerable core. At some point Troy had figured out how to pull the mana contained in his stomach up towards his mouth and then back down towards his lungs, settling it in a secondary pool and doubling his storage.
The path had warped and changed with how much he performed this exercise – creating a sort of etheral pathway, and his lungs had adapted to pull his mana towards them with each “breath”.
Troy didn’t need to “breathe” anymore – his mana broke carbon dioxide recycling oxygen in a completely closed system. His body and stats had adapted – using the lack of breath as a chance to close off his nose and increase his stealth by allowing him to stay perfectly still.
There was currently a very minor effect that seemed to be the mana in his lungs transferring into his bloodstream and the rest of his body…but currently that system did nothing more than help activate his domain – twisting all the mana infused into his body into that of shadow.
That self imposed and grown system was part of why his domain had a cooldown. It took a while for mana to pass through his lungs and infuse the rest of his body.
He could forcefully pull his mana through his flesh and activate it anyways but for some reason that path led to damage – ripping his mana through his flesh instead of gently pulling it into the areas.
And so with Troy’s first refinement he tried to strengthen this entire system.
This system that let Troy breathe.
As soon as he gave it to the sign, he realized he was suffocating and despite this system being his most important Troy threw it as far as he could and immediately went to retrieve it.
His second refinement was a bit different. Troy thought of Jess and their conversations over the past few weeks. How despite sharing the mana of creation and a physical body and physical link to their mana, they had differed in such drastic ways.
A specialized body was 'stronger' than a generalized one but more brittle. For defense a specialized body on average became more and more capable of blocking damage. His bones were like iron and his skin like Kevlar. Any monster they faced with armour like diamond had a specialized body. Despite Jess focusing on defensive stats Troy’s base body was actually tougher than hers.
The difference of course for defense at least was in recovery. If Jess lost an arm her body could regenerate it in a day or two even without Maddy around to fix her up. If Troy lost an arm…well then that arm was gone for good.
Conceptually, creation mana could not "just" replace life mana. He couldn’t just conjure himself a new arm…not as he was. There was some innate complexity that came with conjuring organic molecules instead of simpler ones.
That’s what Troy wished to fix. He spent a long time trying to figure out how to extract this himself, then shifted to the sign and spent a while trying to phrase his request perfectly. There couldn’t be a loophole. He couldn’t just say the first thing that came to his mind – there was still a bit of trauma about that.
Finally he made his wish – refining his bodies natural and magical regeneration as well as his magical ability to repair himself at least until he could be fixed by Maddy.
His third refinement was done with a healthy fear of the sea and a distaste for the signs tax. He wanted to strength his skin. His skin held his mana in and protected him from the elements. His skin was his bodies barrier against the world. His skin was…was what failed first when he entered the shadow land and improving it would increase the amount of time he could stay there.
With Maddy in his thoughts the entire time, Troy destroyed his flesh directly under his skin, carefully skinning himself by focusing on the hypodermis – if it could still be called that after all the changes his stats had given him. He then activated his domain to shift his body to shadow and slide out of the suit.
If Maddy could commit this hard than he could as well.
Unlike her he couldn’t heal himself afterwards and his ability to destroy his nerves was low without a life affinity but Troy worked slowly and carefully – his mana guided by his will.
Feeling exposed to the elements, the skinned shadow then tossed his suit into the sea and waited knowing deep down this would hurt.
The sea which had been a sting became a wall of agony he could barely enter and yet Troy thought of James and his unending pool of willpower.
Troy pushed through – his shadow form ripped from him, and his tender flesh stung by countless bees.
Finally he retrieved his skin sliding into the cast off suit and trying to use his newfound ability to regenerate and build back what he’d destroyed.
Slowly his skin felt like his again and yet there was a massive disconnect. He’d done the equivalent of a bandaid – Maddy would have to fix him up beyond this.
Troy left the area flickering into the shadow realm to bypass the guards then found one of Maddy’s eyes at their meeting point.
The majority of her focus was away – most of her eyes would still take a while refining so without anything better to do Troy got his healing and headed to his custom dungeon.
…
The shadow dungeon felt like something he couldn’t have done before refining. He needed to spend days inside of it – not something he could have done with his previous time limit.
As far as dungeons went it was interesting. It pushed his domain and revealed a lot about what was possible. Considering he hadn’t given it much thought – or even really expected much other than a challenge to one of his main strengths, Troy was happy.
The main theme could be called contrast. Light was bright, dark was dark. Putting them together in the same spot gets you a dim nothing. Placing them side by side gets you a razor sharp line of contrast between the two points. The stronger your light the darker your shadow. The stronger your darkness, the brighter your light. The power in center could be called contrast and it by definition could not let either side mix. The pure mana you created when shifting between both ends was weak because of that mixing. A gradient between the sides was weak – the middle a muddy grey. An incredibly sharp contrast between the two sides? Lines that drew the eye and That was strength.
The difference between what Troy had called the shadowlands and reality was a similar sort of contrast. Really – Troy was just realizing his name for it was wrong. Reality was the world of darkness and this realm was the world of light. They met in the shadows and yet this world wasn’t of shadows – shadows were the link between each side. The power in between.
Before long Troy had forced his light and dark mana together without letting them mix – the dungeons concept of contrast bled in as he worked forcing a weakness into pure strength. He forced them together by forcing them apart – ripping away any mixture and making both sides purer as he worked.
By the second floor the change was more complete than ever. The idea of “pure mana” between sides was gone. The concept of contrast was not his – it was something gifted by the dungeon…and yet the more he used it the more it sunk into his soul and settled his form.
Contrast mana let him create arrows sharper than ever. It let him shift with less power than shifting to darkness had forced him – let him jump between shadows and finally live on the edge of the two worlds in such a way he could now look into the reality from its shadow or even jump between shadows without ever entering the other world.
The dungeon’s third floor broke. It felt like it was both the world of darkness and the world of light in the same place – bubbles of the two dimensions everywhere with deadly attacks he could only avoid by shifting and the two dimensions overlapping and breaking apart at certain points a terrifying feeling void in between each of them.
Troy had tried to use his void mana to effect this, void but destruction could not destroy the nothingness that it contained.
Finally he finished the dungeon – a reward of stats accompanying his crystalized contrast. His arrows were now wholly of the in-between – formed out of the barrier between worlds. It almost felt like Troy was ripping space in two and using the sharp edge of broken dimensional barriers to cut into things. As soon as he pulled creation mana into this contrast, it felt like he was solidifying this ripped barrier into something that actually existed.
Troy left his custom dungeon feeling almost more powerful than he’d done when refining. It was to the point he came back and refined a 4th time – refining his contrast mana in a synergy that improved both light and dark as a side effect.
Finally done his training, Troy rejoined his four friends.
Yes…even Richard.