Chapter 112: Forgiving Oneself
[You have killed a lv. 62 Mindbreaker.]
[Level Up! 42 > 48]
[Class up! Nullmage 15 > 16]
I breathe, as the spell around my mind shatters. The world dulls. I drop the [Suppression] on myself, and freedom ripples through me.
“Whoowee!” Opal says, grinning. “That was fucking badass, you two!” they cheer.
Inu looks at me with a weak, pitiful smile. She doesn’t look at the corpse, as if she’s already forgotten. “You did good, Snow.”
Smiling at her, I nod. “Thanks,” I say. Then, I do some introspection. I check for where my emotions are supposed to be.
Nothing.
It feels like I’ve been robbed. There was something so beautiful about truly feeling for once. Truly hating someone, truly liking someone. And now, it’s all gone, broken like the falsehood it was.
An ugly truth, but one I live with. My decisions are absolute. My feelings are okay to have. I breathe, closing my eyes.
“You… okay?” Inu warrants.
“No,” I reply, smiling. “No, I’m not. In fact… Thatch, please get the cages open. Opal, could you get me my headphones? And Sylves, please fly me out of here. I don’t wanna walk.”
With my eyes closed, I don’t see their replies, but I know what they’d say. There’s a noise of fists on steel, and the metal shatters. Opal’s free.
There’s a pop as they vanish, and then they bring me those beautiful bits of metal. “Good news,” they announce. “Bay finally levelled enough to have the control to charge them. They’re about halfway full right now.”
Somehow, that, more than anything else, breaks the spell. The apathy cracks. I feel a tear trickle down my cheek. “Thanks, Opal,” I say, my voice calm and stable. I place the headphones over my head, and turn them on.
The noise cancelling activates. The sounds of misery fade. I can’t see. I can’t hear. The wind gathers beneath me, and most sensation fades away.
I untether from my sensations. I let the apathy inside me drift and ebb. It’ll recede, it’ll crawl back into its hole, and that’s okay. For a little while, I’m a monster, and that’s okay, too. I forgive myself for the crime of killing someone I held dear. I forgive myself for suppressing my own hate. I forgive it, and let myself exist.
Give myself permission to feel and heal. I let myself drift, close my eyes, and fall into a half-trance.
Time drifts by, as I simply float and think, in blissful silence.
- - -
Eventually, the feelings ebb. It takes a while, a long while, and I feel myself placed on my soft bed. No one touches me. No one tries to speak to me.
I smile, softly. That’s why they’re my friends.
And, eventually, when the time comes that I feel like a person again, I open my eyes. I gently reach up to my head, then hesitate. I leave the headphones on. The world can remain silent for a little while longer. Instead, I simply reinstate my attunement loop, suppressing my mana inside my vessel, stopping it from trying to burst out of my chest.
There was a whisper at the edge of my mind. I take a deep breath, and call up the menu.
[Epitaph: Abiding Apathy (Vessel)
Empty, dull, the need to take,
From broken bits you then remake.
A decision made, an oath opaque,
Your choice stands tall, your heart won’t break.]
I breathe. My hand rises to my chest. I feel my heart thump beneath it. Unbroken.
I breathe.
In, then out.
A thin, fragile smile spreads on my lips. The epitaph is good. I like it.
Yes. I make my decisions. My oath is opaque. I will be honest with people, and with myself, about my choices. And when I uphold them, I won’t regret it.
No regrets. No looking back.
I breathe, raise my eyes, and look forward. The smile on my face solidifies. I decide to move forward, and so I do it.
Gently discarding all the misery, I return my focus to the present. To the knowledge that epitaphs, apparently, can be deepened. Or, etched, the tower called it.
My other actions offered me a new epitaph, but this time, it was seen as an extension of my apathy. It makes me curious when I’ll pick ones for the other stats, and whether they can change, too. Clearly, they’re supposed to describe our actions, somewhat. To be reflections of what we do.
This one suits me even better now. It was accurate before, but I accept the new addition. Slowly, I rise from my bed, burning half my vessel on healing the various cuts and bruises on my body more properly.
Everything aches.
Now that I’ve spent an hour or three in my bed, I can feel it. The stab wounds in my legs, where I did a half hearted healing job. I feel at them, using the trace patterns that I stole from the unmaker’s magic, and see them in a slightly different light.
[Observation 8 > 9]
It lets me see my flesh in an entirely different light. The fibres all look so malleable, like bundled pieces of string, all pulling the same way. My veins as webbing, my tendons as support structures. The change in perspective is as enlightening as it is disorienting.
Somehow, the broken skill holds a hint to bridge [Deconstruction] and my healing. It’s giving me insight into anatomy as I break it apart with that toolbox, whether I’m using a scalpel or a drill to carve through flesh and bone. I feel like it’ll help me grow my skills faster, so I make sure to weave it tightly into my mind.
And then, I pause.
I look at my epitaph. The threads of [Selection] that connect me to my friends. To the people I’ve decided to be kind to.
Those, too, I write down in my mind.
My decisions stand tall. My oaths are opaque. I will upkeep them. I will never forget them. So, I must remember them. I must.
And that emotional desire finally catalyzes the skill.
[New Skill acquired!]
[Memorization 0 > 1]
A small snicker escapes my lips as I look at the name. “Theme still going strong,” I note, shaking my head. But as the skill settles, I feel the essence trickle in.
[Job up! Imbuer 7 > 10]
It comes from the threshold my job crosses, and is less related to enchantment than it is to the decryption of skill patterns. I instantly understand why my new skill levelled the class. Imbuer relies on understanding skills and how to decode them.
[Memorization] acts as a mental library for every skill pattern I’ve ever broken.
I smile, softly.
Now that I can keep them in mind, I guess I’ll just have to keep breaking more magic.
Just you wait, self-repairing, self-cleaning clothing. You will be mine.
Chapter 113: Crybabies
I walk downstairs in the inn. Somehow, in the time I had laid in my bed, my room had moved one floor higher. There was now an inn-between (heh) floor.
One full of rooms with injured minotaurs.
As I walked downstairs, it was a simple change of feel. My [Intuition] told me things were different before my mind had caught up with it. Looking at the patients, I find Amelie wrapping a bandage around some of the wounds.
Her eyes trail to me in the hallway. “Ah, Snow, good to see you again. Art thou alright?”
I nod. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m okay.”
She eyes me up and down, raising her eyebrows. “Really?”
“Really,” I nod, amused. “Didn’t take you for the motherly type.”
“I’m not,” she admits readily, with a bright grin. “I’m the haughty, arrogant type.” She pulls the bandages a little too tight around a minotaur’s arm. The woman huffs slightly.
Shaking my head at her antics, I kneel down next to the patient. “Alright, show me what we’re working with.”
The minotaur eyes me at that, distrustful. “You. Slept while we escaped,” she snorts with derision.
“That’s true,” I nod. “I also stabbed the mindbreaker to death.”
Her eyes widen. “Oh,” she says.
“Yeah,” I shrug. “But y’know. I did take a nap, so, feel free to hate me. I don’t care.” And I mean it. Then, I wave a hand over the bandages, casting my spell. Mana clings to her flesh, and the wound knits closed quickly.
I’m putting a lot of the lessons the unmaker so graciously taught me into practice. There are new inscriptions inside my missing arm, already. My skin itches worse than before, which I take as a good sign. “You’re healed,” I tell the minotaur woman unceremoniously. “Next.”
Amelie looks at me with a gentle frown. “I wish to punch your shoulder,” she says.
“Please don’t,” I reply, waving another minotaur over. This one has a large scar across his stomach, not unlike my recent stab wound, though wider and more shallow. It’s half-healed, with a lot of unaddressed damage beneath the skin. I look at him. “Do you wanna keep the scar?”
His eyes glisten. Slowly, he shakes his head.
“Alright. Then this’ll take five minutes. Maybe a small incision, but I’ll make sure it’s painless.” [Suppression] slowly hums into activity as I manifest a scalpel with [Deconstruction]. My skill breaks apart the scar tissues and lets healthy ones regrow, and the muscles beneath reconnect with the skin.
It takes a chunk of mana, and I hold out my core to him. “Donate your mana for the other patients,” I request. He does so without hesitation. “And if any of you have minor favours, you’re free to upgrade the core. It’ll help me heal you more easily. Next!”
- - -
A handful of hours later, I’ve run through all of the minotaurs, and administered whatever help I can. Their mental scars won’t disappear as quickly, though I’ve cleared away a chunk of the physical ones. Some chose to keep them, and of course, I didn’t object.
That’d be entirely silly. But I took the scars off of those who simply wanted to forget and move on. That was their prerogative, after all. And it was easy enough to clear them away, by now.
[Biological Restoration 14 > 15]
My healing improved even more, as I embraced a few more lessons from the unmaker. It was funny, really. I think the whole flesh-and-blood stuff was mainly fed by their epitaphs and mantle, rather than their skills. It was more part of who they were than what they could do. And yet, it was also very firmly writ into the functionality of their main anti-magic.
So now, I learned from them. And perhaps, they’d learn from me, too. After all, they looked mostly like a sleepy mercenary, so I don’t mind letting them go too much. There is little chance they’ll come after me again. I really feel rather safe.
As for the minotaurs: Most of them head for the undergrowth. There’s… a lot of movement going on, right now. A few are becoming adventurers, getting adopted into mostly trustworthy groups. Harry and Michael have gotten involved in the vetting of people, and so, we’re spared a lot of the trouble that might come with that.
As far as I’m concerned, my part of it all is done. I’ve freed them, opened up the cages, and helped them get out of that miserable place. I’ve healed their wounds, dozens of them, and only gotten a single upgrade to my mana core in exchange. But that’s fine. It’s the kind thing to do, so I do it.
There is, however, one tidbit that bothers me.
[You have destroyed a guildhall. You have killed a (local) guildmaster.]
[Your party has created a guild.]
Now that the minotaurs are dealt with, I walk downstairs, into the actual inn part of the inn. I hand Harry a few chips, and order a meal made from some tower-specific, mana-rich vegetables that can be metabolised more efficiently and that aid in training. Then, I take a deep breath, and sit down next to Thatch.
“Hey Snow,” he says, innocently. There’s paper on the table in front of him, and a brush in his hands.
“So,” I say slowly. “A guild, huh?”
Instantly, he places the brush aside, and drops his head into his hands. “Damn it,” he whispers.
“Yeaaaaa, suck it, handsome bastard,” Opal jeers. “Hand over my chits.”
Begrudgingly, Thatch places a few silvery coins in their hand. Opal tosses me one, as tax for being the subject of their bet, probably. “You couldn’t have waited five minutes?” Thatch complained without any heat.
A small smile grows on my lips. “My curiosity is my greatest flaw.”
“Nerd,” Sylves huffs from above me. I look up, only to see her standing, upside down, on the ceiling. Somehow, her dress is perfectly arrayed.
“Huh,” I note.
She grins. “Oho! So you do notice! Yes, indeed, this gravity defying fabric has been woven to interact more with skills! Now, whenever I float, my dress shall adjust properly! No more trouble of it falling over my head! Only graceful, fairy-fair floating!”
I snicker at her. “That’s lovely, Sylves. I’m happy for you.”
And even just at those small words, her face lights up, and her smile grows even wider. “Why, why! Even the great devil of the third floor, Ion, breaker of magic, killer of cruelty, praises me!”
“Really?” I ask. “Great devil?”
Opal nods. “That’s what they’re calling you now, y’know. The only surviving member of the guild knows that Ion did it. And that you were, apparently, terrifying beyond belief. Ahhh, wish I coulda seen it.” Then, they flash a bright grin. “‘Cept I did! I did see it! You really fucked that guy up!” they cheer.
Gently, I shake my head. “You’re all silly. Stop trying to distract me from the guild thing.”
Thatch gives me a guilty smile. “About that,” he says. “Yes. We made one.”
Sylves smiles brightly. “We’re the Crybabys!”
I blink. Then I look at her smile. Then at Thatch’s awkward glance. Opal’s proud grin, moments from a guffaw. Inu, who sheepishly looks away. I can’t hold back a smile. “You’re so silly,” I say. “How does a guild work?”
“Well, there are two main features,” Thatch says. “The first is a voting system for communal management decisions - we chose to have a leadership council model. You’re on it.”
“Alright,” I say.
“The other,” he continues, “is a distress beacon. Anyone can sound it, and it reveals the floor and approximate location of a guild member to the rest of us. There’s… a good bit more. Some inherent messaging system, if you have someone with the job to support it - Norman’s been working towards messenger, so that might unlock soon-ish. It also offers a marketplace… somewhat. Periodic auctions, interfacing with other guilds.”
I tilt my head. “A lot of half-half stuff, huh. What else does it have, an experience sharing system?”
“Not yet…” Thatch says. “But it’s an upgrade option.”
With a small sigh, I shake my head. “Alright. Two features. We vote on decisions. You call me when you need someone killed or saved. That’s what you want my takeaway to be?”
He wears that embarrassed smile again. How dare it look so charming on his unreasonably handsome face. “Yep,” he admits. “That’s… it.”
“It also marks the guild you are part of on the leaderboards,” Dar interjects with a brutal sabotage. He smirks. “You are Ion of the Crybabies, now, Opal’s friend.”
A long sigh escapes my lips. “I sure have a habit of picking troublesome friends.”
Inu, Thatch, Opal and Syvles all shrug, raising their hands. “Oops?” they give.
I shake my head. Well, I suppose I don’t mind being part of the guild… I sigh, softly. Then I wave them off. There’s a short round of smiles, and I start digging into my food when the door to the inn opens again.
This time, it’s a tall scithian man. Amber wings folded tightly behind his back. He has short cropped white hair, a nicely groomed beard, and piercing yellow eyes.
Also, I remember him from the second floor. The mana around him twists all wrong, too. My eyes narrow.
[Intuition 2 > 3]
His face turns to mine, and his expression turns into a bright grin. “Ahhhh, Ion,” he whispers. “Found you.”
With a gust of wind, he stands right in front of me. Close enough to touch. His mana brushed against mine.
[Bright Priest of the Hunt, lv. ?]
Well, heck.
Chapter 114: Hunting Party
To my amusement, the first person to move after the trouble begins is one of the minotaurs. A woman with a chipped horn, who roars the second he lays a hand on me. She crashes into the guy with all the force of a wrecking ball - and he flinches slightly. His arm bends the wrong way for a second, moved out of shape by her mass, then it snaps back into place with a wrenching sound.
I hit him with [Suppression], and it feels like trying to hold down a moving ship with a flimsy rope. Sure, technically it slows him down, but the skill feels stretched and frayed the moment it takes hold.
Then the world tilts and my head slams into the floor.
Blinding pain eclipses my thoughts. My vision swims with white, my skull held in one piece by my heart score even as the world comes out of focus. Then, a moment later, Harry stands in front of the priest.
There’s strings wrapped around the scithian, too, but they shatter a moment later. Harry grabs his arm. “Now, now,” he says. “Don’t damage my inn.”
The bright priest tilts his head. “Huh? You gonna get in the way of Respitia, old man? In the way of Ezekiel Thorn?”
Harry huffs. “Who are you calling old, fossil?”
“Yeah!” Mike adds, waving a knife out from the kitchen on a scraggly arm. “No one calls my husband names but me!”
Scoffing, the scithian’s amber wings spread out, then flare with effervescent light. It pools around him, and I see it coalesce into two gems. My vision flickers for a moment at the brightness, before marks from above Harry and Mike’s heads. Amber marks, denominating them targets.
“Eliminate the targets,” the priest huffs with a chuckle. “Kill the rookie.”
And then, the enchanted walls shatter. The safety of the inn is broken, all at once, as more high-climbers pour in. Four of them, five, counting Ezekiel. Each one returns nothing but question marks. I grit my teeth, crawling across the floor.
Above me, carnage starts. Harry moves his hand, and the marks wash away like dirt under a shower. A woman with an enchanted blade waves her hand over it, envelopping it in a purple sheen that screeches and hisses angrily as it cuts the air. Harry sidesteps the cut, deflecting it with a rag of cloth.
The cut sinks into the floor, a step away from my legs, and it explodes. Arcane energy tears apart the wood, sending splinters flying. Mike finally leaves the kitchen, and he looks more like a beehive than a person. Knives orbit all around him, floating like angry stingers. There’s no hesitation as he directs them at another intruder, a mage, before a woman in armor directs a flying shield in front of them.
Metal rings against metal, the small blades plinking off. Then, the noise rises, as the mage casts spells. Her hair raises into the air with a crackle of electricity, and a bolt of lightning angrily lashes out at me. Another minotaur throws himself into its path, screaming as his skin charrs.
I watch as his body drops, eyes rolled back and boiled in their sockets, the voltage having torn through his muscles like tissue paper. I watch as smoke rises from his clothes. I frown at the sight.
Then, more minotaurs pour from the upper floor. Dozens of them, in fact. Almost all of them.
Slowly, I blink. Then, Harry pulls me to my feet. “Now or never, kid! Get the hell outta here!” he says, grinning brightly. “I’ll hold ‘em off!”
“Huh?” I ask. “Why?”
At that, he smiles. It’s so wide, and genuine, it feels unreal. His crystalline wings twinkle in the air behind him. “You made me wanna climb. Show me how it’s done, Snow.” For a second, he claps a hand on my shoulder, and I feel mana wash through me. Some part of me, some ephemeral mark, is wiped off, like a stain on a window. And then, he vanishes from my sight, moving so fast he blurs. Or maybe cleaning his own image out of the air?
This time, I don’t stay long enough to look. I run. Instantly. I signal the stupid distress beacon in the guild menu, I hear as people upstairs start struggling, and I watch as more and more minotaur bodies pool into the common room.
Even the descenders, which is what they have to be, don’t seem to have expected that. Bovine bodies pour from the staircase like a tide, rampaging through the room. They don’t have enough levels or power to make that much of a difference, but they have mass. They cause chaos.
And chaos is the great equalizer of combat.
They lose me. A minotaur crashes into the priest, and then Harry smacks him with a towel that flays his skin off. I see Ezekiel cast a healing spell, and the guard steps forward. The spellblade duels Mike, and the caster is trying to fire off spells that don’t incinerate her friends. Finally, there’s a fifth member of the descenders.
It’s a tall, pale sumeen. Their clothes are blood-red, and dance in the air. More than they should.
For a moment, those six, emotionless sight-holes turn to me. Then, the fabric around them stiffens, for all of a heartbeat. I see red ribbons of cloth streak towards me, curling in on themselves to form needle sharp teeth. For a moment, I toss a [Deconstruction] and [Suppression] at them as I roll out of the way. It buys me all of a blink, but that’s enough.
The wood beside me splinters again, and Amelie’s strings pull me to my feet. Then Opal appears next to me with a soft pop, brandishing their blade and striking aside the whips of cloth. This sumeen, too, seems tired. As if they don’t want to be here, half-heartedly fighting a yawn.
There’s a ringing noise, and I turn to see Inu get hit by the spellblade. A shroud of magic cuts into the tough girl’s shield, then explodes, tearing the metal apart in her hands and sending her flying - crashing through the wooden wall and into the outside.
By now, the walls are riddles with holes. Minotaurs pool on the cloth-mage as a horde, and the descender turns to fight those, instead of us, as if just trying to appear busy. And then, there’s a melodic note that reaches only my ears, carried by a whisper-thin string that connects to my earlobe like an old string-telephone.
“Run, devil of the third floor,” they hum with amusement. “I get paid for each day we chase you. Make it worth my while.”
I blink, as the cloth unfolds to wrap around a horde of minotaurs, perfectly hiding us from the sight of the rest of the hunting party.
Biting my lip hard enough to bleed, we run. Each and every one of us scatters like the wind, tearing out of the inn and into the undergrowth. It’s our only way out, since we have guides and they do not. Minotaurs pool from the holes like water from a broken bucket. It’s almost comical, watching us break through the canopy.
Amelie has it the worst, having a puppet hack out a bigger piece so her wheelchair can fall through - but her landing is the most graceful, as she slowly descends by a piece of string. Opal pops into existence next to me. Norman lands smoothly and gracefully, and I-
I slam into the forest floor like a sack of potatoes.
There were a few branches that did me the courtesy of breaking my fall, but all my ribs still ache. The earth beside me shifts, and Bile rises out from underneath. “You made it! Good, let’s move!” he demands, and we do not hesitate.
Not everyone is with us. Inu fell somewhere else. Bay and Jess were out on errands. But none of it matters.
More minotaurs fall around us, swinging down into the labyrinth using a variety of abilities. They grunt and moo and fan out. I see one of them shouldering Inu, running off into a different direction from me. They fan out in a circle, and we run.
I run, as fast as I can, the earth shifting to move me along. Norman sprints like the wind, easily keeping ahead of me. Opal blinks, and Amelie swings from the branches using thick strings, even as they cut into her arms and she grimaces.
We run. We run fast. We run far. And I make sure to engrave the face of the bright priest into my face.
[Respitia the Pure sneers at your cowardice.]
Once again, I’m reduced to a rat in a tunnel. But that’s okay. That’s perfectly fucking fine. I’ll be a rat. I’ll run, I’ll prepare, and I’ll cheat. Because I remember their faces. I remember their faces, and those pieces of shit who showed up to disrupt my party?
I’m going to fuck them up. I’m going to ruin them. Just you wait, Ezekiel.