by Gage Lee
Not even a cave cricket.
“Fine,” I grumbled. “I’ll do it the hard way.”
My serpents grabbed boxes off the shelves, pried open their lids, and presented them to me for examination. One after another, I scoured the seemingly endless supply of containers scattered around the room. The items within them weren’t useless, exactly, but nor were they Machina. Glass orbs filled with purified sacred energy rattled around next to scrivened discs of silver, copper, and gold. Strange cylinders, one end threaded, the other spiked, rested in nests of snarled wire.
It took me ten minutes to go through the first shelf, a half hour to go through the second, an hour for the third. The dense collection of items—strange artifacts, bottles of French perfume, tins of unmarked capsules, and packages of soap wrapped in pink butcher’s paper—seemed impossible to ever dig through.
But I pushed on. Because I had to find the Machina. I couldn’t leave without them. They were my key to making Maps, if making was the right word. My senses couldn’t find any of them, though, which led me to believe they were shielded somehow. If I wanted the artificial cores, I’d have to find them.
The strangest things I found were knives, axe-heads, saws, and other bladed implements. Most of them weren’t scrivened, and all of them had the same strange socket where a haft should be. As I worked my way deeper into the maze of shelves, the blades became darker, corroded, and stained.
Bloodied.
What had Dusalia said? No one had entered the vault and survived.
The knives were some part of Sanrin’s trap. I didn’t know how, but that much was obvious. Threads of worry dug into my thoughts and tried to derail my search. That fear urged me to turn and run out of the vault before the knives carved me into bite-sized chunks. But I resisted and held my ground.
The fear was a trick. Sanrin was clever. He’d know that an intruder’s greatest weakness wasn’t their body, but their mind. I searched for the scrivenings that had to be there.
Only, they weren’t.
I was deeper into the labyrinth than seemed possible. The shelves loomed above me. Were they moving?
Something clicked deeper in the vault, one snap, then two, three, five, a dozen. A whickering sound, like something whipping through the air again and again, came from my left. It repeated from my right.
I summoned my fusion blade, and my serpents appeared around me. I turned in a slow circle, scanning the vault for danger. Sanrin’s guardians were on the move, but I couldn’t see any of them. Even when I shifted my perception to the spiritual realm, all I saw were thin jinsei streaks flashing around the room. They were too small to be a real threat, though, and none of them was near me.
If I were a guardian sent to protect an artificial core from its creator, what would I be?
I activated my Thief’s Shield as I considered the question.
And then one of the storage units to my left buckled and twisted. Boxes flew off the shelves and crashed to the floor, their contents spraying across the cavern. Metal struts twisted and slammed into each other. The weird crescent wrench appendages jutting from the ends of the shelves suddenly made sense.
They reached out and latched onto one another. Shelf after shelf twisted into new shapes and joined together. The blades, so many blades, didn’t just fly through the air. They slammed into the growing monstrosity, the socketed ends attaching to small studs on the underside of the steel tubing that made up the units.
The vault’s defenders weren’t many things. Everything in the vault was part of one big thing. I could only watch, shocked, as every shelf in the vault transformed itself into an enormous spider/crab/robot thing. Fueled by jinsei taken from the dragon line nexus, it was bigger and more terrifying than anything I’d imagined.
Because as it scuttled toward me, I saw a strange apparatus dangling from its center. The frame held twelve glowing orbs, each blazing with sacred energy piped in straight from the dragon lines. They sang with strange voices, not with words, but twisted syllables that cracked into shards of sound raining down around me.
That was Sanrin’s defense.
The Machina.
The creature shambled toward me, gathering mass and extra limbs as it came. I defended myself with quick swipes of my fusion blade, shearing off bits of metal ripping through appendages. But as quickly as I hacked through my attacker’s limbs, more took their place. The whole vault was coming after me.
But that didn’t mean I was defeated. As powerful as this creature was, with its six cores gleaming at its heart, it was still just a machine.
It lacked my intelligence and unpredictability. Its arms and legs moved with precision and the relentlessness of a pumping piston, but it couldn’t predict where I would dodge, how I would attack it, or the lengths I’d go to for my prize.
The shelfstrosity’s legs gouged out chunks of the concrete floor with every hammering step in my direction. Its limbs swept toward my head, dove at my legs, scythed toward my back. The power of the Machina gave it horrible strength that pushed me to the edge.
I leaped over some attacks and sliced others out of my way with my fusion blade, and my serpents defended me with furious aggression. My core-hardened body still took one shot after another, though, because there were just so many of the legs to ward off. The floor was soon littered with severed lengths of steel and broken shelving.
It was time to move.
One of the creature’s legs came down so close to me I felt the wind brush my face. At that exact instant, I hurled myself into the air in a powerful leap, twisted into a spiraling somersault, and landed on its knee joint. A single thrust of my blade ripped through the mechanical apparatus, shredding gears and destroying its structural integrity. As the leg collapsed, I raced up its length, long strides devouring the distance to the center of the shelf spider’s body.
Steel beams sprouted up around me with every step I took. These new attachments tried to bar my path, but I slipped between them, vaulted over them, or cut them down like saplings.
A second later, I reached the vault guardian’s center. The Machina were right in front of me—all I had to do was cut the straps holding their case, and they were mine.
More girders flew into place. One after another the steel bars slammed into the creature’s mechanical exoskeleton. In the blink of an eye, the framework became a cage. I ignored the trap and shoved my hand deep into the beast’s core.
Sanrin’s true trap sprang. The cage’s last girder slammed into place, driving my arm back into the prison it had constructed around me. A nozzle jutted through a slender gap between the metal sides, and a green cloud of gas gushed forth.
The poison hit me square in the face.
I had no defenses raised against gases or venoms. I managed to hold my breath, but it was too late. The attack had blown the venomous gas up my nose. It invaded my sinuses and crawled down the back of my throat. Jinsei fueled the toxin’s aggressive assault, and my body suddenly refused to obey my commands.
The shelfstrosity shed the cage, and my prison tumbled twenty feet to the cold stone floor. It landed with a deafening clang that drove a spike of pain through my ears. A headache took root in my skull, and the pain made it hard to think.
My lungs burned for another breath of oxygen, but the green vapor still hung in the air. Even my venerable core couldn’t defend me from its ravages.
In that moment, I had to admire Sanrin. The traps he’d laid were tailored to deal with my particular skills. They proved that my former elder had never trusted me and did not want me to get my hands on the Machina. It hurt, but it also made me proud. Sanrin was wise and wily; for him to take such precautions meant he knew what a power I’d become.
The gas seemed to have a mind of its own. It pressed against my lips, forced its way into my nostrils. The need to breathe was an overwhelming urge that took far too much energy to resist.
If I didn’t think of an escape, soon, I was dead.
First things first. I had to get ou
t of the cage.
I pushed jinsei into my arms and legs to counteract the weakness from a lack of oxygen. With a grunt of effort, I rammed the fusion blade into the steel and immediately dragged it to the right, down, and back to the left. A final stroke completed the rectangle, and I pushed my shoulder against it to knock it to the floor. The poison rushed out of the cage, and the stale air inside the vault diluted its strength. I dropped to my knees and gulped in a deep, cleansing breath.
My core was running low on jinsei. But cycling didn’t refill it. The sacred energy from the dragon lines was all flowing into the shelfstrosity.
The poison had attacked my lungs and airway. My core’s response was to flood those areas with jinsei to counteract the corrosive effects of Sanrin’s trap. But that wouldn’t last long, and if I couldn’t replace the jinsei or figure out some way to neutralize the poison I’d already ingested, I was as good as dead.
My thoughts were cloudy and disorganized. Still, there was a chance to get out of this. I wove a spell as quickly as I could. Strands of jinsei formed a spiral spike of sacred energy with one purpose. To funnel jinsei into my core as quickly as possible.
With the last bit of strength left in my body, I slammed the spell down into the nexus of dragon lines ahead of me.
The spell I’d fashioned had no regulators or safety mechanisms. I’d built it in a blind panic, without any thought beyond survival. The instant my sorcery made contact with the dragon line, a burst of elementally charged jinsei roared into my core. Fire and stone aspects ripped through me and into my aura, encasing me in a magmatic shell.
The shelfstrosity took offense at that. Its legs clattered across the stone floor toward me, and it drew back a pair of its arms for spearing attacks. Then it extended another nozzle and sprayed a jet of poison at my face.
“Not again,” I groaned, and pumped jinsei stolen from the dragon line nexus into the aspects that surrounded me. Manifested fire set the air ablaze and obliterated the venomous stream in midair. But the fire didn’t stop there.
Power like I’d never known roared through me. It was beyond even the power of the surge that had almost taken out my entire geomancy class. Earth and fire aspects clogged my aura until I could scarcely see through it. To clear my vision, I used my serpents to braid knotted globs of fire and earth into magmatic balls. I hurled those spheres at the shelfstrosity’s body even as it added more girders to its frame.
The lava missiles struck with the deadly accuracy and plowed through the creature’s center, just above the Machina harness. My attack had burned a furrow of molten metal straight through the thing, dislodged a trio of limbs, and left the creature almost unable to stand.
But the creature added three more legs to its body before the magma dripping out of its body began to cool. It drove those spiked legs at me in a relentless assault that forced me back until my shoulder slammed into the vault’s wall. The Machina that powered it hissed and crackled with unrestrained power. Individually, none of the cores was as powerful as mine.
But all nine of them connected to the dragon line nexus?
That was a different story. And if I didn’t end this, soon, the shelfstrosity would grind me down.
With an outraged roar, I cast the aspects out of my aura. As they streaked toward the monstrous beast, I manifested them with a stream of jinsei, transforming the scattered aspects into a spear of lava. The makeshift weapon impaled the mechanical beast’s left side and severed two more of its limbs.
A jinsei-powered leap carried me into the creature, and my fusion blade ripped chunks of metal away, leaving behind gaping holes in its exoskeleton. I dodged beneath another sweeping leg, slid across the floor, then leaped to my feet and hurled my fusion blade like a boomerang. It sliced through another pair of legs, which slammed to the floor on either side of me with a thunderous crash. There was so much jinsei pouring into my aching core that it took me only the blink of an eye to banish my fusion blade and summon another, more powerful version. I gripped the long haft in both hands, leaped into the air, and came down on the stump of one of the creature’s legs.
It countered with a bristling army of needle-sharp talons that erupted from its body and tried to shred me into pink confetti. I jumped away, flipping end over end and sweeping my blade below me to clear a path. I landed near the center of the shelfstrosity’s body and wasted no time with another assault.
I concentrated on parrying the steely counterattacks and sent my serpents directly for the dangling case of Machina. Their precise strikes severed the straps that held the artificial cores in place, and they caught the case before it hit the floor below.
The beast collapsed. Not like a wounded animal breathing its last, but in a disjointed collection of pieces and parts no longer held together by sacred energy. Steel rained down to the stone floor, and I fell with it. An avalanche of girders and beams, bolts and rivets, gears and twisted driveshafts slammed into the ground, and me.
My core funneled power from the nexus into my flesh to harden it against the pieces of junk hammering my shoulders and back. As the weight piled up on me, my core struggled to keep me alive, at any cost. It pulled jinsei through the connection I’d woven to the dragon lines. My channels screamed with the effort of directing all that sacred energy into my flesh. The final pieces of the shelfstrosity bounced off me, and silence reigned.
I was alive.
And I was advancing.
My core swelled inside me, eager to reach its next level. I coughed up blood, and a pulse of fire rippled away from my center, scorching my channels and searing my flesh.
I collapsed to the stone floor, writhing in agony. My body wasn’t ready for this. Hahen was right. My core was too powerful. It was about to obliterate me.
I vented jinsei from my core in an attempt to save myself. A silver blast of sacred energy roared out of me and blasted through the wreckage that had landed atop me. The power arced across the ceiling, scarring the inside of the vault with shadowy forks of lightning.
But that wasn’t enough to save me. The spell I’d woven into the dragon line nexus was too crude. My core had an unlimited supply of power to advance, and it did its best to use all of it.
My body couldn’t handle the flow of sacred energy. It was coming apart. The corrosive power of raw jinsei unraveled my skin, burned my channels. My body was too weak to control my core. If I wanted to survive, I had to change that.
Dazed and tortured, I made a desperate gamble. Flesh and bone were weak compared to elements. I concentrated on the gaps my core had created in my body and put my serpents to work. They shoveled aspects of stone and fire into my wounds and sealed them in place with stitches of jinsei. It was crude work, but it was the best I could manage.
And it worked. My core couldn’t destroy the strange fusion of mortal and elemental that I’d created.
With a rush of exhilaration, I strengthened my torso with threads of elemental power, wove more around the fibers of my muscles. My wounds didn’t heal, exactly, but manifested aspects bandaged them and prevented any further damage.
The pressure from my core didn’t decrease. If anything, it became more ferocious as the energy continued to blast into me. But I let it come, because there was no longer any pain. I’d rebuilt myself, or at least enough of me to survive.
Power continued to pour into my core, pushing it farther, harder.
And I was reborn.
The Offer
THE INSISTENT splish splish splish of water dripping onto the center of my forehead dragged me back to the world of the living. I’d survived, but wasn’t sure that was better than the alternative. My head ached, and my core felt like someone had dragged it over a mile of broken glass and sandpaper.
And yet, I also felt more alive than ever before. My body had survived my core’s attempts to destroy it, because I’d bandaged myself with sorcery and strands of elemental...
Panicked by the memory of the extreme lengths I’d gone through to save myself, I lurched upright
. Steel beams and chunks of manifested stone rolled off me, along with half the creature’s mangled body. I’d moved hundreds of pounds of rubble with no more effort than throwing off my bedclothes.
Stunned by my new strength, I pulled open my robes and stared at my chest. My breath caught when I saw braided ribbons of fire and stone crossing my body like a tiger. I twisted at the hips, bending my torso one way and the other, waiting for a twinge of pain from stone refusing to flex or fire scorching the skin that bordered it.
But the elements I’d strung through my body had adapted to my needs. Sheathes of jinsei forced aspects to maintain their forms and strengths, without making them rigid. The blending of fire and stone aspects created something stronger, something more flexible, than either alone.
Hahen had been right. My body wouldn’t have survived the demands of an advanced core. But this new body, made of flesh and elemental power, was much stronger. And it had survived a transformation I’d once thought impossible.
I was no longer venerable.
I’d become the sixth sage.
It took a few deep breaths to let that sink in. My entire life, I’d heard stories of the Five Sacred sages and the amazing things they’d accomplished. I cycled my breathing and tried to calm myself. Those men and women had always seemed larger than life than I’d ever be, and it was hard to accept that I’d reached their level of raw power.
Sure, I didn’t have their experience or wisdom, but the next time I faced Tycho or Grayson, I wouldn’t be punching up. The playing field was now a lot closer to level.
I laughed, long and loud. It was good to be alive. It was even better to be as strong as any of my enemies. Well, maybe not the dragons. Locking horns with one of those creatures would be like getting into the ring with a true force of nature. The Empyrean Flame had warned me I’d have to reach the next level, eternal core, before I could finish this quest.
And Tycho, who was now my equal, still had Rachel. That edge put him just out of my reach. It wouldn’t do me any good to destroy Tycho or any of the other sages if another of my friends paid the price for it.