Creating a floating ball of Mana sounded like a very flexible skill. Being separate from his Mana pool as well as physically from his Shadow seemed like a great redundant level of protection. That he could pre-load it with a spell structure and it could act as a sort of flying, remote controlled, sentry? That upgraded it into the range of total badassery. The sheer flexibility combined with the safety of being a detached element made it a no-brainer!
Well, he wasn’t sure he had anything physical like a brain, so he discarded that option. Shadows were way cooler than balls of light, plus, he had two Mana based spells already. Making Shadow doppelgangers made a lot more sense. Logically. It had nothing to do with shadowy ninja clones overwhelming foes and chucking out lightning being absolute coolness incarnate. No. Thing. At. All.
His mental fingers hesitated for the barest moment as they brushed over the Shadow spell. That skill, improving the density of his spells, that could be valuable… oh, whoops, already picked Shadow Echo. Oh well, no use crying over spilt milk. Milk? White liquid expressed from the teats of… oh god, that was such a gross concept. He used to drink that? He remembered drinking it. The semi-viscous feeling, both savory and sweet at the same time as it slid down his throat. Greedily gulping the fluid expressed from the mother of a totally different species.
Despite a total confidence he had a mouth or a digestive system, he started dry heaving. It would have been wet heaving, except there just wasn’t anything to heave. Nothing to heave with, really, but his body went through the convulsive motions. The zzap and bzzt and crackle of Them being burst by Spark as they came into contact with his Shadow played the background music to the moment of overwhelming disgust. How could humans, how could he have been so absolutely horrid?
--
Warm support turned into a dull pain, the window I’d been leaning half asleep against reeling back from his overly intimate contact and returning to slap his temple in rebuke. Natural Gas, crushed and cooled into submission, imprisoned in steel isolation, allowed to escape from one confinement to another, until, eventually, it met fresh air, glorious, cool, exotic air, filtered and devoid of particulate but teeming with the microscopic elements and scents of life. Then the spark which united them into one. All that their newfound partnership, an intermixing of the volatile remains of the long dead and the life giving breath of the world, consumed in their union and giving birth to a dead, noxious output of burnt remains and steam. And heat. With heat, expansion. With expansion, the angry pushing and forcing of an unyielding piston that, though it struggled, the might of the steel and flesh and rubber resisting and failing to hold giving way to the rage filled flight of the child born of the destructive union of its parents.
What had been the beginnings of a slip into sleep from sheer exhaustion was transformed back into the unpleasant hell of a packed intracity express bus on a summer day. The compressed natural gas engine hummed along. A compressor struggled to maintain a significant difference in pressure between warm, low pressure refrigerant on one side and hot, high pressure refrigerant on the other. The frustration would be bled from that refrigerant into hot, though much less so, summer highway air. The now cooler medium would be allowed an escape from the tight and stressful existence of the high side through a small orifice, finding itself with so much room it would become almost isolated and alone. Cold. Lacking in contact except the occasional accidental encounter with another molecule of its own kind, or the impassible rubber and steel tubes of the larger prison. Then, cold, craving warmth and companionship, through the evaporative core, steeling the warmth the muggy, overly peopled air of the bus’s interior, which warmth said air would gladly give.
Take it. Take this ungodly, sweat tinged heat. Take it, so that those it came from can survive just until their arrival. Take it, so that they can withstand the brutal heat of the asphalt and concrete world which they have cursed themselves with long enough to reach the closed confines of their self-made prisons of wire and steel and drywall. Prisons which were cooled, cooled in like manner but without even the joy of experiencing motion and travel, however brief or repeated it was for an intracity bus.
So the refrigerant would take, suffusing its cold and lonely existence, growing energetic, colliding more and more until it once again returned, warm, low pressure, to the pushy and unrelenting compressor, excited to be closer to its cousins, the other molecules of refrigerant, forgetting once again the frustration and anger of that confinement, that overly tight existence, the desire to be rid of that heat, to have more freedom. Freedom that would be isolating, would once again become a new unwanted form of imprisonment.
Forcing the groggy and frankly depressing poems of my mind out of the same, I looked out the window and considered the time left in my daily commute. Wake. Shower. Eat. Dress and take my bike to the bus stop by the rideshare lot. I estimated there was about ten more minutes until our exit, a little over thirty minutes into the journey. Then another bike ride five minutes on the bike path, surrounded by stagnant, near dry creek on one side and brown, crunchy grasses elsewhere. Nature, according to the local municipality. As if trees were offensive to a space that had once been thick with them before the arrival of our esteemed and uncaring ancestors to this region. The same that took from someone else’s esteemed, less agrarian ancestors who’d lived there before. One persecuted group persecuting another group in an endless cycle of harassment that was the epitome of humanity as a whole.
Much like the office I trudged to, through my own and other’s efforts on this glorious Tuesday. The company, overall, lacked the slightest hint of humanity. The individuals, on the other hand, were far too human. Drama ensued over small things. It would, naturally, when engineers were but human capital that would be, could be, already had really, been replaced largely by well designed spreadsheets and a touch of code. The impending and unfolding ‘AI’ movement didn’t even need to do that work. I’d done it for myself, just months into the job I’d held for a decade. HVAC engineering work was, typically, just a series of datasheet lookups, basic math, and drawing a bunch of lines. Modifying existing engineering prints and some language here and there to adjust to some minor specific differences for a project or a change from a supplier.
In general, it was the people that made it impossible to automate to a single click, not the engineering. So I was a glorified monkey operating the simple spreadsheet system I’d designed and built to automate my own job within the first year of holding the position. I listened, read, responded as a text to text translator between the same solutions and the same math and the same drawings to an endless cavalcade of supervisors, suppliers, architects, who just wanted to feel unique even while they put a different shade of the same grey or white paint on the same box with the same layout with the same fixtures, only to be filled with the same kinds of businesses and people and customers as the last box.
It was stable. Too stable. I wished for a little bit of chaos in my life if I was really honest.
--
He tried to blink as the wasteland returned sharply and suddenly back into view. Spark was nearly fading away as the last bit of energy dispatched one of Them. Mana once again flooded into the spell structure, bolstering it again and churning its way through it, converting to Lightning Mana. No additional discharge was forthcoming. That in and of itself helped, along with the panic of having lapsed from the world for a time, however short. Once more, his attention strove to free itself from the memory of the bus, to engage with the dangerous world of chaos and death that he existed in.
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A lack of the small ones of Them meant one of two things. There was a pause in their spawning could be one. The other was that an RBB or similar had formed.
In fact it was the latter, but several times over. A half dozen RBBs on the smaller size were grappling over something, even while lashing out and consuming any of Them which emerged from the cracked world, before those smaller ones could flee. He was certain that several full charges of Spark would be needed to take down the group of them. He could risk it. He should risk it. If they were fighting over what he thought, then what would already be a tough target due to sheer size and capacity would become far worse, potentially. Not that it had helped the Scorpion tremendously to have highly refined Shadow.
Though if the Scorpion had not been afraid of being injured, it would have killed him a dozen times over.
He could do this. He’d do it wisely though, using every bit of his arsenal. An arsenal which now included an ally, fake though it would be. The new spell came to him with the difficulty of the unknown and the ease of the familiar at the same time, as with each first casting of a spell. The memories were ingrained in him even though he had never built the structure or weaved his energies in this manner.
Unlike with Mana Bolt and Arcane Spark, the structure was entirely formed of Shadow in a near inversion of the way the other spells were formed. Unlike the other two spells though, it was also not devoid of Mana. There was an intermixing. No part of the spell was wholly Shadow, but neither was it wholly Mana. He realized that the spell itself also likely involved some sort of Mana-Shadow imbuement skill, yet it was so hyper-specific to the spell that more broad application would likely not come readily.
The structure was much less, well, structured. That was frankly the opposite of what he’d expected. The sense of Shadow was stability, form, presence. Mana felt like refined chaos, energy removed of only the tendency to be totally undirected and allowing the bare minimum of form only, yet still inherently volatile. That the spell structure itself would be far more freeform and vague in function at each element was totally unexpected. Yet, as he allowed Shadow and Mana to be pulled into the two distinct input nodes for the spell, he realized that perhaps he shouldn’t have expected any differently.
Shadow was inherently more form, more structure. It did not seek to expand and release, but contract and collect into itself. It did not require a core to suck it inward, force it to be contained, nor a will to direct it. It pulled itself into a form. Its nature was more structured, therefore it gave the structure to the spell rather than the spell giving structure to it.
A wispy, grey facsimile of a humanoid form in a ragged cloak, floating with only arms visible in the impression of sleeves, formed a short distance away. A hair thin string of intertwined Shadow and Mana connected them together, the dark threads connected to his Shadow, the blue-white threads continuing on into his core. An umbilical of both types of energy. There was a vague impression of the sight of the Shadow Echo, as well as the feeling of an empty and waiting center within it. Experimentally he fed some Mana into that center, then a bit more Shadow into the form. The Echo’s center could not hold much, perhaps enough to fully charge a Spark, barely. The ability to continue feeding it though meant that a high capacity was not needed. It also felt, for lack of a better term, leaky. The Echo’s center was spongey, lacking the natural sort of gravity to hold the Mana in tightly. The Shadow of the Echo was also much less dense and controlled.
Perhaps if he invested a large amount of Shadow into it, it could form into something self-stable, or nearly so. That could also prove disastrous if he were cut off from it and it was destroyed, or worse, consumed. A shudder rippled through both of them as the consideration of how much Shadow could easily be consumed into Them through the destruction of a highly strengthened Echo.
The time for that consideration would come later. For now, he needed to see if he could multi-cast the same spell or not.
Arcane Spark was still built and humming, reaching full charge, so he tried to form a duplicate Spark within the Echo. It failed, though at least not spectacularly. All that happened was, frankly, nothing. The spell simply rejected being duplicated just the same as if he had tried to duplicate it without the Echo. So instead he built the Mana Bolt structure within the Echo. This formed almost as readily as doing it within himself.
True, there was that leaky feeling, the sense of a bit less efficiency. Most of that was related to keeping Mana in the Echo’s core though. So long as it remained connected via the umbilical, it didn’t need to keep a charged core. That might prove to inhibit how much energy he could run through the Mana Bolt spell, but a fully charged Bolt and a constant stream of energy should be enough to provide a useful distraction while he went for the literal kill.
It was now or never too. One of the RBBs had incorporated whatever they were fighting over. The form of it hardened visibly, legs becoming segmented, armored layers forming from Shadow, the multi-hued Chaos becoming swallowed by the shell. A segmented tail rose up with a long spike of darkness jutting forth. The nearby RBBs started to scramble away now, showing fear from another of Them for the first time, much like the small ones feared the RBBs themselves. The tail lashed out and pierced the center of one, collapsing the tentacled spheroid and pulling its energies into the Scorpion, which bulged as it grew to incorporate a much greater volume of energy.
The Echo strafed, a rapid fire stream of small, long and thin Bolts bouncing uselessly off the Scorpion and drawing its attention. It didn’t even notice as the real one slipped up from behind. The umbilical, the tether really, easily stretched and flexed around the Scorpion rather than catching on its legs. Perhaps the tether could be cut, but it went unnoticed and required no direction to simply stretch and bend to avoid harmful contact. Useful. He hadn’t even considered maintaining line-of-sight.
The tail twitched, but instead of striking the Echo, pierced another RBB. The Echo’s attack was distracting, but failed to pierce the hardened Shadow armor. Shadow and Chaos flowed down a bulging tail as the Scorpion consumed another of its once brethren.
A gnarled finger poked right at the base of where that engorged tail attached to the body, just as the tail itself was glowing and struggling with the influx of energy. A blinding arc of a fully charged Spark flowed painlessly over that one, solitary finger. The finger, naturally, was selected specifically to express his feelings towards Them for constantly trying to kill him.
Eat hot ass lightning, goddamned desert bug!
He used Arcane Spark on the engorged tail of the Scorpion. Arcane Spark was super effective. The world was black and impossibly hued all at once as the unstable form of the Scorpion in that moment shattered under the added strain. Instinctively he pulled the Chaos through the tether, using the core of the Echo even as it floated mindlessly, no longer being otherwise directed, to act as a buffer.
Shadow poured into him, as did Chaos, but he was never Overwhelmed. The Echo though, it was not responding to commands, Chaos threatened to destabilize the spell structure. Miraculously, perhaps, it did not lose cohesion. Instead it worked flawlessly as a buffer. Any Chaos that was not held by the Echo flowed to him directly. The tether itself acted like a choke, keeping the influx manageable. The Shadow he simply absorbed directly.
As the visibility returned, the released energies now pulled into he and his Echo and no longer muddying the world, he leaned over and grabbed the bit of Artifact that had fallen. Some kind of Shadow hardening or armor circuit. Just the one.
He’d decide what to put it towards later. For now, he had hunting to do and the RBBs that yet lived were rushing towards him, reaching out with desperation and anger for the fragment he now held. With a disdainful toss, the shard sailed through the air a short distance away. Three separate RBBs shifted their attacks just in time to avoid him, a mass of limbs writhing and grasping over the shard where it had landed.
Spark hummed in his mind as it built up another charge. His Echo glided once more, Bolts ripping through one RBB in a line to try and rupture the Shadow holding it together, or at least to slow it down and extend their struggle. He registered, just, that almost none of the smaller ones of Them kept moving about on their own. They were almost all immediately forming aggressively into BBs and RBBs, as far as he could see.
Looked like it was time to power level.