Author: Lurina

083: Split Body - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere | Royal Road

Sanctuary Nadir | 1:14 PM | Third Day

There'd been a lot of panicked tension and creeping tension over the course of the night, but those moments had all been rooted, at their core, in ignorance; we'd known that something very bad was happening, but not exactly what was causing it or what would happen next. This was tension of a very different sort. It was absolutely clear what was about to happen, and what remained was the moment between the flash of the bomb and its blast. A drawn-out, anticipatory terror.

Even Fang's eyes had gone a little wide, their hands held up in a scepter-less casting stance. Kam was breathing heavily, one of her feet lifted slightly in the air like she was ready to leap backwards at a moment's notice.

I don't even want to think about what I was doing, but I felt on the verge of a panic attack. It was fortunate that I was in a state of respectful disagreement with gravity, because if wasn't, I'd probably have fallen to the floor like a sack of meat. I felt like I could have been killed at any instant.

Between our number, there were four layers of barrier active; so many that it'd be considered a redundant setup even in a military context. Besides my own Entropy-Denying Arcana, which essentially worked by preventing the energy in a zone around us from losing or otherwise having its properties altered, there was also Kamrusepa's Time-Stopping Arcana, which in this case had been tuned to create a sphere of halted time about 4 meters across, and Fang's Matter-Refracting Arcana, which bent spacetime around us such that anything headed our way at speed would distort around the periphery and ultimately pass through harmlessly. (This apparently had some application related to altering elemental composition, which was how it tied into their discipline, but the specifics went firmly over my head.)

Finally, Zeno had their own Neuromagnetic-Shielding Arcana, which unlike ours was an actual battle arcana and not a repurposed technique we'd happened to have on our respective scepters. It not only generated an electromagnetic field that could straightforwardly repel a huge amount of force, the electric pulses in it actually mimicked those of the human brain, creating a neural defense that made it incredibly hard to offensively cast anything with an apparition point even close to your target. It also fluctuated rapidly in shape and size and could be remolded manually at any time by the caster, making it incredibly frustrating to contend with.

Each of these barriers had their respective weakness. All could be directly countered if the nature of the effect was divined and the reverse was oppositionally-casted. All had to have exceptions to allow light, sound, air and ambient objects to pass through which could be exploited, save for Kamrusepa's, which allowed none by nature and thus was more of a cloud of tiny time-stopped spaces and could only prevent attacks which couldn't slip through the gaps. Mine was so eris inefficient that it would fail under any serious force in seconds. Fang's could be countered by attacking from multiple directions at once. And though Zeno's was advanced enough that it couldn't be beaten so simply, it was a renowned high-level technique, and someone of Hamilcar's expertise would surely know the counters.

But together, it really was excessive. We ought to have been safe.

I did not feel remotely safe.

"This is absurd, Hamilcar," Zeno said, her tone now razor-sharp. "Put down the weapon. It would not please me to have to hurt you."

"I do think this is folly," he said, his tone sounding somehow more frank then a moment ago. "But I will play my part to the end, all the same."

Zeno scoffed in irritation. "Hamilcar--"

Suddenly, he threw himself backwards and to the side, his robes and cloak briefly flying out of place. I could see his exposed chest, gut, and abdomenal regions, which were almost entirely covered in dark bronze plate. Where there was flesh - mostly in thin lines around the stomach area - it was scarred and starkly pale, looking like it was the awkward addition to a carefully-designed body of metal rather than the reverse. Subtle tubes ran around it at the periphery, like the framing of a painting.

It all happened in practically an instant. He went flying over the edge (and for the next few moments, I wasn't sure if the word 'flying' was literal or metaphorical) and, presumably having a much denser body than a normal human, plummeted sharply downward. Zeno's eyes went wide, and she began casting something as she looked over the edge, her hands twitching mechanically as she spoke what sounded like the beginnings of a Divination incantation.

While this was happening, Fang seemed to notice something. They reached over to Kamrusepa and I, shouted something like 'c'mon!', and then began flying rapidly upwards. I was too confused to resist, but Kam reflexively lurched and tried to pull away, meaning we didn't move much. This was the status quo for 3, maybe 4 seconds.

Then it happened.

The strength of the Power, when it came down to it, was limited by only two and a half things. The first two were the energy available to the caster and the roughly 10 meter casting range respectively, which were 'hard' limitations that nothing could subvert, one a product of thermodynamics, and the other a limitation in the design of Indexes, which could only manipulate reality fairly close to the brain to which they were connected. (Though this rule could be obeyed in ways which appeared to break it, namely when the concept of distance itself was compromised, as with portals or logic bridges.)

The 'half', then, was the competency and will of the caster. These were 'soft' limitations that were the product of circumstance and mattered more in some cases than others.

Human beings are creatures that base their social assumptions on the idea that those around them are at least loosely rational and, to an extent, possess a sense of self-preservation and morality. If you're living in an apartment block with 200 other people, there's nothing ultimately preventing any one of those people from snapping and going out of their way to start a serious fire on the lower floors in the middle of the night. But people living in those apartments obviously rule out that possibility as absurd, and plan their lives based around the expectation it won't happen, considering their homes safe. Likewise, even in a sport like boxing, where violence is the basis of the endeavor, there are unspoken rules about the degree of that violence that broadly remain unbroken, or at least not radically broken. This sort of thing is true in every facet of society.

Aspects that involved the Power were no different. Even in violent contexts, there were a set of assumptions about how people would behave that normally held true. Certain strategies predicated on truly spectacular destruction and collateral damage were avoided even during most wars. And aside from little rituals like what we'd undergone at the entrance to the Aetherbridge, people were broadly comfortable having arcanists around them, and were no more intimidated by them than any other person.

But the truth was the Power was called as much for a reason. What you could potentially do, assuming you stopped giving a fuck, was obscene. A month into my training, I'd already learned enough that I could deliberately discharge my scepter in a public space and kill probably thousands of people. There was a reason why Inductions weren't given out like candy just to staff replication centers.

And it was why we hadn't been trained to expect the nature of Hamilcar's attack.

First came the twinge of a colossal amount of eris being used. I didn't even have time to experience the appropriate amount of dread.

Second, the sound, which reached me before the light because I was gazing up at Fang. There wasn't even time for it to build up-- Just an instant of an excruciating, piercing roar of pure noise that shook my body to its core, followed by an awful bursting crunch that felt like it pierced my skull itself, followed by overwhelming ringing and an agonizing pain in every part of my head at once. Ears, skull, even my nose felt like it was on fire, or an overwhelming pressure was about to burst them open.

Guess what? Your eardrums just popped, some part of my brain managed to report, amidst the agony.

The light, and everything with it, came next. It swept up like a tidal wave from below, blinding in every direction, the flames not even clearly discernible beyond the wobbly, visibly-flowing blur of ferociously heated air - though the barriers did protect us from that, at least. I shut my eyes sharply to avoid them meeting the same fate as my ears, but even so my vision turned white. Still, it somehow didn't feel as bad as it should've.

Someone must've remembered to actually create a filter for permissible levels of light energy, my logic reported. Shame that the same wasn't true for you and sound, huh?

When whatever was happening began to die down (which, mercifully, did come quickly) I risked opening them, and almost couldn't believe what I was seeing.

Amidst the a haze of still visibly incredible heat, half of the metal complex we'd just been in, everything from where we were standing to close to the entrance, was gone, with barely even any flaming wreckage left behind on the massive stone column on which it had been built. The platform Hamilcar had been standing on, that we'd been hovering over, was the only remaining piece, stuck hanging limply at the bottom of our barrier, and coming to a very sudden, melted stop where the barriers cut off.

It started to rain. Droplets of molten metal fell upon us, sliding down in globs along the side of our protective sphere.

There was no sign of Hamilcar. I could see that everyone else was shouting, or possibly screaming, but could barely focus. My head started to spin, and dark splotches opened up on my eyes. Nausea hit my gut in sudden spasms, seeming to reach all the way up to my throat, and I wanted to wretch as Fang pulled us further upwards.

Idiot, cast something before you pass out! Do you want to die here?

That's right. I could fix this. We'd gone over this in training - stimuli attacks were easy to repair if you had a healer, since they only affected a tiny part of the body. and I was a healer. I just had to focus.

Even though I couldn't hear my own voice, I gripped my scepter and spoke the words of the Flesh-Animating Arcana, praying I was getting the words right. With the Death-Sensing Arcana still active from earlier, I closed my eyes again, and saw the world as an extrasensory feed of dying and broken cells. I could feel the damage; in my eardrums, my cochlea, my sinuses.

Oh, and a couple blood vessels had ruptured in my brain. That was probably priority number one.

I finished casting, making sure the scale was appropriate, and suddenly I was mistress of every dying cell or dead cell in my body. I commanded the tissue in the ruptures to mend itself; forced the shredded pieces of my eardrum back into place, corrected the cracks in the tiny and hypersensitive bones in my upper skull, uprighted the cells of my basilar membrane. While I was spending the eris, I cut off the connection from my pituitary gland to my adrenal glands - which were already working in overdrive - and forced it to start releasing endorphins.

This sort of thing was really bad for you in the long term. Especially since I was a Thanatomancer, and couldn't even conjure new cells outright. Still, the last thing I needed to do was panic.

My hearing started to come back as Kamrusepa started grabbing my arm. "...he barrier! Change the bloody strength!"

I jerked my head towards her, still half-focused on repairing my own body. "What?"

"You're the only one who can filter sound!" She shouted. "Fucking do it before we're hit again!"

"O-oh." I blinked, my brain finally catching up with the situation. "Right!"

I quickly incanted an amendment to my incantation, altering it so that any form of motion energy would be stopped dead. I altered excessive degrees of light as impermissible, too-- Even what had made it past had felt like altogether too much. The hum of the superheated air and distant sound of sizzling metal ceased suddenly and completely, giving way to utter silence.

This turned out to be just in time. No sooner had I finished the incantation when felt another twinge, followed by a second blazing surge of light from down below. Because of the diminished intensity, I could now view it properly. With incredible speed, it exploded out from a single point, surging forth at an angle where it all but swallowed what remained of the order's facility before climbing in all directions, including towards us. Even though I knew we were safe, it was impossible not to be frightened on an animal level as the flames subsumed us utterly.

When the blast faded, I saw that this time, a large section of machinery that connected the facility to the machine - the Apega - had been completely eradicated. Presumably that had been the connective component that lowered Fang's 'blade' into the machine proper... Though strangely, the machine itself seemed wholly undamaged by what had happened. In a moment that was both beautiful and harrowing, I saw liquid bronze and titanium rise up into the air in a soaring wave with the force of the heat, before plummeting back down below.

Finally, when all was said and done, my eris dial shot down by about 12%. That's not good.

"This is insanity!" Zeno, who had begun rising with us, cried out. "The fool is actually destroying everything!"

"That's the Particle-Striking Arcana," Fang observed, their tone still surprisingly calm given the circumstances.

Kamrusepa looked to them sharply. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her tone was quicker than normal. She'd have had an easier time healing herself than even I did, but she still didn't seem to be handling the situation particularly well. "That's nuclear fire?"

"Yeeep, much as I can tell," they said, in a tone like they were describing an engine problem. "I mean, there's not really another way to make an explosion that big so fast."

"How on earth did he do it twice!?" Kam asked, her face aghast. "That's a military-level technique! Forget that gaudy staff, you'd need a whole tank of eris!" She looked to Zeno. "He can't cast a sun crown, can he?"

A 'sun crown', developed by Sara of Xattusa during the Tricenturial War, was an incredibly advanced war arcana where the caster created a self-sustaining nuclear convention process around their body, usually taking the form of a loop surrounding their head or torso, hence the name. This could theoretically confer an essentially infinite amount of eris, allowing for incredible feats of destructive power that could oppose entire armies, but was also spectacularly dangerous. A slight lapse in concentration or a failure to properly conceptualize the energy source when casting could lead to a grisly death for both the arcanist and everyone surrounding them. Plus, since the process couldn't be stopped suddenly, eris had to be spent at a continuous rate to prevent the crown becoming unstable.

Only a few people in history had managed to master it - there were only 4 known individuals capable in the modern day among a population of several million arcanists. And with warfare now oriented more around golems than human beings, the concept served more as fodder for action dramas than military utility.

"Of course not!" Zeno shouted, her tone scalding, like she considered her stupid for even asking. "The prick must have cracked open the side of the nullification furnace and is drawing power straight from it. That's why he dropped down below, I'm sure of it."

"H-He can draw eris straight from an active furnace...?" I asked, my voice shaking.

Zeno nodded tersely. "For all his inadequacies, of which more are becoming apparent by the moment, he's always had something of a knack for the conceptualization aspect of casting--"

Another blast came, this time from a little lower, but still reaching us within a second. Most of the remaining facility was consumed, though I noticed that the entrance chamber and elevator remained unscathed. After the first explosion, Seth must've had the sense to mash that button like it was a pile of nearly-expired potatoes. Once again, my eris dial snapped sharply down.

"You told us Hamilcar wasn't a threat!" Kamrusepa shouted, getting visibly annoyed.

"And he isn't!" Zeno snapped, irritated, "This is just a stupid gimmick." She ran a hand over the lower half of her face, looking like she was thinking intensely. "He must be trying to force me to fight him alone. With this onslaught, you won't be able to hold your awkward barriers over both me and your own group at the same time. And now that the air is superheated, if they go down, you'll cook like fish in a fryer."

"Yeah," I said, nodding urgently. "I've lost nearly half my eris already!"

"I'm eyeballing it, but I think he's hitting us about every 40 seconds," Fang said. "Probably doesn't have the incantation on his scepter-- Uh, staff. That's about how long it takes to get through the Particle-Striking Arcana raw."

"Maybe for you," Kamrusepa said, baffled. "It's 75 lines!"

Why does she know it off by heart? Kamrusepa's weird.

"Fuck this," Zeno said, twitching her finger rapidly. "If he wants a 'fair' fight, I'll be happy to give him the pleasure. It's the least I can do for stabbing us in the back without even so much as an explanation."

"Isn't that playing into what he wants?" I asked.

"Yes, but it doesn't matter, because he's still an amateur with a jumped-up sense of purpose." A second, almost skintight barrier surrounded her specifically. "I've been cutting his type down my entire life. If he thinks I'm the type to go down when deprived of my help, he's in for a rude awakening."

"What should we do...?" I asked, as she moved towards the edge of our barrier, taking both of her own with her.

"Get back to your friend and get the records, then save your own asses." she ordered. "I'll catch up to you with the device, assuming he lasts more than 30 secon--"

Mid-word, the transition through the barrier cut her off, but she didn't seem to notice. She finished speaking, then shot downwards into the abyss.

"Well, uh," Fang said. "Let's get the hell out of here, huh?"

Kamrusepa nodded stiffly, and didn't wait for me to approve too before we started moving.

We flew swiftly back towards the entrance area, flying over the molten metal pooling beneath us on the platform. When we were coming up to half way, another explosion came, this time hitting the other side and only landing a glancing blow on our barriers. Once again, it left the observation chamber completely unscathed.

"I don't think Zeno thought about it," I said, "but Seth must have activated the barrier. How are we going to get in?"

Kamrusepa clicked her tongue. "We'll hide behind it at an angle so it absorbs most of the blasts, then try to get Seth's attention. Assuming it's one-way, then if we line things up properly, he should be able to pass through safely and leave with us."

"What if he doesn't notice us?" I asked.

She looked troubled, but resolute. "I suppose Zeno will have to take him back with him."

I frowned. "What if Zeno--"

"He'll win," she said, with forced confidence. "As he said, he is the better arcanist."

We swept down to the base of the upward tunnel, angling it so it was between us and the rest of the chamber proper before incanting to contract our barriers to a smaller size and save energy. But as we approached the entrance, it was clear that something was amiss.

Though the barrier was up, Seth was not. Beyond the threshold, I could see him lying on his side, facing away from us. His clothes seemed burnt, and his arm was exposed to the open air. Even at the distance, it was obvious his skin had been seriously damaged.

"Oh, shit," Fang said, frowning and holding a fist up to their mouth. "Damn, damn, damn. I was afraid something like this might've happened."

Kamrusepa's face paled at the sight. Her already tense expression became almost morbid.

"T-The first explosion must've still reached him before he could get the barrier up," I deduced. "Even if it was facing away... The heat would've been enough to..."

"We've gotta help him," Fang said, taking up one of their little eris-receptacles. "This looks like a force-based barrier. We just gotta hit it with enough punch to force it open."

"W-Wait," Kamrusepa said, hesitant. "Are we sure we have enough eris? If the heat's already rising up through the tunnel... We might not have enough to make it back."

I rubbed my brow, then looked at her, exasperated. "Kam, you're the one who convinced him to stay in the first place!"

Why are you saying this? An internal voice asked. You don't want to risk your life either, do you? And you'll have to heal him, too. What if you end up stuck down here?

"I know, I know!" she said, half-snapping at me. "I just... I want to make sure it'll be alright."

"I can see he's still breathing," Fang said, looking like they were already getting ready to cast. "C'mon, Kam. We're healers! We kid around and everything, but aren't we supposed to save people, no matter what it takes?" They looked to her with a small smile. "You really want to be the one to go back and tell Ptolema that we lost Seth down here?"

She seemed uncomfortable, looking towards the ground. "I..."

"We'll have enough. We'll switch to alternating our barriers on the way out, and if there are any more blasts, well, the others can fix up our ears when we get back. Right?"

She glanced upwards, then gave a reluctant nod.

We pooled our resources, letting Fang tap into our scepters while they cast first a simple divination to determine how much eris we'd need to put into the strike, and then some piercing technique they didn't have engraved, but that they assured us they knew well enough to incant by heart, and we prepared to rush through the barrier. To Fang's credit, it ended up using less than I'd expected. I'd figured my scepter would drain to almost 0, but it only drained to about 15%.

Still, I wasn't feeling good about it at all.

The technique was so generic that I didn't properly absorb the incantation, but the attack took the form of a sharp bolt of force that punctured a hole in the shield around a meter wide, and we shot in, doing our best to angle our own barrier so that as little of the intense heat could get in as possible in the brief moment it had a window. Then we flew over to Seth, descending to the floor so that'd save eris even on that much.

Rushing over, I could see that he was in bad shape, but to my relief, it wasn't as bad as it could have been. From what I could tell, his right side had taken the brunt of the initial attack - he'd presumably been facing the control panel when it had happened - but most of his body had remained unscathed, and he'd managed to enable the barrier before collapsing. Still, what damage had been done was bad. Third to even fifth degree burns all over half of his face, arm and leg. Muscle was exposed in a few places, and the room smelled of cooked human flesh. Blood had begun to pool around him.

To his side, a box lay overturned, full of files marked with red bars.

"Okay," Fang said, clapping their hands together for just a moment as they leaned down to examine him. "It looks like he's in shock. I'll deal with the vitals-- Can you stop the bleeding, Su?"

"Y-Yeah," I said, and glanced anxiously at my eris dial. "Of course." I started casting the Flesh-Animating Arcana again, trying to optimize the incantation as best as I was able.

"It looks like his scepter is undamaged," Kam said, lifting it up from the floor. "We should focus on getting him resuscitated. He's a Biomancer, so the best person to be treating injuries like this would be him. It's already too late for me to reverse it with the Power."

It was obvious she was saying that so that he'd be the one spending eris, but it was hard not to conclude it was sensible. Unfortunately, from what I could tell, that was going to be difficult, and Fang quickly confirmed my suspicions.

"He's in hypovolemic shock," they said, their expression getting more severe. "Have you got his wounds closed, Su?"

"U-Um, sorry," I said. Even with the endorphins, I was starting to get worked up in the tension of the moment. "I'm still trying to get the math done--"

"Kam, you said you found his scepter? Give it here. I know some Biomancy.

Kam frowned, but passed it as instructed.

'Knew some Biomancy' turned out to be an understatement, and Fang quickly started speaking the proper words for Seth's engraving like they were their own, going right into the Flesh-Weaving Arcana without missing a beat.

Genius or not, this was strange. Scepter engravings were usually heavily customized and optimized for the owner. Even if you knew the incantation yourself, you couldn't expect to just pick it up and start using it without learning their details first, or you'd risk a miscast.

But Fang... Didn't even look. Not for a second.

I shared a confused glance with Kamrusepa.

Suddenly, I saw something shoot past the observation chamber window, prompting my head to turn sharply. It was only a moment after it had happened that I processed that the shape had been Hamilcar, soaring through the air at a high speed. In the distance, I saw him duck and dive between the huge tendrils of the Apega, his movements having the unnaturally jerky, machine-precise movements of an accomplished arcanist.

Following behind him was not Zeno, however, but strange, long wisps of energy that slid through the air with an organic quality, like serpents. They moved seemingly erratically before suddenly... Warping their dimensions, looking like they were expanding infinitely in random directions, distorting everything around them until they began to form something like a web. In response to this, Hamilcar jerked higher and higher into the air, before stopping suddenly.

It was at this point that I began to see things in the air. At first, I thought they were extremely small flies, until I realized that was completely impossible in the circumstances. Then I started seeing more of them. And more them, until the swarm was so dense it started to look like a mist.

I recognized this technique. This was an advanced form of Golemancy, and one of its few direct offensive techniques - the sort of thing I'd expect Hamilcar to know. They were primitive, self-replicating machines made of clustered molecules, fed eris in minuscule quantities by the caster. Once there were enough present, they could tear through a person in seconds, and were capable of subverting many barriers.

I felt worried for a moment, not knowing what the counter was or what had happened to Zeno. Fortunately, I wasn't kept in suspense for very long, because after this I felt another twinge from an immense amount of the Power being employed, and a moment later, the world exploded.

Well, maybe exploded was the wrong word. It was more like it - 'it' being the space beyond the window - dissolved from a coherent image into a swirling whirlpool of color, like staring into a puddle of oil in three dimensions.

And then, alone in this, I finally saw Zeno rise.

And, with a flick of her scepter, slam Hamilcar with two pieces of ice the size of houses. They shot from seemingly out of nowhere in the far edges of the cavern, moving at a speed so fast I couldn't even process what they were until everything had already happened, then convened at the top of the machine, slamming into each other with what must have been a thunderous crash. Ice shards and mist swirled everywhere, whipping in spirals from the angle and sheer force.

But it hadn't been enough. Above, I could already see steam rising as a man-sized bubble of fire sprang towards the distant roof, before suddenly pivoting towards the right. As it moved, sections of the air suddenly turned to solid gray stone, forming roughly-shaped giant spheres. They shot towards Zeno-- But he'd already moved, darting in an instant to below Hamilcar's new position. A whirlwind of lightning burst from his scepter, then bent strangely, trying to trap Hamilcar, who ducked and dived to escape. I saw the glint of his huge staff and the metal of his body in the strange light as he let himself fall, desperately trying to gain some kind of position advantage as Zeno harried him with more and more attacks; orbs of homing energy, ice that reached at him as it grew like a vine, beams of glowing force that hung in the air, trying to entrap him like bars of a cage.

"Astounding," Kamrusepa said, her eyes wide with a mix of awe and fear.

"W-What did she do?" I asked, unable to tear my eyes from the sight. "Why can't we see anything?"

"It must be the Matter-Unbinding Arcana," she said, her voice almost a whisper. "It weakens the electric force that holds particles together. It affects photons, so the light..."

"The swarm--"

"He must be trying to stop it from forming itself properly," she continued, cutting off my own similar conclusion. "If even the most base components in the air aren't behaving properly, then they can't be harvested, and the arcana becomes useless. But to apply such a broad effect with such precision... So that it hasn't struck Hamilcar's resistances and failed, or damaged the machine... It's incredible." She shook her head slowly. "Maybe he wasn't just talking himself up after all."

"Will it affect us?" I asked, fretful. "The barrier?"

"I don't know," she said, glancing downwards. "Let me see if I can make anything of these controls. I wouldn't put it past Zeno to have completely forgotten about our own safety." She narrowed her eyes. "At least it seems like he's going to win."

"But she can't pin Hamilcar down," I said, as the two of them descended further, moving suddenly to the left as Hamilcar shot out ten dozen fireballs all at once, which feinted Zeno before coming at her from behind. "He's still holding her back."

"It doesn't matter," Kam said, slowly biting her lip as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing. "All she-- He has to do is keep Hamilcar on the defensive, until he manages to wear down his resistances. The moment that happens, the fight is over."

Kam's weird hangups aside, it was true. As Zeno was constantly keen to remind us, they were a Neuromancer - the first Neuromancer, and a master in the field. Once she could use the Power on Hamilcar's body directly, he'd be nothing more than a doll for her to play with. She could even force him to march back upstairs with us on his own two feet.

That wasn't her only advantage outside of skill, either. You could see it in their fighting styles. Neuromancy was primarily concerned with the manipulation of electrical impulses, which meant users of it had a certain amount of intuitive knowledge when it came to arcana that manipulated electricity generally; I knew from personal experience that Ezekiel was fond of lightning attacks. I didn't know what Zeno had engraved on their scepter, but I suspected that they were twisting the elementary components of their day-to-day techniques into these energy attacks. It was a natural transition, if not one that explained the additional focus on ice attacks.

Hamilcar, though, had no such luxury. Golemancy could be a frighteningly potent discipline under select circumstances, but outside of a few exceptions, it relied on preparation or, failing that, an abundance of prodigiously suitable raw materials to animate on the spot. As far as I knew, it couldn't really be improvised into attacks.

Still, he was giving it his all. As Zeno harried him towards the ceiling again, Hamilcar suddenly pivoted to the side and landed on one of the Apega's many tendrils, sapping power from it for some complicated incantation in the few instants he had before Zeno caught up with him. I felt a pulse, and suddenly the world returned visually to normal, Zeno's technique undone. The air quickly began to fill with mites again as reality around where Hamilcar was standing suddenly twisted and contorted, before creating a shockwave of force that swept him backwards, Zeno hurling more condensed ice at him from behind that he just barely avoided.

I almost wanted to root for him. That is, if he wasn't trying to kill us.

"Ughh," I suddenly heard, below and behind me, followed by a few pained breaths. "Fuck."

I turned. Seth, though not really looking in any better a condition beyond fact he was no longer bleeding, seemed to have woken up, his unburnt eye peering wearily around him.

"Seth!" I exclaimed. "You're awake!"

"'eah," he said, his speech slurred. "Kinda wish I wasn't. What the--" He coughed again, Fang holding him still as his chest heaved. "What the fuck happened?"

"Hammy decided he wanted us well done," Fang explained. "Melted this whole weird place, but it looks like you hit the thingy in time." They furrowed their brow. "Is it weird that I always wanna give people cute nicknames right when they're trying to murder me?"

"Right... I remember," Seth said, nodding. "Everything went white all of a sudden, so I went for the controls..."

"How's the barrier looking, Kam?" I said, glancing back towards her as I was reminded. Through the window, I saw another of Hamilcar's massive explosions, though this one was far, far away from us, only visible from behind the machine as a searing outline, like a solar eclipse. (Or at least, what I'd been led to believe a solar eclipse looked like from dramas.)

"It... Seems stable," she said, her tone strangely terse. "It's still at roughly 90% capacity, assuming I'm reading the numbers correctly." She clicked her tongue. "Emphasis unfortunately on 'assuming', there."

I frowned. "Not, uh, exactly filling me with confidence."

"What, uh... What kinda state am I in?" Seth asked blearily. "I can't feel the right half of my body."

"Yeah-- I cut your nerves off," Fang said, their tone quick and anxious by their standards. "I don't wanna be, like, alarmist? But your body is fucked. Like, you'll-be-dead-in-an-hour-from-radiation-poisoning-without-decent-healing fucked."

"Oh," he said, mutely. "That's not great."

"Hey! Your brains okay. Your skull did a good job of keeping the no-no particles outta there." they continued. "So you'll be good for at least a bit. At least, uh, so long as you don't look at yourself in a mirror."

The extreme levels of honesty was another quality I didn't love about Fang.

"Do you think you could focus enough to heal yourself?" I asked. "We found your scepter."

"Maybe," he said, his tone already sounding weak again. "Fang, can you like, make me some norepinephrine? If I can just cast some basic stuff--"

"I'm on it," they said, and began incanting some basic Biomancy.

"I think we should get focus on getting out of here first," Kamrusepa said, still seeming on edge. "Based on what it's listed here, this barrier is being maintained by a few independent eris tanks below the floor, not the wider power source. That should solve our concerns about having enough to shield us back to the top."

I sighed with relief. "Thank the gods."

"Don't celebrate yet," she said, casting the Matter-Annihilating Arcana and disintegrating a small circle of the floor. I could, indeed, see that there were some tank-like objects below. "We'll need to disable it first, then hope our own stay stable long enough to take the mechanism apart and reaffirm the casting." She peered downwards. "It should take less than a minute."

"That's a pretty good plan, actually," Fang said, and gave a somewhat-condescending thumbs up. "Nice going, Kam!"

"I live to please," she replied dryly.

I frowned. "What if we get hit by some of that while we're doing it?" I asked. Beyond the window, Hamilcar shot a spiral of magma across the cavern over what must have been half a miles distance, only for Zeno to counter it with a wall of energy, sending it splattering in every direction at once.

"We're got a little bit of eris left, and we're no longer being explicitly targeted, so I'd say we have rather good odds," she said. Her tone was sharp, but she made an effort to make a sardonic smile. "And if we don't, well. People like to say 'who wants to live forever', don't they?"