My Best Friend is an Eldritch Horror - Chapter 273 (Patreon)

Havel, who had only just settled back down as a cloak, slipped off Delph’s shoulders once more.

“I was wondering if you’d noticed that,” Havel said. “I was kind of hoping we could avoid the question.”

“Unfortunate,” Damien said. “We can’t. Why’d you do it?”

“Because I’m playing every angle I can get,” Havel replied, his gray body rippling in a shrug. “At the time, I had no idea if you would successfully pass the Faceless’ challenge. Frankly, even though I wanted you to, I assumed you wouldn’t.”

“You knew the Corruption was getting stronger, so you purposely let Delph release one of the Void creatures to try to balance it out better, so they’d both slow each other down,” Sylph realized. “That’s… bold. And stupid. What if the Void had been stronger than you’d thought?”

“Then the Mortal Plane would be reset,” Havel replied. “You’re acting like we have a lot of choice or control over our situation. The Void and the Corruption hold an overwhelming advantage. If either of them gets stronger than the other by too much, it’s all over.”

“Why couldn’t you just tell us?” Damien demanded, throwing his hands out. “Or… I don’t know, one of the other professors? Or literally anyone?”

“You know as well as I do what would happen to anyone that has a Void companion,” Havel said. “Delph would never be allowed to live normally again.”

“So you risked the entire Mortal Plane strictly to avoid inconveniencing Delph?” Damien asked.

“You’re putting it in a way that makes me look really bad,” Havel said. “I don’t see you revealing Henry’s nature to everyone. I’m sure their goodwill would go long enough to hear you out before they tried to kill you, right?”

“I’m sure a few of the professors would listen,” Damien said, crossing his arms. “And Whisp is an alcoholic, but she does seem to care about the school and its students, at least to a degree. Do you really think she’d just try to kill Delph out of nowhere?”

Havel laughed. “You don’t know anything about Whisp, Damien.”

“If it helps, Havel didn’t tell me a word,” Delph said, glaring at his companion. “I had no idea that It Who Stills the Seas was there until after he was freed. Havel kept it from me as well.”

“It doesn’t,” Damien said flatly. “But I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about it now. It Who Stills the Seas is out, and the Void probably isn’t far from reaching their goal. After we deal with this Corruption Seed, we’ll need to go after them as well.”

“Not like you’ll be able to, but make sure you don’t mistakenly damage one of the sides too much,” Havel warned, slipping back up to Delph’s shoulders. “We’re in a precarious balance. If any side is weakened too much, it’ll all come crashing down.”

“We’ll continue training soon,” Delph said. “Void or not, you’ve still got a lot to improve at. I’m curious to see if you or Sylph got much useful out of your little vacations.”

Damien smirked. “Oh, you’ve got another thing coming. You’d be surprised to find–”

Sylph clapped a hand over his mouth and Delph cocked an eyebrow. “Find what?”

“You’ll see,” Sylph said, removing her hand.

“I hate surprises,” Delph said. “Tell me now.”

“No,” Damien and Sylph said at the same time.

“Especially not after I know it’s going to tick you off not knowing,” Damien added. “Good catch, Sylph.”

“Damn kids. No respect,” Delph growled, turning on his heel and striding off. “I’ll see you for training.”

He stepped over the edge of the mountain, vanishing into a gray portal before he could fall. Damien rolled his eyes.

“Planes, he’s dramatic.”

“Do you really think he and Havel were telling the truth?”

“I don’t know,” Damien said, his features growing serious. “They’ve done a lot of lying. Some of it has been for good reason, but the rest… I just don’t know. The more I learn about Delph, the less I realize we really know him.”

“Those were about my thoughts as well,” Sylph said as they walked back into their room, letting the door swing shut behind them. “We’ll just keep doing what we have been. Watching. I hate to ask this, but – if we had to, could you and Henry defeat him? In a serious fight.”

Damien let out a sigh. “I don’t know. The problem is that he’s hiding so many things that I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s kept his real strength secret as well. Delph is probably the strongest mage we’ve met.”

“Good assessment,” Henry said from within Damien’s shadow, speaking out loud so that Sylph could hear him too. “Havel is the first Void creature, Sylph. The amount of knowledge he must have… if we were to fight, it would be very bad. Damien has access to Void magic while Delph doesn’t, which should even the scales a little, but Havel can use it himself. We should very much hope that Delph is never against us.”

Sylph nodded grimly. “All we can do is train, then. Get on that tracking spell as quickly as you can, Damien. We need to deal with the Corruption Seed as quickly as possible.”

“That’s the plan,” Damien said, walking over to their training rooms. A thin layer of dust had settled in over just about the stone. They hadn’t bee very neat in the first place, so it wasn’t much of a difference.

Damien mentally prodded Henry, showing him a combination of two rune circles. After a moment, his companion gave him an approving grunt. The Ether poured from Damien’s fingertip, forming into a yawning black portal.

Air rushed into it, sucking the dust and the smallest pieces of rubble from the ground before snapping shut a moment later. Sylph raised an eyebrow.

“That’s new.”

“Just copying a spell I’ve seen Henry do once or twice,” Damien replied. “They’re starting to come easier to me.”

“Probably because you’re actually making your own spells instead of just copying them like most of us,” Sylph said. “If runecraft wasn’t so extensive, I would have wondered why the colleges didn’t all teach it as a mandatory part of the battle mage courses.”

“It just isn’t realistic for most people,” Damien said. “I was almost completely self-taught after all the basic runecraft we learned in Ardenford. There’s just too much information you need to know in order to properly make your own spells. It would be great if everyone could do it, but the time commitment is too high.”

“Not to mention it actually takes some skill,” Henry piped up, forming a mouth in Damien’s shadow. “You’d be surprised to know how uncreative many people are. Blackmist seems to have it generally right. You saw that Delph assigned Nolan to the runecrafting class. That wasn’t a mistake. Any students that they suspect have the creativity to use runes end up getting assigned to that class.”

“I didn’t get put there,” Sylph said, scrunching her nose. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

Henry snorted. “As if you have the Ether to play around with making your own spells. Focus on your strengths. And, speaking of those, your Corrupted abilities don’t use your own Ether, right? They’re basically perfect for you.”

“They are,” Sylph admitted. “Especially if I’m fighting someone using a lot of Ether that I can steal.”

“Good. Give me more compliments,” Henry said. “I deserve them. Don’t forget that I was the one who stuck the Corruption inside you and weaved your little mortal frame back together so you didn’t blow up in a geyser of green goo and rock.”

“Ignore him,” Damien said, crushing the mouth beneath his heel. Henry formed another one an inch to the side, blew a raspberry at him, then slipped away with a cackle.

Sylph laughed. “I guess it’s back to standard, then. I’m going to get to practicing. There’s still a lot of time left in the day.”

“Likewise,” Damien said. “I’ll see you for dinner.”

He walked into the farthest training room, grabbing his dust-covered bag of chalk from the ground and cleaning it like he had the previous one. He pulled a stick of chalk out and sat down, already starting to put together some ideas on how he might get a suitably powerful tracking spell.

Hours passed, and Damien ran his chalk down to a nub covering the ground in rune circles. Henry watched his work, providing insight when it was needed. He didn’t speak much, which suited Damien just fine.

He was getting more comfortable with all of his powers with every passing day, and the thing he needed most to create the spell was concentration. With Henry catching any small, unimportant flaws such as a missing rune that might end up detonating the Ether along the line of the tracking spell, possibly killing or maiming someone in its path, he was making fantastic progress.

Ironically, the only time that he actually would have liked to have Henry just give him a spell, his companion didn’t have one. Before bonding with Damien, Henry’s senses had been so powerful that a tracking spell was worthless. He just knew. He’d picked up some mortal tracking spells, but Damien had one of those replicated within the first few hours of work.

A normal spell wasn’t enough. He needed to track into the Void, and that made everything magnitudes more difficult. Getting Ether into the Void without it getting lost or consumed was the first major problem. If he could manage that, he still needed to search an enormous area for a very small signature of energy and then relay that information back.

Damien lifted his weary eyes many hours later, covering a yawn with the back of his hand. The floor was completely covered with scribble marks and his fingers ached from exertion. His legs buzzed as he clambered upright, shaking them off to try to get the feeling back.

“Not bad,” Henry said. “You’ve made decent progress. I’ve got an idea of how you can get the Ether into the Void safely, but I want to see what you come up with. If the time crunch gets too bad, I’ll just give it to you.”

“That’s fine,” Damien said, rubbing his eyes. “I think I should be able to get that in the next few days. I just need to spend more time studying the effects of the Void runes. It feels like half the time, they make absolutely no sense.”

“That’s because they don’t,” Henry said helpfully.”

Damien grimaced. “Figures.”

He brushed the chalk off his clothes and walked into the other training room. It was empty, but there were scuff marks on the wall that he was pretty sure hadn’t been there a few hours ago.

Walking out into the main room, Damien caught sight of Sylph as she stepped out of the bathroom, wringing water out of her hair.

“Good timing,” Sylph said. “I just finished training. I didn’t disturb you, did I?”

“Didn’t even realize you were doing anything other than meditating,” Damien replied. “I guess I was just really caught up.”

“Make any progress?”

He waggled a hand in the air. “I made progress. Not sure if I’d say it was a lot, but I’m still on track.”

“Progress is progress,” Sylph said. “Where should we get food? Unless we wanted to cook.”

Damien curled his lip. “Unless you’re offering, I think I’ve seen the results of our cooking. We’ve got more than enough coin to buy something, and the benefits we’d get from eating monsters are probably going to be fairly negligible at this point.”

“Especially considering I think I’ve got almost as much monster in me as human,” Sylph said. She paused, the laughed. “As do you.”

“I am not a monster,” Henry complained. “I prefer to think of myself as a bringer of happiness. To myself.”

“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” Damien said.

“I don’t sleep.”

“Nor are you very good at catching phrases of speech.”

“It’s called being intentionally obtuse,” Henry said. “You wouldn’t know, since you have to not be obtuse in order to choose to become obtuse.”

“Sometimes, I wonder if there’s any actual rational thought that goes on in his head,” Damien said to Sylph.

She shrugged in response. “No comment.”

Henry harrumphed. Damien could feel him gearing up for a rant and was about to shove him back into his mind when a knock rang out against the stone door. Damien extended his senses, noticing Sylph going still to do the same.

“I don’t recognize them,” Sylph said, a tiny trickle of Ether traveling to her palm.

“I do,” Damien said, walking up to the door. “Don’t worry. They’re friends.”

He pushed it open. Xil, Alina, and Venus stood on the plateau, glancing around nervously. Xil let out a pent up breath when she saw Damien.

“Damien. I half thought your insane Dean sent us to the wrong room.”

“Nice to see you, all,” Damien said as Sylph walked up to stand beside him. “You’re here a little earlier than I expected.”

“Kat gathered us all up and said we were going on a field trip,” Xil said. “When we got here, the dean told Alina and I that we were accepted. We didn’t even have to take an entrance exam…”

“She’s an odd one,” Damien said. “I’m glad it worked out, though.”

Xil lowered her head in respect. “I owe you my life and more. You and Venus. And Quinlan. Most of you, actually. Thank you.”

“It really wasn’t much trouble,” Damien replied with a shrug. “Glad it worked out. But… why is Venus here?”

“Quinlan is heading over as well, once she finishes up a quest she’s currently on,” Venus said, crossing her arms. “And nobody else in Mountain Hall was worth my time. I asked Kat if I could tag along, and she said yes.”

“Well, welcome to Blackmist, I guess,” Damien said. “There are quite a few pretty strong people here. I’d love to see how you’d fair against Cheese or Aven. Actually, I’d like to see how I fair against her myself.”

“I’ll be sure to seek them out,” Venus said. “Who’s the girl behind you? Is that Sylph?”

“What other woman would be in my room? Actually, given my track record, don’t answer that,” Damien said. “Everyone, this is Sylph.”

Sylph inclined her head politely.

“I’m sorry for intruding on Damien’s space,” Xil said. “I hope I didn’t cause you any issues.”

“It’s fine,” Sylph said with a shrug. “I don’t care.”

“Say, does Delph know Kat is yere yet?” Damien asked.

“I don’t think so,” Alina said. “She’s not on campus yet. She dropped us off and then left, saying she had to take care of something.”

“Good,” Damien said. “I want to be there when they meet. I get the feeling it’ll be fun.”