by E. M. Hardy
Now it was the Order of Rats, who found some way to hit him so hard, so fast, that he didn’t even realize what happened to him.
“Yeah… yeah, I’ve been shafted more times than I care for. So what’s your point?”
“You know what’s funny, hypocrite?” Silence… long enough to make Martin wonder if the question was rhetorical or genuine. More silence, and that’s when Martin knew the Thing was actually waiting for an answer.
“Look, if you have something to say, why don’t you just say it already and stop wasting my—”
“The way you think you’re invincible,” continued the voice, waiting long enough only to cut down Martin as he responded. It seemed to gain strength with each passing moment, its initial faint presence growing more solid, more concrete as Martin focused on it. He could almost make out the ethereal shape of the voice as it continued gaining traction within Martin’s consciousness.
“You still believe that nothing can touch you. You think you can take things easy, rest on your laurels and just let things happen. I will tell you now, hypocrite, that power is taken, not squandered. For example—”
That’s when Martin felt something sharp and painful stab deep into himself. He looked down and noticed some sort of ghostly protrusion sticking into his sense of self, his consciousness within the void.
He roared first from surprise, then from rage as he realized what the voice was doing.
He bolstered his own sense of self, pushed back against the sharp intrusion into his very existence. The voice continued probing, trying to penetrate his defenses even as he resisted with every inch of willpower he possessed.
They continued their duel for dominance for what Martin felt like was hours until the voice wavered in its assault. Sensing weakness, Martin expanded his sense of self and engulfed the weakened voice, smothering it completely with his righteous anger.
The voice then pulled back, taking away the pain and sense of violent intrusion along with it.
“This,” panted the voice with frustration as it retreated, “is an infuriatingly wretched example of what I’m trying to say.”
“What? That you’re a weak-ass coward that’s all bark and no bite?”
“No… that you’re an exceedingly arrogant fool that never learns from his mistakes.”
Martin was too busy listening to the voice to notice another barb lance into his sense of self. This came from behind, away from where the voice was speaking from. Martin screamed as the lance buried into his existence, drilling faster and far more painful than the first attempt.
He fought back with every ounce of willpower he could muster, fortifying his sense of self as ruggedly as he could.
The voice, however, did not let Martin recover. It launched itself at Martin, piercing through his defenses as multiple barbs dug deeper into his soul. Martin boiled over, raging with all the focus he could gather to keep himself intact.
It was not enough; the voice was slowly but steadily winning the battle for dominance.
He could already feel himself slipping away, the two barbed lances spreading cold numbness in his existence. The voice pressed on, pushing every little advantage it could get, and began spreading its influence within Martin’s soul.
It was at that critical moment when red branches began spreading out at the corners of Martin’s awareness.
The branches seemed to come from all around him, engulfing more and more of his vision as the seconds ticked by. One violent snap later, and crimson blood began flowing within Martin’s vision. The blood crackled with power, with purpose, as it broke through the darkness surrounding Martin’s awareness.
The blood quickly dried up, turning brown as the darkness drained its power. It was soon followed by a torrent of chi and prana flowing into existence, pouring in from the entry point opened up by the branches of blood.
Martin didn’t have time to wonder what was happening. The only thing that mattered was that power flowed in right when he needed it the most, so he reached out with everything he had to take in the soothing embrace of chi and the revitalizing swell of prana.
The voice roared, redoubling its efforts to end Martin’s existence. It buried its stinger-like appendages deeper into Martin’s soul, piercing away in a relentless, almost desperate frenzy of violence.
Yet even this savage attack was not enough to prevent Martin from absorbing the twin energies, drawing strength and fortitude from both. Martin’s vision soon became sharper, clearer, as the darkness around him started to give way to light.
“NO!!!” raged the voice once more, though its shout seemed more distressed than infuriated. Martin took heart from this revelation, pulling in as much of the energies as he could.
He concentrated the vital energy of prana, visualizing a mandala pattern for the energies to follow. The prana quickly molded itself into the pattern, spiraling into itself to generate even more energy.
Realizing what Martin was doing, the voice pulled the barb of pain out of Martin’s soul and pointed it at the pattern Martin was visualizing. It thrust the ragged tip of the lance at the pattern, intending to disrupt it before Martin could finish solidifying the lines and swirls.
Martin, however, knocked the shaft away with a wave of chi. This bought him enough time to complete the pattern, prana quickly filling the endless spirals that fed back into Martin’s existence.
Martin then turned toward the voice, imposing the mandala upon it.
He recalled the time when the voice nearly took over. It swelled in presence with the sacrificial culling of thousands of Shogunate soldiers, their blood and souls fueling his core. It very nearly succeeded in its task, if not for Martin’s last-ditch effort to regain control of himself.
That’s when Martin sought out peace within the mandala patterns. He used those patterns to reshape himself, to find his center and shatter the hellish prison designed to torture souls for power. He remade that same pattern with the aid of prana, cycling the energy repeatedly into himself until he felt his existence form into something solid, tangible… real.
Martin blinked, and a window of awareness formed around him. Just one window revealing a room filled with shattered debris, the remains of the physical vessel that once held his soul.
All he had at his disposal was one branch of thought, not the countless consciousnesses that split his awareness into myriad focal points. He was completely diminished, reduced in scope to just one tiny vessel instead of a countless legion of vessels.
And yet he was still alive.
“Stuck again,” the voice groaned in exasperation before clicking its tongue, displeasure evident in every hiss and mumble that came afterward.
Martin focused inward, bringing his attention to the voice. Now that he regained full control of himself, returned to reality, he quickly recognized what he was looking at: the soul of the invader knight.
It was the same soul trapped by the Builders and studied for countless millennia by the Custodians, and which served as the basis for the pnevmatic technology forming the core of Martin’s existence.
“Wait a second. What are you doing here? Didn’t you move on when I purified my core?”
The voice growled for a moment, focusing its attention toward the mandala pattern locking its existence in place. It struggled for a few more moments before realizing the futility of its actions, stilling itself and ceasing its attempts to break free from the mandala’s alluring spirals.
It began disappearing then, the patterns of the mandala slowly purifying it much as it did before. Its existence soon winked out, seemingly cleansed of its malice and moving on to rejoin the cycle of souls in this world.
Not that he trusted its erasure at this point.
Martin watched as the last traces of the knight’s soul disappeared into a cloud of whitish motes, scowling the whole time. He was positively sure that the soul moved on the last time he conducted the purifying ritual, when he first expunged the hellish nature of
his core.
Did he really move on this time, or was it some sort of fluke?
It should have vanished along with the souls of the malicious dead, the shayateen, that used to linger around the land. He once valued the raging souls for their ability to inhabit the fleshy vessels of the dead, but quickly changed his mind once he realized the cost of wielding them like a club.
He still remembered the knight’s endless rage at that time, of how he bled that rage all out and opened the way for him and the countless other souls to rejoin the cycle of this world.
So what was he doing back here?
Martin groaned at the prospect of having to deal with the invader knight yet again but set aside that concern to focus on the room around him. He found himself within the remains of his core, at least the physical aspect of it.
He winced to himself as he surveyed the damage. The pillar that used to house the countless memory crystals that made up his core now lay shattered, broken into numerous pieces. Black scorch marks around the base of the pillar coupled with the blooming pattern of the debris indicated the use of explosives.
“Crystal bombs?” Martin said aloud to no one in particular. They wouldn’t have been able to get through his walkers, break through the sealed entrances of the pyramid and the thick door of his core without him even knowing about it.
Unless they could somehow bypass all his defenses by, say, hiding in the shadows.
Martin groaned at the realization. He could use the excuse that he was dealing with multiple problems with the rogues, making a massive breakthrough in obtaining the knowledge to build new pyramids. He just wished that Cui Dai’s warning came a bit earlier… though to be honest, she had been low-key warning him for the longest time.
And he hated to admit it, but the knight was right: he really did rest too easy, thinking himself invincible Or at least unkillable. He was so confident in his network of eyeballs, in his web of walkers protecting his core and his pyramids, that he got sloppy protecting himself.
He refocused his attention back to the broken remains of his core.
The original structure was similar in appearance to the setup used by the rogue constructs with one key difference: this pillar of crystals housed his soul instead of a complex set of simple algorithms. It was tied purely to his will instead of a predetermined set of instructions, a mind that could change and adapt to the new information it was presented with.
Or at least he liked to imagine it that way. His limited experience with the Custodians marked them as highly intelligent constructs, so maybe he was just giving his human origins a tad too much credit.
Not that it counted for much at that moment, considering how the Rat saboteurs so easily ended him.
He looked back at his surroundings and took stock of his current vessel. It was a tiny little octahedron—basically a small diamond. He sensed the residual remains of chi and prana contained within, though somehow strangely morphed.
The energies seemed highly compressed, squished into what looked like a solid-state instead of the almost gaseous, wispy forms found around him. Looking closer, he discovered remnants of blood on the casing. Dried blood… from someone who knew how to enchant and bind it, though this blood appeared smeared on the crystal instead of properly bound and enchanted.
This vessel was… interesting. And gave him an idea of how he could reform himself.
He looked around and discovered the vessel lay right at ground level, or at least very close to it. He only had one window of vision available, a far cry from what he used to have when he first came to this world.
Still, it was far better than oblivion, so he really had no right to complain; beggars can’t be choosers, after all.
He peered around his available point of view, taking in the charred and shattered remnants of crystals scattered this way and that. Martin examined the detritus more closely, wondering how he was still alive after sustaining such severe damage.
He then looked into himself to assess his current status. His reserves of prana were nearly tapped out now, first from fighting off the voice’s attempt to take control of him and then from fueling the mandala pattern to banish the voice.
Or rather, the voice belonging to the invader knight.
That revelation still disturbed him. The knight should have been purified, brought into the land of the dead and then sent back through the cycle of life. And yet he returned, tried to retake control of Martin’s soul while he was at his most vulnerable.
‘Stuck again.’
The knight’s last words mystified Martin, left him wondering what he meant by that. The knight could have struck sooner—even before Martin regained awareness. And yet it seemed the knight was just as diminished as he was when he first reawakened. The knight only gained strength, became more tangible, as Martin regained his own strength.
The invader knight even waited until Martin was sufficiently aware before distracting him with stories about how he died. He shared details about the attack, intimated that he knew about the involvement of the Rats and how they shattered his physical core.
Martin shivered in his incorporeal form, wondering what exactly the knight meant with those words.
If he really was stuck with the knight, if they were somehow connected, that meant the knight could somehow return in the future.
What would happen to him then? Would he succumb to the bouts of soul-sucking madness once again? Would he lose himself in battle, turning on friends and foes alike? Would the knight strike when he was at his weakest, attempt to wrest control away from him?
He shook the gloomy thoughts out of his head. “One thing at a time,” he said out loud to refocus his attention.
The first order of business was to gain his bearings, and so he reached out with his awareness. He attempted to extend his reach beyond whatever shell he found himself locked into, but found himself completely tapped out for power.
He exhausted his reserves of prana creating the mandala pattern to purify the soul of the knight—or at least get him out of the way long enough to regain his footing. The same could be said for his reserves of chi, which he used to keep the knight off-balance, prevent him from tearing his soul apart.
Fortunately for him, he could still pick up a light trickle of chi in the air around him.
The Qleb Sierra may be hostile to most living things, but there were still enough hardy shrubs and even hardier critters to generate a smattering of ambient chi. Not that he could handle a larger flow of chi all at once, considering the tiny diamond-like vessel housing his soul right now.
He reached out for the minute levels of chi floating in the air, drawing in steady sips of power while doing so. It took hours, maybe days since he couldn’t keep track of time, but he eventually collected enough chi for the next step of his plans.
With his energy reserves replenished, Martin used a small flicker of chi to pull the nearest crystal shard toward himself.
The little thing wobbled at first, then steadily scratched the clay floor as it made its way to his current vessel. He felt his existence expand as the other fragment melded into his crystalline core, the extra space accommodating more of his awareness.
The whole thing drained what meager amounts of chi he could collect, meaning he had to wait to replenish his reserves once more. More time passed by before he gathered enough chi to pull in another shard, then another, then another, then yet another.
He repeated the process, pulling more and more crystals and gathering enough chi to do it all over again.
He started small at first, pulling the shards nearest to his vessel. Each shard he pulled in ‘melted’ into his core vessel, increasing its size and strengthening his hold on reality.
His reach grew as well, allowing him to draw in more chi and crystals from further away. He started off from a three-inch radius, slowly growing to five, then a foot, then a foot and a half. Each new shard he brought into his vessel expanded his range even further
, and he found himself drawing enough chi to begin drawing two, three, then four shards at a single time.
What really bolstered his growth, however, was a massive tide of lifeforce that suddenly rippled through the quiet, abandoned tunnels of Martin’s pyramid.
He found himself inundated with a deluge of chi, caught completely off-guard by the sheer quantity of the stuff. If he was able to pull in mere thimbles of energy a day, this new source meant he could begin drawing an entire bucket of power at a time.
The surplus of chi meant a lot of living things were passing through the highways, making their way through the Qleb Sierra. Lots and lots of living somethings, judging by the amount that flooded into the tunnels.
He greedily lapped up the vital forces, bolstering his energy reserves while he could. This allowed him to reform the vessel for his core even faster, pulling not only the crystalline shards but the loose rubble as well. He broke down the clay he gathered along with the shards, clearing away the ruins of the pillar that once housed the physical components of his core.
The groundwork cleared, he used the surplus chi to push his crystalline vessel into the central position within the core room. He collected the rubble around his vessel, sending it underneath the crystal and building a platform to raise it up above the ground. He then wrapped his fledgling vessel in a protective case of rubble, adding a little bit of protection while leaving enough room for him to expand his vessel as needed.
And just in time, for the tide of chi petered out as the lifeforms finished their trek through the Qleb Sierra.
Martin guessed it was an army, probably reinforcements for the allies fighting the rogues down in the Wastes. He couldn’t imagine why thousands upon thousands of living creatures would even want to pass through the roads of the Qleb Sierra, risk falling into toxic valleys or get flattened by constant rockslides.
On one hand, he felt relief knowing that the allies were still focused on fighting the rogue threat. On the other, he felt anxious wondering how the allies fared.