The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4)

by Chris Eisenlauer

  “I’ve got him, Nils!” Vays cried.

  Jav was not alone in the development his martial prowess over the years. Vays had perfected his techniques—which past masters had sometimes needed a full minute to effect—making them nearly instantaneous. So even as Peshil was transforming into light, Vays was leaping into the air, his sword supported by both hands sweeping from overhead as he cried out, “Union Blade!”

  Reality itself seemed to be drawn into the Single Element Ghost Sword, Peshil’s light, too, substantiating the blade so that it was all that was real.

  Vays passed through Peshil and Peshil’s light failed utterly. In two great halves, skinless, bloody and separating according to the angle of the Titan Saber’s edge, Peshil arced to the ground, dead.

  Nils, already making his way back to the Palace, reformed the Porta Fighter and swooped low to accompany his squad leader. As Vays rose to his feet from his landing place he turned towards the Palace but before he could take a step, he froze in place, a perfect statue of not silver but gold.

  “Commander Vays?” Nils called as he neared, but then he too became an inert mass of solid gold, his momentum keeping him aloft briefly until he crashed to the ground.

  • • •

  As Jav passed over Gran Mal on his way to the black dragon he beheld a very disturbing sight. Below him, Brin Karvasti flashed and in her place there gleamed a perfect likeness in immaculate gold. The Dharma Clock disappeared, freeing the white dragon from its punishment. Jav looked further and knew that the gold of Gran Mal was not its own.

  “Scanlan?” he called through his Artifact, but got no response. Brin, he knew would be the same. He turned in his place in the air and saw that Gran Mid was still and shining gold. Gran Pham and Raus’s lower half, too, were a single, fused statue.

  Jav saw the new golden dragon approaching, but continued his progress, now backwards and at a greater pace, towards the black dragon. “Hilene! See what you can do with this new one! Icsain, you, too!”

  Hilene responded in the affirmative, but as Icsain started to comply in silence, he and Gran Lej were turned to a mass of solid gold. Hilene had seen what appeared to be a liquid stream of molten gold shoot from between the new dragon’s eyes, transforming all that it touched to the heavy, lustrous metal. Before she could get close enough to attack, that stream was aimed her way. Because of her psychic facility, she had gotten over her fears of receiving physical pain when still a small child. This lack of fear had done much to condition her natural reflexes, which were already superb and further honed by her practice of the Darkness Piercing Spear Hand. But hers were not the reflexes of normal human beings, or even those of other F-Gene fighters. She had trained tirelessly to ignore physical threats, so she did not flinch when the liquid beam came her way, and so what happened on impact startled her all the more. As the beam—for that is in fact what it was, its appearance alone was that of a liquid—penetrated her form, it triggered the Attenuated Splitter, overriding her will or ignoring it altogether. This unintentional splitting was painful in a way that she had never experienced and had difficulty explaining. It was also very disorienting. As she recombined, she found herself again being fragmented, and the process repeated itself three more times until she drifted senseless but still intangible towards the ground.

  Jav had turned again towards the black dragon and now landed upon its broad head, taking two steps before leaping forward, turning again and jamming the Kaiser Claw into its right eye socket as he descended. The iron eyeball was huge and Jav’s arms were spread as wide as was possible while still enabling him to grip it. Though worry had affected him somewhat, he’d been preparing the calculations for the Kaiser Claw all along the way so the solid metal eye quickly buckled and imploded in punctuated steps so that it was reduced eventually to nothing.

  Sustained golden light streamed over Jav’s shoulder, nearly missing both him and the black dragon, but the growing light at his back didn’t bode well. He shot a glance behind him and saw that the Root Palace largely was, and was still becoming, a treasure of gold, the likes of which no god had ever witnessed or had the hopes to possess. The metallic condition had overwhelmed the Palace proper and the courtyard walls and was still spreading upwards as the beam was finally exhausted. A great iron claw rose up and swatted him then, sending him to the stony ground. The force of the blow and the impact upon the ground dazed him. He looked up and saw the black dragon cover its right empty eye socket with the same claw it used to strike him as it turned to retreat from the Palace.

  “Toth Talpas!” Jav heard it speak for the first time. “You are late.”

  “But most welcome, Kels Ansrath, am I not?” the other replied.

  “You are. Come, Sera Fontessa. Toth Talpas has done what the lot of us could not. Let us return home and nurse our wounds.”

  “There is one more that yet moves,” Toth Talpas said, fixing his gaze on Jav as he started to sit up. The golden beam flashed and Jav was dashed to smoke as the ground shone gold for several meters in every direction of the impact point.

  1.4 RETREAT & ADVANCE

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  Jav stepped away from his hiding place and watched as the three dragons flew off. He rose up into the air and tracked them with his vision. It didn’t matter how far they went, and the curvature of the planet offered no obstacle to his sight when it was supplemented by AI. After a fashion, Hilene rose up to join him, but remained silent, knowing what he was about. For an hour he watched them until he was sure of their destination, another castle very similar to Peshil’s.

  Together they looked on in further silence at the Root Palace. Its gold exterior reached several kilometers up and Jav had little hope that anyone inside had been spared the fate shared by all of their fellows.

  “It would be a simple matter for me to check,” Hilene said, almost reading his mind.

  He nodded. “Be careful, Hilene.”

  Now she nodded in little self-conscious jerks. Still Dark, neither could see the others’s face, but she was sure he knew she was blushing furiously.

  Her first impression was that this was like swimming, only the water was solid gold. Though she had the ability, she rarely descended into the ground or into other massive solid bodies. They posed no real danger to her, but the thought of getting lost inside and not knowing when she might be able to find her way out was a compelling deterrent. The gold felt odd, too, exerting some vague, constant pressure upon the Attenuated Splitter. She was able to maintain control and was in constant contact with Jav, though, which helped her stay calm.

  She soon saw that while the gold beam did a fair job of joining contiguous objects, it didn’t fill large intervening spaces, so after passing through the initial outer husk of the Vine, she entered into lovely golden apartments occupied by perfect golden statues. She tried to take a straight line course in the unrealistic hope that the gold effect might have lessened as it reached the center of the Vine. From the outside it was obvious that the entirety of the Palace had been affected, so this was the only possible hope for survivors. And though perhaps unrealistic, she was not disappointed, for as she proceeded, she found herself in a vast open cylindrical space, twenty meters or so from wall to wall but rising up and continuing down interminably. She was certain that this was the hollow core of the Vine. The space was just that, though: space, empty. She refused to believe that everyone was lost and that the nearly eleven thousand year history of the Viscain Empire would end here on this barren rock.

  “You have not searched in vain, Miss Tanser,” a familiar voice echoed from above. “Rise. The next obstacle you pass through will be the floor of the war room. I await your arrival.”

  Hilene did as bid and rose up through the war room floor to see that neither the room nor its sole occupant had been turned to gold.

  “Minister of Affairs Witchlan! You’re all right.”

  “Yes,” he said, musingly. “We do appear to be all right in spite of what has befallen us. The hollow you found c
ontinues up nearly indefinitely. Twenty-seven kilometers up, you will find an aperture open to the outside. Please go at once to retrieve General Holson and then we can make our strategy, though I fear that, in the end, it will be rather simple and direct,” he said this last almost as an aside. “Go on now. Hurry.”

  • • •

  “Kill the gold dragon,” Jav repeated.

  “Yes, I know it’s overly simple,” Witchlan said dismissively, “but we believe that by doing so this metallic affliction will be lifted.”

  Jav, no longer Dark, pursed his lips and nodded. “As a matter of course, we’ll kill the dragons. I can only hope that your optimism is borne out. What makes you think that the effects will be reversed, though?”

  “Call it a hunch, Mr. Holson,” Witchlan said, refusing to call it instead Salton Stoakes. “And reverse isn’t quite right. I believe all that the gold dragon has done requires an effort of will to maintain. I believe that a transformed volume of this order may be heretofore unknown to it and that it may soon tax the creature’s mind. Of course it is speculation, and I charge the two of you with confirming the truth of it.”

  And it was speculation. When the Emperor had debriefed Salton Stoakes—who was himself a fine statue of gold at this moment—Stoakes had told him how one of the dragons had temporarily stolen his Artifact. Had the theft been clean and permanent, Stoakes would have died a messy death upon separation, but he had not. The Emperor could only hope now that the effects of the gold dragon’s abilities were similar, that they were, though perhaps long-lasting, or even without actual limits, not permanent.

  He’d never been this numb before. The Root Palace was his main source of sensory input and it was now a dead mass of unfeeling metal. For the sake of the Empire, with The Place with Many Doors and its promise of real freedom so close, he could not afford not to hope.

  “May we have some time before sortieing, Minister?” Hilene said timidly.

  Witchlan was hesitant. He stared at Hilene inscrutably for a time then looked to Jav. “It is up to you, Mr. Holson. Though we are eager to see an end to this condition, the logic I have put forth would tend to indicate that time is either immaterial or our ally. Do as you see fit, but do not disappoint us.”

  “Yes, Minister,” Jav said.

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  High, high up the length of the Vine, where the effects of the gold and the planet’s atmosphere failed to reach, Jav and Hilene sat upon an improvised gravity block. Witchlan had arranged for a shifting and altering of the Vine fibers to create a sizable compartment with artificial gravity. Far away from the facilities designed for human habitation and with no fragile machinery nearby to succumb to its affects, the gravity, though not precise, was greater than what even Jav was used to, but this Hilene had requested.

  She had explained to Jav what had happened when the gold dragon—Toth Talpas, he’d informed her—had turned its beam upon her, how, though she remained intangible, she was unable to control her division and how the beam had disoriented her.

  “I remember Raus talking once about his first assignment,” she said. “He said that you were able to tear ghosts apart with your bare hands. Well, with Approaching Infinity and your bare hands.”

  Jav nodded.

  “I want you to see if you can reach me with Approaching Infinity and then I want to see if I can put more distance between us.” She broke into a grin and looked down to the rough, resin floor, poking a finger absently at her right foot. “If you can reach me, though, I won’t have any advantage over you, and you’ll have no reason at all to fear me. In fact, you’ll be able to do whatever you want with me.” She said this as she looked up to meet his eyes, realizing too late exactly what she was saying. The flush spread out across her cheeks instantly.

  “Here,” Jav said, reaching for her chin and gently drawing her closer to him with his fingers. “This is what I want to do with you right now.” And he kissed her softly on the lips.

  When he pulled away her eyes were still closed, and her lips were still slightly parted. He placed his hands upon her shoulders and helped her rise to her feet under the crushing gravity conditions.

  “Go hollow,” he told her. “And I’ll try that again.”

  • • •

  Hilene’s speculation that Jav could, through rigorous and constant exertion of AI, reach her in her intangible state proved to be accurate. At the end of the day, he succeeded in brushing her lips with his own, a feat which both shocked and excited her. No one had ever been able to touch her if she didn’t want to be touched. Even purely mental assaults were largely ineffectual against her because of the nature of her power, and those that were able to “pinpoint” her were significantly reduced because of her already high Raw Mental Power of 4,500.

  She flinched reflexively when he reached her. He immediately stopped his efforts and backed away, but then she broke out into a wide grin and was so excited that she couldn’t control her breathing. She told him to do it again, and for several minutes she simply let him, reveling in the contact she’d been seeking for so long. She had asked for this training, though, knew that there was an appropriate time and place for everything, and was possessed of enough self-discipline to continue the exercise. That Jav had reached her was significant, but only the first step. Now she must retreat further into the places that were not places, to make herself even less accessible to the physical than were ghosts.

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  They started fresh the next day, exactly where they had left off. Hilene pushed her power, flexed it like a muscle, or tried to, for training one’s involuntary muscles is no mean task. She was aware of the mechanism inside her which made her intangible, but it was more like a switch, one which she had never really taken the time to examine beyond on and off. Her time at the Locsard Psychic Academy had mostly been spent becoming comfortable with the switch and learning basic and advanced defense techniques to supplement her RMP. Now, however, she looked inward, examined that switch, the way it responded to various kinds of mental stimulation, and found that she could push it, that she could recede further into whatever nether realm it was that received her.

  Through the course of the day, she succeeded in drawing away from Jav once again so that he could not reach her, though by evening, he was successful once more in laying his lips upon hers. They were both exhausted by the continuous mental effort, but Hilene felt that there was more to be gained by further training. She asked for one more day and Jav consented without argument.

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  The third day had them pursuing the same course, but it appeared that Hilene had reached her limit. With time and supreme effort, Jav was able to reach her and she could retreat no further.

  She shook her head and stared at the floor. “This isn’t right.”

  “What do you mean?” Jav said. He hesitated to say what he was thinking, that she shouldn’t always expect her power to top others’.

  “I feel like I’m on the verge of something, like I have been for most of this training.” She looked him in the eye. “I don’t feel that I need to be better than you, but you’ve opened my eyes and my mind to a potential I never even imagined.”

  “Okay,” he said. An awkward silence filled the room, lasting for what seemed a long time. Finally Jav spoke again. “Did I ever tell you how I trained with Kimbal Furst to develop the Ghost Kaiser?”

  “No,” she said.

  He grinned uncomfortably, scratched his chin, and looked away. “Well, it wasn’t with kisses.”

  “That’s encouraging, but on a different front.”

  “This is for both of us,” he said.

  She cocked her head in confusion then reeled at his approaching claw hand. His lips she welcomed; his hands, which in this case were death, she did not. She saw his hand grow closer and closer and time slow down as the distance between them was cut in half, then cut in half, then cut in half, opening an unlimited microcosm to him and enabling him to build up infinite momentum, infinite mass un
til he reached her, exceeded infinity, and obliterated her. She retreated as only she could. The challenge spurred an adrenalin rush, which commingled with the sudden lust she felt for him, giving rise to something she might only describe as an orgasm that reverberated through her entire being. She felt an explosion of liquid power/space/remove wash over her, taking her so far away from the physical that her perceptions changed—all of them—so that the physical world around her was utterly changed and she understood what it was to be a god.

  Unable to move, Jav gaped at her, his claw hand buried in her shimmering, semi-transparent face. Sparkles danced all around her, winking in and out of existence. “It’s beautiful, Hilene,” he said, giving himself a chill by voicing his awe.

  She seemed unaware of his words. She was looking all over the chamber, through the chamber walls, and finally her eyes returned to him where they went wide.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” he said, withdrawing his hand.

  “I can see them. I can see your Artifacts,” she said.

  Jav swallowed hard. “Oh.”

  “The Ritual Mask is dim, buried deep, but the Kaiser Bones are vivid. They’re all bunched up around your spine. If I wanted to, I could. . .” She started to reach forward and then stopped herself. She smiled a smile Jav had not yet seen on her. She closed her eyes briefly as she composed herself and returned to solidity.

  She took his hands in hers, and both proceeded to lose themselves in each other’s eyes. Finally, she could not fight off a yawn any longer.

  “I’m really tired,” she said. “Can we take a break?”