003 – Veh

“Can we please stop trying to force a unified theory for the Veh? The truth is, any single explanation is inconclusive because the canonical evidence is a mess of contradictions. Are they humanity’s natural metaphysical predators? Then why do they routinely attack non-humans and sometimes even non-sapient creatures? Why do they exhibit targeted, hateful malice and not just simple predatory behavior? Why do they sometimes display eusocial behavior, but other times seem utterly incapable of coordination? Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum, all the way down. We simply don’t know what we don’t know—it’s futile.”

In the land of Varrah, nightfall meant death.

Ai looked up at the night sky as the tomb crumbled all around her in a thunderous roar of falling rubble. [Eye of the Storm] clattered off into the distance, buried under falling debris.

The open night sky greeted her for only moments before flickering figures of pure shadow began to appear seemingly out of thin air, illuminated only by the moon and stars behind them.

Veh flickered into existence all around Ai. One. Two. Threefourfivesixseven—

Despite the dim light of the distant stars, it was still dark enough that Ai had trouble seeing more than a few meters around her. The crumbling tomb had also kicked up a cloud of sand and dust that hung in the air, making it that much more difficult to survive.

The Veh needed to be dealt with now. She could go find [Eye of the Storm] again later.

Low visibility would mean her doom. She needed to see. Ai immediately began weaving a spell of [Illumination] and [Clear Skies], before more Veh were attracted by her magic.

The Veh were an ecological constant in this world. New players to Dirge thought of them as monsters or hostile mobs, which for gameplay purposes they were, but that wasn’t quite accurate. They appeared anywhere in the world dark enough for their shadows to form, as long as it was unprotected by daylight or the light of the Ve’un.

The practical reality of dealing with them was brutally simple. They didn’t care about your level, nor how powerful you were.

Physical contact meant immediate death.

A single touch from one of the Veh meant total and instantaneous dissolution. The victim’s body simply vanished in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing behind but a scorched shadow permanently burned into the ground. Fire and heat could damage the Veh, but the only thing that could truly harm them was sunlight—either the real thing, or a magical recreation called True Sunlight.

There was a reason that establishing new settlements in the Wilds was such a big deal for any endgame guild. Without the protective light of the Ve’un, it was only a matter of time until the Veh wiped out your NPC settlers through sheer attrition, so there used to be constant skirmishes for ancient ruins that came pre-equipped with their own Ve’un wards.

Death by Veh had been a frustrating, if clean, death mechanic. A trip to your last saved respawn point, a naked run back to where you died conveniently marked by your shadow to retrieve your gear if other players hadn’t looted it already, and a hefty debuff for your trouble. An inconvenience.

Now, the potential finality of it was a knot in her gut.

There might be no respawn. No coming back. Just a person and everything they were, snuffed out and reduced to a smear of ash on the ground. If the Veh were now as real as her own magic—

She’d be dead, not even an hour into her transmigration.

Ai gathered the links of meaning that permeated reality around her, and formed her personal sigil to activate her weave.

“[Luminous Atmospheric Refinement]!”

A sudden expulsion of energy cleared Ai’s immediate vicinity. The dust, sand, and crumbling debris that had choked the air moments ago were banished in a concussive burst of wind. A sourceless and blinding light also blared into being, illuminating the entire area.

Ai’s pupils, still dilated from the gloom, contracted violently. She blinked rapidly, her physiology struggling to compensate for the sudden brightness.

In the instant she struggled to adjust to the overexposure, a shadow materialized within arm’s reach. A Veh – it was right there – a figure of pure shadow, impossibly dense against the artificial glow of her spell. Its form was indistinct, a wavering silhouette that absorbed all light, defined only by its utter absence.

By instinct, Ai activated her [Sunblade], honed through countless encounters with the Veh.

[Sun-Divinity]-[Dark-Banisher]-[Bladed-Weapon] —

“[Transcendental Sunblade]!”

Ai’s right arm—her off-hand—was sheathed in a blade of condensed True Sunlight, a shimmering, white-gold weapon of molten light that instantly vaporized the lunging Veh. It dissipated into nothingness in a silent explosion of blackened shadowstuff, leaving behind a sickly chemical odor where it once stood.

She had gotten the spell down to five semiotic links in the chain of meaning before waking up in Varrah, with an offering of lifeforce as its cost. It appeared she could get away with just three links and a trifling of effort now.

In the next moment, more Veh blinked into her range, lunging in formless aggression. Ai swung her arm—and the Sunblade—to meet their attacks. She cut through the encroaching shadows in rapid succession, their destruction equally absolute and instantaneous.

“Aru! Attack!” Ai barked, as she readied his suite of anti-Veh armaments.

[Sun-Divinity]-[Dark-Banisher]-[Life-Matrix-Infusion] —

Aru’s fur-feathers, normally a plain white, began to glow with internal luminescence. Being a forever dog in this setting meant being able to survive the worst of the worst, and any animal that could keep up with Ai was both intelligent and magical enough to be a target for the Veh.

So they had repurposed his photosynthetic fur-feathers to also be conduits for True Sunlight.

Aru growled ferociously, a sound somewhere between a wolf’s menace and a crocodilian hiss as his fur shone with the same white-gold of Ai’s Sunblade. The lizard-dog was almost too bright to look at, but that was an unavoidable side-effect of high level anti-Veh combat: if it wasn’t blinding, it wasn’t effective against the shades.

He leapt into the fray. Aru went where Ai couldn’t be, making sure to stay within reach as he tore through any Veh that approached the pair. They hacked through dozens of them in the space of a minute, but there was no end in sight.

True Sunlight had been, to put it lightly, a bitch to cast and maintain. It was a testament to Ai’s skill and dedication that she was able to get both the invocation itself and activation cost down so low in the first place, but the divine nature of the banishing light was such that it guzzled away Ai’s stamina on top of that despite her then-SS Rank Semblance. There was a reason stationary Ve’un wards were the preferred option of anti-Veh countermeasures.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

At SSS Rank, the spell was effortless to maintain as far as her magic was concerned. Despite this newfound ease, it was quickly dawning on her that in her exhausted physical state, she herself couldn’t keep this up until sunrise.

A sudden wave of fatigue washed over her. She’d been awake for nearly forty-eight hours by this point, and even she was human. The adrenaline and hyper-focused dopamine that had sustained her for the last two days began to recede, leaving in its wake a bone-deep exhaustion.

The final battle to beat the World Quest had been, subjectively, barely an hour ago, and she’d been planning and fighting for nearly the entire two days preceding that. In the weeks leading up to the final ritual at Varranir, she’d barely slept as she ran herself ragged securing allies, making the spellwork flawless, and…