Volume 1, Chapter 38: Side Effects May Include Poor Judgment (Patreon)

After diving into the hot pool, I surfaced at the far end and immediately looked back at what now resembled a collapsing heap of molten metal, repeatedly catching fire and flaring up, only to sputter out again amid hissing bursts of steam. What remained of Eli were just charred bones in this primordial soup. I choked on the smell.

Both my Stoke and the two instances of Pyrography stopped working the moment their source of fire burned itself out.

I crawled out of the water and the steam still billowing from it, then focused first on what was happening inside me.

[Kill! Kill! Kill!] My mind kept on wandering toward a dark place, but I managed to cast those thoughts aside.

My Psyche, though strained and overworked, was still holding up surprisingly well. I felt like I could afford at least one more use of both Cinderhide and Stoke, provided the fire involved was small.

I was almost certain that wouldn’t have been possible yesterday. Whatever had happened must have made me better at handling the strain, which was currently causing dizziness and a faint buzz in my head, but still at a perfectly manageable level.

[Skill branching available.] had been the last message I felt, right after using Stoke. So I decided to check what new abilities my Path wanted to offer me.

[Sufficient Essence of Authority accumulated. Branching condition for Stoke achieved: Reinforce another Inspired’s Stoke to the point where they lose control over the amount of heat being generated.]

[Wildfire]; Classification: Technique, Expression Type: Reinforcement, Authority Requirement: high, Authority Claim: An existing flame may be reinforced to spread rapidly between suitable sources of fuel. Each new flame may in turn kindle others, allowing a single fire to expand into a rapidly growing conflagration. Greater propagation consumes more Authority, while controlling the direction and extent of the spreading fire requires continuous support. Once sufficiently dispersed, the flames may become difficult or impossible to control.

[Whitefire]; Classification: Technique, Expression Type: Reinforcement, Authority Requirement: high, Authority Claim: An existing flame may be reinforced to increase its temperature and intensity without proportionally increasing its size. Continued amplification can drive the flame toward a white-hot state capable of rapidly damaging or melting materials that ordinary fire cannot. Greater intensity consumes more Authority and fuel, while excessive amplification may cause the flame to become unstable or exhaust its source.

[Ability upgrade cost: 250 Standardized Essence of Authority Units. Current estimated balance: 280 Standardized Essence of Authority Units.]

This time there were two options, and unlike with Cinderhide, both increased my combat capabilities. I still wasn’t sure, though, whether I might get something better to choose from soon if I held on to my Essence, so for now, I decided to put off progressing further down the Path.

Second, I looked around at my immediate physical surroundings. Bri was flying through the air between the melting toad and the wall of stalagmites, heading toward Nicky and, I assumed, Khufu, who was probably still lying somewhere over there.

“Nicky? Sophie? Khufu?!” she shouted, and I saw her form shrink slightly. “I’m, um, worried! Say something!”

“I’m alive!” I shouted back, getting to my feet and moving away from the water.

[Kill! Kill! End it! Do it! Kill!] Sweat ran down my forehead.

At the same time, I noticed that in the subconscious part of my soul, my Anima had decided to stop armoring my face, hand, and foot, thereby reducing the strain I was placing on my Psyche. The hand I had painted for Bri, however, was still attached to her body.

“Me too,” I heard Nicky call out as I reached into my pocket to check whether I still had the crystal fragment with that yellowish light trapped inside.

Separated from my companions’ eyes, I could finally take a proper look at it. So as I walked toward the passage on the far side of the chamber, I turned it between my fingers, studying something that looked like a current of water flowing inside a diamond, bouncing off its inner walls and shimmering with its own light. My Daimon, however, suggested that aside from the visual effect, the object also possessed certain magical properties.

[An inspired item found: Faith Crystal Shard. Classification: Authority coalescence. Known properties: A fragment of crystal containing condensed Faith Authority. When shattered, it releases the stored Authority to perform a miracle of a corresponding magnitude.]

Miracles? A crystal containing this light could perform miracles? I asked myself in silence, wondering at the same time how I might extract more of the light. Even here, in the place where the frogs had been trying to pry crystals from the walls, every shard I had noticed was empty inside, while the light, as if mocking me, kept racing through the crystalline veins.

It seemed obvious to me that if there were some way to lure that light into a crystal just as it was being broken away from the wall, it might be possible to harvest actual miracles.

Having no idea how to accomplish that for the moment, however, I decided to slip the crystal back into my pocket, say nothing about it to my companions for now, and head toward them to see where we stood.

Sophie was just staggering into the main cavern, looking around while holding her head with her left hand and bracing herself against the rocky wall with her right. She stumbled slightly over some of the crystals scattered across the ground, but managed to keep her balance on bent knees.

Khufu’Ri got back to his feet with Nicky’s help. She glanced toward her companion as she withdrew the hand she had offered the lion a moment earlier.

Bri, meanwhile, saw that everyone seemed to be in reasonably good shape and shifted her face toward me, manifesting it with a smile directed my way. At the same time, her spherical form flared with fire, adding both volume and brighter color to her body, before she flew toward me.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” I told her, offering a smile while finally looking down at the knife hidden in my backpack, the one that had been accelerating my cognitive abilities the entire time.

Only then, holding it in my hand again, did I realize that it was vibrating and seemed to radiate some kind of dark, murderous energy, one that tried to force my hand to attack and kill. My fingers curled around the hilt, and my face twisted with the hatred building inside me. Everywhere I looked, I saw those disgusting creatures. Those amphibians beneath me in the hierarchy, beneath me in evolution. They weren’t fit to exist on the same plane as I did.

I heard my companions shouting. Felt someone’s hand against my body, the warmth, the sensation of my body moving. Then it grew colder and colder until, eventually, I felt moisture again.

Rain fell across my hands and face. A few droplets at first, then more and more. Each one perfect and pleasant, bathing me in its warm, wet embrace.

“Arthur! Stop!” I finally heard the words, and my mind slowed.

Only then did I realize I wasn’t in the main chamber anymore. I was back in the tunnel, gripping the jawbone knife with both hands, its blade buried deep inside the frog’s wooden-flesh body.

I pulled it free from one of the dozens of wounds covering the creature. Around it lay the rope, hacked into tiny pieces. The blade trembled in my hand, and my hand vibrated in answer, matching it with a rhythm of its own.

“You massacred that thing.” Nicky. That was Nicky’s voice.

I stared down at my hands, red with blood. I touched my face and realized—or at least thought—that it was smeared and splattered with blood too.

“I’m sorry,” I said, watching as one of the teeth along the blade turned completely black, broke away from the jawbone, and dissolved into evaporating dust. “This weapon… it has magical properties. As long as that frog was alive, it accelerated my mind, but apparently, with every passing moment, it also kept forcing this need to finish what I’d started onto me. It made me want to kill the creature until I couldn’t hold it back anymore.”

“You need to be careful when you use that thing,” she said, crouching beside me and keeping a hand on my shoulder.

“I thought that, well, something had happened to you,” Bri said, hovering above me. “I’ve never seen you, well, like that before, you know? You didn’t react to any of my shouting. To anything I said.”

She looked so small, and her colors had faded as she spoke. I felt stupid for letting that tool get into my head.

“For now, I don’t intend to use it again—at least not on someone I don’t intend to kill immediately,” I said, putting the knife back into my backpack and standing up. I was afraid of hurting someone with it whom I had no intention of killing. I didn’t know whether, once I drew blood from someone, I’d be able to stop myself from spilling all of it.

“Generally speaking, aside from your brief loss of control,” Nicky said as she walked beside me, “we managed to clear the chamber of every amphibian that was in there. Completely.” She added the last word with another gesture. Every sentence she spoke came with some motion of her hands explaining the situation, as though she were trying to sketch everything that had happened onto some virtual map only she could see.

On the way, I picked up the bandage-wrapped crowbar, tossed it into my backpack, and grabbed the staff leaning against the wall.

“…Khufu is recovering,” Nicky was finishing.

“He’s in very good physical condition. A few wounds, some dizziness, disturbances to his hearing and smell, but he’s holding up well, and in a few hours he should be back to one hundred percent, but…” Bri finished for her.

I noticed that whenever she talked about something related to health, she rarely stuttered. Sometimes not at all and yet this time she hesitated and Khufu’s ears turned toward her.

“There’s something else. Something odd. I don't understand it.”

“A debt written into my bones long before I met any of you,” Khufu said. “It is not today's enemy.”

“But—”

“Today's wounds, Miss Bri.”

“…They’ll heal.” She finished, shrinking just a little and releasing a puff of white smoke. “Eli…” she gasped, looking in his general direction. “I guess he is, um, another reminder of how serious all of this is.”

I nodded. I didn’t like the guy. Wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. Didn’t need to.

“Sophie, on the other hand, even though she’s conscious and, as far as I can tell, isn’t dizzy, is… how do I put this… deprived of her own will.” Bri continued her assessment.

“Yeah. Look,” Nicky added as we approached the other two.

Khufu started looking around, trying to draw air through his nose and grimacing every time he did. His ears kept twitching in every direction, but he remained upright and steady on his feet. Whenever his eyes settled on something, he seemed able to focus on it without any trouble, but the rest of his senses appeared to be working constantly—including his whiskers, which never stopped moving for even a moment.

He was also the one supporting Sophie, who stood with one arm wrapped around him from the side. His massive arm returned the favor, curled around the smaller woman.

“Sophie?” Nicky said, snapping her fingers in front of the blonde woman’s face.

Her eyes immediately locked onto the movement and followed Nicky’s fingers.

Nicky moved her hand from side to side, demonstrating the connection. “Do you know where you are, Sophie?” she asked.

Sophie didn’t answer.

“Can you come over to me?” Nicky asked again, but nothing happened. She looked at Khufu then, and without another word, he understood that he was supposed to let the woman go. “Come over to me,” Nicky added.

Sophie started toward her at an even pace and stopped in front of the woman.

“Raise your right hand.”

Sophie obeyed without a word of protest.

“Good. Lower it. That’s enough of this degrading demonstration. You understand how serious this is, right?”

“Miss Sophie has become a will-less slave to stimuli coming from outside herself. The voices of the world move her bones now, rather than her own will. I witnessed such an occurrence once in the past, when I was still only a small cub,” Khufu added, striking his tail against the ground and planting his hands on his hips. Watching him move made me realize just how much my shoulder hurt. “When a shaman overreaches and asks the spirits of the bones for more than he can carry upon his shoulders, sometimes his will gives way and breaks for several hours. Then he becomes exactly this—a puppet in the service of others.”

“So this is the result of Psyche collapsing?” Nicky asked. “So far, all I’ve experienced were mostly nausea or sensory disturbances.”

“Now, richer in knowledge, I see that Psyche is indeed responsible for it. Yes,” Khufu’Ri replied. “Sometimes shamans reacted exactly as you describe, but the effects were not limited to disturbances of the stomach, or hearing things from the spirit world instead of beyond the real grass.”

“So besides sensory disturbances, overusing Psyche can also cause you to lose your own will. Anything else?” Nicky pressed.

I was silently grateful that, so far, all I’d managed to do was throw up and have wild hangovers.

“Along with losing the ability to control magic, one may lose the senses—all of them, or only some. Consciousness. The will to control one’s body, or only a part of it. Sometimes the mouth speaks only truth. Sometimes it always lies. Sometimes a hand does something it should not. One may also lose one’s morality and do something one would never normally do, but none of my ancestors were ever able to determine which bone decided what would happen. It was as though the wind, choosing for itself which direction to blow from, made that decision instead.”

“In short, we need to be careful not to overdo it with magic,” I added, richer in knowledge I fully intended to put to use. “The fight is behind us, though, so we should decide what comes next. I intend to see what’s on the other side of the chamber. Keep mapping it out, continue the green line, and look for the Toad That Dwells.”

“Are you insane? You want to keep going in this state? You’re not feeling the effects of Psyche overuse?”

“Little dizzy. Nothing serious.”

“I can, well, keep going too. I barely got any points for what happened here. Did you guys, um, get any achievements?” Bri asked, raising eyebrows made of flames that peeled away from her body. Her colors grew brighter as she spoke.

“No, Bri. No achievements, no points, and even though I’m feeling pretty decent too, Sophie is completely out of commission. I’m taking her back upstairs. No discussion,” Nicky replied.

“And I’m not going to waste time while I still feel fine. If I reach something that makes it impossible for me to keep going alone, I’ll let you know and turn back too,” I said.

“So when having us nearby is convenient for you, great, but when we become a burden, we’re supposed to fend for ourselves while you collect the reward for something we helped you defeat?” Nicky frowned and started jabbing a finger in my direction.

“I never said I was planning to collect anything by myself. I want to continue what I started. I was already operating on my own before, climbing the tower and dealing with the orcs. Somehow that didn’t bother you then.”

“Yeah, but the situation is different now. We could’ve left you behind after you collapsed next to Sophie, but we stayed with you. We didn’t go deeper into the temple and start looking for things on our own. And now you”—she pressed a finger into my chest—“intend to abandon her so you can keep hunting for treasure.”

“You’re right that the situation is different. Like I said, though, continuing to stand around guarding each other is a waste of time. Whether you like it or not, I’m going farther in and at least mapping whatever I find so that—careful, this might fly right over your head—you can come back here later with Sophie and find your way without any trouble. Eli gave his life so the rest of us could keep going,” I tried to play on their emotions.

“You’re an asshole, Arthur. A fucking piece of work. Did you know that Mara died because she protected one of us?”

I was pretty sure that was the first time I’d heard her swear since meeting her.

“If it makes any difference to you, I don’t mind Khufu coming with me. He can make sure I don’t accidentally find the Toad That Dwells without you, so you can get your share of the reward too.”

“Fuck off. This isn’t about the reward. It’s about us being a team. A community. We need that.”

“But we aren’t, Nicky. Bri and I are riding in one cart, and the three of you are riding in another. We joined forces to complete this side quest. That’s it.”

“Nicky. Arthur,” Khufu began, pushing us apart with his hands and drawing a deep breath. “Arthur is not wrong. Each of us follows their own path, and each path leads into different corners of the savanna. But Nicky is also right, because each of us walks while carrying the same burden upon our spine—the weight of all our worlds. Please, let us not forget that. Where Nicky’s path”—he placed a hand on her head, though she clearly didn’t appreciate the gesture and knocked it away—“sees the need to build a community that supports one another, Arthur sees the necessity of seizing time and devouring it down to the bone.”

“What are you trying to, um, say? Who’s right?”

“Both of them.”

“You’re going to go with him? Leave Sophie with just me, as my responsibility?”

“No, my dear. I’m going back uphill with you. We’ll rest together and eat our fill. We’ve earned that after what we accomplished here—together,” he added, looking at me. “But I trust Arthur. So far, he has shown that he is no stranger to laying his own bones out to bleach beneath the harsh sun if doing so would help either you or me, so I place all my faith in this”—the chamber brightened with the yellow light flowing through the crystals hidden inside the stone walls—“that he will not act against us, just as he has not done so until now.”

“I think that’s a miscalculation, Khufu,” the woman replied, looking at me with contempt.

“I feel in my bones that it is not. I will gladly accept the chance to follow a path someone else has already explored for me while I rest.”

“I, well, um, I’m going to go with Arthur,” Bri said, and her whole face seemed to lose its definition. Her colors faded, and her form shrank. “Sorry.”

“That is understandable, Miss Bri. Take care of yourselves,” he added with a bow. Then he took Sophie by the arm and gestured toward the tunnel we had all come through.

Nicky looked at me and Bri for another moment, then turned away without a word and started walking ahead, leaving us behind.