by Dakota Krout
“Ah yes, is that where this happened?” The Master waved his hand at Dale’s body. “I had thought that this dungeon was the product of my attempt to create a dungeon over a decade ago, but the soul involved is too different for it to be one of mine. What do you know of that?”
Dale was quiet while he decided how much to say. “Depending on how you look at it, this dungeon was created either well over a decade ago or just a month or so. When we attacked the Tigress Queendom to regain the dungeon’s Wisp, the necromancers tried to escape through a portal. Most made it, but as the final few were escaping, the portal was impacted by chaos. I… somehow… the portal connected through time, and I was sacrificed to create this dungeon. The current-day dungeon had been holding open the portal and took my memories back into itself. We share a soul because I was killed to create the dungeon, and Cal remade my body to rid itself of its newfound human morals.”
“That… that is the most incredible thing I have ever heard in over five hundred years of life,” The Master said after he had fully processed everything Dale was saying. “Is this common knowledge?”
“It wasn’t, but I have no doubt that it is about to be.” Dale looked around and noted how many eyes shifted away swiftly. “Ugh.”
Chapter Fifty-five
“Dungeon!” The Master spoke aloud, trying to get my attention without shouting. “Cal, we have need of your assistance.”
“Whoa, easy, Cal.” Dale at least sounded concerned about this; he must be able to tell that I was serious. “We are here to ask a favor. We aren’t here to attack you or anything like that, right, Master?”
“Of course not.” The Master seemed upset by the tone of the conversation. “I’m guessing the Guild was telling him they were going to cause damage? Maybe they gave a show of force? Morons. That is just asking for trouble. If someone doesn’t want to work for you, there will always be ways they can hurt you. Dun- that is, Cal, we would like your help in stopping Xenocide. We need to find a way to dismantle those Runes or possibly send them away.”
I waited a moment so that Dale would panic a little. That never got old.
“Well, the planet might be destroyed, so you get a place to live,” Dale shot right back.
Dale pulled a face, and The Master correctly guessed the reason for it. “Cal, just a hint of what this might entail. We are going to be attempting to send those Runes off our planet, to draw the moon away from our world. We would be pooling all of our most rare resources and esoteric knowledge to make this happen. I have forbidden Runes, dark knowledge that humanity was forbidden from ever learning for hundreds of years. Would you like to be a part of this venture, or should we do it ourselves… somewhere else?”
Water was pouring off of the ceiling near them, a visceral reaction that I stopped as soon as I noticed it. I don’t think I had ever drooled before.
“What do you mean by that?” Dale looked around, trying to find a hint of my advancement. “How high have you reached in the last few days? …Are you the reason there was no Mana storm? Did you go and absorb all of it?”
That snapped Dale back to reality. He repeated my words to The Master, who nodded. “Excellent. I’m happy to learn of your progression; it will be more helpful than you know. Hmm.”
He rubbed at his chin, then looked around. “B-rank nine… I remember it well. This rank is a difficult one to break through, and even when you do, it may not be apparent right away. The others all seem to have clearly delineated objectives, such as gaining a spiral, reaching a certain amount of power, forming an aura and empowering it, or gaining Mana. The A-ranks is all internal, within your mind and soul, and begins with the laying of your foundation. Only when you have gained a certain amount of solidity, when your foundation is settled, do you reach the A-ranks. In fact, perhaps it is simpler than I think, and I can tell you the key to the A-ranks right now. Being able to manifest your law and combine a portion of your foundation into it.”
“In fact, perhaps that is it. When you can store an item in your world, you will need to have settled your foundation. That seems to be the minimum requirement for anyone I have ever met in the A-ranks. Of course, you won’t be storing a living thing. You would need to create a soul-key for that, which requires that you sacrifice a portion of your soul. While people do it… they are typically beast tamers or some such. It is very dangerous and wasteful in the extreme if done without a purpose. Also, most people’s foundation simply cannot handle the inclusion of external life. Their souls would fight each other. Now, the benefits for those who can properly utilize…” The Master looked at the stunned people around him and smiled. “I always wanted to teach.”
“You know, we have been looking for an instructor in the infernal wing of our academy,” Dale stated hopefully, getting only a short laugh in reply. It had been worth a shot.
A young man cautiously approached the group. He bowed several times as all eyes in the cavernous room turned to rest upon him. “I am so sorry to bother you, but I was tasked with coming here and informing you that the Dwarves have arrived. The… um… their leader. King, I think? I-”
“We understand,” Madame Chandra jumped in to rescue the youngster from his babbling. “Thank you; you can leave.”
The boy bowed once more and ran away, obviously terrified of the ominous ‘Master’. Brianna stepped through the shadows and stopped next to Dale. “I suppose we should get moving then. Dwarven metallurgy and their talent with shaping the earth will be paramount to this project. Cal might be able to replicate it or even do a better job with the initial creation, but there is no one more versed in altering metal.”
“There was an actual reason to call the races together, then?” Dale looked askance at the Dark Elf. “I really thought that it would just end up being a power play.”
“It will,” the Elf responded pessimistically. “There is no other choice than for him to demonstrate his power. There will be someone, some insignificant speck that won’t listen to reason, who won’t see this as the end of the world but as a chance to add some gold to the pile. So The Master will obliterate them to show the rest how easy it was for him to do so. There will be no uprisings after that. No. If Xenocide doesn’t want to do it, The Master will rule the world by the end of the day.”
Silence followed her grim proclamation, even The Master unsure of how to respond. Madame Chandra let out a harsh bark of laughter and glanced at him. “Just like you always talked about when we were kids, huh? This whole event has sped all your plans up, didn’t it?”
“I wanted to do it through diplomacy, through words and deeds that sway the hearts of the people. You know better than anyone that I would have never chosen this path!” The Master angrily turned her words against her.
Dale joined into the conversation when it was obvious that no one else would, “Can we just go meet with them and start working on a plan? There is the possibility that they will understand the g
ravity of this situation, isn’t there? That we will be able to point at Xenocide and get them to understand that fighting is futile?”
“All we can do is try,” Tyler chimed in, having caught up to the group just as Brianna had turned glum. He wilted under the gazes sent his way and busied himself with a roll of vellum that he had brought with him.
“Dale.” Chandra reached out and brushed some dust off his arm, “I don’t think that you should attend the upcoming meeting. I know that it is a weakness of the powerful to see lower ranks as lesser, but the fact remains that you will hurt our chances of resolving this peacefully by your mere presence.”
Narrowing his eyes at her, Dale folded his arms to cover the fact that his hands were balling into fists. “You aren’t joking, are you? Madame, I have been the one who-”
Brianna impatiently stopped his speech, “No one is doubting your contribution or intellect, Dale. Those of us who know you understand, but for now, just shut your mouth and find something else to do for a while. Take this order from your new Queen, please and thank you.”
Dale looked at her somberly. “I’m… I’m sorry for your loss, Brianna. Long live the Queen?” Still, he took a breath to argue his point. Brianna flicked him in the forehead, sending him spiraling into unconsciousness against Tyler, who needed to scramble to keep him from falling on his face.
“Brat,” she murmured affectionately. “You need to learn to follow before you can lead, my Duke. Let’s get moving.”
The powerful members of the council vanished in a whirlwind of displaced air, leaving Tyler holding Dale’s limp body. Tyler started dragging him toward the entrance, moving faster and beginning to sweat when he saw a few curious Bashers approaching them.
Chapter Fifty-six
I told Dani with satisfaction as I looked back over the progress of my foundation. I was extra happy with my choices to this point; the fact that I had been creating air instead of earth allowed me to shift around what I wanted to see in my inner world. Why did I need to create a copy of the world I lived in? Because it was easy? That wasn’t my usual process!
I projected an image of what I saw to Dani and started detailing my thoughts,
I paused and waited to see what Dani’s reaction would be. She pondered long enough that I was concerned about her final decision. “I like it, but you are missing a lot of details. What about the oceans that you will likely need to bring along with you? What if you make six landmasses, then another area that is ocean? You can freeze portions of it, boil others, and then you can always use it as a source of easy water if you need to instead of creating it fresh every time.”
As a salute to their influence on my construction, I decided to name my new sketches of areas. The connective water would be a ‘bifrost bridge’, as it had two states: frost or steam. If I could replicate this in the real world or even do it in my inner world, I would have a lot of fun. Right now, I was only playing with my mental projection, but it felt right somehow. By my naming scheme, would that make my ice and water world ‘Hel’? Sure, why not. I could then- *Oof.* I felt like I had been punched directly and quickly needed to turn my eyes inward. What I saw was… not shocking but still very interesting.
My foundation was splitting, following the patterns I had designated in my mental projection. It wasn’t perfectly smooth, and I needed to intervene multiple times, or there would have been some catastrophic collisions, but my mental vision was soon realized within my soul. It was amazing how much my mind impacted everything I did, especially to my own being. If I had a head, I would have been shaking it in wonder. As the corruption-sketched landmasses settled into their positions, I felt like I had finally decided upon the shape my foundation would take. Something within me *clicked*, and the Essence in and around me vanished.
There was a small clap of displaced air as my Core took every bit of available power from the area around me, but other than that, I felt no different. Hmm. What was it that Master guy had mentioned? Was I in the A-ranks now? I focused on a small rock near me and tried to will it into my Core instead of absorbing it. I kept staring at it, pulling, pulling… and with a small *pop*, it vanished. There was no increase in the amount of Essence coming into me, so I hadn’t accidentally dissolved it with influence. Did I pull it into my inner space?
I looked around but quickly realized that I was looking for a small rock in an area with the landmass of a planet. Then again, it was my soul, so I felt like there should really be a way for me to scan the contents quickly and see what didn’t belong. I poked around for a moment or thirty and reeled back as I figured out the different ways to look. Everything in my soul had a certain ‘feel’ to it, and when I was looking at the world like this, I could feel what wasn’t entirely ‘me’. Even though I had created the rock in the real world, it was still by using what was available out there. There was no perfect way to describe how it felt, only that the difference was instantly apparent to my mind. The rock had found its way into the massive orb of water and was hidden by the sketches of what would be millions of gallons of water and ice. No wonder I hadn’t seen it.
Now, though, I had confirmation that I was in the A-ranks! At least by the metric given to me by the second-least trusted man on the planet. Still.
“Cal, if you need to ask, you probably… oh. Yeah. It appears that we are. I didn’t even notice; that was the smoothest transition to a new rank. Wow, yeah. A-rank.” Dani seemed unsure how to handle the transition.
<...We did it!> I cheered with a ton of exaggeration. That was the most anti-climactic…
“Cal! Look at the Silverwood tree!” Dani broke my grumpy mood with a simple statement, and I turned to look at the Silverwood tree, which was blooming!
“I can’t believe how good that smells!” Dani sighed happily at the heavenly scent that I couldn’t experience. “Wow, we should definitely steal this scent for our own uses.”
My two current favorites were absorbing the passively increased Mana in the air at a prodigious rate, and right then, I realized something amazing about my power. Not only was I able to absorb any type of Mana from others, it seemed that my own power could feed them as well. I was a universal receiver as well as donor. The power of my Mana was not only meant to boost myself, it could be used to power Mana-based creatures directly! It seemed that I had been underutilizing my powers to a vast degree and that I had kept the same ability that I had with Pure Essence. I had been splitting the power into its constituent parts and only feeding them Mana tha
t fit their current archetypes, but for the elementals - at least - that was unnecessary. Interesting!
Naturally, I started running tests right away. I tried treating my Mana in the same way I handled my Essence-based influence, just to see what would happen. Instead of an invisible gas-like power, my Mana-based influence created sparkles in the air that caught any light and reflected it like glitter. The first time one of these ‘sparkles’ touched an elemental, their power would substantially increase. Careful testing showed that increased sparkles were beneficial but not nearly as much as I would have expected it to be. For instance, no matter the amount of sparkles I devoted to my new infernal lava spider, Aranea, it never reached my own ranking. As usual, the same rules for growth seemed to apply. No creatures at my own strength level without somehow making it happen either by luck or disaster, and even if I were able to… controlling it would be near impossible.
Back to my original realization, Aranea and Imbrem Aureum were swelling in size, then taking a few steps deeper down the ramps and being compressed by the gravity Runes again. They were both blazing with power now, having reached the mid B-ranks. When your entire being was compressed Mana surrounding a Core, rapid growth was more than possible; it may as well have been a requirement. Somehow, I had also unknowingly found the key to their progress by increasing the gravity to such intense levels. If the gravity in here had been merely standard, they would have simply become larger and larger blobs, almost certainly reaching a critical mass and losing control.
There was another aspect to these elementals that had me laughing with maniacal glee; they were almost purely Mana. Not only did this make them nearly immune to standard damage, it also meant that they had impeccable control of their Mana and were vastly more powerful than a standard Mage of the same rank. If a B-one Mage fought a B-one elemental, the fight was almost certain to turn in favor of the elemental.