Chapter 235: Dislike

PoV: Inu Brook-Chavez - Hound

Despite Snow’s absence, things continue moving. The gangs from the fifth largely leave us alone, using Jean’s healing service when needed. It’s a fragile balance, where everyone needs to keep their mouths shut, but dad has taken over much of the management for Sylves.

His contracts work more simply, usually involving a fixed upon binding agreement about what might be lost in case of a breach. They’re a lot less esoteric, and involve a lot less agony, while being more binding in other ways. Sylves couldn’t demand monetary recompense, for example, but consigning their items to the deal makes people a lot less likely to break them.

The gangs on the fifth leave us alone. Reign makes use of the healing service the most. We don’t even know what she does to get so hurt so consistently, especially since Jean says it’s all internal. But she remains quiet and aloof, always.

Instead, the nobles have taken to giving us trouble. The rumor of where Ion lives has spread, and since Snow crushed house Richter. There are offers for marriage included in there, even, which we all swiftly agree to burn. Most of them, though, want illicit jobs done. One noble house asking to sabotage another, and threatening to rat us out to Respitia’s guard if we don’t.

That’s the funniest part. The city guard doesn’t know where Ion lives, even though the noble houses do. And they keep threatening each other over it. This is even funnier because I know that Snow accepted a deal from Owl to steal from some nobles, too.

And even funnier, because Delfine, one of Respitia’s more trusted accolades, knows who Ion is among us, but she doesn’t say. Right now, for that, she’s probably sitting in a cell somewhere, confined to the dark, but I can only imagine a smug smile playing across her face.

But, of course, there are sources of conflict. There are sponsors and nobles wanting us dead, and as the messages get more insistent, we prepare. At some point, one of the other gangs will try to take Jean. At some point, Respitia will find where we live, and send everyone she can after us.

At some point soon, I imagine, the nobles will get impatient and show up with personal guards in tow. The Flametouched will send another avatar after us, maybe even Flamando if he still can show up. 

I’m a little scared of all of that. But in the end, there’s not much to do except wait it out and prepare. I’ve been stagnating a bit with the lack of fighting here, and even though it’s been comfortable, I can feel that things are slowly coming to a boiling point.

When Snow returns from the monolith, we’ll need to be ready. Maybe even before that…

I turn to look at the door when I hear a knock. 

A soft sigh leaves my lips. 

Maybe even right now, apparently.

- - -

PoV: Snow Okiyama - Ion

For the sixth floor, we find another puzzle. Everyone in my group seems to feel thoroughly relieved at that. Pout and Nerves especially seem like they just want to be out of the monolith already. They’ve been growing stronger, but they just don’t have as much bite to them as the rest of us, I think.

They’re probably crafters at heart. That’s okay. I am happy for people to seek out their passions. Everything has its own value. 

Wearing socks and shoes again isn’t super comfortable, since the water staining them was rather dirty, but I washed them in the well of the safe room once everyone finished drinking from it. The puzzle of this floor is movement-based, so I’m actually largely useless for it.

Wire and Nerves, however, aren’t. The two of them dance across the pressure plates, testing them carefully in ways my [Observation] can’t. Lars sticks to my side as the others go about solving the puzzle. 

“Go on, ask,” I say with a sigh. I’m not good with people, but he’s truly painfully obvious, fidgeting about restlessly. Given how much I’ve ignored him, I get it, but having him try to hold any questions in doesn’t exactly seem to make it better.

“Do you hate me?” 

I tilt my head to the side. He was so worried, so I do him the courtesy of considering the question a little.

“Of course the bitch hates you!” Arithia interjects happily. The cheerful woman seems to really enjoy causing me trouble. “I’m pretty sure Yuki here hates everyone.”

With a small shake of my head, I deny her accusation. “I don’t particularly hate any of you.” I  turn to look at Lars. “We’ve got no bad blood between us. But that doesn’t erase all the stuff you did. Calling people from the tower NPCs, for example, is something I struggle to forget.”

He winces at that, and nods. Arithia’s eyes turn a lot darker at that, the glee disappearing from them. She grips her mace a little tighter, the shadow underneath her bubbling faintly.

“I understand,” Lars says quietly.

“Maybe, maybe. But let me be clear. I don’t dislike you. I dislike what you did. As for you, yourself…” I look him up and down, boots to the crown of his hair. “Apathetic. That’s how I feel about you.”

The words make him scrunch his face as if hurt, and Arithia’s lips twist into a smile. She’s about to say some kind of insult, I imagine, when Lars looks at her, fists clenched, and she shuts up. Her own lips twist into a frown.

Ugh. These two are an absolute pain. One so caught up in his own world he can’t look past his feet, and the other so obsessed with Schadenfreude she can’t even conceive being a little kind to others. Exhausting, exhausting. I can feel my battery drain. Wire truly is my most trusted ally in this group.

Nerves has been chittering to Cold and Pout about the puzzle, while the feryran woman simply completed her part, landing on the other side of the hall of pressure plates, having marked out a path for us to walk with thin thread. We need to synchronize our journey across, one person walking on each side.

In a cohort, there are an uneven amount of people. If we wanna beat the puzzle legitimately, we’ll need to cooperate with another group. Lord Seetang comes through the door, alongside Grisha and Leo. There’s a few more guards for the lordling, but he regards the room with a  cold gaze.

Grisha smiles and seemingly recognizes it, having climbed this place multiple times before. “Sorry, kiddo,” she says. “If everyone buddies up, that leaves you and me, and I’m not helping you across.”

I look at the trap she evidently wants me to trigger and sigh. One by one, the pairs cross. Pout and Cold. Lars and Arithia. Cassian and Leo. Other retainers in pairs…

Yep. It leaves me and Grisha, the last stragglers from each of our cohorts. The warrior woman gives me a grin, and sits down. “Come on, now, Yuki. Show this old lady what you can do.”

Stepping forward, I simply trigger the first pressure plate. What’s the worst that can happen?

Electricity surges up my legs, making me spasm. I take a stumbling step, triggering three more plates. My poor heart instantly starts spasming, my weak constitution sabotaging me.

Grisha snickers as she watches me get electrocuted. My mana moves against the current. Let’s see how this goes, then.

Chapter 236: Specialty

Life in the Tower is sometimes simple. Sometimes I just do my best, fight my hardest, and deal with things as they come up. Right now, I’m really rather annoyed because of how much politicking there is. 

I don’t wanna worry about who to annoy or not. I don’t wanna think about some noble brat’s feelings when he asks me to kneel. But I’m just not strong enough to crush them all.

Right now, it’s a halfway thing to there. The freedom to just do my best, to try and beat the trap, and the careful balancing act. Yuki and Ion are separate identities. I’m meant to be just an enchanter, someone who’s really rather good with runes. And sure, I can use shadow magic, because me being Kuro is well-known enough, after wiping out Raven.

Ion is still someone else. I don’t wanna reveal that yet. Showing off my healing in front of Lucky’s gang is somewhat fine. A little iffy. But they’ll manage. In front of Grisha, though, I’d rather not deconstruct anything.

An enchanter. How would an enchanter deal with this trap?

They wouldn’t have walked into it in the first place, I suppose. Gritting my teeth, I let my mana flood outwards, pushing back at the electricity. I imbue it with runes spontaneously - not dispelling ones, but conductive ones, instead.

This monolith has given me a whole lot of lightning essence, and I put it to good use. The electricity darts through the mana shell I created, crashing back into the floor. Sprawling threads, as Grisha taught me, redirect it away from me, grounding it, dispersing the energy.

A few tiny bits break apart against my Abiding Apathy, feeding me fragments of mana and essence, but I don’t work to properly annex this. It’s too complex for that. Instead, I simply make my shell denser and denser, weaving in the threads Grisha showed me to give myself a mana-metallic shell.

The woman smiles as she observes my measures, and I roll my mana-based hamster-ball forwards. Lightning surges, and rolls harmlessly off the sides of my wireframe construct. I tilt my head.

Thinking of a fun idea, I dispel parts of the shell. Grisha raises her eyebrows as large chunks of mana peel away and fall to the floor. Dozens more traps tripper, but instead of hurting me, they impact the sides of my conductive cage.

A faraday-cage, to be precise. I smile smugly. 

My conductive mana threads and particles rearrange, counteracting the outside electrical charge. They crash into each other, and the effect ripples across the material I made, but in the end, dissipates harmlessly.

This time, I’m a bit more greedy in what I steal. I must still learn to charge my headphones after all. It’s very important that I do, so I take the opportunities I can to gather lightning energy. 

And with my polite, insulating cage, I walk across the trap, unharmed. Grisha laughs one roar, then follows along on her side. The warrior-woman is a lot less clever about it than me. Rather than worry, she just lets the bolts impact her armor and shrugs it off. By the end of the zapping, her chestplate glows a dull red from heat, but her skin underneath seems entirely fine.

“Clever brat!” She grins brightly, then pries one of the pressure plates from the floor and tosses it at me. “Here! A gift!”

The way her fingers strained to lift it, and the horrible creak-crash it made when she ripped out the plate, I don’t think I could have done it. The bottom of it, though, is covered in runes. Runes to create lightning. 

Hm.

Before I can give her my thanks, Grisha walks through the staircase to the next safe room. So do we, I suppose. 

Pyro sits by the well, his eye looking a lot better underneath the eyepatch. Maximillian lounges against the wall, and Rose broods. Ascending a monolith like this so synchronized surely is a bit troublesome, but I do my best to ignore it. Instead of that, I just focus on Leo’s liquid mana.

How the hecc does he do it?

- - -

The seventh floor goes by swiftly. It sports automatons that we’re meant to fight, which means I get to very politely offload all of that to my great minion army. Lars is more determined than ever, now, and I think he’s trying to earn my approval. What a silly guy.

Compared to that, Arithia goes about everything in her usual, lazy way. While Wire and Nerve speed through the hordes, Pout and Cold sling spells from afar. Meanwhile, I sit politely in my corner, tracing runes that give me tiny little lightning shocks every time I test them with mana.

There’s a thin smile on my lips. I even wear my headphones a little. Angry tunes roil through them. It’s fun how music can drive emotions for me. For a little bit, it makes the apathy inside me abate. I use it to feel a little anger, and sometimes, to shed a little anger. 

A quiet expression of myself.

When I finally decide I’m done with the runes - having shattered all of them, destroying them wholly after saving their shape in my Archive - I rise from my seat on the floor. The team is sweating by now, especially the flobs. Arithia is covered in blood, with bits of metal still stuck in her, and Lars is enveloped by a heat-haze that warms the room enough for me to sweat.

I breathe in deep, then out. Mana reaches from me, latching onto one of the automatons - and failing. I tilt my head. Antimagic, in robots?

My, oh my. That’s why they’ve been struggling? “They’re enchanted, aren’t they?” I ask.

Arithia laughed scornfully. “Oh! Does the mighty guide finally deign to move its ass? Yeah, the metal boxes are magic. Zappy, too.”

“Interesting.” With calm steps I walk out in front of her, in front of Lars. The handful living robots - bigger and more menacing than those that mauled my team - lock onto me and charge. 

My mana reaches out, and this time, when the dispel comes, I tear into it. My mana falls upon their enchantments hungrily, redefining who is predator and who is prey. I shred through the dispelling enchantments. As a blade comes cleaving for my head, I unweave the magic that animates the creature.

Rune after rune falls dim, the faint glow underneath metal plates dissipating. Like an electric conduit short circuiting, there’s a simple flash of light that ripples across the automatons. And then, they fall apart into a heap of worthless metal plates, the runes cleanly erased.

[You have killed a lv. 75 Knightly Magebreaker]

Four more charge at me, each one equipped with blades, fangs, throwing knives, and more. Each of them moves to hurt me, only to find its processes failing. My mind jumps between them at the speed of lightning, my hand rising as though I’m conducting some kind of symphony.

Enchantment after enchantment crumbles into nothing. More essence pours into my mantle, bits of electricity and principles of animation that I think Amelie would kill for. After half a dozen seconds, the armors clatter to the ground, empty and lifeless.

[Deconstruction 30 > 31]

[Core Controller 30 > 31]

Without a word, I walk through the bodies, and onto the next floor. Arithia and Lars… they have authorities. Still, they’re getting ground down by just this? A little disappointing.

Ah well. They’ll heal from the well. Lars had his authority partially broken when we fought and he was abandoned. And Arithia… I eye her from the corner of my eye, seeing the smile on her face as she bleeds half a river. Her authority is probably something fricked up like wounds or death or maybe resurrection. Who’s to say. Not exactly combat based.

Unlike my efficiency. It’s mostly internal, of course, but when it comes to breaking enchantments like these apart, it turns me from an amateur enchanter into a disenchanting machine. My specialty just aligns rather well with this monolith, that’s why Lucky hired me, probably.

… Me being Ion is probably starting to be a stronger suspicion with, well, most of the underworld. That’s okay. Ion is logged as part of the Crybabies guild, too, after all. It was inevitable. Kuro is probably still considered separate, though. That one’s sneakier.

I scratch my favourite critter and they give a soft purr as we head to the next safe room. This time, it’s quiet. I use my headphones some more as I drink from the well. Grisha soon shows up, as do Pyro and his gang. My party needs a rest, so I’m stuck again.

Despite everything, I bear with it, the music expressing the anger I feel in my gut. It’s okay. 

Soon I’ll be back with my friends. And then, I’ll lock myself up in a lab for a week. I’m a bit of a rat, but I’m not sure how much longer I can keep going before I start to overthrow the state. 

A deep breath.

All in due time. All in due time. 

I look at Leo’s liquid mana once more. Cassian glances at me, and I frown.

By the end of this monolith, someone might get drowned.

Chapter 237: Lampreys

Floor eight. Another underwater one. I chug the water-breathing potion, and the air bubbles out of me bit by bit. My headphones and phone are isolated in a shell of mana that keeps them dry. This time, there are no leviathan bones.

Instead, there’s a glowing path in the sand. Plankton makes the water glimmer all around me, glowing with bioluminescence. And mana. That’s how I know it’s glowing, since even to my mana-sight it makes it harder to see. Waves of power ripple through the water, the energy that seeps from my vessel in a wide scan lighting up the ocean with scintillating shades of teal.

Hm.

Interesting. Very, very interesting. Carefully, I make another mana-jar, the construct glowing brightly in this environment. It’s full of water instantly, of course. There never was any air in it, in the first place. 

I pocket it, with the plankton inside. Perhaps I can grow a colony back home, and use it to visualize mana? Or improve my mana-sight, somehow? It would certainly be useful. Worst case, I’ll use it for alchemy. 

With that done, I let the rest of the team go ahead. They can at least see properly when it’s dark. I use my solid mana to manifest an arrow, pointing forward right in front of Arithia. There’s a decent chance she turns to me, but with the ambient mana-glow I can’t quite make out her features.

Instead, I just wait until she does walk ahead. Hmmm. When I’m not sending out pulses, I can see when people move. Interesting. The plankton radiates mana whenever something disturbs it, which means that people who move light up like, person-shaped glimmers, compressed down to show only the front of their body, the back distorted by eddies of swirling water.

Slowly, I tilt my head. Arithia’s shape in the water is different from what I remember her looking like. There’s little gaps in her outline. I watch, and another one appears - a semicircle on her outline where she doesn’t disturb mana anymore.

A thin thread of [Selection] sneaks through the liquid. It lights up the plankton, too, the tiny organisms being sensitive to far smaller amounts of mana than clumsy giants like me. Even the rest of the team can probably see it. 

When I touch upon the bits of Arithia that are missing, there’s a shape there. Something long and slippery, that has seemingly latched onto her. Does she not notice? I tilt my head. 

Mana travels along the tether, sending another ripple of blue light through the dark ocean. For a brief second, in that halo of light, a dark shape slips through it. A blot of black on a blue canvas.

My forehead furrows. The mana that moves along my tether, a simple [Deconstruction] reaches its target. Half of it disappears meaninglessly, and the other half seems to properly hit a target. There’s a faint sensation of thin, weak bones snapping, and I hear the faintest sound in the water.

The round indentation lifts off of Arithia, her flesh filling back in with mana. My tether begins to disappear. No, not disappear.

A dark, mana-absorbent shape travels along it, right towards my face. My hand moves before I can think.

Fingers curl in the darkness. I grab something wet and slimy. A long body, with thin scales. Some kind of eel-like thing. I swallow dryly, and pull at it.

There’s a tug on my skin.

I pause.

Slowly, I focus my senses, even as a fish’s teeth are apparently embedded in my flesh. My mind narrows. My mana flows normally. It ebbs throughout my entire body, in slow waves that pulse outwards from my vessel. Except…

There. In my cheek, there’s a gap. The mana just vanishes. It’s right where the fish’s mouth would be, if it were, say, biting me. 

With a swift and brutal motion, I rip it free. Parts of my skin tear, and fill my mouth with the taste of iron. Long, needle-teeth, I think, even as the pain from the wound returns to me.

Something like lampreys, administering anesthetic when they bite, and eating mana where they latch on? Gross. There’s a disgusting shiver that goes through me. 

I stop walking. Hold up my hand. The others, one by one notice, and stop. The glow around them fades to a thinner one, and the mana becomes slightly translucent. I expel a ball of floating mana, sending a solid surface forward.

Dozens of the lampreys flock to it from the darkness. I am blind, but by the way the mana lights up, the others take a moment to look down at themselves, and then they start to scream. Noise breaks out in the water, muffled noises of disgust and agony. They pry the things off themselves, their skin coming loose in bitten chunks. 

A shiver rolls down my spine. I send a mental command to Kuro - who is far less mana attuned than I am, and they once more prove why we’re friends. In a single moment, they flow over my skin. 

Unlike me, they use little mana in that motion. They simply flow around me as liquid darkness, curling around me. And with me, they curl around the other half dozen lampreys that are leeching my mana. 

In a single, dark bloom, Kuro’s mass flows inward. Mana spills into the water, but it’s used to give the shadows mass, rather than with mana itself. Needles of darkness burrow into the lampreys, and their jaws go slack on my skin. I shake myself with disgust, walking patiently as kuro peels the remaining bits of fish off me.

I dig their teeth out of my skin. I let my shadow-buddy form a suit of armor, and feed them mana when they need it. Darkness flows out from me, travelling across the ground. It wraps around the other, and occasionally causes them to make more noises of fear.

Mana and skills erupt in the darkness. Fire and heat, liquid metal and freezing cold. Small pulses of lightning, too. Skills pour into the water, lighting up the plankton - but the lampreys reappear. 

Now that everything around me is bright, I can feel them swimming through the mana like little blots of ink. They’re deceptively fast, hard to spot, and they just keep swarming. Only the glow of mana illuminates them-

My hand slams into my forehead. The glow of the mana! The dumb plankton is signalling to them. 

[Obfuscation] begins to spread outwards from me in a roiling wave. The water lights up in a brilliant blue, I’m sure of that much. I don’t make an effort to hide my mana in the slightest. They can see as much of it as they want to. Because I think that the lampreys lack mana sense in its entirety.

They’re antimagic creatures. I think they usually eat the plankton, and flock to anything that glows, since it means movement. The mana-draining seems to be more of a stealth mechanism, though it’s also effective against smaller animals, I’m sure.

Regardless of all that, I don’t worry about the mana. Instead, I [Obfuscate] the light. It’s a minor application of my shadow-based essence on the skill, and I imagine it more or less looks like I’m a squid throwing out an inky cloud. Kuro swiftly picks up on my intent, and ephemeral shadows spread out, too, cloaking the glowing plankton in darkness.

[Obfuscation 19 > 20]

Holding the effect in place while more lampreys nibble at me is difficult - both because the disgust I feel is distracting, and due to their genuine mana-disrupting effect. I throw stronger and stronger bits of [Deconstruction] at them. 

Their skin is still disgustingly resistant to it. Most of the attack’s power seems to just dissipate when it touches them. I can’t even see what happens to the mana, but I suspect, from the way it feels, that it’s being transformed into heat. The lampreys seem to radiate a bit of heat.

Despite that, I manage to break through their defenses, bit by bit. Their mana absorption has a limit, like I’m filling some kind of reservoir in their body. It’s definitely larger than it has any right to be, so I don’t imagine they’re just storing the mana wholesale, but I can just overload them.

Then, I slowly move onto finding the gaps between their armor. Digging my mental fingers in where the mana disappears, taking apart the mechanism - which, sadly, seems mostly biological - and learning to break it first.

That makes my war on the fish a whole lot cheaper. Bit by bit, as we kill them, their numbers dwindle. Reinforcements have slowed, now that we walk in darkness, but it does make it harder to stay together - until Wire wraps a metal cable around us all, allowing us to stay together.

By the time all the lampreys are gone, I’ve earned a whole bunch more essence, and am tempted to summon more of them. However, there are also a dozen holes in my body where I’m missing chunks of muscle and skin. So, perhaps it’s okay if I don’t.

Kuro still clings to me, forming semi-solid plates of shadow. Perhaps, if the others could see, my Kuro identity would be out. But they’re blinded, as I am, right now. A soft sigh leaves my lips. 

This floor sucks.

- - -

At the very least, past the lampreys, there are no more surprises. I took a sketch of their biology in my mantle, just to see if it might be useful once I get into more proper alteration with my healing skill. All in due time, I suppose. Too many projects to work on.

We also carry more than a few of the lamprey corpses with us. Turns out, they do store the mana weirdly. It’s mixed all throughout their blood, when they absorb it, slowly dissipating into heat.

Which also means that their blood is a pretty potent alchemic reagent for making any sort of heating draughts. If only harvesting underwater weren’t such a nightmare. We certainly do our best, though, and in the end, come away with a few alchemy reagents.

Eventually, cloaked in darkness, we do find the stairwell. More because Arithia periodically proves brave enough to poke her head out of the darkness and use her eyes to look for it. When we take too long, there starts to be a faint tugging sensation in my chest, like the mono is leading us along. Which is nice of it. 

In the end, we make it to the safe room. Arithia plops down on the floor, bleeding all over the nice stone instantly, as soon as we arrive. She gives a happy sigh. “What a fucked up floor that one was!” she whines.

She’s right, though. It was a messy floor, in part because I couldn’t tell how dangerous it was. [Observation] didn’t tip me off about the eels when I scanned the portal, probably because of their properties. It’s a weakness for me to consider.

At least we’ve gotten some decent materials out of it. The fish blood and the plankton by itself should make for interesting ingredients. Still, it’s frustrating. I listen to the pitter-patter of the rain on the ceiling as water drip-drops from my soaked clothes. Kuro stays wrapped around me, and I take a moment to spend my mana and drink from the fountain, restoring much of it. Then I spend it all again.

When Grisha tries to talk to me, I hold up a hand and shake my head. For a moment, she tries to interact anyway, and I give her a calm, long look. 

She gives up in the end.

I sit down in a corner and focus on my breathing. This monolith has not been as fun an experience as the last one. Too many extroverts. Too many, too many.

Cassian gives me another look. Pyro’s eye looks better. Grisha has noticed, I’m sure. She wants to talk about it, but she bites her tongue.

I feel tired.

- - - - - - -

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