Endless Online: Oblivion's Blade

by M. H. Johnson

  "Keep my head, gather my men, find cover, and take decisive action."

  His father flashed a grim smile. "Even if all that means is retreating back the way you came until you regroup, never let yourself be caught flatfooted, too afraid even to move. No surer way of making me going to a funeral I never hope to attend than that."

  Val had grinned, knowing his father had been dead serious despite his smile, but at that moment, the birds chirping, the sound of drill just a mile ahead, the bright summer day, he had felt utterly convinced he could take on the world. Nothing would ever get the best of him.

  And how bitterly did he rue that arrogance, in the few brief years that followed. Yet as mad and violent as things got in the cauldron of battle, never had he felt as powerless, as overwhelmed as he did in that pitch black cave, the second day of his new life, mind pierced by a thousand crimson orbs screaming for his agony, his torment, his death at their hands.

  Screaming with the same choked cries, the same gurgling sighs, as every man to gasp as Val tore out their throats, sniped them from hundreds of yards, or shot them point blank in the back of their heads. Every man ever to die by his hand seemed to rise up; their accusing, milky white eyes blazing into his own, crying out for his death.

  Agony eternal, to match their own.

  In that moment of supreme, helpless terror, Val remembered his father's final bit of advice that year he joined the military and slipped forever free of the few hostile eyes that still hunted for culprits in the mysterious confession and suicide of a certain star quarterback, the golden boy of school and town alike.

  When everything goes to shit, the world exploding in screams and hellfire, one needed to react. To freeze was death.

  As much swimming in a sea of nightmare delusion as feeling the cave, Val nonetheless dove back as a massive tentacle crashed down, fragments of rock tearing open cheek and brow, the sharp sting of pain helping to bring his mind back into focus, a gash of blackness in the shadow seen in the space between the hideous delusions his nemesis flooded his mind with. It was all he needed to orient and sprint into action, twisting and darting as death crashed down yet again, the cavern shaking with monstrous howls, and Val thought it a miracle his treasures hadn't ruptured, only then realizing how tight his mind was holding on to a great number of things.

  A desperate lurch forward as the ground exploded where his feet had been but moments before. A panicked roll through a narrow tunnel entrance and into the still bubbling remains of the specters he had killed, and desperate relief as his physical body was suddenly out of reach of the howling gibbering horror even now pounding the rock with desperate tentacles, tendrils lashing into the opening as well, Val howling with horror and pain as he stumbled back, screaming as he felt his mind being flailed alive.

  -5 hp shrapnel damage. -10 Psion damage.

  Val grimaced, fleeing terrors unseen as his mind screamed with the horror of memories unending flooding through him at once. Every injury he had ever suffered, every regret as had ever laid him low flooded through him.

  He gasped and sobbed under the unrelenting wave of torment, even as his foe howled in blind fury, trying but unable to reach him with its viciously writhing tentacles.

  And even in the horror of living nightmare, trapped in his foe's psychic attack, Val knew he had to take cover and run. Flee this madness, fleet this pain, slip past the enemies closing in.

  Past the howling mass of foes chasing after him in the ever growing dark.

  Flashes of his time in service touched him once more, Val remembering so viscerally the ever-growing communion he felt with the night, feeling freer in the arena of war than he ever had constrained to the familiar haunts back home.

  Slipping effortlessly past a foe who not only didn't understand him, but wasn't even human. On some level he sensed his enemy's terrible gifts as akin to clever guard dogs fixed on a scent trail. A scent trail of anger and regret. So he led them through pitch darkness on a merry chase through darkest woods of memory, slipping at last into a clear stream of emptiness, washing away all ego, all sense of himself, losing himself as deeply into the moment and the reality all around him as could be.

  And in that moment, he managed to slip free.

  Breathe in, breathe out. Meditating within that passageway, becoming one with the darkness, the night, the blackness of the passageway entirely.

  After endless moments that passed in the blink of an eye, the hideous abomination was gone. Howls abruptly cut off, sliding its way through the massive chamber, in search of fresh prey.

  Val did not break his focus, his sense of oneness with everything in that vast cavern and adjoining branches. It was not him that waited patiently for the abomination to make its erratic rounds, sure to pass the point of no return eventually. It was only the smallest piece of the whole that waited so patiently for the perfect opportunity to strike.

  It was not he that slipped his last full vial inside his sling, slow revolutions turning to a twirling hum that cut through the air, deliberately aiming for the most massive crystals overhead, in perfect position to impact his kill-zone. No. It was time itself, winding the seconds away to its own inevitable conclusion as the ceiling roared and shook, a ton of priceless rubble hitting at just the right point to cause so much of the ancient ceiling to come crashing down, spearing the suddenly alarmed horror in a thousand different arcane intersections, even as the flasks of Elementium infused Silbion buried in shallow shrapnel covered pits suddenly catalyzed to irrevocable excitation by the shock wave of pressure crashing down from above.

  The resulting series of exothermic shock waves resulted in the most fantastic of explosions, the chamber roaring as tons and tons of Elementium infused rock tore through the abomination, matrixes ruptured multiple times by shrapnel and shock waves, the beast expiring in an awful howl that echoed endlessly through the vast chamber long after the dust had settled, or at least it felt that way in Val's mind, having ducked and huddled as deep in the side tunnel as he could get, hands clapped over his ears the instant he had jumped through after a single burst of flame, knowing there would be a price to pay despite the vast size of the cavern, no matter that he had placed the magical detonations in the very heart of the chamber.

  There was indeed a price to pay for his reckless madness, and pay he did, the shock wave blowing out his left eardrum as his body crashed against the far wall, minuscule pieces of shrapnel still slicing through Halvar's borrowed attire, resulting in multiple abrasions and cuts as his head smacked against the hard stone wall and he collapsed, dizzying blackness drowning him, along with the Abomination's dying shrieks.

  And the pain was nothing compared to the hideous rush of that beast's vile energies roaring into his psyche as all its power, all its potential, flooded his soul and became his own.

  Shadowmind Rank 4 Achieved! - Even when a creature that should have bested you many times over pierced your wards and flooded your mind, you still somehow managed to break free!

  Psionic Perception Rank 2 Achieved!

  Arcane Perception Rank 3 Achieved!

  Meditation Rank 3 Successfully Quantized! - Nothing aids in overcoming your limitations like battling for your soul against a creature of Hell.

  Greater Alchemy Rank 2 achieved! - Continuously catalyzing, decoupling, and stabilizing two of the most dangerous arcane compounds in existence while fighting against insane odds has paid off!

  Meta-Magic Feat: Stabilization Rank 2 Achieved! - Not one for balance in any form, you've pushed yourself to the limit, suppressing hideously deadly catalyzations multiple times, when by all rights you should be a crimson smear on the cavern ceiling. Well done!

  Demolitions Rank 2 Successfully Quantized! - Who needs Semtex when you can toss around vials of explosive death!

  Psi-Sense Rank 2 achieved! You danced through that cavern battling a beast from hell like your life depended upon it, and it did!

  Congratulations, you've leveled up! You are now level 3.

  Val felt hi
mself caught up in inconceivable storms, buffeted by the desires, the desperation, the agony of all the souls that nightmare had devoured and claimed for itself. All that awful potency, now Val's own. Potency he must claim, or be consumed by it, lost forever to the hellish maelstrom just below the surface of this fantastic reality. And there was nothing he feared more than becoming lost in the madness that defined this realm.

  Congratulations, you've leveled up! You are now level 4.

  The whirlwind intensified. So much power. So much potency. So awful was the creature he had fought, flooding him to the point where ecstasy became agony and his world flew apart.

  Val gasped, desperate just to breathe, drowning in the rush of furious power burning through his psyche, his very soul. Closing out maddening pop-ups, phenomenon of his own disturbed mind, Val focused only on quantizing the terrible growth flooding through him. He strove to direct what was happening, to master the crimson tide of potency before it consumed him forever.

  He was struck by memory of Elise's solemn violet eyes, shaking her head at how foolish he seemed, unable to grasp the continuum of connections in even the most basic weave of symbols and lines that served as their means of communicating vast algorithms comprising entire subjects. An encyclopedic tome's worth of knowledge in every diagram, all contained in complex interlocking charts, masterworks of interwoven concepts and correlations that would do the most brilliant physicists proud.

  Val wondered if he were something like a chimp or hound to these people. Useful in some militaristic, violent fashion, but on so many other levels a perpetual child to their eyes. So behind the curve it was like they were two different species. And how could he deny the analogy? They really were from two different worlds. One with starships, wizards, and wonder, the other with a race of self-destructive primates slowly poisoning the very world they called home.

  A part of Val shied away from the horror of his own failings, just as he did the mad screams of the creature writhing against its awful fate even as Val devoured its potency, claiming it as his own. To know that he was utterly behind the curve, that his future upon this world was looking ever more dire and bleak. A part of his mind wished desperately that he could have been a part of this universe, this world, to grow up and blossom; happy, clever and free, a master of these strange charts, the magnificent potential they held, a beautiful future just a degree or two away.

  He imagined so viscerally what it would have been like to attend school, someone like Elise his childhood professor, smiling gently as she slowly explained concepts that finally, after endless hours, days and years of study began to make sense, feeling those first visceral flashes of wonder as his brain finally began to understand concepts so like the most complex uses of algebra and calculus, seeing how a few perfectly understood variables and their correlations could be used to measure and understand a thousand different situations, the answers to endless scenarios to be found in any one of these charts, just by understanding the variables involved.

  In constant flux yet self-contained, these visualized ideas could summarize a whole species and its evolution in a single syllable. For all that their verbal language was so like Val's own, at least in how his mind chose to interpret the words, every noun was symbolic, and simultaneously perfectly representative of all the standard variations and strengths of an entire species. Val shuddered to contemplate how many of these variables had to be perfectly understood, their meaning and degrees of meaning somehow self-evident, or else perfectly taught and memorized, so that all would arrive at the same conclusions making use of the same diagrams. And the way they were structured was almost self-correcting. If someone didn't understand a concept, the chart would seem to close in on itself, and they would be left with only confusion.

  It chilled Val, the degree of complexity and nuance involved, and he took scarce comfort in what his anthropology professor, with a doctorate on primate evolution would have said. In so many ways we are similar to our closest ancestors, and those gifts we have with mathematics and abstract thought, most particularly language, are thanks to specific nodules, specialized portions of the brain. Gifts of the mind that set us above our closest relatives. Yet without them, we would be little better than chimps, and in many ways, worse off. It was clear to Val that despite the calculus of tactical planning and instinctive reaction that they all seemed to share, outside of the battlefield, his friends had evolved in ways that he had not.

  Desperately Val ignored his own pain, the struggles of his suffocating soul, finding solace in focusing himself, centering himself on the gentle sound of Elise's voice as she counseled him through the diagrams of the one tome she had chosen for him to study, an ancient treatise on Personal Resonance Mastery.

  And slowly but surely, after what seemed endless hours of effort even as Halvar flew paper airplanes at his head from the back of class, Sten demanding they all leave immediately for recess, and Gregor declaring Val an idiot, a monkey who had no hope of ever learning how to read, it all finally began to make sense.

  He could feel it. He could all but taste the ebb and flow of arcane energies flowing through the tome he held. He turned to glare at Gregor, bitter for the truth his smirking classmate knew for a fact. Val would be forever too stupid to understand most of the hideously complex tomes they studied as a matter of course.

  But specialized tomes dealing with the arcane arts? Those he had a hope of understanding. His Psionic and Arcane Perceptions somehow letting him feel the ebb and flow of intent and meaning in the exotic symbols scattered throughout the various charts, how the interconnecting lines affected and influenced each piece of the puzzle until the innermost meanings would eventually make themselves clear, even to him.

  Val shivered, a smile of wonder gracing his features.

  He gazed up in awe at a frightened looking Elise, gasping in shock as the body she had taken for dead gasped a startled breath of still dust-clogged air. "I can read," Val whispered, before collapsing into a stupor once more.

  (Basic literacy achieved! Limited to texts of Arcane or Psionic Nature. 3 of 7 points spent.)

  (+1 to Scholarship. 4 of 7 points spent)

  (Rank 1 in Personal Resonance Mastery. -Initiate- This is a Non-Intuitive Greater Skill. 5 of 7 points spent)

  (+10% to Mana, + 10% to Psion, compounded. 7 of 7 points spent.)

  Val felt humbled and grateful, as if cresting a steep incline, ready to coast down the far slope, alight with relief and excitement, feeling himself grow in ways wondrous and profound. Growing into himself, the person he was waking up to, the person he had always been destined to be.

  Before he was sent crashing into waves of awful uncertainty once more, exhausted and spent, in danger of drowning as the sea of souls he had claimed from the Horror sought to claim his destiny for themselves, desperate not to be consumed by Val in turn.

  "Wake up, idiot. Class isn't over."

  Val lurched in his seat, head aching, gazing at Sten's handsome, brooding features peering into his own. "I don't know what Elise sees in you. To me, you look pathetic."

  Val groaned, feeling dizzy and weak, yet somehow knowing that if he were to leave the door of their old-fashioned classroom, if he were to step away from his wooden desk and too small chair, he would be stepping out of his own life. Forever. Yet how he ached to go to the nurse's station and take one gentle pill, slipping away before the spirits howling and calling him a failure. To escape the heckling crowd of angry, pockmarked kids (twisted, bleeding souls) pounding upon the classroom door, clamoring for the chance to rip him apart.

  But it would all be over, at last, if he just cried sick, and went to the nurse.

  "Val? Eyes on the chalkboard."

  Val fought back his sickening nausea as power continued to burn through his soul, gazing into Elise's gentle eyes once more, finding her more beautiful than ever with her hair curled in a tight, professorial bun, her slate-grey dress prim and proper. A shining white stick of chalk darted across the old slate board, a brillian
t shimmering matrix of power and potency forming up with the diagram of symbols and lines being drawn for all their benefit.

  "Can you understand this, Val?"

  Val swallowed, slowly shaking his head.

  Cute furrows formed between his teacher's brows.

  "Look harder, Val. I need you to concentrate. It's just the next lesson. You mastered the first, I know you can understand the second. Sense how the magic flows through you every time you cast Firestream."

  "Frying our poor lasers," Gregor grumbled from the back, his massive mane of curly salt and pepper hair the same as always, for all that his face was now that of any other sixteen-year-old. "Idiot."

  "I could fix mine," said Halvar, holding up his blaster, beaming and proud.

  "Sure," Gregor sneered. "But where is your other eye?"

  The one-eyed Halvar bowed his head sadly.

  Val shook, blinking back tears, futilely gazing at the charts before him.

  He felt Elise's hard stare. "Concentrate, Val. Everything depends upon it. Everything you would ever be."

  Desperately he stared, finally relaxing, letting the symbols and correlations flow through him. After a time, he gained a rough sense of the big picture. The most basic routes to containing his own energy flows so he wouldn't pulse surges of arcane radiation that could wreak so much havoc in modern society. He blinked and smiled, realizing that there were deeper lessons, even in these basic algorithms. With a sense of relish he studied on, and finally, it all began to make sense.

  (+1 Rank to Greater Arcane Skill: Personal Resonance Mastery. 2 of 7 points spent)

  (+1 Rank to Greater Arcane Skill: Personal Resonance Mastery. 5 of 7 points spent)

  (+10% to Mana, +10% to Psion, compounded. 7 of 7 points spent).

  At that moment his classmate's heckling, even the din and roar of scores of students banging desperately on the door outside faded to nothing. Elise's stern gaze softened into a smile. "Congratulations, Val. I think you just might make it."