182 – Jane, 2/2

Kiri sat in her chair and also in the sky far above the Brightwater.

Teressa stoically handed her a mana potion. The large woman’s blonde hair was a bit unkempt, a bit unruly from the neat bun she usually kept it in, while her emerald eyes were half sunken with hidden worry.

Kiri took the mana potion. It was as brilliant blue as a clear sky, and it weighed. It was her first potion of the day but it might not be her last. She decided, “I’m going for Intelligence as soon as Erick gets back.”

Teressa softly said, “That’s the dangerous one. Erick has to fight paranoia all the time. Do you think you can do that?”

“Yes, but… Hmm.” Kiri sipped the potion. Her Mana Regeneration slowly climbed, and it would likely settle in at around triple regeneration for a good five minutes. It would be enough. She had to save some fuel for the treachery that was sure to come. No one truly trusted Brightwater or Farix. Kiri said, “I have a support structure. I won’t go crazy from paranoia.”

Teressa said nothing.

Kiri leaned back and submerged herself into Sunny’s senses. Things happened fast.

The Brightwater was down below.

The soul ooze was in the center.

Killzone bounced off the soul ooze.

Jane retreated with her kill.

Nirzir’s spellwork broke as she canceled it, because the soul ooze pulsed and sent out a thousand globs of black ooze and also a pulse of shadows. Nirzir didn’t want to risk her spellwork being turned against them, for it surely would have been.

The ooze’s pulse turned all the nearby bright blood into dead blood. Black droplets, each a meter across, hung in the air around the ooze like a thousand floating [Force Traps]. Black puddles on the ground for kilometers around ripped into the air, into those hovering orbs, and then the larger orbs flowed back into the soul ooze. And the ooze began to grow.

A waterfall in the northern wall turned from a lazy gush of black water into a seeking tendril of the stuff, flowing directly at the soul ooze.

And the soul ooze began to rise into the air.

Slowly. Surely. It had cast [Fly] on itself.

‘No soul casters spotted and that wasn’t actually a Soul Bolt spell; Sentries confirmed. It was a [Dispel] from a dispeller still inside the thing.’ Poi sent, ‘You’re clear. Attack before it can regrow itself or escape.’

Kiri focused.

Sunnys rapidly descended into the bowl of the Brightwater. For a moment, just briefly, Kiri was surprised at the scope of the battle. From where she had been all of this looked like dots on a far away map. Now, the soul ooze’s size was readily apparent. It was at least two kilometers across, now.

Kiri and all of her [Familiar]s opened up with [Luminous Beam]s, switching out for [True Sunlight Rift]s as soon as their Script Second allowed them to, letting them keep up the burn for 5 seconds at a time while adding to the burn with sunlight. She began chain summoning her [Familiar]s, while commanding them to reapply spellwork and to get back out there as soon as they could.

Beams of absolute light tore at the soul ooze from ten different angles, while Rifts of pure sunlight lit up the bottom of the Brightwater like looking at the sun. The puddles of soul ooze on the ground, not swallowed up by the monster, instantly evaporated under such an assault. Her beams crashed into the thing like streams of high powered Water Magic tearing through particularly hard ooze. It was not as effective as Kiri had hoped, but it was still effective.

She was spending 811 mana per second and regenerating— Not enough. She downed the rest of her mana potion. Within seconds, she was regenerating 133 mana per second; ten times her usual max.

Each Sunny was able to cast five [True Sunlight Rifts] and two [Luminous Beam]s, meaning ten seconds of work for each Sunny before they were expended. In the first ten seconds of her assault she managed to get through one full rotation.

Huge swaths of central ooze evaporated under her onslaught. Everything that broke away from the ooze rapidly evaporated, but actually breaking anything away was a lot tougher than it should have been.

And then the monster pulsed with a terrible, vibrating scream of shadows, popping every single Sunny in the area and disrupting every nearby rift. The land was still filled with rifts, though, and Kiri had managed to interrupt the waterfall of mucus streaming in from the north, but it was not enough.

Kiri sent in more Sunnys.

Kiri’s second assault went better. Sun rifts piled up all around the thing while beams of light cleaved into the monster. But she could not keep this up. Not at this rate.

In 15 seconds, Kiri had summoned all of her Sunny again, expending all of her mana to do so. In those 15 seconds, she had regained enough mana to cast two more Sunnys, which she had to do because the dispeller inside the soul ooze was still breaking them when they got lower than half mana.

This was not the slow and steady race at the beginning. This was a frantic sprint to see how much damage she could do. And she was doing damage. She had also cut away whatever magic was enabling it to fly. The thing rested on the bottom of Brightwater Lake, like before.

The ooze had lost well over half of its diameter, too, meaning Kiri had cut through 70 to 80 percent of the creature’s size—

She clipped the dispeller amalgam still inside the ooze. She got a notification. She had killed it. But she was not killing the ooze fast enough. And yet… Maybe she had stabilized?

All of the Brightwater was now absolutely filled with Sunlight Rifts, removing the black mess in the bowl of the Brightwater, turning the entire land bright red. Farix had repaired the broken crystals in the walls, staunching the flow of ooze into the Brightwater…

Was she still on a timer—

‘Time to switch. Keep two Sunnys on the ooze, preventing it from flying.’ Poi sent, ‘All the rest need to start laying down Rifts near the other sides of the holes in the Brightwater. Farix’s magic will not last much longer.’

She was still on a timer.

Kiri moved on, quick as a mental shift in direction.

Eight Sunnys stepped through the sky, back over the edge of the Brightwater, most of them heading toward the other side of the western break in the wall. Barely three kilometers down from the top, Kiri encountered the gloom that was everywhere below the surface of Ar’Kendrithyst these days. There were surely more amalgams below that gloom, but they shouldn’t be a problem.

Right?

Poi answered her unasked question, ‘We never noticed soul casters anywhere except near the core of the ooze. You’re cleared to dive in and start killing anything and everything you see.’

Right.

Kiri did just that.

Soon, light bloomed in the dark depths, driving away gloom and then ripping through disconnected soul ooze like it did every single night, all around the walls of Spur. Massive whirlpools of ooze began to form here and there as Kiri’s Sun Rifts appeared under the surface of the waters. Lances of [Luminous Beam]s went out occasionally, killing the larger threats before they could become actual threats.

– – – –

Jane sat upon a pool of blood and felt as the sun seemed to shine upon her and every single piece of reality connected to her many legs. The day’s earlier revelation of how Mind Mages saw the world was similar, but different. Similar, in that Jane felt the world in a way she never had before, but different in the depths of that feeling.

Lights flashed overhead, but Jane sunk her feet deeper into the puddles of blood all around.

Her connection to the world expanded.

And she realized something, there in that bloody land, filled with the transformed remnants of dead and mutated life. This was not physical blood at all, but raw, Elemental Blood. Her new thought was, in the realizing of it, perhaps a trite revelation. What was actually important though, was what came next.

The impetus to the creation of her Prismatic Class. The reason she wanted to be ‘Prismatic’ at all.

She wanted to do everything. She wanted to be anything she desired to be. She wanted to be Everything. Maybe not all at once, but she certainly wanted to see all that life had to offer, from the brightest skies to the deepest depths, and everywhere in between. She wanted to cast magic and swing swords and hide and show herself and tank and backstab. To be whatever the situation demanded; that was what Jane desired.

[Greater Shadowalk] was just one version of her transformed self, no less able than her [Greater Lightwalk] self, which was again, no less useful than her [Air Body], or [Stone Body]. Everything had its place. Every power had its necessity.

And.

She had been artificially limiting herself.

There were six primary Elements, yes, but there were other Elements out there that also had their place of power, their usefulness. Poi’s Mind Mage powers were an Element, for sure. Blood was an Element which Jane was very familiar with, ever since gaining her Queen Blood Weaver, but even before that, with all the blood and violence necessary on Veird, Jane was familiar with blood.

Jane touched the world through the blood and felt a hundred million small secrets calling to her, telling her what she needed to know, that Blood was an Element, and that Mind was an Element, and that everything she could think of was an Element, because of course it was.

That’s how magic worked.

“You see now, yes?” Melemizargo spoke to her, from the Dark, the place beyond mere Shadows. “It’s all connected. Nothing is truly separate. All is one, and one is all.”

Jane heard someone talk to her, but she could not hear the words, or understand the speaker. She felt her legs sink into the blood. The stone rubble below seemed to part, drawing her down as a depth expanded from her soul. The wind and the sunlight touched her and she saw herself vanish, becoming one with both. The shadows under her welcomed her to join them, and she did so, plunging straight down into the rubble.

This was the Truth of it all. Everything was connected. Mana held all possibilities; even more than the Script allowed…

Which was perhaps a trite realization, but there it was.

In seconds, Jane touched upon the wall of Ar’Kendrithyst and felt a thousand years of spellwork upon that wall trying to rebuff her presence. Jane merely flicked a switch in her mind she didn’t know was there, becoming one with the spellwork, and then she passed through the wall.

She shouldn’t have been able to do that. People did not [Stone Body] through the wall of the Dead City and live. Even the soul ooze could not breach that absolute barrier. But it was like the wall had been primed to let her through. She had no time for that mystery, though.

Because she felt the world, and the world called to her.

She touched the ocean underneath the Crystal Forest, becoming one with the Abyss, feeling her connection between Shadow and Water deepen. For a moment, she was the Abyss itself. Deep dwelling eels lived down here, and they snapped at Jane’s passing, but all they got for their trouble was a smack on the face and a ripping of blood out of their violet bodies.

For Blood was everywhere, too. Blood was life, and life was Blood.

Jane became one with the Blood, and then she moved on.

A twist of direction brought her to a land of Fire and Stone; to Magma. Lizards made of Elemental Magma hunted on the edges of those fiery depths. The lizards snapped at Jane just as the eels had done, but she left them be, for she was fast as the bubbling Plasma rising up, and she had to keep going.

She followed an endless river of Plasma that became simple Air that blew up from down below, into a land of Shadows and Air and Elemental Sand. She became one with something that was more than pulverized quartz and broken obsidian, and quickly moving air. Nothing overt lived in this dark, endlessly hot place, except for the elementals swirling in the sand, watching as Jane passed by.

For she had seen something in the far distance.

She followed the Light, this time.

A brilliance of Light shimmered out of long forgotten Elemental Crystal, a mix of Light and Stone, in the middle of a cavern that was filled with bright water that was not water at all, but Elemental Healing. Jane giggled. ‘Elemental Healing’! What a silly notion. They couldn’t come up with something better to call it than simple ‘Healing’? The waters of this hidden place were filled with all manner of fish and grasses and monsters that Jane had never seen before, and they all shimmered with bodies composed of Elemental Healing.

A True Rivergrieve tried to bite Jane, to eat her, Forceful jaws snapping out from every part of its thirty-meter-long eel-like body as it gave chase. Jane laughed. She almost wanted to try her hand at becoming one with Elemental Force and to eat the rivergrieve right back, but not today.

Jane left that land, headed up, directly out of the Healing waters and into another cavern, lit with the light from those waters. This smaller cavern was not filled with Healing, but instead with Lightning, and Jane had to laugh even louder when she saw the creatures that lived here. Spiders. Thousands of them. They crawled over webs made of Lightning and they shot bolts of lightning down into the waters to catch fish for their dinners.

They tried to catch Jane, too.

But the Darkness guided her forward, dancing through the Lightning and the Stone and the Air and the Water. Nothing could touch Jane as she transformed herself right alongside the Darkness, like a child chasing after a playful giant—

Suddenly, the Darkness passed through the lower walls of Ar’Kendrithyst. And Jane followed. The walls let her through a second time as she chased the dragon into a world of Radiance, dried and dead Blood, and a sad looking soul ooze’s core—

Several things happened very fast.

At first, a notification appeared.

And Jane felt the world all around her, as she suspected very few ever could. She felt the stone and the crystalline floor of Ar’Kendrithyst. She was the air all around her, and the dried blood on the ground. How was the blood dried? It was wet not ten minutes ago. As Jane contemplated the dead blood all around she soaked in the light from a hundred different Rifts suspended overhead, feeling the world all around her as she never could before. From the stone underfoot to the hot, stagnant air, to the bright sky…

She was everywhere, but there were two places where she was not.

Both of those places were in front of her. One was crushed against the dried-blood bottom of Lake Brightwater; the core of the soul ooze. It was a black and radiant white at the same time; a tumor of a grand rad twenty-five meters across at its narrowest section, but with raised domes of crystalline growth all over the thing, and with a smattering of sharp spikes of black/white crystal as well. It was perhaps the second most dangerous thing Jane had ever felt and seen. The only reason Jane wasn’t more concerned with the soul ooze was because it was completely cleaned of black ooze, its Domain was broken and could not be repaired, and it was currently cowering from much larger power overhead.

For Melemizargo, like a black mountain of wings and scales and power, had one clawed hand resting atop the core of the crystal ooze. He was a thousand meters tall, or even larger. Jane had no idea. She had never seen him this big. He was using that size and his power to gently crush the soul ooze’s core into the bloody ground. He probably could have done it shaped as a three meter large snake, too, but he chose this big form because he could, no doubt.

Jane had no idea why she said it, but the words came out before she had time to think better, “You’re bigger than before.”

“Much smaller than I used to be.” Melemizargo leaned forward, like he was inspecting a very pretty bug, and said, “You’ve grown, too, and yet you’re still getting into deeper trouble than you know how to handle. Tackling this thing without a Domain. Tsk tsk. Reckless. I respect recklessness. All the best growth is done through adversity.” He eyed Jane with an eye brighter than the sun rifts all around. “But you’ll run out of mana if you keep doing that, so you can stop now. I’ve got everything under control.”

Jane’s power vanished in a flashing instant.

Suddenly, she was just a tiny blue spider facing off against a massive dragon and a world-threatening enemy that that dragon treated as one would treat a very small stepping stool. And yet, something was different. Something unrelated to the dragon or the ooze. Jane felt different.

Some eternalness clung to her body like an elemental miscellany, a fog, or a glow. She glanced at her blue spider legs and saw a prismatic sheen that was new. She had no idea what it was, but she could feel the world almost the same as before, but on a much, much smaller scale.

Aura control? Perhaps.

She would deal with that later.

Jane asked, “What are you going to do with the soul ooze?”

“Make you kill it, of course.” Melemizargo moved one of his talons around the soul ooze, pointing to a cleft that separated the left half of the grand rad from the right. Jane hadn’t even noticed the weak spot until Melemizargo pointed it out. “[Strike] right there. You don’t even need your black sword to do the deed.”

Jane suddenly realized her sword was gone.

And that she was talking to Melemizargo.

And she was standing about thirty meters away from the soul ooze’s core.

She was halfway dissociating due to the danger, but she was still cognizant enough to say, “This seems like a trap.”

Melemizargo’s entire face filled Jane’s view as he grinned, showing off some very, very large glowing white fangs. “They tried everything to kill this little guy, and still they could not break its power. I had to step in, you see, and only because you managed to get this far with your understanding of [Greater Prismatic Body]. You deserve a reward, Jane. This is that reward.” Melemizargo inclined his head toward the west. “Or… You could let that happen.”

Jane glanced to the west.

The blood crystals that had held the flood back were broken. The flood had been released. And yet, time was frozen, and like time, the ooze had frozen, too. Not wholly. Not completely. Jane watched as a blood crystal slowly spun away from the hole it had been covering and as the wave of black ooze flowed out of the hole like that Pitch Drop experiment she had read that one time. She had no idea why she thought of the Pitch Drop experiment, but there it was.

Jane fully turned back toward the ooze’s core. She conjured a [Flying Striker] in the shape of a very large ice pick…

It hovered above her, ready to [Strike]…

And yet, she had to repeat, “This feels like a trap.”

Melemizargo nodded sagely. “It is not, but I understand the trepidation. This whole scenario of me granting you a kill on a demonstrably greater power than yourself goes against everything I usually stand for. This little slime was pretty strong, and it was getting stronger, and if it were capable of overrunning this whole world I usually would have let it.

“But I’ve learned a few things recently, and… Hmm.” Melemizargo hummed, then pianoed his talons atop the ooze’s core, creating a series of terrible taps upon the crystalline surface. The ooze’s core vibrated in fear, though that could have been Jane’s imagination. “Tell you what. I’ll make this simple for you: I saved your life, and so you owe me one, and I’m calling in the favor. Kill the slime. In fact! I require you to kill this creature in my name. You need to say ‘I dedicate this hunt to Melemizargo, God of Magic’, before you strike the blow, or else I will depart and let things happen as they will. And to be sure you understand what will likely happen: The sun is fifteen minutes from setting. That boy of Rozeta’s is lining up his spellwork right now. You can’t tell, but this entire place is in shadow, and the soul slime still has a good connection to its body, all the way out there. That’s why Farix’s spellwork has finally failed, and why Kiri’s blasting of the ooze beyond here has also failed.

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“This place will become a crater in five minutes unless you kill this thing here, and now, and with my name upon your spidery lips— Actually! We’re going to do this properly. Transform back to a human. Now.” Melemizargo added, “And put everything you can into the [Strike].”

Jane…

Transformed back into her human form.

Feeling a lot less strong, and a lot smaller, Jane Flatt stood before the God of Magic, naked as the day she was born save for the rings her father had made upon her fingers. At least she hadn’t lost those. She did not flinch at the Dark Dragon’s grin. She did not waver as she readied her flying weapon.

Jane simply walked forward and enveloped her conjured weapon with the power she had learned. The dried blood all around her held a little power, and so she used that power along with stone and air and light and shadow, swirling them all together, transforming her [Flying Striker] into lightning and abyss and brilliant blue fire. The modifier for using all of these elements in a proper [Strike] should have been in the tens of thousands of mana costs, but it was a lot less than that. Easier, now that Jane had found her Truth.

She was everything she needed to be, and this [Strike] reflected that part of her Truth. Instinctively, she knew that it would shift to become the Element it needed to be to inflict the most damage possible. She felt rather good about that part of herself.

It felt… Very correct.

With a directed thought she hovered the weapon ten meters away from the weak point in the core—

“Speak the words, Jane Flatt.” Melemizargo said, “And thank me for saving your life back in Songli.”

“… Thank you, Melemizargo, for saving my life. I do this for Veird, and for your eventual sanity.” Jane said, “I dedicate this kill to Melemizargo.”

She struck.

Melemizargo could have prevented the strike with a casual tilt of his claw, for his claw held right beside the weak spot in the ooze’s core, but he did not. He merely grinned.

He had not stopped grinning this whole time.

Jane was honestly surprised as her conjured spike, which shouldn’t have been able to do anything, pierced the soul slime. As the length of elemental power drove deep into the core the black-white grand rad cracked in all directions. Radiating fractures spread out everywhere, and then deepened. Parts of the whole shattered without preamble. A tumorous growth of crystal broke away from the top. Another outcropping of sharp crystal shattered away from the left side. The entire right side cracked fully in half, the whole thing slipping apart—

Melemizargo lifted his claw and the entire grand rad fractured and broke like a disintegrating pile of magic, slowly at first, and then rapidly.

And then Melemizargo pulled his trick.

He slammed his claws into the center of the disintegrating soul slime and pulled out a pearl of white light. It was beautiful. It was pure. And then it was gone. It had vanished sideways, disappearing from sight in some way that Jane couldn’t tell. What had he done?

“What was that?” Jane found herself asking.

Melemizargo smirked, and then told her, “The soul slime was a unique existence, only possible because of a hundred small factors that normally never would have happened. A broken artifact here. A consumed artifact there. A feast of dead souls and a magical impetus allowed to run amok. A hundred small failures that I can only attribute to Fate, but there’s only one current Walker of the Path right now, so, by all rights this should have been his burden to bear. His monster to kill. It was, after all, a horrible amalgamation of every bad thing to ever come before. The perfect monster to foil Erick.

“But apparently Erick’s Fate is not a normal Fate.

“He guided you this far, and he guided me to be here, too. He gave spellwork to his apprentice in the form of [Luminous Beam] and powerful weapons to his daughter and his guards. He helped that one archmage from Songli with that inspired Undertow effect. He helped from afar, which was exactly as it was meant to be. Apparently. Not how I expected it to happen, but the mana is always a bit mysterious in its workings.

“But that wasn’t really your question, was it? Your question was about the thing I took from the broken core.