Shivers travel up and down my spine in conflicting waves.
“I don’t wanna lose my memory again.”
I almost give in and start crying, but this time is different. I at least know the source of madness. It isn’t coming out of nowhere. It’s the system’s doing. I purposefully don’t even look at the system screen for a moment, composing myself and take in the situation.
Coming here wasn’t in my plan for now, not after learning each time I came left me with a scar in my mind and lost memories. This dark forest really isn’t a pleasant place. I try to walk out in my ghostly body, but I’m limited to a small circle, barely wide enough to extend my arms out.
The system screen reads pretty simply.
You meet the parameters to unlock a legacy Class.
Error… system user already has a class.
Do you wish to switch your class from A&*MT#2 (Legendary) to Speaker of the Dead? (Mythic – Locked rarity)
Yes No
Absolutely… Noooo….ot yet.
Just thinking no may take me out of here. And there is a pretty compelling reason to remain here least for a minute.
The system is going to erase my memory as soon as I leave.
I have my own Lifestuff and whatever Nash gave to me in the last second. But as I try to summon it into this plane, I fail. For that matter, summoning anything including mana doesn’t just seem far away, it seems at an infinite distance. Over here only my own thoughts and ‘body’ are under my control.
I try to mark my ghostly skin, open other system screens and do whatever comes to mind such as writing on the ground and though that seems to create a slight effect it’s hard work that won’t help in taking any information out. I can’t even walk out of the tiny starting spot.
I try to engrave this moment in my memory, even though I know what the system will do as soon as I reject its offer. Trying to stop it this way may only yield a worse result than letting go, but I can’t simply give up.
All that seems under my control are my emotions and my body. The first is only minimally useful, while the second is unlikely to work.
Still over the next minute, I try to drive myself into the most excited state I can, but it simply doesn’t come, at least not enough that it will take a while to fade. The only state I’m sure will work is one I don’t want to experiment with.
Fear.
I already have enough just being here, but I simply let it build while adding fuel to the fire and watching my own anxiety explode.
Doing the most ridiculous pose I can imagine just as an experiment, I tap the little NO button and then confirm my action.
An invasion of my mind brings confusion and something else….
-------------------
Nash’s POV
Ajax starts to be teleported back. He is not even fully back and I ignore his father’s complaints as I open a portal just behind him ready to push him through into a prepared room.
Life comes to my fingertips. The deep crimson resource, more concentrated than Health rushes into his brain even while I feel the system’s fingertips medling.
Normally I would be at warry of the system, but right this second seems like the end of the world. I shouldn’t allow the memory wipe and any thought that doesn’t support my goal simply bounces off.
I drive all my power and attention trying to undo the damage happening right in front of me. The system pushes and I even feel something ever so slightly different this time but the only thing letting me keep any semblance of equality is my momentum. The drive consumes my focus.
Ajax fully enters the inner world and I close the portal forcing the system to pass all the defenses in place.
Runes carved all along the edges of the main inner world, connect to a single room that is focused around a tiny pod. Each layer that its attention has to cross makes the system’s efforts exponentially harder. I try to shift the mental frames of how the whole thing works even while the system drives inside relentlessly.
Millions of carefully carved runes suck in hundreds of thousands of mana, hundreds of Qi and the willpower of seven rings of mages around Ajax numbering in the thousands. Their entire will was out in the open, mages who didn’t care for the system and wanted to deepen their knowledge of how to resist it. Opposing the system in small ways doesn’t seem to open them up to hidden penalties as I was under in the instance.
I try to imagine that the inner world is not outside of me. An independent pocket of space, but that it is housed within myself. My leverage to push the system grows ever so slowly. But like running just shy of a full sprint, even if don’t yet feel the burn, it is only a matter of time and soon I will be at my limit, as surely as gravity points downward.
The attention of the machine is relentless. So relentless I have to wonder if it is going be like if it is for a few hours or forever. It really doesn’t seem like the type of thing that it will give up after a couple of tries.
Even if it doesn’t go forever, I doubt that Ajax has the willpower to fully resist at such a young age to win a staring contest against the ruthless eye in the sky. And each moment I only get closer to my own limit and soon my help will drop off.
Still, as long as he is standing, I’m not willing to give up.
The usefulness of my two minds comes to the forefront. As my other half is consumed with using our Qi to empower the most critical parts of the runes balancing it all out to the delay the system. I put my mental imagery on the back burner trying to telepathically reach the unresponsive Ajax.
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A permanent balance seems impossible, but maybe he could tell us something from inside before it's fully gone because I doubt he is going inside anytime soon. I flood his brain with Life with tight control of my actions. Months of tinkering with seed brains hadn’t really made me any kind of expert on the human brain, but Life usage is mostly instinctive and it heals the neuron barriers the system tries to establish. While they happen, the change is trivial to see with the perception field, enhanced by Ajax being inside my inner world.
In the pool of Life, I weave tiny filaments of healing around his brain in a facsimile of what I imagine a fully fledged mind healer would do.
A fog in his mind I didn’t realize was there lifts as a result of something I did and the system’s reaction is violent.
I put my own will behind the defensive efforts empowering the gold carved runes in Ajax’s pod. The temporary room carved out against the system helping us now as it can’t overwhelm our efforts instantly. The damage gets through to me as the trashings of the system grow stronger, but it is fairly predictable and while it marshals its strength and brings more of its attention over here we have a tiny window.
We have seconds at most and I won’t waste it. Even before the words leave my mouth, The system presses begin to pile up its power around our barricades.
“Tell me everything. You arrived here fearful.”
His voice is croaky, but there is steel hidden underneath.
“Yes, but it felt fake, forced. Like I intentionally drove myself into a panic. I think this is the only way I figured out how to communicate from the other side. I simply added fuel to the situation. Fuel. That word is stuck in my mind.
“Keep going.” I encourage him over his dad’s protests, but he is outside the inner world and can’t do much to interfere right now.
“Either way, not real horror, just a passing state. If I was willing to undergo this process a couple dozen times, maybe I could spell a word or something. I need to think on it.”
My mind runs through it at supersonic speeds, powered by my perception stat and I ask the obvious.
“Where were you?”
“I…I think a dark forest. I just have this image… of dead nature and fog.”
“What else?”
“I don’t think I was really there, only my ghost. I had a choice before me. I think I always chose against something so the system kicks me out.”
“A choice?”
“A system prompt… I can’t remember what it’s about, I can’t…” I see the fragility of his state, the crumbling memory castle. Even the connections still there are wildly connecting to undamaged parts of his brain. Soon, anything I force out of his is gonna be fabricated out of whole cloth. The system is muscling me out and taking even packing up the rubble so that I can’t piece the original shape back together.
He spins his own Aether and mine in something akin to the natural patterns but in a concentrated way and only inside his own body. Something he told me is all he knows how to do.
Then I ask one final question.
“Can you at least tell me if the system screen was a trial, something to do with a new territory, a quest…?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“A class?”
“I… that, that sounds familiar…..” The crashing of the system is complete and even I tremble at the wave of power melting the gold and Mithril runes in the closest layer to him. Near absolute control of the inner world, space lets me avoid the molten metal dripping on his vulnerable body and I sense a vindictive desire rise in me to one-up the efforts of the system.
But feeding this dark desire is only gonna corrode my own will. I won’t push Ajax towards another pyramid just to extract that little bit more information to satisfy my curiosity. And I won’t lie and say that would be my main motivation if I let it run amock.
After a moment of silence, I manage to hear what my gut has to say, which lines up with my logical interpretation of the situation. I won’t learn much more without changing strategies and Ajax probably should be left to heal his own scars.
The system would have a harder time erasing my memory, but even I might not escape even if it ‘only’ used something of this power. I can’t ‘take’ this burden from Ajax, he will have to find a way to bear it. I have done what I could given that finishing the mechanical aspect of healing is trivial.
I fully relax as the last vestiges of the heavy pressure in the air fade. The system is constrained by its own rules. The machine, limiting itself because it was built with a relatively pure purpose. Without those limitations, it would be and now is turned against the very people it was supposed to nurture into greater power, but there are fundamental limitations.
We aren’t strong enough.
Ajax’s memory is purged and so I stop trying to heal him the same way, but as the system fades, newfound insights lead me to smooth over the oldest scars. Reconnecting the blank spots in his mind won’t allow him to remember, not when the memories hadn’t even been something he stored in his long term section through a night’s sleep. At least that should help with the open cycle loops in his mind. That feels like something that would drive most people insane over the weeks or months. His own mind would have probably done something similar eventually, but the points of life I spend seem worth it right now.
Life can’t heal most sicknesses of the mind, but acute injuries like this it can.
My mind spins, even as Ajax returns to the pyramid to his half worried, half pissed dad. I close this avenue in my mind. While useful, the danger of pushing Ajax for minimal gains completely turns me away from it.
Not without a fundamental increase in my own or his capability to fight the system or an entirely different strategy. He will have to find his own way forward. Maybe a seed would be able to retain something but he mentioned a ghostly body, so probably not. Aether constructs, a mnemonic memory palace and even a variation of his emotion driven state are possible options, but we know too little.
A thousand ideas pass through my head and all are discarded just as quickly as they arrive.
“This experiment is over,” his dad says while holding Ajax tightly against his side in no uncertain terms. We both stop padding my clothes mid-action and look at him with similarly chiseled faces though wildly different heights and simply say in unison:
“Yeah, of course.” I feel a hint of an untamed curiosity in the back of his voice, behind the lingering fear. Ajax won’t be content to remain in the dark forever. Then he mutters: “For now” so low only the vibrations of his own vocal chords are enough for me to discern his words, but I chose not to comment.
At his insistence, I end up spending another half an hour trying to tease anything out of his memory without success, and I look at the time more as a lesson to move him more towards some of the aspects of Aether he hasn’t experimented with.
I end up learning more than I expected. Like my first impressions, I don’t share enough of a mindset, to imitate his use of Aether just yet, but it’s a skill I eventually work on. It sounds very useful and interesting.
Anything I learn will probably help make my own development smoother.
With one last look at the young boy with a determined face, I know that I have to say a few more words.
“It won’t be today. It may be this year, or even this decade, but you know what you have to do one day?”
“Yes, I know.”
“It may not be fair. You are young, but it is your responsibility. Lay it to the side and get yourself back together, Learn and grow because I have a feeling only you will be able to unlock them.”
I step out of the pyramid and manipulate Qi to take flight phasing the effect from the inner world which doesn’t limit me to a few meters or even a few dozen meters, but kilometers of height.
My mind can’t let go.
“How to unlock the pyramid?”
Ajax poking stumbled upon the first clue and he carries the torch, but we should do our due diligence and test.
So, I outline a plan. Gather thousands of children both with and without classes for them to ‘explore’ the pyramid. Maybe we will get lucky but something tells me that Ajax is special. The system may want us to unlock the pyramid, but it hasn’t stepped in to guide us in the right direction just yet.
Still, through it all, my own trial and meddling system screen comes to mind. I will have to figure it out. The ten months of wait are over and the next wave of enemy reinforcements won’t come for nearly a month. This is the ideal time.