A harsh crunch repeated as something scorched, and glistening dark color tumbled down the crevice that would get them outside. The ones that were awake felt momentary terror grip their hearts as a skeleton shambled to its feet. The drop hadn’t killed it. The attacks above hadn’t killed it. They were out of Essence. They were abyssed.
Blanket blinked at the entity of hate and murder that looked at its family like it was about to tear them asunder; mostly because the mindless thing was about to do exactly that. The sugar glider took exception to a threat.
Jiivra didn’t quite believe her eyes at the sight that came next. The waking students were silently glued to the… fight? That couldn’t have been called a fight. It was easy to forget that, between the love and sweetness, Blanket was still a C-ranked beast. The glider zipped over in a celestial flash and clamped jaws on the back of the undead’s glossy skull. One *crunch* later, the pile of bones harmlessly collapsed into a pile. They watched as individual bones dissolved into misty black sand.
Blanket bristled. Standing up on his hind legs, he looked up to the crevice the undead had fallen from. Oh, it was not having any of this. Slowly, the Glider sat on its haunches. It chuffed at the ceiling light, daring another to try and come down here. A few glances told Blanket that his family was tired. They needed sleep. Blanket was awake, and strong. When it saw Jiivra smile before weakly nodding off against Astrea, it took on the mantle of responsibility.
Blanket defends.
Blanket protects.
Chapter Sixteen
The Blight glanced up to the ravine above. All it needed was one undead. Just one… to fall close enough for it to grab. Since its vision couldn’t be seen by others, it was confident that this plan wasn’t something his… company… had seen through. There were things it wanted to do, but it had held off on wantonly attacking in favor of a higher priority. As usual, distractions were getting in the way.
“What was it you said?” Artorian rapped his knuckles against his forehead. He recalled, and mimed the words with as much insult as he could muster. He disliked parroting the Blight’s words, but it was all for the sass! “Oh, you can’t begin to understand how wrong you are there… you might have had a chance.”
A cruel smile crossed his lips, so unobstructed and visible that Dawn quirked an eyebrow. She didn’t know the old man to be one for malice. Her senses felt the change on his skin before his lips pursed into an expression of cheeky amusement, like a child that knew something a sibling didn’t and couldn’t wait to tell mother.
The violet Blight elf hummed as it pressed a hand to a nonexistent hip. “Shame that you really don’t… you’re more drained than a twisted rag, squeezed dry of water and left to hang in the sun. You’re holding on… how, exactly? You should be crumpled.”
The academic laughed back with a mocking ‘Oh, hoh, hoh!’ “A comment on my well-being? I’m in better shape than that pitiful excuse of a body you’re trying to form. Your ears aren’t even… even. Might want to work on your shaping technique, boy-o…”
The Blight elf snarled and lashed out a dissolving violet whip of desiccating energy at the irritant. There was no reason to let the mongrel keep talking. The desire of watching the bug suffer over a long period of time to savor his slow demise had been fully replaced with a need to just shut. Him. Up.
A pleased smirk graced the Blight’s locally formed body, but it faded and dropped to dissatisfied agony as its attack was blocked by… it didn’t know what. The invisible orb surrounding the old man had stopped whiplashes from twenty differing directions and bent angles; all the hostile energy stopped dead in its tracks.
He shot a glare to the Actualized hovering nearby, but she silently blew the Blight a kiss. Of course she wasn’t going to let her friend be threatened. The protective energy wasn’t even visible; like it occupied a part of space not active in the real world, but still prevented his assault all the same. S-rankers were known for their greyscale effects, yet it had perceived none needed to put the shield into place. Wasn’t it a requirement that the field activated if they used any Soul energy?
*Clap. Clap. Clap.* Artorian mockingly copied the clap Cataphron had given him shortly after he’d first woken in that awful pit of despair, filled with countless dead. “Look at you, trying so hard… really though, fix those ears?”
The old man winked and pointed to his own left ear, whispering, “I’m sure you’ve heard this plenty of times but… it’s a little short!”
Dawn covered her face to stifle a brutal giggle. The Blight wasn’t remotely as amused at the two-millennia-old stab. “There is nothing wrong with my ears. They’re supposed to be like that. It’s… stylish. I won’t have my favorite technique be spat upon by a creature such as you.”
Artorian brushed his ears and nodded sagely. “Correct, and you saved me the need to ask a question… awfully kind of you!”
The darkness screamed at him with a hundred raging mouths, but didn’t advance. Its attacks repeated, only to be equally rebuked as the hot orb made his Essence whips catch fire. Essence, catching fire? Soul energy was a cheat.
Artorian held his hands behind his back, face aglow with maximum snootiness. “You see, you’re right. I am awful at techniques, absolutely terrible at them. I’ve been relying on a trick I learned from my dearest friend here to get the Essence back by creating a zone of sovereign Presence. A space owned by me. Mostly I just throw Essence out, carefully crafted with identity, purpose, shape, intent, and a myriad of other factors. However, if I throw it out, it mostly isn’t coming back. Not much of a technique if it isn’t stable and fails to reel in the majority of spent energy.”
He trotted towards one of the energy tentacles bearing down on an invisible shield. Yet his walk seemed to move the shield, forcibly altering the attacking whip pattern as well. He wouldn’t be able to inspect it closely. A shame, but he described the knife the Blight was about to get shanked with.
“Yet… for all my ineptitude, I could not have even attempted such a feat if I didn’t have one, particular thing that let me do it. To manipulate Essence, I need a cultivation core. A refining technique that lets me gather, store, and use relevant energy. Why, I would venture to say even Dawn still has one, and so did the Wood Elves! Strange thing, that last one. You see, theirs weren’t in their actual bodies. Yet still, they use and refine techniques with skill I haven’t had the time to replicate.”
He paused in his stride, and winked at the floating S-ranker, who promptly pretended to react as would a shy noble lady to a troubadour playing beneath her window. “So that leads me to a simple conclusion, Blighty. As you just so kindly confirmed for me, you’ve been using techniques. Honestly, you think you’re brooding and clever but your ideas have as much spice as a salt sandwich.”
The Blight didn’t like where this was going, but couldn’t do much about it. That abyssal Actualized was hanging around, stifling his wick so it could not burn. That failed student from the mountain was also still not shutting up, and electric distaste sparked through its mind when Artorian asked a question that no one ever should. “Sure, you generate Essence, yet that isn’t enough to satisfy the requirement of control. So, my dear boy… you say you can’t be killed. I say, where is your spiral?”
The Headmaster pressed fingers to his puffed-out chest like a guest lecturer at a public forum, adding more pomp to an already pompous, purposefully aggrieving choice of words. Meanwhile, the Blight was sending an impressive, diverse array of differently shaped and identity imbued attacks at him. It didn’t like being looked down on, in fact it actively despised it. It was just more proof for the academic that the lack of self-control was indicative of having poked a sore spot.
Dawn was having a great time. Fresh from the inversion, she was still ‘cooling off’ and coming to terms with just what exactly she now was. It was thrilling. She knew borderline nothing about what to do from this point; beyond the fact that she’d need to learn new things all over again. The age of stagnation was over for
her, and she delighted in the thoughts of future opportunities while lounging about. So she indulged in a show of verbal backhanding while still ‘waking up.’
Watching her friend lambast an ancient… evil? Well, it was elven in the golden age and thought it was doing well for itself now. So… evil idiot? The correct term was ancient idiot. There was also something annoyingly familiar about the way the violet body was shaped, and Artorian’s mention to the ear had made her pay attention. There was a poem in her family concerning the sacrifice of the first Aran; the person whose lineage she had taken the name of, as she intended to start it anew.
She tried not to hum as she recalled the verse.
‘In depths of void, and coldest spite.
There lived a creature of darkest night.
It spoke with haste such that it spat.
A tale of an ego that could fit within no hat.
The first of Aran fell to lay it low.
Yet none under the sun could deliver a fatal blow.
If ever the dark would see the light.
All those lives shall be granted respite.’
Dawn mused over the verse a few more times, but found no wisdom in it that she could offer to her friend. The first Aran had been like her, a fresh S-rank, though one tied to a higher Law than her. If her greatest forefather hadn’t been able to extinguish this stain from the world, she wasn’t going to do it either without help. Yet that was just the thing: she had help. A memory flashed of her time within the bonfire. The lesson that one couldn’t, nor needed to do it all alone.
Dawn’s smile flashed at her wordy friend that was quipping back and forth with the Blight; both untouchable as they flung poorly veiled insults at one another. They were each trying to step onto some higher, more noble platform of moral superiority. The dark one was going to have difficulties with that challenge… if you wanted to wax poetic, you could not come ill-prepared. Unfortunately it appeared ‘Blighty’ over here hadn’t just been idling time away. As amused as she was over the verbal destruction being swung about with the subtlety of fish being used as clubs, she cleared her throat.
Space warbled. Grey exploded from her being, and Dawn frowned as she found that she was the only one capable of moving freely. Everything else was stuck, stopped. She hadn’t done anything different? Why was there a field now? Could she make it go away?
Space stabilized as she thought about making the effect disperse, but the grey remained. Oh. It was even worse than not tightly controlling your Mana at all times. She hadn’t held too much Soul energy before, but now the trickle was building bit by bit, and her thoughtless action had caused some to… leak? No, not leak. She’d lost nothing. It had just… forced its effect upon the world? No. Still wrong.
She nearly snapped her fingers, but stopped herself as she realized she’d cleared her throat at S-ranked speed. Not Mage speed. Mage speed was sluggish in comparison. Where was the sound she made in her throat? Oh, it was still here, traveling as a visible ripple of sound waves. Not very fast, but in motion. Dawn realized the effect of those tiny waves might… utterly reduce anything within in a sneeze’s radius to fine particle dust. The grey field was preventing an effect from being unleashed upon the world.
It wasn’t an attack, or some special feature. It was a defense, a precaution! Well, a little late now, it was out in the world. Her own fault, really. So it was her task to stop it. What to do… more energy wasn’t going to fix this. A voice played in her head as she tried to ponder. “You looked, but you didn’t see.”
Without trying to physically do anything, she looked around. What was different? What was new? Aside from the world being grey… grey. It was grey. Why was it grey?”
She could feel a smile in her thoughts. “Now that… is the correct question.”
Dawn was imagining Artorian’s voice, but it helped. The region of space she occupied didn’t defy the rules of nature currently in progress. It more… took them elsewhere? This was her space, and the earlier mention of sovereign territory came to mind. Not exactly the name using Presence should have. It was just Presence. It also just happened to make it easy to reclaim resources spent in an area. Like taxes. Oh… sovereign territory. She got it now. Clever.
So, what was here, and what was ‘elsewhere’? Motion in the space wasn’t present. The world was still. Her grunt was still ‘here’. Could she… move the grunt ‘elsewhere’? She focused on it since the world was essentially not moving anyway. She could see the soundwave fade into obscurity, and successfully move… ‘elsewhere’. Well, that was going to need significant exploration in the future, but as soon as the threat she hadn’t intended was gone, the grey effect on the world dropped. Much like her friend did.
The Blight brushed itself off, then pointed at the fallen academic just to laugh. It had experienced S-rank pressure before, and Artorian hadn’t. Gasping for air, the Headmaster heaved in a breath and sat up on his butt. “Great Woah! What in the name of cultivation was that?”
Dawn pursed her lips and said nothing. She was keeping up a shield of Mana around her friend, since that’s what she’d had available at the time. Yet her control was starting to crack as her Mana was fed into her soul space, and her Soul-ranked… something… gulped it down to trade it in for Soul energy. It was just like trading Essence for Mana; except she couldn’t discern the source.
A world of grey washed over them all again as Dawn turned. Just turned. Oh, this was hard! Even just thinking of the Mana shield made the orb suck away from its current position, leaving Artorian vulnerable. No! Not acceptable! With a wave of her hand, a new bubble formed in place. She’d done it hastily, and had forgotten something. Still, protections were in place!
Artorian was on the ground again when the grey field lifted. He heaved a deep breath again. “Dawn, my dear! Please do be careful with those, I can’t breathe when you do that!”
Controlling herself, she really pressed herself to drop to Mage speed, then mundane speed. Working on it, she realized that the confines of that bubble didn’t have a replenishable air source. She altered it to allow for some imperceptible holes to allow filtering. She kissed out the words, “Sorry, bee-bee…”
She got the conversation back on track. If she was losing control of her abilities the more powerful they got, a quicker resolution was better. He’d been onto something early on. “So, why is the location of Blighty’s spiral important?”
Chapter Seventeen
Artorian brushed himself off. He could have sworn something odd had occurred in the space around him. It felt cramped, but he was already mentally trucking along. He too, wanted to give this annoying foe a fatal back of the hand.
“Do you recall in the Grove, how Wood Elves retained their Core techniques outside of their personal bodies? I am convinced Blighty here is no different. There’s no way this fake body before us, or messy amalgamation-mass down below, holds a cultivation core able to hold enough Essence energy to make our boy here ‘all-reaching’. Words from his own mouth.”
The academic pointed an accusatory finger at the arms-crossed violet Blight; who was snarling at being picked apart like this. It needed an undead to fall already. “The techniques in use don’t appear too cheap either, and I’m a wasteful fool when it comes to expenditure. I can tell. So given your flattening earlier didn't do him in. It means the vulnerable part isn’t what we’re looking at. Like we’re facing a phantom of the original. He hasn’t been defeated because nothing has been attacking it somewhere it can actually be hurt.”
The Blight snapped at him, “So what? Theories aren’t going to help you! If there was such a thing, it could be anywhere. Maybe even on the moon!”
The creature bent backwards to laugh, but it petered out quickly when it saw the foxy smile the old man had plastered on his face. “Awfully strange that you mentioned waiting on an undead to come by, so you could escape. Your Core isn’t anywhere far, it’s here. There’s no other place it could be, because of the very thing supposedly protecting you from Da
wn.”
She picked up on that cue, but said nothing. It was better for the attack strategy to be laid out entirely.
“A function of starlight definitely hurts you. Yet if it’s not affecting anything except rogue fumes. Not very effective, yet Dawn supposedly can’t harm you because of a land-law. Why else take that ridiculous elven body and personality? Not that much of a personality is left. Now, to be immune from whatever she can do to actually hurt you, you need that land-law. Funny thing, that; do you know where land-laws don’t work?” He was beaming. The Blight wanted to tear his throat out.
“Outside of that land’s area! When you leave the relevant territory, the rules in that place can’t express themselves upon you anymore. You should have seen the books available on the topic in Alexandria’s library. Interesting stuff… so if the only place you can be protected by the land-oath is here, then here is the only place it could be relevant. That means your Core, your real body, is here. There is also a second, incredibly important aspect to consider.” He brushed his beard. The Blight was desperately looking for ways to silence the man; and it noticed something. A tiny space in the shield, just enough for particles… and particles is all it would need.
“I was wrong before. There can only be one land-owner of a given area. You were right, and I repeated the sentence just for this reason. ‘I’ could hurt you. For ‘I’ am the landowner, and a land-rule that prevents you from harm in general will not function if the land-owner rescinds the ruling. I just have to say that I revoke y…”
*Chhlggg!* Artorian fell to his knees and grasped his throat. Tears of pain ran from his eyes as he turned red. Unable to breathe or speak after inhaling… infernal particles? Abyss! He flickered his Aura to life and switched it over to affect his Presence, filling him with the effect as the heavy celestial Essence in the Aura trashed what was preventing him from breathing. His voice, unfortunately, had taken a severe toll. Blood dribbled from his lips as he coughed. He saw that Dawn was already purging the area with… he didn’t know what. Fire? It was probably fire, but it didn’t feel hot to him; it was also bright neon blue.
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