Cursing under their breaths, every student and instructor made a run for it. Artorian and Jiivra took up the rear, Astrea and Jiminus led the front, with Razor and Ali directly behind so they could work some stone if needed. Jiivra saw the violet cloud worming its way up the tunnel behind them at a glance. It was aglow with infernal energy, angrily bouncing off the metal tube confines as it thrashed forward. She didn’t need to hear the shrieking to somehow be aware of it. “That looks unfriendly!”
Ali’s voice called out loud from the front with good news. “Cavity dead ahead! Get through, we’ll seal the way!”
Earth students were already closing the gap they had to squeeze through long before the back of the line was close to making it. If they didn’t, even rough mental math said they would all be dinner. Jiivra shared a glance with Artorian. It didn’t look good for them if they didn’t hurry up.
Artorian glanced over his shoulder mid-hustle. “Doesn’t look very intelligent, or like it’s anyone we know.”
Jiivra shot him a look of fury and confusion. She was not okay with him risking a foolish ploy to buy them time, they needed him to funnel Essence between them. “Don’t you dare old man!”
She didn’t say more as a quick glance revealed some… unpleasant realities. There wasn’t a lot of refined Essence to go around anymore. They were all running on fumes, and the old man didn’t have much to spare. She was tapped, and far too close to her own death plane to really say anything.
“Grab those last in the line. Get in the cavity and work it from there. I’m going to buy you… those extra few seconds.” Jiivra bit her lip at the academic’s words. Emotion was breaking her, but she couldn’t afford to do so much as stop running.
“We’ve got fresh airflow in here!” one of the students yelled through the closing metal pipeline. That passage was getting awfully small. “We can get outside!”
Artorian smiled at one of his favorite people and pressed a hand to her back. His Aura winked out of existence as the Essence needed to sustain the soothing effect dropped below the minimum requirement. The light in the tunnel literally went out, and when Jiivra flickered on her own Aura… she was no longer running next to the old Elder from the fringe.
She bit her lip to silence herself, swooped up the two stragglers in an arm each, and hurled herself through the metal split and into the cavity behind it. She hated herself for shouting her next words… even if she knew it was necessary. “Seal it!”
As the metal creaked to a smashing close, a tiny, buzzing, red dot zipped through the final remaining inch of the passageway. Artorian turned. His back facing the closed metal seal. He was panting, sweating, sore, and out of breath. He relied fully on his Presence to carry him through life, and now that it was teetering… there was no point in running. He sucked in a breath, and his external Aura just barely sputtered back to life. “There we are, a little extra light to keep the violet worm at bay—gah!”
A violet claw was three inches from his nose. It had moved so fast. Based on the speed the Blight had been going, he should have had easily another seven seconds. He’d been deceived. While watching the tendril retreat, the charismatic, oozing voice clicked at him. Abyss. Cataphron. “Tut… tut… tut.”
A familiar shape crept into being as the amorphous worm shaped blob took on an appallingly familiar violet body of infernal energy. Cataphron soundlessly clapped his hands together. Why didn’t it make a sound? Ah. Right. No real body present to make sound with, probably just the voice box. “All that running! Look at where it brought you. I was so close… you were nearly on your knees. I thought ‘I have him’! Alas, it appears that I’ll have to wait, oh… maybe a minute longer?”
Artorian’s Aura sputtered, and in that blink of time the infernal violet body flashed forward, as close to the old man as it could get. The elemental ended up a scant three feet away, compared to the… thirty it had been before. Not good.
“I told you I was willing to wait for my sweet, sweet satisfaction. I had prepared follies and fogies as distractions. Pathways and prefectures of dead ends. Years of quips and one-liners. Here it was all… for naught. I’ll have my vengeance, and so much sooner than anticipated. Can you hear it my friend? The rumbling of my stomach? I wonder what you taste like…”
“Salt and vinegar.” The old man took a deep breath and steadied his Aura, regardless of how weak it was. He heard something, a sound the Blight clearly wasn't making. It was distinct, and utterly out of place for their location. His attention broke away from the Blight, and it was not happy about that.
“You’re a clown, I bet you’ll taste funny. No matter, it all goes to the same place.” Though it couldn’t see what had distracted its prey, Cataphron saw Artorian hold his hands up and clasp something invisible. The old fool was playing a trick on him again, but something about the fool’s expression made it feel… wary.
Artorian couldn’t believe what he was holding. It was living fire, but didn’t burn to the touch. If anything, it was soothing. His kind of soothing. The familiarity was making his heart pound as he held the tiny, single… bee.
It crawled around on his hand like a real bee, just like all other bees had loved to crawl around on him. He still didn’t know why they did it, but the sensation was heartwarming, and it brought a softness to his previously dim and dour face; a smile that was half sadness. “Well… will you look at that.”
The bee fluttered its wings at him. Undisturbed by his surroundings, Artorian pet the little beasty with a single, tender finger. Brushy brush…!
Cataphron screamed at him, but it only resulted in the barest minimum of reactions. “Look at what? There’s nothing! You think you can steal my victory by pretending to go senile? I have you, old man! You’re mine!”
A small set of chuckles left the Headmaster. His eyes rose up to regard the personified Blight. If he’d been wearing a set of glasses, he would have looked over the rim and adjusted them to cause a glare to shine off the glass. “No… so long as I have my moss in place, you’ll never have me. You’ll never find my last little trick, and it will strip you of all victories.”
The chuckle became laughter. His Aura weakened, but it was worth selling his last little distraction ploy. His enemy took the bait. The Blight found every instance of that odd, harmless looking moss and devoured it whole wherever it was found. It wouldn't allow a single thing to taint his satisfaction. “I will have the last lau… why are you smiling…?”
“Oh, Blighty…”
Cataphron took a cautious step back as Artorian plucked a patch of moss from his pocket. “I hope you packed your bags, because you’re going on a trip. You don’t eat the glowing moss.”
Lifting the bee to his lips, he exhaled fire Essence onto it. Speaking with a whisper. “Honey…”
The bee lit up with Mana, and finally the Blight could see what had been hidden as the celestial shell coating the insect peeled away. The opposing energy had hidden the creature from its gaze! The Blight felt wrong. Its ability to see was going through a worse psychedelic phase then even Astrea’s nightmare had caused. Cataphron’s reality was starting to go through an odd inter-twisting kaleidoscopic set of landscapes.
Exploding in a harmless burst, the bee sent out a pinpointing shockwave of Mana, loudly heralding its exact position. The cavern filled with ambient Mana, providing the general region an outburst of fire Essence as the Mana followed the direction to ‘give’, and purposefully disassembled itself. Artorian’s eyes shot open wide at the realization. Kicking his sun core into gear, the confined fire Essence slammed into the cultivator. This was in part a terrible idea, but Essence was Essence, and he was almost out. The C-ranked cultivator’s skin turned red at the rapid absorption, and his pearlescent core became hot, hot, hot!
The Blight wasn’t doing too well. All that awful moss had been imbued with celestial energy. It didn’t take being a scholar to know that a creature made entirely from infernal didn’t do so well when ingesting a material that was its pure antithesi
s. The identity trapped in the moss only made the effects worse. What had this terrible geezer done to this stuff? Where in the world did glowing moss exist which wrought havoc directly upon the mind? It didn’t have the ability to think any further, and blindly charged the old man.
Visibly unable to uphold the Cataphron identity, Artorian deduced there was no threat of triggering the land-law. But while the Blight could no longer reason, it was still bigger and had more Essence. It would win.
Against Artorian, yes. It would have won. Against the burning thing that split the earth from ceiling to sky like it was ripping apart a cardboard box? No, there it could not win. It also could not stop itself from trying. Infernal masses flooded the crevice and shot upwards in the form of countless gaping mouths.
Ember wasn’t interested in the defiant mewling of a fake B-rank incorporeal creature. Her left hand was raised palm up, and a tiny bee made of incarnate fire hovered a few inches above it. She regarded the scene below with sclera as dark as the deepest void in space, her body cracked and covered with searing spatial tears.
She leaked Mana like a shredded waterskin as she descended, yet her density only increased. Ember hit A-rank eight, causing a wave of energy to explode outwards. Her Mana easily burned away the oncoming darkness storm, and reached out to grip the culprit. A Mana shaped hand comprised mostly of flame and a touch of celestial squeezed the life from the Blighted cloud.
Phantoms shrieked, and her light shifted from torrential pyrostorms to radiant starlight. Artorian gasped in relief, feeling invigorated. His active cultivation drank in the Essence generated by the rapidly deteriorating Mana. Except that this variant was already in the configuration he desperately needed. He’d been a toe away from his Essence death plane, and he collapsed upon the ground, no longer even attempting to uphold the charade. The ploy had worked in the nick of time.
While he was certain the Blight would recover from consuming celestial Essence sooner than he liked, Artorian had known that in terms of raw power… the Blight was going to win out sooner or later. He was still stuck in a hole in the ground, living on a timer that was ticking toward ‘done’. When he squinted his gaze to look upon his savior, his hopeful smile bled away to horror.
“Ember!” he called out to her, hoping that the fractured creature in her shape was actually her. It was getting hard to tell, and it had been a taxing few days. From rescuing Astrea until now, life had been a nonstop wild ride of activity. He was exhausted. Still, from the look of it, the rest would need to wait. There was no rest for the weary, nor the wicked.
He tried again: “Ember!”
The spaced-out Mage blinked, her head jerking back an inch as she saw rather than merely looked. Mage speed was incredibly swift, and Artorian hadn’t finished his second call to her by the time she hovered before him, her arms embracing the old man as softly as they could. He still felt a rib creak in complaint. He spoke with great effort. “It is good to see you… my dear.”
Ember’s inhale drew in enough breath that all the air in the cavern moved. She was aflame, but didn’t burn to the touch. That, or his core was so hot he wasn’t feeling the singe. Hmm… little of both? His cultivation slammed shut as she hugged him; he couldn’t let Mana in.
Ember released him slowly, and a burning field in the shape of an orb surrounded them. It countered the Blight when it blindly attempted to swamp over them, but she didn’t seem to care. Her voice was as cracked as her skin, and Artorian gently took her by the shoulders. “You t… too. I n… need help.”
His nod was sharp, and he mentally caught up faster than her Mage speed could move. “Details. Short.”
Ember tried not to break her friend’s arms when she gently squeezed for support. She’d found him. She’d actually found him! But she was out of time. Ember would hit A-nine shortly, and then she’d have seconds on the clock. Her voice was hasty and frightened, her tone streaked with gasping tears as she tried to get the words out at the right speed.
“S-rank. I’m… Actualizing. I’m Incarnating. I don’t… I don’t have a stable self-image. I don’t know me. Who am I? Artorian, who am I? I’m going to rip apart without a proper personality, and I didn’t have the t… time. I don’t have the t… time.”
He’d never expected the knowledge from the Blight to have been such a boon, especially this soon. His arms shook off her uncertain grip, surrounded her shoulders in a hug as his mind raced. “I’ve got you. I have an answer for you. It’s not the answer you want, because it doesn’t answer the question you want answered. A philosopher does not find the right answer, they find the right question.”
“The correct question for you, my dear, is not who you think you are. Nor who I think you are. The right question, is who do you want to be. Those values, those viewpoints, those core patterns. Grasp those. Think of that which you would want most in this world, and claim them. Grasp them tight and hold them close. Find that which you would promise yourself forever and ever, and never betray. For that is the core of a person.”
She swallowed away a panicked breath as tears stained her cheeks; they were vaporizing as they touched her skin. She was here, listening, because she was placing her trust in the hands of a frail little human that wanted the best for his world. She desperately wanted to believe that she was part of that world. “W… where? How do I even begin?”
Artorian clasped her hands and closed his eyes. An idea came to mind, but he didn’t want to tell her. He considered it a violation, but… if it might save her… he had already prepared to die just earlier, what was a few extra minutes with a friend? “Ember, tell me again. Please, if you ever told me before. What was her name? The name of your youngest, the one they called the Fire Soul?”
Ember frowned; that was a sharp left turn away from a useful topic, but there was no way in the Celestial Heavens that he wasn’t asking for a good reason when the timer was so close to ticking. She hit A-rank nine, and swallowed as she diverted the energy away from the confinement of their safety sphere.
Everything outside of their sphere became molten slag, but that detail would need to wait. She closed her eyes, and sent her mental hand reeling into her heart to open up a box she did not wish to open. Gritting her teeth as steaming tears ran freely down her cheeks, she opened the box and pulled free the memory of her child. Her precious, dearest little one.
Her jaw moved, but no sound came out. He spurred her on, adding volume to his concerned words. “In your language…”
Her breathing became hectic, sporadic, shuddery. She snapped her eyes open, and within them Artorian saw only the void of space. The depths of the unknown, and blazing irises that swirled as a mighty supernova. She was different. Something had happened to Ember, and it was tearing her apart on more than just the S-tiered level.
He had a thought… it was a terrible thought. Ember swallowed, and this time her mouth moved, and words were spoken.
“Dawn. I wished to name her… Dawn. For she smiled bright and playful. She greeted the world with a noise of elation, and when I held her… she was at peace. At peace until the end. Until her last breath, my little one was the first ray of light on a new day. She was my hope. The first, and last Zaran. Taking the name of Yaran one iteration further.”
Artorian held her tight. This was taxing, heart-rending, and a deep burden. Yet he had to say it; he had to. “Think, my dear, of how you would have raised her. What values you would have taught, what lessons you would instill over the centuries of her growth. What would you have said, if she stumbled? What would you have done, had she been hurt? Where would you have been, had she needed you? For she needs you now. She needs her mother to think of her and all the things you would have done. For the soul of fire is named Dawn. The Incarnation of the will of flame awaits her calling.” He squeezed her harder, though she would never know it.
“Who, my dear, is about to become the Incarnation? Who better to honor the daughter that embodied hope than the one who holds tightest to her memory? You have named the
soul of fire, and she awaits you in the spirit of the Law. Greet her. Give her the life you wished to give her. None knows those values, those lessons, those desired personality traits better. Than. You.”
He swallowed hard, trembling. “You are not stuck being what someone else wants you to be! That’s not their choice to make. A sense of identity, who you are, is decided entirely by you. Let me meet you again. Let me meet the soul of fire. Please, let me meet Dawn. For that is the name of hope you have always embodied.”
The cracks on Ember’s body tore wide open.
A-rank Nine.
Zenith.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Death or graduation’. This was the universal motto by which the S-ranks functioned.
Pagacco and Duke hadn’t moved an Ur-piece on their board in over an hour. They just sat there and watched, unable to speak. They didn’t want to admit the failures they’d gone through to be so thoroughly stripped of their remaining S-ranked power. They could feel the inversion looming; it was just a matter of time before Ember was completely topped up and the judging concluded.
They knew the outcome to their ranking decrease. They were about to suffer incredible, horrific pain as their Incarna bodies turned inside out, reverting to the original A-rank bodies they’d had so long ago. Neither of them liked the idea of those forms after eons of being what they wanted to be, but it was inevitable. They had no good ideas on how to keep their current niveau of power.
Even the dungeon Karakum was silent… albeit for different reasons. The fire Law-bound dungeon Core knew something was afoot; it just didn’t have the intelligence to puzzle out what. The silence was… palpable and intoxicatingly depressing. Its two annoyances were about to lose something. It didn’t know what, it just knew it had to hide its unbridled joy. It had plans. Several, since it recently had a Mana influx that let a dungeon of its type and color actually do something.
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