Chapter: 762 - Afterglow (Patreon)

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Tala felt the world around her like never before. She could sense the ribbons of authority from ten thousand sources weaving together to create the landscape of power, including how they interacted with magic, reality, and void.

Reality threads lay out around her like a ten-dimensional map of existence… which it was. The overlapping reality nods showed her how things were both more united and more segregated than she’d ever have guessed, and language utterly failed her as she tried to even think through exactly what she could now perceive.

She felt the swelling resurgence of morale within the alliance forces looking on, fighting their own automata in the near distance.

Frost licked over her sensitive, newly crafted skin, her nervous system recalibrating moment by moment, the cool feeling accompanied by the static tension of power rippling through her as her soul-spirit settled into this physical form.

She’d left behind her old state of being, and for the first time truly understood why this level of advancement was called ‘Ascending.’ She was on a path that would draw her upward, and that path defined a good part of her existence now.

Still, it was not all that she was.

She could also feel how many eyes were widening in surprise—and no little embarrassment—at her… unclad state.

She had needed to get back to basics with her body in the remaking process, and even now, she was weaving her inscriptions through her flesh, moving quickly through each step, but that was more due to the larger circumstances than any real embarrassment on her part. This was her, and the world would accept her as she was.

One Fused who had well and truly retreated before the Black Legion commanders seemed to speak without thinking. “She’s… She’s naked!”

Tala huffed a laugh, feeling a sense of nostalgia as she remembered her return from the Academy, so very long ago. Still, she didn’t want people getting too distracted, so she sent her voice through the surrounding area to jar them from their shock. “Nothing’s for sale, gents, so please stop window shopping.”

With her inscriptions reestablished, Tala grew and manifested first her clothing then her armor, eyes locked on the clearly unsettled prime commander as it fought to escape Terry and Rane’s attention.

-Didn’t want to make yourself taller?-

Rust you, Alat. Tala still smiled at the renewed presence of the alternate interface. Good to have you back.

-Yeah… that was unpleasant.- There was a momentary pause before she added. -Inscriptions at one hundred percent, including the ones that we’d simply prepared for Ascending without using them before now.-

Her smile grew. Good.

Her skin lit with a powerful golden light as the cohesion inscriptions that she’d long utilized blazed with power.

“Mine.” Her voice held the power and authority of the Eskau of War, and both Rane and Terry backed off, giving the prime commander a momentary opening. At the same time, her previously empty armor shell melted into the dimensions of magic and that which had been her dissolved away into nothing.

The prime commander sprang backward, but Tala’s magic was faster, and she was still flush with power in the immediate wake of her advancement.

The iron and reality iron that sheathed her spellforms contained the inefficiencies, amplifying the effects even as her soul poured forth magic, reality, and void in quite unequal measures.

She wasn’t naturally existence souled, but she could still utilize what her daughter had revealed and what she’d baked into her reforged soul.

She flickered forward, catching the battered prime commander with a flat palm to the chest. As her fingers closed, the gauntlet let out a series of dissolution pulses allowing her to easily dig her fingers and make her own finger grips in the thing’s breastplate as she lifted the larger being off the ground.

Her aura forced itself through the interference of the reality field, letting her armor grow into the automaton’s insides and latch her more firmly to its physical form.

Before Veridicus could react, four of Tala’s arms came from stone- and starward, each wielding a blade, and they severed the prime commander‘s limbs, freeing them to be pulled into her sanctum, where they were contained within zones of magical suppression.

Iron spikes manifested, driving into each stump and locking the automaton down, preventing the ancillary matter it carried along with it from manifesting.

Tala was still blazing with power, her advancement just now settling in, even as the magical density in her expanded spaces finished ascending to new heights.

The Talons began flickering into Ironhold and back out, filling themselves with the new density, even if they weren’t well practiced in maintaining it.

The other automata were retreating to the west, seemingly unable to comprehend what was happening, and the Talons were in hot pursuit with power boosted to new heights as they carved through the previously stalwart commander variants. Alat locking onto their soulcores for destruction even as they were made vulnerable.

Tala felt as if fog were rolling away from her senses, and she truly saw the war from a higher perspective.

She’d been right in assessing the allies’ advancement as inevitable and that the Black Legion was simply trying to delay them.

She hadn’t realized that the automata were so close to creating more prime commanders, and now she felt five within the scope of her perception, and one more that was… more.

The alliance had been on the edge of defeat without even realizing it.

If that greater automaton had joined the Forest Spirit in attacking Anatalis, Botulf, and Conri within the southern forest—the domain of the Forest Spirit—then, the three god-beasts would have very likely been driven back if not slain outright.

The wolves were strongest as a pack, and a pack of three was not enough to hunt an elk and automaton of such power, not on their own.

As it was, the new one—Tala decided to call it a supreme commander—was going to be a problem.

The Leshkin princes had already been an unexpected wrinkle, and everything was coming to a head.

“This is it.” Tala’s voice reverberated through the trees. Instantly, most of the allied forces were moved to Ironhold, where they were told to rest and recover. If they were able to return to a battle-ready state quickly enough, they’d be included in the fight to come.

Tala wasn’t hopeful for most of them.

She moved the squirming torso in her grip to one side, even as she moved Eskau Meallain to appear directly in front of her.

The elf staggered slightly, then bowed toward Tala. “Eskau of Blood, Eskau of War.”

Tala quirked a smile beneath her helmet. “You have ever been one to fight above your advancement, Eskau Meallain, but I’ve held you hampered for years.”

Eskau Meallain dropped her eyes in difference. “It was right for you to do so.”

“Yes, it was.” Tala straightened. “Are you ready to fight properly once more?”

The elfin woman looked up sharply, her face becoming a mask even as her spirit surged with an eagerness that was difficult to describe. “I am the sword of the House of Blood. At your command, I will make even the rocks bleed.”

“Then go, take your fill and be ready.” Tala moved Eskau Meallain into Ironhold, removing all restrictions on the density of power the woman could draw in.

She turned her focus on the prime commander in her grip as he tried to speak. An iron spike manifested and rammed itself between the thing’s teeth, lodging in place and preventing any more reality manipulation through that method.

She sent a series of commands through Alat, and others began to gather.

She could feel the forces coming their way even if they were quite distant still. The balance was broken, and all semblance of covert action had been thrown to the wind.

The two sides would clash at as close to their full power as they could manage and all would be decided then.

If they were lucky, it would still be a few hours, but Tala suspected they might not even have that much.

Only time would tell.

*

Olen felt a trembling through his very blood as something in the southern woods changed forever.

The tree around him—Makinaven, which had been his home since he was but a mageling—shuddered, and warning magics triggered throughout the entire city.

Olen rushed toward his position in the city’s defenses, his inscriptions already flaring to life to give him a bit of extra speed and focus.

The city was nearing a time of waning—even if it hadn’t entered that phase just yet—and his tasks as a foundational script engineer was more critical than ever.

From the information pouring into the slate in his hand, he knew that something was going catastrophically wrong.

They’d been attacked more than a dozen times in the last year alone, sometimes by powerful individuals and at others, by whole armies.

Master Jevin and Makinaven itself had sent every threat away with ease.

This was something else.

Olen was still near the beginning of his career, but he knew enough to understand when something was beyond him, and the scrolling error messages presented to him were well beyond him.

He arrived to find his former master and current leader already hard at work, pouring power into their workstation and doing his best to manipulate their portion of the citywide grids.

“Master Olen! Good, I need your power.”

“What I can do?”

“Just power, interface A.”

Olen nodded, moving over and putting his hands on the indicated interface.

He activated the chain of inscriptions needed to turn his hands into efficient conduits from his gate to the magical infrastructure before him.

“What’s going on?”

“Reality took a hit, and it’s unbalancing our scripts.”

Olen blinked, not understanding. “Wait… Reality?”

The older man grimaced. “I apologize, but it’s not something I can easily explain, not now. When this is done, I’ll answer what I can.”

Olen nodded, turning back to his work, putting his mental efforts into getting just a bit more power through his gate.

He didn’t know what was happening, but he trusted his former master.

Moreover, something deep within him told him that his sister was involved in all of this.

It had been years since they had spoken face to face, but they’d stayed in touch.

If Tala was involved, it likely was very far outside his realm of understanding, probably far beyond his former master’s as well.

I don’t have to understand. I’ll do my part.

All across the city, other Mages and Archons threw their all into supporting Master Jevin as he fought to keep the tree city from slipping into the Doman-Imithe, despite the majority of them having no idea what that might be.

They knew enough, and if they failed, very, very few of them would ever see Zeme again.

*

Tala looked down at the broken shell that hung in her grip, limbless and sparking with vain attempts to wield magic and reality to execute some form of change.

“You got very unlucky, Veridicus. The moments of power surrounding an advance border on Sovereignty when we touch on the upper reaches, and I attained… more than one advancement, depending on how you look at it. I suspect no power on Zeme could have kept you safe from me. Now, that is passing, but you are already broken.” She shook her head slowly. "All you had to do was leave my daughter be. What happened here was your fault. I have taken your hostile intent and used it to forge my next step."

A blade flickered into existence, severing his neck, and quick as a juggler, she dropped the body and caught the head.

She looked around. “Make what preparations you can. I sense more of the Black Legion approaching, but we’ve at least two hours. They will be joined by what seems to be the remainder of the Forest Spirit’s offspring.”

Walden came to a stop beside her, his domain continuing to slowly press outward even as he no longer moved himself. “You feel… Different.”

She smiled. “I am different. How do you feel?”

The elk took in a deep, inhumanly large breath before letting it out in a hurricane of expelled air. “It is good to be in Zeme once more. Long have I been separated from this world, and I did not truly realize how much I had languished in that isolation.”

She reached out with her free hand and patted the tall shoulder of the immortal elk. “Welcome home.”

He chuffed, then looked down at the head in her hand. “What will you do with that?”

Tala followed his gaze. Two of her fingers were in the shattered eye-sockets of the head and her thumb rested on the iron spike driving into its mouth. “I will take apart the soulcore and let it pass from this world in peace.”

Walden looked at her, then back to the Black Legionnaire. “It is interesting… I sense that there are some stark similarities between the two of you, now.”

She nodded. “That which is evil can rarely come up with anything new, and this is no different. The Black Legion was using a rusted, hacked together mimicry of an Ascending state all along. The Leshkin too, now that I consider it. It should have been obvious. They were freed of the fate of their physical forms, and they didn’t have a domain from which to draw power or in which to be reconstituted individually. That left only Ascending as a model for what had been done to them.”

“And what has been done?”

She smiled. “I can give you the basic description, but it likely as not won’t make sense.”

“I listen.”

“The spirit does not belong to the next world. Thus, if the two are welded together, the spirit acts as a tether, keeping the gate from passing on.”

“Leshkin don’t have gates.”

“As I said, it might not make sense on every level, but the mechanisms are similar enough that it's unlikely to be a coincidence.”

Walden huffed but didn’t press.

Tala lifted Veridicus’s head up, turning it back and forth as she examined it. “Now, where to begin.”

Flow manifested in her other hand, a knife-sized void-blade already burning at reality as she trimmed away the more stubborn physical parts of the automaton. Less than a minute later, she held just the soulcore, a spirit entirely encapsulating an enslaved gate.

It truly was an abomination. The spirit anchored to the reality of the gate’s surrounding, filtering and processing all the power flowing through for its own ends.

The spirit was still aware, and was attempting to alter reality to get free, or harm her, or do anything of note, but Tala kept every act entirely smothered with her aura, will, and authority.

This prime commander was finished. She was simply taking her time to learn all that she could for the coming clash.

Those ready for the fight were gathering close, including the Pack as the Forest Spirit had momentarily fully withdrawn, going to gather with his own allies for this seemingly final confrontation.

Anatalis came before Tala and examined her for a long moment. He then threw his head back and howled in exaltation. He was joined by his remaining Pack.

Their clash with the Forest Spirit’s offspring had generally gone their way, but not entirely.

Some seven of the arch-beast wolves had been slain and would need time for their mother to reconstitute them in the northern forests. Still, those that remained were ready for the fight to come. More of the elk-kin had been slain, and waiting for those to regain form would not be in the alliance’s favor. Things were coming to a head, and there was now a reason to hurry, or at least not dawdle overmuch.

Tala tipped her own head back and basked in the sunlight coming through the opening in the canopy where the factory had once been.

It was a glorious day for deciding the fate of the world.

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