Evelyn stared at the man who looked as if he was ready to fight at any moment, not sure if she'd heard right. "Em... I'm sorry? I haven't killed anyone, none of us have. Why would you even suggest that?"
"Earlier today one of our squads reported one of their teammates dead, by the hand of civilians who had entered the tower. You three are the only civilians who we're aware of having entered... Illegally mind you. So, either let us peacefully restrain you, or we're going to have to use force."
Evelyn nervously glanced at the floating blade that seemed to freeze the very air around it. She wasn't a citizen of Valessa, that had been made abundantly clear by the goddess herself, which meant that she didn't follow Valeria's laws. She couldn't be guilty of any crime, even if she had actually done anything. Evelyn almost said so, until she realized it also meant no law protected her or her friends. The man could simply just kill her if he wanted, with zero repercussions.
"What gives you any right to arrest us in the name of Valeria, you're not her citizens." Michelle said from behind Evelyn before she could give an answer.
Before Evelyn even noticed anything to be off, a single iron chain came flying at her from the ground behind them. Evelyn was knocked out in a near instant after Michelle dropped Audrey off her shoulders, and dampened his fall with the miniscule amount of mana she'd recovered. Evelyn barely saw Michelle prepare to fight the helpers one handed, before everything went dark.
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Why couldn't I have a head. I really wanted to bang my head against a wall. I'd tried everything I could think of to get a mind attached to random inanimate objects, and been wholly unsuccessful. I had reached a dilemma. I knew that a mind could be attached to near anything, I myself was connected to everything I understood within the control of my mana. I needed mana to control everything in my domain, but brains, and even cells, have something in them that communicates with the mind, without mana.
That left me with two possible ways to give minds to objects. I might be able to give a mind mana so that they'd get a domain large enough to envelop the object, but they wouldn't be tied to the object. Instead they'd be whatever I was, just smaller, and them controlling the weapon would be like me controlling my golems. And why would anyone want to play a simple weapon when they could be like me.
The second option is to figure out what made minds communicate with living things, and somehow turn an object into a body they could control. If I could figure that out, I wouldn't be limited to simple biological lifeforms.
Oliver flew back in the tower, and like the mass of ideas he was, his mere presence gave me a possible idea on what I should do. Not so long ago, I had figured out how to sense conscious minds. I highly doubted the things minds communicate through are molecules or anything like such, so maybe if I knew enough, and was on the right track with my speculation, I could start sensing them too.
When I had started sensing minds, I had focused on the idea of their very existence, what they were and represented. A mind wasn't just a byproduct of the brain, they were their own things. Something capable of creating information from nothing, to be able to choose, connect to mana, store data, and act upon that collection of information. If a mind can interact with mana, then there could be other things it can interact with. Something similar to mana, but more grounded in reality, more physical. Maybe it moves in the presence of a mind, or produces electricity—except that'd be dumb—or maybe it creates a force or...
I focused all my attention in a single cell with a mind rapidly moving about. It continuously moved in seemingly random patterns, going in a straight line until suddenly turning to another direction once it made it's way to some molecule or such. If my theory was at all right, then those points were what I was looking for. I focused on a single point in a protein molecule that the cells mind had already turned at twice. Turning my thoughts in my head, I was overwhelmed for a moment when I finally sensed it.
It was basically exactly the same as mana, but more like a particle connected to certain particles instead of everything the mind understood within the mana cloud, and could affect what it was connected to on a much weaker level. Connecting a single mana particle to a stone, should make the stone to a body ready to be inhabited. It wouldn't have any sensory input other than knowing that the stone existed.
Connecting a mana particle to each of the stone's molecules might be better, because then the mind will know their locations relative to one another, or in other words, know the shape of the stone and what it's made of. But even then, it wouldn't have any proper senses, or any way to move, but it could probably manipulate the electrons in the stone. In fact, that was probably how a mind could control a living body. I just needed to make a working vessel for the newly dead mind I had ready for testing. It couldn't be too hard...
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
I focused my attention outward, and noticed Oliver had disappeared to somewhere without my noticing. I'd been focused on the single cell and it's protein for longer than I had thought, or at least the sentence written from a few vial fulls of carbon spheres suggested. Oliver had apparently become bored of waiting for me to focus on what he was scratching on the ground, so he'd used the dust so I would notice when I eventually focused on the tower again. And that message definitely didn't bear good news. It seemed as there were people outside my tower, waiting for me to educate them on my rules.
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Evelyn woke up with a groan, her head hurt. She tried to sit up, but her hands tied with thick rope to her body, which was tied down to a long wooden plank, speeding through the air along the familiar road to Valessa.
"Would've been much easier for all of you if you'd have come willingly." Evelyn heard the familiar voice of the person who'd captured them say. "Your friend especially, ready to fight tooth and nail just to escape."
Evelyn heard a muffled groan from a few steps beside her. She managed to turn her head just enough to see Michelle, looking worse off than she had before, along with being tied down and gagged on her own plank. "You'd do the same if random people came to arrest you for a crime you didn't commit!" Evelyn shouted.
"You sure acted guiltily for someone who claims to be innocent. We have multiple eye witnesses who all agreed that you three were the ones they faced on the third floor of the tower. You gave a good man an injury severe enough to slowly kill him over the course of a dozen minutes!"
Evelyn's eyes widened as realization struck, maybe it really had been them who killed the man, she did remember at least one of the guild members getting struck unconscious... But it also could've been the tower that killed the man. Yeah, that had to be—
The planks abruptly stopped moving, and Evelyn felt something push against her from all directions, with the gates of Valessa a short distance behind her. Then everything went flying, the helpers strength in mana manipulation not being enough to fight a goddess.
For a moment, the helpers had lost their focus on the restraints holding Evelyn and her friends down. As she came crashing to the ground, Evelyn managed to loosen the ropes holding her down, and became free.
"What did you do!" She heard someone shout from across the road. There were three men climbing out from underneath the small carriage they'd been traveling on.
"That wasn't me," Evelyn said as she got up. "It seems that Valeria doesn't want you entering her city."
"So, none of us are her citizens, seeing as she threw you out too. That means..."
A sphere of water came blasting at Evelyn, which she managed to dissipate with a strong blast of wind. Then behind it came the spinning blade, tip first to be almost entirely unaffected by the air blast, the water had been a distraction. Evelyn barely managed to form a stone in her palm, which she used to block the soaring blade. But she hadn't expected it to burst into flames upon contact with the stone, and neither had she expected the sudden wave of pressure that exploded from the blade, caused by all the frozen drops of air expanding in an instant of heated air.
Evelyn was thrown backwards, her right hand entirely numb from all sensation. She'd have thought it to have been torn off if not for the fact she could see it.
The stone had shattered into pieces in her palm, which she blasted towards the guild members with a crack of thunder, but they slowed to a stop midair upon contact with their cloud of mana. Evelyn knew she was severely outclassed, and neither Audrey or Michelle were in the condition to fight. The shards of stone came tumbling through the air back at Evelyn, which she managed to block with a thick sheet of ice.
A flaming blade burst through the ice, but it was slowed down enough for Evelyn to dodge it. Evelyn was running out of mana, and fast. But she came up with a last ditch idea. The floating boards had given her inspiration, all she needed was a distraction.
Evelyn could only hope it'd work, as she grabbed the boards her friends and she had been transported, with her mana, and formed the combined runes for water and fire, before pushing it through her tattoo. A glob of steaming hot water was formed, but it wasn't what she wanted, so she shot it towards her opponents. It was blasted apart but Evelyn didn't care, she prepared a second set of combined runes.
Evelyn wanted to form a cloud to obscure the helpers' vision, and clouds are basically water in air... Probably. Evelyn combined the air and water runes, and the effect was much better. A thick fog erupted out of her hand, and Evelyn pushed more mana into it, covering a large area around her in a dense blinding fog. She wasn't sure if the helpers could sense her location with their mana, but escape was the only hope Evelyn had.
Under the cover of the cloud of fog, Evelyn grabbed on her board with everything she had, and sent the three of them flying away before the fog could flee with the wind. It was difficult, and she almost crashed a couple times, but with the help of a barely conscious Michelle, they made their way towards their village. Evelyn couldn't think of any other place they could go to, even if the helpers guild would probably find them from there. It was her home, always had been, and Evelyn didn't want to leave it behind.