“Something happens, every time. Even when I do everything to prevent it.”
“Almost enough to make you believe in fate, huh?”
“No. It just makes me think someone’s out there working against me.”
“What’s to say that someone isn’t fate?”
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Eythron took the replacement hand—an intricate construct of metal, crystal, and mana-conducting threads—out of his soulspace and tossed it to Jair.
Jair caught it in his good hand and inspected it thoroughly.
The replacement had the same measurements as his existing hand, but jointed intricately to imitate movement. Technically, it could move in ways a human hand couldn’t, but subconscious understanding of standard restraints typically prevented that from being useful.
Jair could overwhelm his natural restraint instincts if necessary, but there was generally little reason to do so. The wrist joints were flexible enough that grabbing something backward was no advantage compared to standard.
The arm part that bound to his forearm was hollow to allow his replacement blood channels to continue their diverted flow undisturbed, which detail he appreciated. He turned it over more than once in his examination, and found its craftsmanship as impressive as could be hoped.
He also found the ‘curse’ Eythron was concerned about, and immediately saw why it would be giving his mentor so much trouble.
It wasn’t a curse in the traditional sense. A ‘cursed item’ would be one that caused a negative effect when activated, or one which imposed excessive drain on the manabody to no effect. Simple curses were created by careless constructists or malicious children, more complicated ones were the result of serious effort by nefarious individuals for specific purposes.
Such cursed items could be understood by those familiar with how magical constructs worked, the malicious parts rerouted or dismantled, and the item restored to its previous function—or given a new one if the curse was its sole purpose.
The ‘curse’ on his new hand wasn’t part of the item and had no physical presence. It was the lingering trace of a soulspell, one that would trigger when the item was activated. The one advantage to this was that delayed-effect soulspells with a trigger were one-time use. Whatever the effect was would only occur the first time Jair used it—or when he convinced someone else to do so.
He was far more concerned with who and why than the what. He could tell from the thinness of the spell’s presence that it would be a very minor effect.
Even if it was a thoroughly destructive attack directly against his soul, something of this strength wouldn’t be enough to do much. It could give him some dissonance backlash for a week or so at most. At its worst, it could be an effective distraction to weaken an ordinary mage for assassination, but against someone who could reverse time it would be laughably pointless.
And, though the specifics of the soulspell were impossible to read, he didn’t get any sense of a destructive nature. It didn’t feel spiky enough.
The disadvantage of it being a soulspell instead of construct based was that there was no way of knowing what it did before activating it. Assessing the nature and effect of a soulspell was notoriously difficult.
The power on this wasn’t visible, but even if it had been, that was no guarantee. Even people with visually identical soulspells could have wildly different effects. Jair’s golden hue, for instance, was most commonly associated with transmutation type spells, while a temporal spell would ordinarily be depicted in shades of red.
Eythron was watching him with narrowed eyes. “You don’t have to do this, boy.”
“You think I’m going to pass up a mystery like this?” Jair turned the hand over again. “Either someone’s routinely casting unknown spells on construct replacement limbs, or someone knows something about me. If it’s the former, it doesn’t really matter, but it’s possible there are people out there still searching for Maelstrom.”
Eythron chuckled. “You can’t blame them. That thing is unprecedented in power. Even I would be tempted if it weren’t so ugly.”
Jair chuckled. “You’re helping me complete it so it’s worth stealing?”
“With a power like yours? I’d know better than to try anything. As curious as I am to see what sort of change it would obtain from me, I’m not going to volunteer chunks of my soul to find out.”
“With good reason. Don’t worry, I like your soul the way it is.” Jair slid the replacement hand construct over his shortened arm.
The constructist knew his work. The new item fit perfectly and matched almost exactly the size and shape of his living hand.
The moment he ran mana through it, whatever soulspell had been left on it activated and its remnants dissipated. There was no discernable change, no flash or sound, no sensation at all. Only because he was paying such close attention did he even know it had happened.
“Information based?” he mused.
“You triggered it?”
Jair nodded. “Guess we’ll have longer to go before we find out what kind of ‘curse’ this was.” It was completely gone, now, whatever its purpose had been. It could have been something as simple as the creator verifying the item ended up at the right person, but if it’d been something like that he’d expect to know about it.
Setting aside the matter of the unknown spell for now, he started mentally mapping out the intersections of mana and movement necessary to sync up his manabody with the new appendage.
The spot where his hand had been sliced was a tangled knot in his manabody, but the hand itself remained. Ghostlike and useless without anything physical to interact with, but eager to resume function as soon as Jair could get it to understand what it was supposed to do.
Jair flexed his manabody hand, and the construct replacement didn’t follow his movements. It led to an odd disconnect, but he’d been through similar situations enough it was only mildly disorienting. “The acclimation will take a while, but without any obvious negative effects I can practice with it as we go. Where’s this last brobeg you’re so eager to strip down for parts?”
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After two days of walking, fighting off the ordinary dangers of the Oriad, and gradually accustoming himself to his new appendage, Jair finally succeeded in moving the construct fingers with his manabody exclusively.
The easier way to control it would be direct mana application, using the connections in the armband section, but that relied on maintaining an active connection through specific locations. If the connection was broken—such as the power cable being destroyed in a fight—the entire construct became useless.
With the manabody to act as guide, fully subsuming the new limb into his magical perception of the self, the reliance on physical connection was at its most minimal. As long as they stayed in sync Jair could force it to move if necessary, even if it’d be much less of a strain when combined with the standard power connections.
It’d be another few weeks before he could properly swing Maelstrom without dropping it, and longer before he could start recalling it to the construct, but so far the connection and integration process was going very smoothly.
“I don’t suppose Qahrvirna sent a dragoncube along too?” Jair asked hopefully, when he remembered his other order.
“She did not.”
“Guess I’ll have to bribe her properly then. Good thing I’ve been killing a lot of exotic monsters.”
“You think she’ll be bribed by common monster parts?”
“She’s lazy. May not look it, but she’d rather never leave her tower at all if not absolutely necessary. She’d pay a lot for someone to go out and do the boring collecting of things for her so she can stay indoors and play with her visitors.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“I never got the impression that she was so shallow.”
“She puts an incredibly complicated veneer over it, sure, but at her heart she’s just a playful scientist. Studying alchemy and messing with mortals are her favourite pastimes.”
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The final brobeg in their search took significantly longer to find than the first five. Terlunia came and went and came again, and still they followed the elusive beast.
Jair and Eythron were both fully accustomed to spending days and nights out in the jungle without proper shelter, creating basic camps together each night with the familiarity of years of repetition. They killed more than enough common aggressive creatures to provide for their food needs, and the dampness provided plenty of water for their condensers.
Every time they neared its location, it glided away and disappeared, forcing them to spend days searching the area before picking up its trail again.
“Skittish thing,” Eythron grunted. “I hate it.”
“It can’t run forever. It’ll have to rest eventually.”
At least the extensive downtime gave him the opportunity to improve his synchronization with the new hand. Over the past month he’d gotten to the point where he could use his construct hand almost as naturally as the original one, and summon Maelstrom back and forth between them as rapidly as ever. He was still a little behind schedule on adapting his strategies to having inhuman flexibility and making the most of the construct’s specific jointing, but those were always going to take the longest.
Far easier to remember a known fighting style than invent something properly new.
The construct drained his manabody to a ruinous extent when used to its full potential. If he were anyone else, it’d render him incapable of casting spells from sheer constant strain—one reason such replacements were uncommon and had to be created custom. Such replacement limbs were generally seen only among the rich adventurer strata.
For people without a magic class, leaving a perpetual mana drain active indefinitely might be less of a logistics issue, but still a questionable choice in regards to comfort and financial viability.
For Jair, though, it was perpetual ongoing strength training for his manabody. It wasn’t as dramatic as it would be in a high density area like Mount Sanctum or Nuprima, but months of steady draw would still help his boundaries and channels firm up.
It didn’t help with active spell strength and would make simultaneous casting significantly more challenging, but with Maelstrom being so strong he hardly needed to rely on spells at all any more.
One other thing he did, now that his basic imprints were firmly settled, was to start training Maelstrom for Bladewalk. Or try to. The undertaking was not going very well.
There were technically several different techniques that were all considered part of Bladewalk, but it was common practice to focus in on one of them and leave the others alone. Did you want to run across the sky with your sword forming a solid foundation for your every step? Or stand majestically gliding with your sword as a vessel? Send your sword to a faraway place and fly toward it with hand outstretched?
What all the Bladewalk variations had in common was the basic ability to shift the nature of a weapon’s material presence, allowing it to reject the influence of physical reality and such mundane things as gravity or physics while retaining tangibility.
With his old reforged blade, Jair could have attained the proper state within a few days of focus. Maelstrom, though, was an entirely different creation. While its core may be his old trusty sword, it had transcended its base form so thoroughly that the usual resonances were completely inaccurate.
In this, for once, his intimate knowledge of what had been actually held him back more than it helped. Reaching a proper understanding of Maelstrom as itself and not as what it used to be was difficult enough without adding in how its soul was constantly shifting.
All the gaps in its soul weren’t static. They opened and sealed over time, some sections becoming more solid, others fraying. Only the sections stabilized by monster souls remained unchanged, and even those were changing in character over the weeks.
The more he tried to push it into Bladewalk readiness, the more strongly Maelstrom resisted. Almost like it knew it was incomplete, and couldn’t accept an ability built on a flawed version of itself. Or perhaps, Jair’s own stubborn refusal to accept anything but complete success was bleeding over into his soulsword.
Whatever the reason, it looked like he'd have to wait a little longer for proper aerial freedom of movement. Still, having Lift back made him feel much more relaxed in his fighting style.
They’d settled in for another long day of sweeping the foggy swampland for their oversized tree-frog adversary when something unexpected interrupted their hunt.
Jair’s first warning was the slightest rustle of wind from the side. He dropped, just in time as the venix flew by overhead, beak snapping down right where his head had been a second before.
Eythron cursed and jumped into the fray, arms lighting up as he brought his combat spells into play.
Jair jumped up and swung Maelstrom. Not quite fast enough.
The venix soared upward and out of reach, eyes aglow with yellow light and deep green wings trailing hints of dark flame. Fog melted away around it, then swirled in to fill the gaps as it disappeared.
Eythron’s attacks glanced off the jungle phoenix's wings, their sharp feathers glancing his strikes aside. A single feather fell, but the venix didn't stop to notice its loss.
Jair jumped to his feet and stood back-to-back with his mentor. Swords in hand, they slowly turned as they searched the surrounding trees, intent and alert for any sound or movement betraying the venix's return.
"Do you think it's going to come back?" Eythron eventually asked, as the minutes stretched out and the brief ambush was not continued. "That sword of yours is pretty terrifying."
"I'm sure it will." Jair straightened out of his combat stance as the venix continued to not return. "The question is when, and where. I'm suddenly less eager to get into a fight with another predator."
"You think it's that intelligent?"
Jair nodded. "Of course it is. It tracked me down halfway across the continent. You think it doesn't know how to take advantage of our distraction?" He waved at the surrounding fog. "Who knows how long it's been following us hoping for a chance like this. Its first ambush failed, so its next is going to be that much more cautious."
Eythron grumbled under his breath.
"What's that?"
"Go back to Qahrvirna. She's better equipped to help with something like this. I can handle the brobeg on my own."
"Sure you can, but there's a very high probability of you being severely injured in the process. I'm not willing for that to happen on my watch."
The old man snorted. "It's not your job to look after me, boy."
"Right. It's my job to distract the monsters so you can stab them. Don't try to deny that I've made your job easier."
"So what if you have? Doesn't mean I have to let you keep doing it. That thing went straight for you."
"Since when do you care about my safety?"
Eythron smacked the back of his head. "Disrespectful brat."
Jair strapped Maelstrom at his side, a simple harness that made it impossible to fall out regardless of what they did, but kept it close and ready to be recalled at a moment's notice. “Right, I’m the disrespectful one.”
Eythron dismissed his sword and picked up the single venix feather. “You know if you keep that glowing thing flashing out in every direction it’ll be very hard to sneak up on anything.”
“And if I lose a half second summoning it, I’m much more likely to die when something sneaks up on me.”
“Heh. Takes you a half second to summon? Sounds like you’re in dire need of practice.”
Jair gestured at Eythron’s imprints, then his own. “One of us is optimized for handling ambushes, and one of us is set up for assault. Isn’t being the loud and noticeable one my entire job on this trip?”
“That was before I knew the venix was hunting you. You should leave.”
“Why are you so eager to be rid of me? You usually enjoy having me around.”
“You’re a complication I don’t need. What’s there to know?”
“Considering hunting the star hydra on your own?”
Eythron snorted in derision. “Absolutely not. I couldn’t touch the thing if I tried."
"So what's this all about? Why are you trying to send me away?"
Eythron sighed. He looked away and didn't answer.
"Aww, it's good to know you care."
"I don't. Idiot boy." He started walking. "Go find the vampire."
"But if you think I'd be safer alone, you're mistaken." Jair kept pace with Eythron. He had no intention of leaving.
"I've seen your imprints. You're holding back to stay with me."
Jair raised an eyebrow. "How do you figure that one?"
"The way you use Lift is incredibly practiced, and the subtle application you put into everyday movement is beyond anything I've ever seen. You could run farther in ten minutes than we walk in an hour."
"Eight minutes. But you think that'll be enough to protect me from an angry venix?"
"No guarantee the bird's here for you. Could be after me. Or the brobeg."
"You think the venix just happened to be hunting the same brobeg as us, in the same time frame?"
"No, I think it's after you and we'd both be better off if you got somewhere it can't reach you."
Jair grinned. "It should be more worried about me reaching it. We've already proven Maelstrom can take it out, and unlike brobegs, venix essence seems to play very nice with Maelstrom’s soul."
"Which is probably why it's avoiding direct conflict this time."
Jair shrugged, patting Maelstrom. "Then I see no reason not to travel together. Either it's avoiding me and we'll be fine, or it's hunting me and I can kill it again."
Eythron chuckled. "Your propensity for self-destruction is impressive. I see why Qahri likes you."
"It's not self-destruction. I know I can handle myself in the majority of cases, and the few I can't I can revert." He glanced sideways at Eythron. "Except the star hydra, so don't be surprised if I redo that one a few times before we even get started. I'm going to be incredibly proactive with avoiding it even if it means redoing these weeks a few more times than absolutely necessary."
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