“You’re sure you’re not lying to me?”
“I’m not lying, but I’m not telling you everything.”
“Why?”
“Some things, it would only hurt you to know.”
----------------------------------------
Jair went through the octide swarm this time with much more care not to scare them off. He activated Darkflame only in the instant Maelstrom met each creature, giving it only a moment to flare up before fading, which allowed him to get through more of them before they decided to flee.
This gave him a nice large scale amount of data to look at regarding what happened when darkflame killed something.
Out of the first ten octides, two were revived as the antimagic version of themselves. None of the next ten, then two of the next twenty. He continued through the rest of the nest, adding four more revenant octides to the group as he finished off the last twenty or so, then one more as he hunted down the last few who'd tried to run away.
The revenant octides' behavior after revival was growing more predictable, but still not something he fully understood.
They would stand quietly unless fighting was happening, and if fighting was happening they'd get involved. Whose side they'd get involved in seemed fairly random, at least in the chaos of Jair's battle against overwhelming numbers.
Of the nine total he ended up with, six ended up fighting for him against their normal kin, while the others came after Jair aggressively enough that they gave their counterparts a solid fight.
Aside from Qahrvirna's spells, which did nothing against the green-hued revenants, only Maelstrom failed to impact them. Any normal physical attack was unmitigated as long as it wasn't made by Maelstrom.
Jair really wasn't sure what to make of this. It didn't align with any of the standard abilities, didn't even match up with any of the less common ones. Animation abilities, control classes, mental influences, creation and conjuration, all of it could be combined to imitate whatever darkflame was doing. But this power didn't feel like a combination. It felt more like a convergence.
The fact that they had the brobeg's more yellow-green hue rather than the black-green of the venix gave Jair a bit more of a hint as to what could be going on.
In the end, it seemed fairly simple. The brobeg was immune to magic, the venix could revive itself, so roughly one of every nine or ten creatures Jair killed with darkflame would be revived as a copy of itself immune to magic. And being stabbed with Maelstrom specifically. That part was more than a little annoying.
It also raised the question of whether he could rely on darkflame at all against something more powerful. If he could immolate a brobeg in one hit, that would be great... but if it then returned completely immune to his weapon and decided to be hostile?
Thoughts of burning Ryenzo away in a single flash were quickly assailed by thoughts of an even stronger and more resistant Ryenzo unrelentingly continuing the pursuit of Jair and Raina.
Though, in that case, he could always revert. If it only happened one in every nine or ten times—even if he rounded up and said it happened one in eight times—it wasn't something to really worry about. Just be aware of.
The fact that he couldn't pin down exactly what made the creatures hostile or protective toward nagged at him. At least with the weaker monsters so far, they’d only ever joined an existing combat, never initiated one.
As long as it was one on one, Jair could just walk away. Probably. He hadn't verified it yet, but he was growing more confident in his theories.
He helped Qahrvirna collect the octide carapace and eyes. His two surviving octide revenants circled the vicinity as they did so, staring out at the surrounding jungle as though searching for danger with their blank gazes.
If Jair figured out how to reliably get the revenants on his side, it could be very helpful. Unfortunately, as far as he could tell, there was no way to intentionally trigger the revive target mechanism, or to duplicate, command, store, conjure, or otherwise interface with the creatures.
Once created they were there, and that was all. Less useful than an animator's subordinates, perhaps, but even if he could never do anything but watch them fight for him it was an unexpected boon. Mageblade was a class known for its intensive personal focus, improving the specific user above all else. It even stood outside the usual hierarchies of class rank, granting no benefits to subordinates and not qualifying toward the abilities of superiors. To have an ability capable of creating even occasionally allied creatures was far outside expectations.
When Qahrvirna was finished and the two of them left the site of the slaughter behind, the two octide revenants followed. They continued their protective circling, but they also didn't have even the slightest sense of stealth.
The octides’ presence made their party significantly less covert, but did they need to stay covert at this point? Jair wanted things to come try and kill him. The more, the better.
They fought the common vylix, the serrated-tailed feline doing its best to shred the party, but Jair's octides were having none of it. Though they ignored its approach, making them entirely useless as scouts, the moment it attacked they focused in fully and counterattacked with such violence that the cat was forced to retreat.
It didn't get far before Jair caught up and stabbed it, Darkflame incinerating it on the spot.
"I'm impressed," he told the pair of revenants, "standing up against your natural predator and winning."
They didn't respond, only resumed their perpetual circling patrol, keeping perfect pace with Jair and Qahrvirna.
"I'm not sure if I should be disturbed or impressed," the vampire said, as they settled down in a cave for the day. The opening was low, hanging with moss and thorns. Tree roots twisted around one side, forming a natural arch of sorts. "How long do they last?"
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Jair shook his head. "No idea. This is the first time we've all survived longer than a single fight."
"Ooh, exciting. Take notes on what you find out.”
“I will,” Jair promised. He smiled innocently. “And if you’re very nice, I may even let you see them.”
Qahrvirna pouted and went to lie down in the darkest recesses of the cave.
He didn't sleep much, too interested in observing every last moment of these creatures' bizarre existence. He half expected them to disappear any minute, but as the day wore on and Qahrvirna slept, the revenant octides circled the entrance tirelessly without pause or shift in rhythm.
Fog hung low, muffling the insects chirping and creatures rustling, lit up by shafts of sunlight between branches.
Jair walked over to the patrolling octides and nudged one out of its track. It moved around him, shifting its path to a broader one circling his new location.
He took hold of one of its claws to lead it alongside him, and it came with reluctant half-skitters to one side or the other as though eager to be away and back to its circling.
"Protective," he realized. That was the key nature. Whether they decided to protect their fellows by attacking Jair, or guard Jair from any comers, the default behavior of Maelstrom's revenants was to protect.
Which, the moment he thought it, made perfect sense. Fight to protect. The exact reason he'd created Maelstrom. Kill the dragon to save Raina.
The brobeg's influence counteracted Maelstrom's natural power in some unknown way. He wondered if that could be why the darkflame revenants appeared as blank slates upon creation.
He'd still need to narrow down the exact triggers for what made the revival effect occur in the first place, unless it was truly random. He couldn't think of a pattern that fit. Sometimes they were the smaller ones, sometimes bigger. Some groups he'd end up reviving two or three of, others none.
It was too early to give up on finding the pattern. Jair of all people would be willing to try an unreasonable number of permutations before accepting a situation at face value.
He found a mossy stick and bent down to pick it up. Snapping it in three pieces, he threw them one at a time at one of the octides.
The circling octide didn't react to the attacks, such as they were. It continued to circle. Jair ran up to the creature and kicked it. It moved away to continue its patrol.
Jair glanced at the second. He'd thought it might react aggressively to protect its fellow, but it also ignored Jair’s actions. Was it an imprinting thing more than a behavior thing, then? It certainly seemed that way.
Once the revenants settled on their Creature To Be Protected, they'd stick with that.
Which immediately raised several followup questions. For how long? What would they do if their object of fixation was killed?
He needed more creatures to test with. That herd of bulbix they’d encountered in the previous loop should work, if Qahrvirna ever woke up.
Jair swallowed his impatience. There was still more he could learn here today. Not everything had to be discovered through action.
He sat down, Maelstrom across his lap with his hands resting lightly on its hilt and jagged-edged blade. For a long moment he only looked down at the sword, its form so much transformed from the original deformed shape it had been born as.
Where once the imprint of his fingers had left dulled lumps where there should have been smooth steel, now a double ridge of vicious barbs adorned the edge, reaching halfway from hilt to tip. The pearl that had been knocked out of alignment remained where it was, but the way it led into the jagged spines made the positioning look intentional rather than the result of him being slammed atop the weapon before it could fully coalesce.
It would never be what he’d once envisioned it as becoming, but the alterations and augmentations to its form were creating something far beyond his initial expectations. The sword he and Eythron had designed over years of testing and discussion and experimentation was based on an untested premise.
Maelstrom had turned out to be so much more.
Jair ran one finger across the tip, where the yellow-green glow pushed back against the silver glow. The shape of the blade was unchanged, but this one spot felt oily and vaguely wrong. He disliked the brobeg’s influence as much in physical reality as inside Maelstrom’s soul. Though… was the spot smaller now than it had been? He thought he remembered it being larger.
He’d verify that while inside. He hadn’t looked at Maelstrom’s soulmap yet since completing Darkflame. Now that he’d tested out its capabilities, he was curious to see the changes internally.
He closed his eyes and searched inward. His soulspell remained as impenetrable as ever, a golden network of incredible complexity looping back in and onto itself in ways that couldn’t quite be perceived, let alone understood. Beside that, Maelstrom looked downright simple for all its own complexity.
Focusing further in, he isolated Maelstrom’s soulmap and brought it into the forefront of his thoughts.
The unstable shifting web of silver filigree that had been there previously had stabilized into a clear form. Instead of appearing like a damaged fabric torn with uneven gashes, it now resembled an intricate jewelry setting waiting for its custom-created gems.
The outer shape was something like an elongated spider web with nine points, but instead of being divided by straight lines it was intricate swirls and curves that split the interior into dozens of smaller gaps.
Nine larger sections came together in the center in a twisted spiral, two of which were filled in. One was part of an interconnected network that stretched all the way from one outer edge to the inner spiral, the color of Darkflame and the pattern matched to the rest of Maelstrom’s soul. The other was thorny and brown and filled in just under half as much space as Darkflame.
The large patch of slimy brobeg-essence that had been draping itself all over Maelstrom’s soul had shifted. It now covered half as much of the network of silver as it previously, only a tenth now rather than a full fifth, sprawled across the silver of one of the blank sections still waiting for content. The other half may seem to have disappeared, but he had a pretty good idea of where to look.
Jair focused in on the venix’s sections, and found what he’d expected after a moment of searching. Subtle patches of filmy brobeg slime pooled in the recessed whorls of Darkflame, looking at first like an intentional part of its pattern, only revealed as foreign upon close examination.
He wasn’t sure what to think of its influence on Darkflame, or what that influence had done. He instinctively wanted to blame it for Maelstrom’s inability to touch the revived creatures, but that felt like an incomplete answer.
But when dealing with things on the level of ‘mixing and matching different creatures souls inside my own’ it was hard to test anything with any degree of certainty. None of what he was doing with Maelstrom could be duplicated, he knew that much. Whatever had occurred that last desperate instant on Mount Sanctum, no amount of repetition could recreate.
Some questions may never be answered. That didn’t mean he was going to stop looking.
He stayed there for a time, observing the soulmap to see if it would start to shift, but it appeared to have fully stabilized. It was no longer trying desperately to repair itself, tearing open new wounds in the process, but settled and patient. It seemed to understand what it was missing and how it would be replaced, and formatted itself accordingly. The long delicate sections of spirals and waves provided a clear structure and hierarchy, rather than the shifting collection of patches it had been before.
Jair smiled fondly and returned his attention to his body. The angle of the sun had shifted, but less than he’d hoped. He’d spent perhaps an hour and a half examining Maelstrom’s soul, which still left practically the whole day before Qahrvirna woke and they could start walking again.
He was eager to get back to exploring his upgraded weapon’s potential, and he had a bit of a score to settle with a certain herd of round cows.
He glanced over at the sleeping vampire, then grinned and shrugged. He didn't actually need to wait for her. No point wasting the day. It was only late morning, she'd be sleeping for hours yet.
Plenty of time to track down one little herd of cattle and kill them all for science.
Qahrvirna would approve.
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