Chapter One Hundred Forty-Four: ‘Thy toxic prize...’

“And what is so terrible about eggs?” the young Lady Najir asked.

Hector, meanwhile, already had some idea where this was going. The discussion he’d had with Garovel on the way down to the Undercrust was still fresh in his mind.

Atalim was the one who answered her, however. ‘Worm eggs,’ was all he said.

Jada’s expression shifted from curiosity to flat displeasure.

‘This box is vacuum sealed,’ said Garovel. ‘And given how large it is and that it doesn’t appear to be refrigerated, there’s pretty much nothing else that could be inside.’

Hector figured he should take a turn asking the obvious question. “Worm eggs need to be vacuum sealed?”

‘Indeed,’ said Atalim. ‘They secrete a kind of sludge, which gives off pheromones. And most species of worm possess a terrifyingly good sense of smell. Greatworms in particular.’

‘And certain morons consider that sludge a delicacy,’ said Garovel. ‘Though, I suppose they could also want these for scientific purposes. Regardless, I thought the practice of capturing these things was outlawed ages ago.’

‘I am fairly certain that it was and still is wildly illegal,’ said Atalim. ‘But invariably, that never completely kills demand. In less reputable circles, such laws only serve to drive up the price.’

‘Maybe that’s what all this is really about. To the right buyer, these eggs could be worth more than all the food in the city.’

‘Hmm. Perhaps we should inform the others of our discovery before getting lost in speculation,’ said Atalim.

‘Fine, if you wanna be all smart and pragmatic-like.’

They reconvened with the rest of the group and learned that they had not been alone in their findings. Two more warehouses full of rations and foodstuffs were nearby, apparently, and both contained a vacuum-sealed chamber of their own.

Asad and Imas took point on questioning the captives while everyone else discussed what to do next.

“I believe we should destroy the eggs and be done with it,” the Lady Stroud was saying.

‘I don’t disagree,’ said Garovel, ‘but that would be incredibly dangerous to do in the city. If even the smallest whiff of pheromone escapes, Babbadelo will be swarmed with worms inside twenty-four hours. I think the safest thing to do is take the boxes away from civilization and THEN destroy them.’

“That sounds reasonable,” said Evangelina.

“Whoa, whoa, hold up,” said Diego. “I don’t think we know enough to make that call yet. These things are incredibly difficult to get your hands on, right? What if... someone really needs them?”

The reapers all just looked at him.

Diego raised both hands defensively. “Look, I’m just saying, it would be a shame if we destroyed them when someone might be needing these eggs for something important, like creating a vaccine for some terrible illness that we don’t know about.”

Even Yangéra, the man’s own reaper, was looking dubious. ‘And your concern has nothing to do with the fact that these eggs might be worth a lot of money.’

Diego smiled. “Hey, if we get rewarded for doing god’s work, then so much the better, right?”

‘Wow.’

Ultimately, they decided to wait until Asad and Imas finished their questioning. It didn’t take much longer, as the Sandlords did not seem to be having trouble getting the captive Hun’Kui to talk.

“A deal was struck between the cities of Babbadelo and Ornamegir,” Asad explained. “The eggs were to be transported from here to there under armed escort, purportedly for some kind of pressing research by the Cadaculos, which is the largest medical facility in the Higher West layer.”

“Ha!” Diego exclaimed. “See?!”

Hector heard several reapers sigh in unison.

Yangéra rubbed her skull with a bony hand. ‘I can’t believe he was right...’

“What else did you learn?” asked Diego.

Imas picked up where her brother left off. “The eggs were supposed to leave Babbadelo over a month ago, but the railway line that they need to use also happens to pass very close by a recently discovered worm nest.”

There was more sighing.

“Both the government AND the militia around here have been trying to organize a heavier escort, but with a damned rebellion going on, they can’t cooperate on anything,” said Imas. “Not to mention, people aren’t exactly lining up to be a part of such a dangerous mission.”

“The militia has managed to enlist the help of one of the larger treasure hunting groups,” Asad added. “The Akassu. That’s why so many of these guys are wearing green. The hunters were much more eager to cooperate with us than the militiamen.”

‘Well, this is just wonderful,’ said Garovel.

“None of this changes the fact that we should not leave the eggs here,” said Evangelina.

‘We could turn them over to the government,’ suggested Qorvass.

‘And what would stop the militia from stealing them back?’ said Ezura.

‘That would be up to the government to figure out,’ said Qorvass. ‘We came here altruistically for the food. We do not have to make the eggs our problem, as well.’

‘That’s true,’ said Garovel. ‘And we still don’t have a plan for distributing the food, either. It might be best to just turn everything over to the government and walk away.’

Ezura tilted her head. ‘You surprise me, Garovel. I thought you boldest among us.’

‘I just want to make sure we consider all of our options,’ said Garovel. ‘But thank you, I think.’

“I think we should go all in,” said Diego. “Let’s talk to this Akassu group. Maybe we could partner with them in moving the eggs. From the sound of things, if we don’t move them, then no one will. Seems like a good opportunity for us. Throw a bit of our weight around, do some good, collect a reward, maybe partake in a bit of treasure-hunting ourselves while we’re at it?” He looked around for approval. “C’mon, this is right in our wheelhouse. I can’t be the only one thinking this? Am I the only Rainlord here?”

Qorvass hovered around Asad’s head. ‘As a matter of fact, you and the Lady Stroud ARE the only Rainlords here, yes.’

Diego scratched his head. “Huh. But hey, the reapers count, too, so that’s four of... twelve. Hmm. Alright, I see your point.”

‘I agree with Diego,’ said Ezura. ‘We should not balk at this opportunity. ‘The rain fears not the torch.’’

‘Again, the rest of us aren’t Rainlords,’ said Qorvass.

‘True,’ Ezura admitted. ‘Then shall we go see what our kin have to say about the matter?’

That made everyone go silent. She’d pretty much won the debate with that, Hector felt.

Evangelina’s eyes fell upon him, however. “What does the young Lord Goffe think?”

Hector was surprised, but after a moment, he supposed he shouldn’t have been. It was more or less his fault that they’d even come here in the first place, after all.

But the way she was eyeing him... Perhaps he was mistaken, but he felt like she wasn’t just asking a question. He felt like she was about to pass judgment on him, like he’d made some mistake and she was waiting for him to either explain himself or apologize.

Maybe that was just how she always looked, though. He’d noticed a similar quality in some of the other Rainlord leaders, particularly Zeff.

Either way, he didn’t see much point in letting it bother him. Not after all that had happened.

“...I think I would like to see things through,” he said. “And... securing all this food won’t be very helpful if a bunch of worms kill everyone before they can eat it.”

Diego laughed, but Evangelina’s expression did not change, and her gaze lingered on Hector for a bit longer before Asad spoke up again.

“Well, whatever the case, someone needs to go tell Zeff and everyone else what we have found.”

A bout of volunteering and counter-volunteering intervened, until at length, the group was satisfied that Diego and Imas would go together while Asad, Hector, Jada, and Evangelina would remain here to watch over the captured Hun’Kui. The pair soon departed, and Hector and the others found a place to sit while they waited.

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Hector had the distinct feeling that things were going to start moving very quickly very soon, so he wanted to make use of this downtime while it lasted. He tried contacting Emiliana again with the Shard in his pocket, but when he received no response, he decided to work on his materialization skills.

He wanted to attempt the “binding” technique that Zeff and Asad had shown him earlier. He figured that would be more useful than simply meditating. And besides, he couldn’t very well close his eyes when he was supposed to be watching the captives.

First, however, he had to think of how to attempt the technique. The whole idea behind binding--as he recalled Asad and Garovel explaining it--was to convert a task that required active concentration into a task that did not.

That was about all the information he had to go on, though. He considered asking Garovel for more details, but the reaper was in the middle of a conversation with Atalim and Ezura.

Hmm.

Something that required active concentration...

What about making his iron move through the air? It was one thing to add velocity to a created object and be done with it, but could he possibly make that object fly according to his will? Against gravity, even?

No, strictly speaking. From everything he’d been told, as well as his own experimentation, such a feat was flatly impossible.

But Hector wondered if he could at least make it look like it was happening.

Certainly, he couldn’t control his iron once it was created. That seemed to be the First Law of Materialization, if such labels existed. But even so, he could always grow more iron out of his already-created pieces. And growth was a kind of movement, wasn’t it? And that other technique that Zeff and Asad had taught him earlier... the perpetually falling object...

Ideas swirled through his head, even though he couldn’t quite imagine any practical applications just yet.

Maybe, instead of keeping the falling object perfectly still, he could add on to it in a different direction while also annihilating it from the opposite direction. Wouldn’t that give the object the appearance of movement?

Hector gave it a shot. He began with an iron cube hovering over the palm of his hand, just as before. It still fascinated him, simply looking at it, falling eternally in place without ever changing shape. He concentrated and started adding on to it from the right while simultaneously annihilating from the left. And of course, he also had to make sure that he didn’t stop adding to it from the top while still annihilating it from the bottom, too.

It actually worked. The cube floated to the right, out of his hand, and he couldn’t help smiling to himself.

It became unsteadier as it drew farther away from him, however, and then its shape distorted.

He frowned and started over.

Maintaining that level of concentration was difficult enough, but he also had to keep in mind that the angles of both creation and annihilation were constantly changing as well. And worse still, the distance from himself--slight though it was--also seemed to impact his level of precision just enough to mess him up.

For such a simple trick, it sure demanded a lot of concentration. He was starting to understand why he hadn’t seen anyone else doing this so far. It probably wasn’t worth all the effort. He was probably just wasting his time.

But still, he didn’t want to give up. Because, somehow, it felt more personal than usual. Like he was inventing something. Even though he was sure someone else had figured this all out ages ago, he wanted to keep puzzling it out for himself, wanted to uncover all the little secrets that he could without relying on anyone else for help.

And, hmm. Maybe there was a simple solution to the distance problem. Maybe he could make the cube orbit around him in a perfect circle. Then the concentration requirements would never change.

He blinked at himself, mulling it over in his head a couple more times.

But what would it need to orbit, exactly? His body? Or his brain?

Hmm.

He supposed it might prove easier to have it orbit around his brain, so that was where he started. He created the cube directly in front of his face, made sure it was hovering and stationary, then began moving it. He kept his head still as he concentrated, visualizing his work as it curved around to the right and beyond his peripheral vision.

Adding the curve felt a bit tricky, but he wasn’t having any trouble picturing its movement in his mind. He just needed to maintain its course until it curved all the way back around from the left.

He waited, trying not to get so eager to see it reentering his view that he ended up breaking his own concentration. It was on its way. Hopefully. He just needed to focus. It should’ve been getting close. Any second now, and it would--

There it was. It worked. But the sight of it floating there was enough of a relief that it pulled a small laugh from his lips, which did break his concentration. The cube distorted and then plummeted. Rather than destroying it, he let it clatter to the ground and then picked it up.

It was very hot to the touch, he found, and then realized that it would’ve been much more so if not for Zeff’s misty armor drenching and cooling it for him. The constant, low hiss of the armor was somehow easy to forget about, at times. But he knew that if he ever left Zeff’s range, the Undercrust’s searing heat would be sure to remind him. He was just glad that the Lord Elroy’s range was so enormous.

He tossed the lump of iron into the air and annihilated it again.

Alright, well, he’d come up with something that required active concentration. Now, this “binding” technique could convert it into something that didn’t require concentration...

...How the hell was he supposed to pull this off, exactly? Purely through memorization? Really? What was the best way to commit something like this to memory?

Shit. Maybe this technique was too advanced for him, right now. Come to think of it, the way they’d talked about it kinda suggested as much...

Eh, whatever. He wasn’t afraid of failing. He’d already failed harder at so many other things. Important things. This was kiddie shit.

Hector took a deep breath, found his focus, and put a new cube into orbit.

When it came down to it, it was just a pattern. A fairly complex pattern, sure, but a pattern nonetheless. And if he thought about it like that, then it didn’t seem so difficult to memorize.

Two instances of creation, two instances of annihilation. Top and right, bottom and left. These were the constants. The easiest parts. The real difficulty of it stemmed from the shifting angles at which he had to maintain said constants.

But maybe he could think of the two instances of creation as just one. Two instances of adding to his iron. If he applied the same force to both of them, then...

The cube swung past his vision sooner than he’d expected, then swirled around again, quick as a curving arrow shot, and then again, so fast that it cut audibly through the air, and then several more times at such a speed that he wasn’t sure he was even doing it himself anymore.

Then it flew completely off course and punched a hole through the wall next to him.

Hector stared with an open mouth, not quite sure what had just happened.

He looked around, wondering if someone had taken control of his iron or something, but no one was paying any attention to him--well, aside from a few of the captive Hun’Kui, who were looking worriedly in his direction.

Hmm.

Whatever just happened, he needed to replicate it.

He started over, taking the same steps, trying to repeat his same thought process, and then--

Yep. The second cube did the same thing, making a new hole only a half-meter or so away from the first one.

Oh, wait.

That constant rate of growth he’d applied on the right side... that was equivalent to gravity, wasn’t it? And gravity was accelerative. As in, increasing. So... since there was no counter-force being applied by actual gravity like there was on the top side of the cube... then he’d essentially made the cube grow faster and faster... until his concentration could not keep up and he simply lost control of it.

Huh.

He scratched his head.

That was... almost worryingly easy, Hector felt. He would’ve thought that he’d have more trouble making the annihilation on the left and bottom keep pace with the accelerated growth on the right, but apparently not. It was like he’d barely even needed to think about it.

For a time, Hector merely sat there, mulling over what he’d just done. He supposed the only explanation was that his degree of control over iron was simply higher than he’d realized. Granted, he had lost control there at the end, but the point of interest was how fast the cubes had gotten before escaping him, not to mention how many revolutions around him that they had made.

It was true that he hadn’t tested the limits of his materialization in a while. And had he achieved emergence recently? He didn’t think so, but as he thought about it, he realized that he wasn’t actually sure--a thought which he found slightly worrisome. Shouldn’t that have been something he could be certain about? Maybe this was all just the result of meditation. Or Rasalased’s “tempering,” perhaps.

Or both?

Agh. He couldn’t help feeling like he was losing himself, somehow. He wished he had more time to practice, to fully understand his current limits. He hated this feeling of unpreparedness. And he’d been feeling it all too often, lately.

He stood. If nothing else, he wanted to use what time he did have as efficiently as possible, and it occurred to him that he should perhaps locate the iron cubes and see what kind of state they were in before trying to draw any further conclusions.

It took a bit of searching, but he found them on the ground in front of an apparent sleeping quarters, having penetrated a second wall beyond the first and left a pair of cracked dents in a third.

He was surprised, however, to find that the cubes were no longer cubes at all. But after thinking about it more, he supposed that only made sense. When he’d lost control, they’d become distorted, because his control was the only thing making them hold their shape.

...And perhaps that was important to know. He squinted as he eyed the dents in the wall before him another time.

Another question was forming in Hector’s head, but he wasn’t quite able to articulate it to himself yet.

He decided to do one more test. He formed another hovering cube, but this time, he purposely made it float into the wall.

Nothing happened. But perhaps that wasn’t strange. Perhaps it needed to float faster. He swung the cube around and increased the speed.

Again, nothing happened. He tried one more time, increasing the speed even further, and sure enough, nothing happened. Not even a sound.

Which seemed strange to him. At that speed, the cube definitely should have made a noise when it collided with the wall. Moreover, the previous two cubes certainly had made noises.

So what was going on here?

Well, there was only one discernible difference that he could see. The first two cubes were distorted, while the third was not. They’d both changed into long, vaguely conical shapes--not identical to each other but still similar enough that it didn’t seem coincidental.

Hector blinked as he realized what had been bothering him. Yes. The reason that third cube hadn’t made a noise when it collided with the wall was because it hadn’t actually collided with it.

That was the way that “growing” his iron was supposed to work. Materialization could not occur within a solid object. He’d learned that very early on. So the cubes shouldn’t have been able to grow into a wall and thereby pierce it, because he had been using this growing technique in order to make them move. Regardless of their speed, they should have simply reached the wall and stopped, not even colliding with it or making any noise, which was what the third cube did.

And yet they had.

Because their shape had changed. Because he’d lost control over their growth. The part of the distorted cubes which ended up colliding with the walls must have not been “growing” anymore. They must’ve simply been regular iron at that point.

That might’ve also explained why the cubes flew so wildly off course. The non-growing sections of the cube would have gained their own, genuine momentum while being pushed along at such a speed by the still-growing sections. Not to mention, they would have begun to bear the effects of gravity--and possibly other environmental conditions? He wasn’t sure.

Hmm.

This was not a minor discovery, Hector felt. Clearly. With it, he would be able to, in effect, manipulate his iron after its initial creation--even to attack. Sure, it wouldn’t be easy and would probably require shitloads more practice, but...

With this, he could evolve his entire fighting style.

He wondered if Zeff and Asad had been intending to teach him this soon. Maybe they didn’t think he would’ve been able to do it. He wouldn’t have thought he could do it, either.

Heh. He wanted see their faces when he showed it to them later. Garovel’s, too, of course.

But first, it needed refinement. He had to practice more.

Abruptly, however, it occurred to him that he’d stopped keeping an eye on the captives. He annihilated his work and then briskly returned where he’d been sitting before. Thankfully, no one seemed to have noticed. He counted the number of captives, just to be sure none were missing.

Rather than sitting back down, though, he remained standing as he set to work again. Now that he knew not to add an accelerative force to the cube’s orbit, he found that it was almost trivial to sustain, almost as if he were keeping it to its path with one of his hands.

He tried out different centers of orbit, around his torso, around his arm, his hand, his leg. They were more difficult but not terribly so. He tried out different angles as well, and found a similar result. Then he tried walking while trying to maintain the diagonal orbit around his torso, and he began struggling again, but not for long. After pacing back and forth a few times, he was starting to get the hang of it.

Hector found that the initial difficulty with walking had come from trying to maintain the orbit independently around him, but when he visualized all of the motions and shifting angles of creation and destruction as relative to himself--as an extension of himself, even--it became much easier.

But it did require active concentration, still, and that was the real hump that he wanted to overcome. As enjoyable as it was to have a tiny satellite floating around him, he wasn’t really any closer to figuring out this “binding” memory technique.

He supposed the only way forward was to simply continue maintaining its orbit as much as possible, and then eventually, it would become second nature to him. Like riding a bike. Probably.

At length, Garovel finally looked over in his direction again.

‘Hector, what the fuck?!’ the reaper shouted, still with the echo of privacy.

Hector had expected Garovel to be surprised, but even so, he was a bit taken aback by that reaction. He wasn’t sure whether he should laugh or ask if he’d screwed something up.

Garovel pointed at the cube as it moved. ‘What the hell is this shit?! Are you really doing that?!’

‘Uh... yeah?’

The reaper just gave him a look that Hector didn’t recognize.

Hector added a second cube, this time orbiting it along the opposite diagonal path over his other shoulder. ‘I was just, uh... I was just testing some stuff out. Why do you sound so upset?’

Garovel took his time answering. ‘...Are you repeatedly creating and destroying new cubes so quickly that they look like one object in continuous motion?’

‘Wha? No, I--that’s... hmm.’ Hector hadn’t even thought to try doing that. And why the hell hadn’t he? It sounded way simpler than the method he’d come up with. Maybe not easier, but definitely simpler.

‘“Hmm”?’ said Garovel. ‘What do you mean, “hmm”?’

Hector explained himself. It took some time. He had to go over his experimentation and thought process.

When he was done, Garovel just stared at him for a while.

‘Hector...’

‘...Yeah?’

‘I’ve never seen anyone do such a thing with materialization before,’ the reaper finally said.

And Hector was confused, because Garovel didn’t sound like he was joking or trying to trick him. But then, maybe that was part of the trick.

Garovel turned and floated quickly back toward the others. ‘I need to hear what Asad thinks of this immediately.’

For a brief time, Hector merely stood there, watching him go.

Huh.

Okay, well, maybe it wasn’t a trick.