Artorian's Archives Omnibus

by Dennis Vanderkerken

  “Abyss! Entire front is all black. I don’t know. Stop. Stop!” The five skidded to an unwanted halt. They could hear a wet surge rushing behind them. They knew it wasn’t water filling the cavern, but it didn’t need to be. They could all imagine seas of grey goo flooding the empty space behind them. Their heads turned when the pathway before them squeezed shut like a violent muscle spasm, crushing solid rock into gravel.

  Ronan brightened his cubes and squinted at the ‘muscle’ blocking their way. “Did we get swallowed? That looks like the inside of a throat in the diagrams from the Second Volume of Medicinal Practice.”

  The others looked at the fire practitioner with quirked brows, and the discomfort made Ronan blast the barrier with a stream of fire. Something shrieked in response. They didn’t like that; a shriek meant a physical thing. The throat released its hold, and at Astrea’s push they all continued their mad dash for freedom.

  Tired, frustrated, and on edge from avoiding dungeon-level death traps. Jiivra snapped at nobody in particular, “Someone tell me that wasn’t a real thing that just happened.”

  The Headmaster hopped over a pothole and fell into step next to her. “Still the same creature! Smoke signals aren’t exactly good for long explanations. It’s an infernal elemental, it can go physical under the right circumstances. No, I don’t know what those conditions are! Just run! Stick to the plan!”

  One of the other students in the group of five, Ishtar, swiveled her head around, and her long braid nearly smacked Ronan in the face. Her voice was soft in comparison to the guarded and borderline panicked tones of the others. She’d been brought along to keep their movements quiet, but the air essence student was out of gas. “What is the plan? You forget we do not all speak glow-moss or read smoke-signal. How do you even do that? No, forget I asked—plan! What is?!”

  Astrea agreed. “I know all the bits of how we get to granddad, but the rescue was improvised and I didn’t hear anything about a plan!”

  Jiivra’s face turned sour. “I said we’d think of something when we got to it!”

  Ishtar sassed back, because that was in no way an answer, “Well, we got to it. Now what!”

  The silence from the glowing combat instructor didn’t do their morale any favors. She bit her lip. Just getting to the correct cavern so they could recover their Headmaster had been the extent of her plan. They were up an unpleasant creek, and didn’t pack spare paddles. “It’s not like we can leave the mountain! It’s crawling with undead out there!”

  Astrea skidded to a scared, sudden halt. “Everyone on the ground! Now!”

  They all almost made it as they hit the ground. Tearing through the ceiling, an infernal mouth bit a chunk out of Ronan. Everything from his torso on up was gone in a crunching flash, including the illumination his cubes provided. Only the legs remained. The remaining four didn’t have the liberty to remain as still as those legs as their infernal guide screamed at them to get up and run.

  Astrea glanced at something behind them right before her scream, and nobody dared to look. There was only running. They soon came upon the large domed cave where the rest of the students awaited them. Welcoming cheers turned to shrieks, and expressions of joy quickly turned ghastly at seeing whatever was behind them. The four didn’t halt, yelling in unison: “Run!”

  Chapter Ten

  An aspect of Favor checked a very fine gnomish pocket watch for the sixth time. What was taking so long? You’d think that a vast workforce of countless undead toiling without pause—and with strength their previously living counterparts could not have mustered—would be able to make some kind of tangible progress.

  *Click*.

  The lime green sigh fogging from the skeleton’s mouth was proof that even he was tired of waiting. The aspect clicked the contraption shut and held its perfectly bleached skull with a bony hand. Seated cross-legged on an appropriated palanquin, it watched the minimal progress. It’s not as if the ‘princess’ had any use for comfortable seating when her bones were scraping at dirt and rock the same as all the others.

  It was just a forced cave in. Even if the blocks were sizable, excavation should not take this long. Just how deeply had the entryway collapsed? He dearly hoped it was not particularly far. They had a schedule to keep… oh. Wait. No, they didn’t. This assault on the mountain was significantly ahead of schedule. They weren’t supposed to be able to take the region for… what? Another decade at least before they’d even been slated to try?

  Favor counted his blessings that no demons were present. That would have altered this entire engagement. It also would have meant he’d not have gotten the credit for what was about to happen. Him, a mere Favor, succeeding in an assault that the bigshots hadn’t seen as possible. What an upset! He’d felt strung along at first, and hadn’t really wanted to come. It was a known suicide mission.

  Alas, favors are favors, and they were merely a currency for the powerful. Whatever insidious plot the Vizier had finagled was certainly working out, and the credit would be all his! Sure, the sudden… disappearance, of the Favor before him was… worrisome. Yet a bargain once struck is final. The aspect sharply looked up.

  After that freak rainstorm, it had turned out to be a very nice day. The sun was shining, and barely a cloud stained the sky. Had the Favor still been able to feel the heat on its skeletal frame, he might have even called it pleasant, had the threat of eternal torment not laid so heavily on its soul. Alas, such was the fate of a skeleton, and the reminder was always there; where you’d go if you’d fail. How easily failure came to pass. All it took was a little pull from a displeased caster and *pop*! An unimpressive pile of bones clattered to the ground and off you went, screaming back down into the abyss.

  As an undead, one really needed to work and show results to stay connected to your summoner. Especially as an intelligent undead; those were expensive and problematic to raise. Having been a necromancer several hundred years before this raising, this particular bag of bones was exceptionally keen to show immediate fealty.

  It was what had landed it in the ranks of ‘Favor’ instead of being stripped down to a ghoul, or ghast, or other near-mindless undead that would have guaranteed a downfall. Even undead, Favor shuddered from that thought. His bones rattled unpleasantly. Anything but going back to the abyss, and he did mean anything.

  The abyss was entropy personified. Infinite, yet contained in the worst of ways. The place was timeless, yet you could feel the seconds grind past. You didn’t have a body there, therefore you couldn’t do anything. Yet one could experience the violent, unknown, chaotic changes that occurred there. Things existed, but they were named such because they were otherwise indescribable.

  The aspect had no clue how he’d held onto even a scratch of sanity. It might have been the type of energy involved when he was fished back out? It had certainly been nothing like his own vague recollections of being a Mage. He never, not once, brought an undead into being which was something other than an angry, mindless murderpile. Your mind is one of the first things you lose in the abyss. Then when you come back, the return to a lack of pain is…

  Favor didn’t know how to describe it. Maddening, perhaps? He heard a chunk of rock cave in, and a glance let him see a fresh dust cloud obscuring the crushed bodies of easily a dozen undead. Maybe that was the problem? His poorly controlled army was digging a hole that just kept collapsing in on itself from above. A ‘two steps back’ scenario. His bony hand pressed to his forehead. Some intellect was certainly lost; how had it not noticed that sooner?

  Craving a distraction from failure, Favor glanced the other way. Some infernal geese honked at one another, having a tiff with undead c’towls. The c’towls! Now those were things of beauty. Sure, they’re the puffiest little monsters alive, but dead they’re all murder and no fluff. He loved them, which was an odd concept for a creature not actually capable of love. Was an undead skeleton even a creature? Probably not. A worry for another time. He scratched the losses and rough time of day onto the vel
lum.

  That’s odd, hadn’t it been barely morning? Why was it so bright? Forget that question, why was there a second sun, and why was it getting closer? Favor pressed the sleeve of its robe over empty eye sockets out of habit. Not that it did anything. The blindness only grew, and something suddenly enraged Favor. It didn’t even know what, or why; it was just so, so angry. That a skeleton could feel anger wasn’t considered. All higher thought was tossed out. Similarly, the other undead in the region also reacted in the same way.

  Favor reached out a clawed hand towards the incoming meteor, and saw his hand… melt? What the abyss? A creeping, awful feeling crawled over its being. It felt… soothing? What an agonizing, terrible experience! No soul that spent time in the abyss that acclimated to the normality of pain and discomfort could accept this atrocity. This feeling wasn’t just harmful, it was insulting. Being basked in this glow was akin to being afflicted by an Essence healing effect. Those tore undead up like a salt block in water, and the light from the fireball was no different.

  Something about the descending ball of doom made all the afflicted undead in the region howl bloody rage at the object’s impending planetfall. The burning meteor turned sharply in the sky, veering down at a forty-five degree angle to steadily whistle towards them. They wanted to attack it, rip it to pieces, charge it en masse and tear asunder whatever dared to take pity on them and take away their pain. They had earned their resilience!

  They should have known to hide. To seek cover. To do anything other than charge towards the depths of peril. Such considerations didn’t happen. There was only wrath, and only vengeance was accepted. The light had to die; they would make it die. It didn’t matter that their legs melted away to soup. They would crawl. It didn’t matter that their arms broke to brittle pieces like sugar cubes in hot tea. They would hinge forward on their jaws and bite!

  The enraged hordes didn’t get to do any of these things. They, along with all the vegetation, nearby land, and most other objects not bolted down with the weight of a mountain were wiped from the map. The mountain, unsurprisingly, was the only thing that didn’t budge. Everything else wasn’t so lucky as the full force of a meteor impact wiped the slate clean. The previously hilly and wall burdened city of Jian was reduced to flattened wasteland in a bright flash.

  Nothing remained as shockwaves uprooted and tossed matter out of the way. Stone wall sections flung far into the distance, sure to give whoever was below them an exceptionally bad day when it was time for the projectiles to come back down. The burning wreckage would be one thing, but the thousands upon thousands of Jian made swords and spears that zipped off into the distance like glimmering dots of glitter were sure to cause all sorts of strife.

  What would a lone adventurer think when a shining blade flicked through the sky, only to split the clouds and stab deep into the ground before them? So it was for a great many people. They thought that the heavens had suddenly destined them for a new calling; for the weapons didn’t just retain their Jian quality luster, unique shape, and honed craftsmanship. With the meteor’s impact, something more imbued itself into the crafts.

  The resulting dust plume mushroomed the sky. Mana crackled and flared into being as the impact point drenched the region in aberrant fire Essence that set aflame any wreckage and uprooted any greenery it could get ahold of. The landscape of waste and ruin was soon a raging caldera; a pyre that fueled itself. The inferno even caught lingering clouds of dust aflame.

  What had, a few minutes prior, been a war won ahead of its time was now reduced to a total loss. An explosive wave of Mana repelled rogue particles, and an orb of incinerating swirls helixed around a rising figure at the center bottom of the newly born caldera. The impact had crunched and packed earth much more than anticipated. Unknown underground tunnels that wildly sprawled were all empty space, and didn’t hold up as well as solidly-packed ground did when a several-ton object comes knocking from the skies above.

  Ember brushed off her shoulder and took a single step before looking at the devastation she’d wrought. Her power absorbing body emanated visible waves of burning energy. She was actively trying to pour as much of it into her environment as possible, and she’d taken the opportunity to sink several A-level Mage ranks into energy expulsion on impact.

  Securing her own well-being had been worth the cost of the resulting nuke she set off. Gathered walms of power released fully, and she now stood unharmed in the ruin of what had once, probably, been a place.

  When she’d noted an unpleasant lack of life during her descent, Ember had upped her output. There was no reason to hold back and attempt to save lives when there were none to hold back for. She didn’t care for the abundance of undead either. One stone. Two problems. Or in her case, one Ember-shaped meteor. Her rank ticked up again as she looked around. She’d bought herself precious minutes with that outburst, but it wasn’t good enough.

  Ember had spent far too much time looking for her friend, and she had more than a limit; she had a deadline. She was sure the current S-rankers were enjoying the few extra moments of game time, but she didn’t have time for that. Calling out seemed pointless, and since she’d only gotten a single response from her Mana fueled echolocation tracking, she was happy to have even gotten this close.

  Who gave up when so near to victory? Certainly not her! Yes. Good. That was a stable personality trait. Hold onto it. Keep it. Hold it tight and don’t let it go. That was one more thing that could provide a basis of her S-ranked actualization. The new body that would come into being couldn’t survive or thrive under the shaky self-image she currently had. Where in the Abyss was…?

  A *ping* reached her Mana, and Ember’s vision snapped straight down. A wave equivalent to a solar flare burst from her body as that tiny motion was performed at Mage speed while at full emanation. Ordinarily this was so wasteful one would die from it, but she was in a Judging.

  “Below!” Realizing what she’d said, and what she’d done to the ground made a chill grip her heart. Oh. Oh no…

  Panicked, Ember grabbed empty space above her head and spat blood. Blood? Yes, blood! Sure, it was mostly Mana, but Mages did still bleed! It was that darn ripped fire Essence channel, and the new celestial one wasn’t exactly helping. The channel had previously mended to a perfect connection, but the sheer mass of energy moving through had torn it right back up. The injury to her affinity channel was throwing her off. If she wasn’t currently being gorged in energy influx, she’d have no idea how to cultivate now that such affinity channels were present. How was she even going to cultivate as an S-ranker? Did that even work the same?

  She tried to push through the panic, which only caused increased blood loss. Her Aura laughed at the cost, shifting into the horribly expensive starlight variant even if it did little. Expensive was good right now! So was thinking she’d make it to the S-ranks! She would make it. She could do this, and Ember screamed to build herself up. “Come on, You’re a Yaran! Yarans can do anything.”

  Rogue firestorm Mana wreaking havoc in the region, and starting to do its own thing, stopped when it felt the pull. Turning, it hurried to fill the space between the A-ranked Mage’s hands. Ember squeezed her eyes shut, trying to think of something, anything, that could help her find the mind that she needed right now. Think. Think! What was connective enough? What would be a message that could be recognized when she couldn’t directly talk to who she needed? What would be the one easily recognized thing that would make someone realize she needed help, and either rush to her or let her find them easily?

  She glanced up and winced. Manastorms were no joke.

  Manastorms actively being fed without a solid intent were even worse. It crept into surviving material, and upon being called, sought to find form and meaning before answering to a hierarch. Mana was no different than Essence in that regard. It needed direction, or it would go wild. Ember’s pull was enough for it to adhere; for all of it to adhere. Some, however, had already self-generated things it was going to accomplish.<
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  While the Mana gathered, so did all the objects and items it had crept into; similar to the distance flung weapons, but on a far more deep and intense scale. While the weapons that flew far and wide had been ingrained with a Mana that changed their internal composition and structure to allow for a randomized fire-based effect, the effect in Ember’s immediate vicinity was far more profound.

  Entire suits of armor dug their way from the ground. Rising to heed the sounding bellow of the warhorn. Weapons burst from scorched earth to freely float to her beck and call. Circling around Ember’s being in a wide ring before being grasped by the empowered gauntlet of living armor, adding to their collective intent. Because Ember’s intent was to find anything that could help, her Mana did its best to improvise. Like a toddler trying to be helpful by bringing you a handful of mud when you casually mention needing plant food.

  Storming the region, Mana lashed out in its wild search. What was the region plentiful in? Weapons. Crafts. Creatures. Such scant options. Crystal cobras remade with Mana now sported three, rather than two, affinity beast Essences. They herded in a manner Ember was used to, adhering to a tactical rank and file. Each of them rose up once in ordered place, hoods flaring. They felt threatened because Ember felt threatened. Her power, freely emanating from her panic, bled over into everything she was wantonly calling.

  C’towls with fire instead of fur traipsed into formation with their common catlike grace. Owl intellect shone in their eyes as the geometric symbolism on their foreheads absorbed rogue Mana, forming into B-ranked Beast Cores as they sat on their butts. Geese rose… but exploded, burning to cinders as the infernal basis of the creatures couldn’t hold up to the trickle of celestial that was present in the raging, jagged lightshow pervading the area.