200 – Trap

Vivi had buffed herself in preparation, so with her massively boosted senses, she caught a snapshot of her surroundings in the instant before the trap triggered.

A ritual encircled the exit portal. Maybe the Fell Apostate was fond of eight-point symmetry because, similar in design to his previous working, there were eight floating pillars acting as the ritual’s foundation. These ones were black and purple rather than white, and scattered between the pylons were piles of otherworldly corpses.

Voidglass as the structure, and voidbeasts as the sacrifice? she thought. And so many. Some are [Greater Voidbeasts]. How did he even manage to kill them?

That was as much analysis as she could manage in the fraction of a second her heightened senses had bought her. High Arcana flashed, white symbols bright against black, and what felt like a nuclear-equivalent blast of void energy engulfed her the next heartbeat.

She made several rapid decisions at once.

This might be greedy. That’s a lot of energy. Maybe I should worry about myself.

Immense amounts of rampaging void essence impacted her shields, but she didn’t reinforce them in preparation. Instead, she used that split moment to protect two other things.

First, she summoned a protective bubble around each of the eight voidglass pillars, preserving the core structure of the ritual.

You probably meant to destroy your handiwork with the blast, but sorry. Your last one was way too interesting. I’ll be taking this one too.

Second, she conjured a bubble around the entire area. She didn’t know whether this faded, otherworldly realm could be destroyed to begin with, or whether it mattered if pseudo-Prismarche was erased from existence, but it seemed smart to err on the side of caution.

Then she was weathering the storm.

Crack. Crack. Crack-crack-crack.

Vivi raised an eyebrow as glowing splinters manifested across her personal barrier. She linked to the Codex and began repairing them, and she found herself impressed.

The Dragon King challenging her defenses was one thing, but anyone else? Much less a mortal mage? Though maybe the Fell Apostate couldn’t really be called ‘mortal’ anymore.

Also, she had made it harder on herself than it needed to be. Instead of letting the explosion wash around her, she had contained the whole ritual at once, splitting her attention ten ways: herself, the city, and the eight pillars. She was drinking an ocean of void energy, matching every ounce of power with her own.

Rampaging devastation churned for what felt like forever, though it might’ve been a few seconds in reality. Then the transmuted power of several [Greater Voidbeasts] and dozens of weaker ones blinked out, and Vivi was left floating high in the air, her surroundings suddenly and eerily serene.

She waited for more, then released a small sigh when nothing else came.

It was a good effort, I suppose. Nice try.

Unfortunately for him, it would take a lot more than that to win in the domain of raw power.

She wondered briefly how she would have gone about trying to set a trap for someone like herself. Her eyes wandered to the portal. Maybe collapse the tunnel while I’m still inside? If it works like that. Trickier than brute force, but it’d have better odds of hurting me.

Perhaps a direct assault had been the easier, quicker method—what the man could set up on short notice. Still, failure or not, it had been a real attack; it had cracked her shields. Rituals had always allowed a mage to hit above their tier, a tradeoff for the extensive preparations and sacrifice requirements. Combine that with how the Fell Apostate was a formidable mage in his own right, and he could throw a solid punch when given time to plan.

Plus he’s learned how to transmute void energy. That also lets him fight above his weight class.

That new capability was also the more concerning issue ten times over. Vivi had needed to hold a meeting with dragonkind’s Crown Prince to decipher the secrets of voidglass. To be fair, it’d been the work of an evening to make the breakthrough, and they’d gone further during that session than simply releasing the energy, but a few hours’ collaboration between Solfirus and Vivi ought to be a nigh-unmeetable standard.

This guy really is dangerous.

The mere act of transmuting voidglass wasn’t the most difficult task, and he’d done it clumsily, since several [Greater Voidbeast] corpses properly converted should have produced a much heavier blast. But that he’d solved the first step at all was a good reason to worry.

She flew over to the ritual pillars. Her shields had manifested in time; the High Arcana was undamaged. She studied the symbols with interest for a few moments, head tilting first to the left, then to the right.

I already know how to transmute the material, and better than you, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn from your approach.

I’ll be taking this, please and thank you.

She checked for traps, then scooped the tall black columns into spatial storage and set them out of mind. She had more important things to worry about.

“[Detect Presence].”

Three entities filtered into her awareness, spread across the washed-out gray of alt-Prismarche. The resulting signatures resonated with that same discordance from her first time in the void. The spell wasn’t picking up on living beings, but rather, Concepts—those perplexing echoes that represented ideas from her home world, which apparently defended against foreign threats. At least, that was what she’d surmised the entities did. She knew even less about the Concepts than she did about voidbeasts.

One of the Concepts felt more bizarre to her senses than the rest, like [Detect Presence] had found its existence especially odd.

Or… anomalous? Upsetting?

Wrong?

Vivi’s wariness returned. What did that mean?

She glanced over her shoulder to the exit portal. She still intended to make this trip as quick as possible so she could understand how the time dilation effect worked. With the initial trap handled and no voidgod army setting up camp around Prismarche, maybe she ought to head back, leaving this ‘anomalous Concept’ for her next expedition.

It won’t take that long, and it might be dangerous. I’ll just do it now.

She found the Concept in question standing within a watchtower jutting out of the northwest section of Prismarche’s city wall. She floated toward the window and peered through the iron bars to see what was inside.

***

An Echo of a Soldier Who Keeps a Lonely Vigil

***

She’d let herself get distracted—she’d forgotten to brace for the flood of emotions. A weight of solitude abruptly crushed down on her, an exhaustion so bone-deep that she almost staggered in the air. Along with that overwhelming emotion came another, more positive one: a quiet determination. She might have been forgotten, but she knew her post was too important to abandon. She would stay here until death or relief.

She was still shaking off the burst of unwanted empathy when the figure turned to look at her. He was an older man, a grizzled veteran with military bearing from head to toe: short hair, a stern countenance, and a crisp uniform. A sword hung at his hip, and a bow and quiver peeked from over his shoulder.

More important than that mundane description was the detail that had immediately seized her attention: the red, jagged cracks spreading across his faded pale form.

What even is—?

The soldier drew his bow and aimed at her. Vivi’s thoughts blanked out.

But they’re friendly? He’s not pointing that at—?

The soldier released, and an arrow streaked through the air, as fast as any of Cinereus’s attacks. It hit her shields with a boom, and though she didn’t go flying back, spiderweb fractures radiated all around the barrier. It’d done even more damage than the void-nuke.

She’d known the Concepts were strong, but to that extent?

Still bearing a grim expression, the soldier drew another arrow, the tip of it tracking her as she floated sideways to see whether the first had been a bizarre coincidence. Not that she really believed that would be the case.

Another boom as projectile met magic. Yes, he was going for her. She repaired her shields and frowned at the entity. This Concept didn’t even seem like one of the stronger ones, such as King Alistair’s—the Echo of a King Who Stood Above Kings. The beings were apparently more dangerous than she’d assumed.

“Let me guess,” Vivi muttered. “The Fell Apostate got to you.”

It hadn’t taken any great detective work to surmise that. None of the Concepts had shown the slightest aggression, even the Echo of a Great Beast. If a Cataclysm hadn’t attacked her, then clearly none would.

The unnatural red fractures spreading throughout the being’s body were the more telling clue, as was the way [Detect Presence] had returned a result that felt almost uneasy. Different even compared to the already-odd-feeling Concepts.

A third arrow flew, which she swatted away. While stronger than she’d anticipated, the soldier was still only hitting as hard as a 1900-ish opponent. Cataclysm-level, but she could deal with those.

There are a lot of different Concepts, though. Even one this minor is that strong? There are hundreds of these monsters out and about?

She guessed the baseline made sense for a creature representing a core idea of a world. If they were ‘white blood cells,’ they would need to be as strong as or stronger than their foes, and [Greater Voidbeasts] were pretty durable.

As for the actual problem at hand.

Do I… get rid of it? she wondered, hesitant.

Her stomach turned at the idea, and she broke out into a cold sweat.

Nope, nuh-uh, definitely not.

She’d had the same thought during her first expedition, and her reaction had been identical then. Killing the entity was off the table, even as a last resort. She had no idea what would happen, what the consequences would be and whether they would reverberate into the real world, but she didn’t intend to test her gut instincts.

A fourth arrow hit her shields, and this one she ignored, now deep in thought.

What then? I can’t leave it sitting around. I want to bring people here, and it’s strong.

Her frown grew. She already had enough problems, and now she had to figure out how to repair broken Concepts? She didn’t even know what Concepts were yet, much less how to fix one.

What did the Fell Apostate even do to it? And why? An attempt to weaponize it against me, or general research? Her eyes traced the red fractures across the soldier’s form. I have no clue where to start.

She had a lot of talents in magic, but she obviously didn’t study corruptive, defiling, and profane spells often. The Fell Apostate far surpassed her in those specialties, and she’d rather that continued being the case. 

Soul-based, maybe?

The Concepts showed up to [Detect Presence] not as people or even animals but as something adjacent. Souls-that-weren’t-souls? Her magical intuition wasn’t omniscient, just very good, and it wasn’t helping much at the moment.

Ugh.

“[Cage of the Sunless Sanctum].”

She watched the soldier for a minute longer, confirming that the spell had trapped it. It had; the Concept failed to scratch the super-high-tier barrier despite drawing its sword and whaling on the magical prison. She’d used the same ability to contain the Faceless Legion, and this thing was weaker than that. Certainly a lot less slippery. Hopefully.

“I’ll deal with you later,” she told it.

Leaving behind the watchtower, she finished her sweep of Prismarche and its surrounding areas. There were a few [Greater Voidbeasts] hanging around, but with her recent advancements, they had become trivial to kill. The only question was how much stronger voidgods would be.

Voidgods, she thought, the idea distracting her. There really aren’t any nearby. Was the first one a fluke? Maybe more aren’t coming.

Or were they amassing their forces? Did voidgods have a society at all to worry about? Alliances or whatever else? Maybe the ‘Anaxtharras’ Remian had killed had been the strongest creature in the local area, but other voidgods were concerned with their own territories?

Less optimistically, maybe he’d been a scout, and a whole legion of them would be swarming soon, to see what had happened.

“Tch.”

She found herself annoyed, even if she was also intrigued. It had been a given she’d find complications or unpleasantness returning here, but that didn’t mean she was happy her suspicions turned out correct. Not only had the Fell Apostate made progress in learning how to manipulate void energy, he’d done something to a Concept—and that might be her bigger concern.

Could he bring those entities back to the real world? Or harness them in some other way? Clearly he’d managed something. And in such a relatively short amount of time.

She would rather the Fell Apostate didn’t start bottling up Cataclysm-tier creatures by the dozen. Or using their powers in any other capacity.

An unbidden sigh escaped her.

She returned to the portal with a [Blink].

More stuff to worry about. Always more. At least it’s interesting. For now, though, it’s time to see how long I was gone.