A Simple Transaction I
- Thread starter Rihaku
- Start date
- Original
DarkSideBard
Flying, without moving on
Well, I guess it's impossible to overcome the power of people namevoting Rihaku. But getting omake rewards at least partially because of my efforts feels good.
...someday I'll come up with a more optimal plan that you! Someday! *Shakes fist at the sky in despair*
The problem with magic being real and the existence of enchanted objects is that nothing is ever truly safe to touch again! It's even worse with Misfortune. Wiz's house in particular is a death trap, haha. I hope that, with the Rewire Mitigation, funny stuff will happen instead of things like that terrible vision of him trapped under burning logs.
The only way I can think of to deal with the problem is acquiring some sort of mage sight that Kazuma can flick on and off, just to know whether there's magic on things. Plus, such a thing is likely to be generally useful and upgradeable when it comes to divining information to prevent Misfortune procs. Can we buy something like that? My bet is that it's either non-elemental Advanced Magic or something that branches off of Countermagic, which Rihaku bought in his build if I'm remembering right?
"As Expected, This Lich is Too Friendly For Capitalism"
...I want to eat Dragon meat hotpot, now. This isn't even food porn in any way and that still sounds delicious. I blame Toriko for doing this to me.
Buttering your party up with luxuries before getting them to swear themselves in for Retinue is a good strategy, though I suspect that it's more targeted at Aqua than Subaru, who wouldn't be insulted. Though it will set the "pizza party" precedent for Kazuma breaking things to them, as well as for whenever they induct a fourth person, since they still really need some sort of tank/soak to be effective. Kazuma will have to look out for someone (who isn't Darkness) who can be relied upon to be suitably martially inclined. Optimally it would be soon, but nothing is stopping him from picking up and going through temporary party members who fill the role until he finds the right person. And finding the right person is really, really important on the scale of time that they're likely to be comrades on.
If this was QQ I would say that I Know Where This Is Going, but seeing as this is a good Christian Light Novel/Original Universe Crossover Rihaku Subquest, I will simply note that Kazuma can check a few different fetishes off the list entirely, since he doesn't have them. Good for you! The process of self discovery can be a winding path that takes you all sorts of places, like being called "Sir" deferentially by a pretty immortal undead woman who could flatten you like a hydraulic press.
"Hmph," snorted Misfortune-kun, raising his pointer finger to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose, the glare rendering his eyes invisible. "You...ARE TOO NAIVE!"
M O L D
E A R T H
Good reaction from Kazuma! Charity's flexibility is really saving his bacon from Misfortune in a way that I didn't anticipate, since it lets him ignore or avoid things being spilled/crashing into him, so long as he notices them. And I guess his gliding trick also helps him out with the breakability of stairs. Seeing him use his magic abilities in general for the utility of stymieing Misfortune's ability to fuck with him is actually really enjoyable and funny. It's weirdly almost as satisfying as combat is, though in a less visceral way.
The Mondo Bait, Kazuma. The Mondo Bait.
Lute is good as a one-time distraction. Ring is...maybe useful in a pinch, if you don't mind need Aqua right afterwards. Spider Whistle is consistently good at ruining social events or any sort of gathering, especially indoors or in the forest, though hopefully we'll have some method of dealing with the spidertide ourselves. Spoon of Oatmeal is good to feed a lot of people in a pinch, since all you have to do is get a larger vessel and keep filling the bowl with water or dirt and pouring the slop into the larger vessel. Theoretically this artifact sucks to use yourself, but it's amazing for emergencies.
Matchsticks sucks. If we want bright light, we can upgrade the basic lightning or fire spells to get a flashbang or flashlight variant.
Nuka-Cola isn't worth it for the Rads, even temporarily, unless we know that we're going to a volcanic environment before and want to swing back to buy it off of Wiz.
...the Elder Scroll sounds dumb, sure, but it's actually a non-inconsequential additional sense in any environment with moths, since it gives you the general lay of the land, where there's some open air vs obstacles, the wind speed, as well as letting you know if you're close to the surface while you're in a cave. If this gave a permanent moth sense it would be an instant buy, but otherwise I'm on the fence.
If the White-Bone Crossbow works, then it's an invaluable situation-specific buy.
I don't really like the Flexible Sword since it doesn't do its job as a sword particularly well.
Ditto for the Holey (ha) Shield, which we don't even have the right party member to use.
Fishing Rod is Mondo Bait. It's conditionally useful, but the condition is narrow enough that I don't see it as worth buying unless Kazuma comes across a situation where it seems like he'll want it.
Ring of Rebellion is just a +10 All (non-luck) Stats with no downside for us. If Kazuma had Accretion, this would be prime Panoply material! Behind the Rod, of course.
I like the Elder Scroll as a fun pick, but it takes too much money. The Ring of Rebellion is great, and I feel like the Crossbow is a must-take for a just-in-case scenario, though that leaves Kazuma with only 1500 Eris...I don't think that it's an issue tomorrow, considering how much money the party is probably going to be bringing in.
Obviously two 75% actions are better than one 100% action, with taking 100% or 50/50% plans only neccesary if there was one task we had to get right or two tasks we had to do that conflicted.
Hang out is cool but hardly necessary to do right now. We're literally still on the first day, so there'll be time.
Relax and Focus is probably important, not just because of the mechanical benefit of the willpower, but also because introspectively thinking about the major changes that have happened in his life is an important long-term habit for Kazuma to pick up if he wants to continue being alive and enjoying it for as long as time now stretched before him.
Productive Work is good because physical statistics are lifesavers, though the increased Work Ethic is arguably more important. This is, again, something that can wait, since physical stats are not key to Kazuma's build.
Training Drills is just the same shit but worse. He hasn't even been here one day, chill.
Meditate On Life gives key stats for Kazuma's build and synergizes well with the purpose of Relax and Focus. Plus, it's got a + for Kazuma's brother! This is Kazuma's +Catherine option, y'all. I would feel guilty not taking it.
Look For Tutor/Look For Party members are both good and essential tasks, but have no real urgency to them, since it's unlikely that putting them up now will catch anyone who wouldn't see them if we put up the notices tomorrow morning.
So my choices are Relax and Focus/Meditate on Life, which are synergistic in type and purpose.
Power Injection is just a bunch of immediate power, which is super useful but not particularly special.
Shining Resolve is good, but Aqua is already doing alright, and we still aren't on to Stage 2 mitigation yet, so 10% faster isn't worth quite so much.
Advanced Tutorial is good, just for the chance to learn Heal, which is absolutely invaluable in preventing death spirals and improving the party's safety. Do we get to spend upgrade points on spells we learn this way?
Red Dawn is amazing for someone as creative as Kazuma, and is amazing for him as a Progression-Type with Arch Wizard in the long term, but might be a bit weak inside of the timespan that this subquest is likely to cover.
Fortune's Celerity is incidentally good, but since working on Luck now is a misuse of resources, it's mostly valuable for accelerating Fortune's Smile. But I don't know that decreasing the cooldown by a month out of a year is worth quite as much as the other things here would be from being given that length of time to ripen. And also there's obviously the length of the quest to consider.
I think I'm going Power Injection/Red Dawn, since the former is power type and justifies the potential type of the latter. Power now is power later, as the saying goes. Plus, Red Dawn lets us develop healing advancements with concerted effort. I'm not sure if I read the situation right, but apparently using spells in specific ways a lot can end up unlocking custom variant spells for people, I guess as a matter of their effort being spiritually perfected into an outright Skill. With Progression, this should allow Kazuma to use Unstructured magic to practice his way into high-utility effects, that can then be unlocked and bought as proper skills. If not, Unstructured magic is still an extremely ripe field for Progression to work with and should absolutely be taken. It'll save Kazuma's ass in a pinch, so long as he keeps some manatite handy in Charity's space.
[Bird] White-Bone Crossbow
[Bird] Ring of Rebellion
[Bird] Relax and Focus
[Bird] Meditate On Life
[Bird] Power Injection
[Bird] Red Dawn
[K] Ring of Rebellion
[K] Productive Work
[K] Training Drills
[K] Shining Resolve
[K] Red Dawn
Ring of the Rebellion - and only that - with Curse of Misfortune, having some cash on hand is mandatory. We are already regularly spending money on broken beds and such. There is arguably some value to not buying anything at all - but come on, +allstats is good asf and so is a connection with Wiz. Consider the fact that she might be a potential magic trainer.
We should inquire in-depth about the Ring of Rebellion. If there are other items in the [Of Rebellion] series, we are very, very interested in getting them. Does Wiz crafts her stuff herself, or..? If she does, it might actually be worth commissioning an entire set of these things. That could be a lot of +allstats, depending on the number of item slots Kazuma has.
All of the other magical items on the list are very good in certain situations, but we do not have the money to buy situation-specific items right now. We will soon, though, since in this world Progression pretty much automatically translates into cashflow. Just get what we need now, we can get the rest later.
Work ethic. Work ethic is majestic considering how limited Kazuma's time is with Affliction of Slumber. It is an invaluable multiplier in general and would get Kazuma further than a single +Willpower. It is also invaluable for training with a trainer, which we should get - later. Now, for synergy reasons, studying the basics of How To Be An Adventurer is a better choice.
Not quite sure about Boons. @Birdsie - do we need magic effects discovered and unlocked before we can start experimenting with them using Unstructured Magic - or we could just start pouring in mana andmake some shit up instantly unlock spells like Unstructured Heal or Flight from the get-go without any additional requirements?
Does getting Advanced Training now makes training and buying further "exotic" and clerical spells easier?
[K] Productive Work
[K] Training Drills
[K] Shining Resolve
[K] Red Dawn
Ring of the Rebellion - and only that - with Curse of Misfortune, having some cash on hand is mandatory. We are already regularly spending money on broken beds and such. There is arguably some value to not buying anything at all - but come on, +allstats is good asf and so is a connection with Wiz. Consider the fact that she might be a potential magic trainer.
We should inquire in-depth about the Ring of Rebellion. If there are other items in the [Of Rebellion] series, we are very, very interested in getting them. Does Wiz crafts her stuff herself, or..? If she does, it might actually be worth commissioning an entire set of these things. That could be a lot of +allstats, depending on the number of item slots Kazuma has.
All of the other magical items on the list are very good in certain situations, but we do not have the money to buy situation-specific items right now. We will soon, though, since in this world Progression pretty much automatically translates into cashflow. Just get what we need now, we can get the rest later.
Work ethic. Work ethic is majestic considering how limited Kazuma's time is with Affliction of Slumber. It is an invaluable multiplier in general and would get Kazuma further than a single +Willpower. It is also invaluable for training with a trainer, which we should get - later. Now, for synergy reasons, studying the basics of How To Be An Adventurer is a better choice.
Not quite sure about Boons. @Birdsie - do we need magic effects discovered and unlocked before we can start experimenting with them using Unstructured Magic - or we could just start pouring in mana and
Does getting Advanced Training now makes training and buying further "exotic" and clerical spells easier?
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Birdsie
Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy
- Location
- Poland
Yes. The very definition of Unstructured Magic is that it has absolutely no structure, and for that reason, absolutely no limits. In other words, you can do anything with it - it's low-quality reality-warping - but its mana-to-effect rate is horrendous. It's only useful in a pinch or for impressing people at a party, or otherwise obscuring the range of your abilities.
Teleport a snail to see its reaction, then control its mind to make it race against other snails, and then accelerate its personal timeline by a factor of 1.25x to make it win. Finally, transform the snail into a fire elemental snail and bestow low-tier sentience upon it, that it may rule other snails. So long as your target is "snail-sized" it works beautifully, but the further up you go, the more power you spend.
At Kazuma's current level, Unstructured Magic that's 66% as strong as a Basic Spell would be as onerous as casting Teleport once and then spamming high-intensity Freeze for a couple of seconds. As his Magic Power increases, this will rise slowly.
So, basically, it starts as Lesser Wish Prestidigitation and evolves into Wish. It also does not need XP investments to stay relevant, as it basically scales with our mana pool.
...Also, we have Aqua, with her ungodly - well, literally godly - magical reserves. Once Kazuma learns that Drain Mana trick, Unstructured Magic is going to become absurd. In fact, this might be something worth aiming for.
Yeah, it is a crime not to get it. Still undecided about other options, though.
...Also, we have Aqua, with her ungodly - well, literally godly - magical reserves. Once Kazuma learns that Drain Mana trick, Unstructured Magic is going to become absurd. In fact, this might be something worth aiming for.
Yeah, it is a crime not to get it. Still undecided about other options, though.
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[Bird] Ring of Rebellion
[Bird] Training Drills
[Bird] Meditate On Life
[Bird] Red Dawn
[Bird] Shining Resolve
Ring is pretty good given the Curse of Misfortune, Drills and Meditation synergize (and give us some lore on the Demon King + Rep, which is never bad given Wretched), Resolve is further Mitigation and Injection a nice power boost I'm willing to see where Unstructured Magic leads us in time after a bit of self-reflection, but I'm not letting go of that Resolve.
[Bird] Training Drills
[Bird] Meditate On Life
[Bird] Red Dawn
[Bird] Shining Resolve
Ring is pretty good given the Curse of Misfortune, Drills and Meditation synergize (and give us some lore on the Demon King + Rep, which is never bad given Wretched), Resolve is further Mitigation and
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Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
A Foolish Transaction - Advanced Shardcrafting Techniques
By it's very nature, Shardcrafting excels at interacting with base reality to achieve effects far greater than one would except per 'oomph' of energy. Among the powers offered by the King's Scepter, it's initial growth curve ranks remarkably high, in terms of actualized power output and destructive capability.
Take care not to extinguish yourself by accident.
Reality Rend
"One day, you might find yourself with enough power to just reach out into the fabric of universe... and just shatter it. You will know what to do by then."
The penultimate form of Shardcraft; To apply Shardcrafting upon the fabric of reality itself. Ordinary Shardcrafters instinctively understand the next step when they become capable of this act; For Shardcrafting is creation in destruction. So it is with reality itself. To be a Shardcrafter is to herald both end and beginning.
On the lowest end, the Shardcrafter can create false gravitational singularities, lacking an event horizon and near-instantaneously decomposing to exotic forms of matter with extremely lethal results for anyone remotely nearby. This has horrific collateral damage - Nuclear missiles would be considered a weapon of precision in the comparison.
Surviving merely the aftermath of such an act would likely require an effect such as Form of the Crab, or another durability-improving power. Take care not to be destroyed by your own genius.
This technique can also be used to create true gravitational singularities, instigate false vacuum events, etc, but at present you have no means of surviving such an act, even should you be so inclined to perform it. The innate offensive capabilities of Shardcrafting are immense, but their innate defensive capabilities.. leave much to be desired.
Properly used, this capability allows the creation of new universes, budding off from the original; Fragments of a universe are still a universe. In time, the fragments may well outgrow the original. Additionally, there are likely many unique effects depending on full conceptual structuring of the reality you exist within. Within the warhammer universe, for example, this ability can be used to tear the veil and invoke incursions. Within the D&D cosmology, creative usage of this power may allow transportation/creations of semi-permanent portals from plane to plane.
* Theoretically, up to starbusting-levels of power.
* Practically speaking, MAD capabilities.
* Might be combined with technology to theoretically create devices able to generate energy ex nihilo.
* This ability may be better used as a precautionary note against spreading Shardcrafting far and wide. 'What if we gave everyone a sun-destroying bomb?' comes into question..
Limit Break
"What is a limit, but a barrier, an occluding of perspective to be surpassed, transcended?"
Shardcrafting allows one to break the whole and acquire the parts, the sum of which is greater than the whole. Why then, can it not be used to augment the body, augment the mind? In the past, Shardcrafters who attempted such feats tended to slay themselves by accident - Shardcrafting is not a kind art to the incapable and untalented. Shardcrafters who experimented found that whilst it is true that the sum of the parts might be greater than the whole, the whole was greater than any individual part, a limitation that plagued all attempts at self-modification; Always the best result that could be hoped for was that of multiple lesser entities that surpassed the original only when working in concert.
Thus the foundational limit of Shardcrafting discovered: It cannot create any individual part that was in itself greater than the whole. It cannot augment, only degrade.
But given the spark of the conceptual-shattering power of the Accursed, even this limit may be overcome. The Scepter-Empowered version of Shardcrafting can be applied to 'physical limits' of one's attributes; Strength unbound by biology and physics, durability achievable beyond any physical possibility. Further beyond, one can also apply this as well to the Shards of one's Shardcrafting as well, allowing true growth that will in time surpass the original by all metrics. Even further beyond, the Scepter-Empowered Shardcraft has the potential to shatter the self-imposed limits of other magics the Shattering Entity wields..
* Actually gain attributes that are superior to that of baseline humans.
** Still pretty slow compared to acquiring a magic system that lets one just get supernatural physical attributes to begin with.
* Unlocks lichdom and other forms of 'survive dying' forms of living.
** Given the apocalyptic nature of high-end Shardcrafting, this is a necessity if one intends to ever use the full power of Shardcrafting.
* Attribute gain still slower than magical augmentation.
* The power of applying [To Shatter Heaven] to future magics learnt cannot be understated.. Even if the ability is likely to be as limited as you suspect. (Most likely Noble Praxis-grade and below.)
Shardform
"If the sum of the parts are greater than the whole, then let me be the sum of my parts."
The user manifests a multitude of lesser clones ('Shards') of themselves, each wielding Shards the user had collected. Unlike most other self-cloning powers, the total power of this ability increases with the amount of shard-entities created, though each clone becomes individually weaker. For example, you might summon 2 clones, each at 75% of your original power, or 10 clones, each at 30% of your original power. The maximum amount of Shard-entities created with this ability is directly equal to the amount of Shards you possess.
You may not Shardcraft while this power is active.
* Moderately useful in combat, especially against weaker entities.
* Extremely useful in training Shard-abilities. Multiple entities equal a direct multiplication of training time that isn't in the form of chronomancy.
* Shard Entities still suffer the full effects of your curses.
* Also useful if one desires a specific Shard ability to be empowered; Typically they represent only a small fraction of your power, but with this ability one can artificially empower specific Shards to 'represent' large fractions of your power.
** For example, you could fragment yourself into 2 Shard-entities, and have 1 Entity possess the Serendipity Shard, and the remainder possess all your remaining Shards. The Shard-Entity with Serendipity would empower it as if it represented a full 75% of your original power, unlocking powers such as Fateweaving as well as a passive rate of fortunate event at a rate almost rivaling the Apocryphal Curse' rate of unfortunate events.
By it's very nature, Shardcrafting excels at interacting with base reality to achieve effects far greater than one would except per 'oomph' of energy. Among the powers offered by the King's Scepter, it's initial growth curve ranks remarkably high, in terms of actualized power output and destructive capability.
Take care not to extinguish yourself by accident.
Reality Rend
"One day, you might find yourself with enough power to just reach out into the fabric of universe... and just shatter it. You will know what to do by then."
The penultimate form of Shardcraft; To apply Shardcrafting upon the fabric of reality itself. Ordinary Shardcrafters instinctively understand the next step when they become capable of this act; For Shardcrafting is creation in destruction. So it is with reality itself. To be a Shardcrafter is to herald both end and beginning.
On the lowest end, the Shardcrafter can create false gravitational singularities, lacking an event horizon and near-instantaneously decomposing to exotic forms of matter with extremely lethal results for anyone remotely nearby. This has horrific collateral damage - Nuclear missiles would be considered a weapon of precision in the comparison.
Surviving merely the aftermath of such an act would likely require an effect such as Form of the Crab, or another durability-improving power. Take care not to be destroyed by your own genius.
This technique can also be used to create true gravitational singularities, instigate false vacuum events, etc, but at present you have no means of surviving such an act, even should you be so inclined to perform it. The innate offensive capabilities of Shardcrafting are immense, but their innate defensive capabilities.. leave much to be desired.
Properly used, this capability allows the creation of new universes, budding off from the original; Fragments of a universe are still a universe. In time, the fragments may well outgrow the original. Additionally, there are likely many unique effects depending on full conceptual structuring of the reality you exist within. Within the warhammer universe, for example, this ability can be used to tear the veil and invoke incursions. Within the D&D cosmology, creative usage of this power may allow transportation/creations of semi-permanent portals from plane to plane.
* Theoretically, up to starbusting-levels of power.
* Practically speaking, MAD capabilities.
* Might be combined with technology to theoretically create devices able to generate energy ex nihilo.
* This ability may be better used as a precautionary note against spreading Shardcrafting far and wide. 'What if we gave everyone a sun-destroying bomb?' comes into question..
Limit Break
"What is a limit, but a barrier, an occluding of perspective to be surpassed, transcended?"
Shardcrafting allows one to break the whole and acquire the parts, the sum of which is greater than the whole. Why then, can it not be used to augment the body, augment the mind? In the past, Shardcrafters who attempted such feats tended to slay themselves by accident - Shardcrafting is not a kind art to the incapable and untalented. Shardcrafters who experimented found that whilst it is true that the sum of the parts might be greater than the whole, the whole was greater than any individual part, a limitation that plagued all attempts at self-modification; Always the best result that could be hoped for was that of multiple lesser entities that surpassed the original only when working in concert.
Thus the foundational limit of Shardcrafting discovered: It cannot create any individual part that was in itself greater than the whole. It cannot augment, only degrade.
But given the spark of the conceptual-shattering power of the Accursed, even this limit may be overcome. The Scepter-Empowered version of Shardcrafting can be applied to 'physical limits' of one's attributes; Strength unbound by biology and physics, durability achievable beyond any physical possibility. Further beyond, one can also apply this as well to the Shards of one's Shardcrafting as well, allowing true growth that will in time surpass the original by all metrics. Even further beyond, the Scepter-Empowered Shardcraft has the potential to shatter the self-imposed limits of other magics the Shattering Entity wields..
* Actually gain attributes that are superior to that of baseline humans.
** Still pretty slow compared to acquiring a magic system that lets one just get supernatural physical attributes to begin with.
* Unlocks lichdom and other forms of 'survive dying' forms of living.
** Given the apocalyptic nature of high-end Shardcrafting, this is a necessity if one intends to ever use the full power of Shardcrafting.
* Attribute gain still slower than magical augmentation.
* The power of applying [To Shatter Heaven] to future magics learnt cannot be understated.. Even if the ability is likely to be as limited as you suspect. (Most likely Noble Praxis-grade and below.)
Shardform
"If the sum of the parts are greater than the whole, then let me be the sum of my parts."
The user manifests a multitude of lesser clones ('Shards') of themselves, each wielding Shards the user had collected. Unlike most other self-cloning powers, the total power of this ability increases with the amount of shard-entities created, though each clone becomes individually weaker. For example, you might summon 2 clones, each at 75% of your original power, or 10 clones, each at 30% of your original power. The maximum amount of Shard-entities created with this ability is directly equal to the amount of Shards you possess.
You may not Shardcraft while this power is active.
* Moderately useful in combat, especially against weaker entities.
* Extremely useful in training Shard-abilities. Multiple entities equal a direct multiplication of training time that isn't in the form of chronomancy.
* Shard Entities still suffer the full effects of your curses.
* Also useful if one desires a specific Shard ability to be empowered; Typically they represent only a small fraction of your power, but with this ability one can artificially empower specific Shards to 'represent' large fractions of your power.
** For example, you could fragment yourself into 2 Shard-entities, and have 1 Entity possess the Serendipity Shard, and the remainder possess all your remaining Shards. The Shard-Entity with Serendipity would empower it as if it represented a full 75% of your original power, unlocking powers such as Fateweaving as well as a passive rate of fortunate event at a rate almost rivaling the Apocryphal Curse' rate of unfortunate events.
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- Location
- Italy
ehi, I'm back!
I might slow down, but I'm not giving up quite yet!
yeah. we're quite beyond them by now. Interesting that we finally met a variant though. Wonder what the green one has that make him different though, even if it's likely not that important.
Yeah, there's a reason why trained and disciplined armed forces are just that much more effective than militias, or, even worse, rebels.
That's actually the main advantage the Romans had over most of their neighbours, right when they started expanding their Empire.
Interesting. Would this also happen to the ones approaching from the outside? It would certainly explain why nobody uses the main entrance.
...well, hopefully any decent loot would be able to survive Nullity. We don't really need minor magical items.
..though if we find out she nullified potions or bags of holding I WILL be annoyed!
yeah, yeah, we know, as a cursebearer you'll eventually go far beyond what most mortals can accomplish.
Try to retain some morals, and hopefully you'll be a net positive to the multiverse.
that IS pretty ironic.
well, rivalry doesn't necessarily imply hate after all. What I TRULY wonder is who else was/is allowed to pass through the main entrance, other than ringbearers.
Was this temple even created for/by the ring or one of his bearers, and only AFTER subverted and transformed into its torture chamber?
Maybe we'll learn more about it later on.
...also I wonder, is in ALL ring's nature to fight and contest? Does that mean Truth and Majesty consider themselves rivals as well? It's funny to imagine them arguing like an old married couple, apparently hostile but actually really close and friendly/in love.
Truth CAN be Majestic after all
ehi Hunger, be nice! Will you ever stop teasing her with the Evangelion jokes?!
..that's actually pretty close to the truth. Her share of blame is really small all things considered.
eh, We would have found other dangerous enemies/challenges even without her. It's our destiny until we manage to mitigate Apocryphal and Indenture enough after all
It will be interesting to see Letrizia interact with people that are... well, not US, in the future.
Maybe she'll manage to win a verbal spar then!
...he's being such a Dad
Also I'm pretty sure Nameless would agree that No task is beneath a ring, as long as we say it isn't!
oh, so Letrizia won! Let's get ready to learn then!
So, while the Republic has by far the most territory (and likely the best economy and possibly technology, as the advantage usually go the bigger polity), the Empire has more or less a similar amount of military power, and if they can get the Association to side with them That's probably enough to stop the Republic from trying anything... at least directly.
I assume the Association tries to play each polity against each other. It's the only way they could maintain their independence if any of the others showed themselves interested enough after all.
Hunger's note to self: work on ways to extend Letrizia's lifespan. Blood powers are a decent start
I wonder if the emperor REALLY planned to give the Armament back later on... or what kind of person he is.
Maybe they want to cast blame on the Republic to get a casus belli and something to convince the Association to side with them. Or maybe it's simply internal politics, and someone wants to get her duchy.
If Letrizia really trained from a young age, maybe she didn't have the time to also learn all she needed about internal politics. Or maybe her father had enemies she doesn't know about.
Or maybe she's right, and this IS a republic plot. It's certainly possible.
And what's wrong with liking frivolous things? We'll get you a pony later! A superpowered one!
Maybe a pegasus?
739 words
I might slow down, but I'm not giving up quite yet!
yeah. we're quite beyond them by now. Interesting that we finally met a variant though. Wonder what the green one has that make him different though, even if it's likely not that important.
Yeah, there's a reason why trained and disciplined armed forces are just that much more effective than militias, or, even worse, rebels.
That's actually the main advantage the Romans had over most of their neighbours, right when they started expanding their Empire.
We can always count on GIsena to keep spirits high with her banter!
Interesting. Would this also happen to the ones approaching from the outside? It would certainly explain why nobody uses the main entrance.
...well, hopefully any decent loot would be able to survive Nullity. We don't really need minor magical items.
..though if we find out she nullified potions or bags of holding I WILL be annoyed!
yeah, yeah, we know, as a cursebearer you'll eventually go far beyond what most mortals can accomplish.
Try to retain some morals, and hopefully you'll be a net positive to the multiverse.
that IS pretty ironic.
well, rivalry doesn't necessarily imply hate after all. What I TRULY wonder is who else was/is allowed to pass through the main entrance, other than ringbearers.
Was this temple even created for/by the ring or one of his bearers, and only AFTER subverted and transformed into its torture chamber?
Maybe we'll learn more about it later on.
...also I wonder, is in ALL ring's nature to fight and contest? Does that mean Truth and Majesty consider themselves rivals as well? It's funny to imagine them arguing like an old married couple, apparently hostile but actually really close and friendly/in love.
Truth CAN be Majestic after all
ehi Hunger, be nice! Will you ever stop teasing her with the Evangelion jokes?!
..that's actually pretty close to the truth. Her share of blame is really small all things considered.
eh, We would have found other dangerous enemies/challenges even without her. It's our destiny until we manage to mitigate Apocryphal and Indenture enough after all
It will be interesting to see Letrizia interact with people that are... well, not US, in the future.
Maybe she'll manage to win a verbal spar then!
..Well, it looks like Letrizia is NOT the only one who misses the Fish, though Hunger seems mostly interested in this... "project", for Letrizia's sake more than for himself.
...he's being such a Dad
Also I'm pretty sure Nameless would agree that No task is beneath a ring, as long as we say it isn't!
oh, so Letrizia won! Let's get ready to learn then!
So, while the Republic has by far the most territory (and likely the best economy and possibly technology, as the advantage usually go the bigger polity), the Empire has more or less a similar amount of military power, and if they can get the Association to side with them That's probably enough to stop the Republic from trying anything... at least directly.
I assume the Association tries to play each polity against each other. It's the only way they could maintain their independence if any of the others showed themselves interested enough after all.
Hunger's note to self: work on ways to extend Letrizia's lifespan. Blood powers are a decent start
I wonder if the emperor REALLY planned to give the Armament back later on... or what kind of person he is.
Or maybe it's plot from other Nobles and/or the emperors.
Maybe they want to cast blame on the Republic to get a casus belli and something to convince the Association to side with them. Or maybe it's simply internal politics, and someone wants to get her duchy.
If Letrizia really trained from a young age, maybe she didn't have the time to also learn all she needed about internal politics. Or maybe her father had enemies she doesn't know about.
Or maybe she's right, and this IS a republic plot. It's certainly possible.
I think you're a bit too young for Hunger, but I suppose there's always room on the Waifu list... though Gisena will be hard to beat, unless you somehow convince both her and Hunger to go for the harem/poliamory ending, which might be pretty hard to accomplish...
And what's wrong with liking frivolous things? We'll get you a pony later! A superpowered one!
Maybe a pegasus?
739 words
- Location
- 1
I thiiink this is the active thread, so I'm going to ask a question I've noticed here (if this has been asked about before, or there's a detail I'm missing which explains it, my apologys; I've only discovered the... series? world? quests? as of yesterday and haven't read everything in the stories, never mind WoG and discussion.). It is written in Even Further Beyond:
"*The sheer force of a Combat-class Cursebearer represents power enough to sunder armies and boil seas, to shatter continents and raze nations to ash. Even in a world such as this, the number of experts capable of overcoming you could be countered on the fingers of one hand."
And has been mentioned elsewhere that level 1 million is approximately the benchmark for having Infinite power.
Considering the Accursed is level 7.39e34, and that various debuff-afflictions (I think just the inviolability ones) had specific notes that they couldn't be avoided by beings below level [a number in the e30s or so], it Sounds like beings of levels above 1 million are... not Common, exactly, but not rare-to-the-point-of-being-in-specifically-enumerable? and Even Further Beyond is also implied by that line as taking place in a place with unusually many powerful people...
Basically, the first set of details seems to imply that Combat-Class Cursebearers have generally sub-infinite power, but the second bit seems to imply that the number of people with infinite power isn't small enough for Combat-Class Cursebearer to be a 'don't worry about most threats' ticket. Is this a mistake of worldbuilding? some kind of automatic routing inherent in Combat-Class Cursebearer-travel which keeps them away from places with Infinite-power enemies? a multiverse which is Just That Big that you can both have arbitrarily many infinite-power people and never encounter any? selection bias where we only see cases without infinite power? something else?
(especially since if a person with infinite power has the ability to use any finite/same-or-lower-infinity-as-they-possess to grant other people even an arbitrarily small amount of power, or the ability to effectively partition their power and let other people use it, then that person can raise as many people as they want to infinite power (does it take infinite power to give someone else one unit of power? All right, just use 0.5% of your power to do that, which you can because 0.5% of infinity is infinity, then give them another one unit using 0.25% of your power, repeat infinity times, you have created another person with infinite power. alternatively, let someone use 0.5% of your energy reserves. give the next person 0.25% of your energy reserves. repeat as needed. you still have infinite energy reserves, and so do all of them. so if even one level-a-million person wanted to proliferate that level of power, well... It'd spread pretty quickly.)
"*The sheer force of a Combat-class Cursebearer represents power enough to sunder armies and boil seas, to shatter continents and raze nations to ash. Even in a world such as this, the number of experts capable of overcoming you could be countered on the fingers of one hand."
And has been mentioned elsewhere that level 1 million is approximately the benchmark for having Infinite power.
Considering the Accursed is level 7.39e34, and that various debuff-afflictions (I think just the inviolability ones) had specific notes that they couldn't be avoided by beings below level [a number in the e30s or so], it Sounds like beings of levels above 1 million are... not Common, exactly, but not rare-to-the-point-of-being-in-specifically-enumerable? and Even Further Beyond is also implied by that line as taking place in a place with unusually many powerful people...
Basically, the first set of details seems to imply that Combat-Class Cursebearers have generally sub-infinite power, but the second bit seems to imply that the number of people with infinite power isn't small enough for Combat-Class Cursebearer to be a 'don't worry about most threats' ticket. Is this a mistake of worldbuilding? some kind of automatic routing inherent in Combat-Class Cursebearer-travel which keeps them away from places with Infinite-power enemies? a multiverse which is Just That Big that you can both have arbitrarily many infinite-power people and never encounter any? selection bias where we only see cases without infinite power? something else?
(especially since if a person with infinite power has the ability to use any finite/same-or-lower-infinity-as-they-possess to grant other people even an arbitrarily small amount of power, or the ability to effectively partition their power and let other people use it, then that person can raise as many people as they want to infinite power (does it take infinite power to give someone else one unit of power? All right, just use 0.5% of your power to do that, which you can because 0.5% of infinity is infinity, then give them another one unit using 0.25% of your power, repeat infinity times, you have created another person with infinite power. alternatively, let someone use 0.5% of your energy reserves. give the next person 0.25% of your energy reserves. repeat as needed. you still have infinite energy reserves, and so do all of them. so if even one level-a-million person wanted to proliferate that level of power, well... It'd spread pretty quickly.)
- Location
- Italy
a quick reminder of what Bloodslayer actually was:
Probably the best pick if we want to continue the grinding immediately. THe most immediate power gain compensates for the 2 weeks-long penalty from Lingering Paralysis (15% penalty to physical actions, 5 in rage form).
I would have also been fine with the Gisena Dress option winning though. Sorcerous evolution for her, pseudo-grace for us, invulnerability to Nullity... But this is fine. VERY fine.
what's this? A not-combat pick in my quest? GET OUT OF HERE!
But seriously, this COULD be a decent chance of getting more informations AND giving a little gift to Letrizia... and we could always meet Lady Fairbright...
If we're going to the Encampment at all we probably want to do it while Apocrypha is down, and it would only take one day.
There is something to be said for sticking to what we do best and go back to the grinding though...
this is, by far, the safe option. 2 picks, small chance of 3, smaller chance of true fight.
and HERE IT IS AGAIN! Death Chance, our constant companion!
if we can't mitigate it this is probably a bad idea... and yet it has an 80% of what's more than likely a better result than the previous plan..
risky, but possibly worth it. Maybe there's a way to mitigate the death chance further below?
..or we could take our time, rest, socialize, and buff Gisena. That works too I suppose...
Actually I think I like this more than the basic grinding. +Gisena and Letrizia, bugg to Gisena and removed malus is worth a single pick I think. Maybe even 2. We can then go back to the middle temple, and Bloodslayer gave us enough power that it should be safer than it was before anyway, even without 2-3 picks more, especially with a buffed Gisena.
Yeah, I think I'd go with this! I want more Letrizia and GIsena anyway!
oh, my poor Arete... well, let's see these picks...
basics...
probably better than the basics, our new basic pick as long as it's available as far as I'm concerned. agility and wits also synergize REALLY well with Thousand Cuts.
Blood progression is already paying off!
If we're going to the Encampment we could certainly use a bit more Charisma, otherwise I'd go with the previous one.
mh.. not bad, but would this be lost once we get Ruling Ring? Because in that case I'd have to refuse.
not a bad pick to supplement thousand cuts and quickening.
...this synergizes REALLY well with the Gisena Buff pick, and should definitely be taken if that one is as well! It's also a good pick for the encampment, better than the "Vigor Itself" one, though it also costs some arete.
really good sinergy with the mid temple alone pick, makes Rage Form even more reliable. Probably the best for outright power grinding.
ehi, wasn't "only three FOR NOW" before? Also I don't really like this one that much, especially that -20% exp (and the -20% to a mind stat is also ugly to look at).
I'm immediately suspicious of any permanent exp penalty, and this one seems to offer much lesser long term gains than Stranglethorn, at least in terms of pure stats, though admittedly the "ignore one wound per battle" effect is pretty nice
Well, I'm all for taking synergistic picks, as I mentioned above. I'd probably go with either Blood Rage + Mid Temple for max exp growth with max safey possible, or buff Gisena + Exalted Spirit, though it would also work with Encampment
597 words
Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
It's this, more or less. While there are an infinite number of beings who possess power akin to Rank 10, Stage 15, Level 1000000, etc., there are infinitely many worlds that have no beings of such power, or possess only one or a small handful of them.
Birdsie
Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy
- Location
- Poland
I'm no expert, but I don't think this is how it works. You're looking to explain everything through sheer numbers, but to the best of my awareness, you should be trying to explain stuff through raw conceptuality.
The Accursed's power level definitely isn't infinite; like he says, he is greatly diminished. There must be some considerable restrictions to the Cursebearer process, given the fact that he usually (but not always,) picks only or primarily humans who are at a very low power level.
A Combat-Class Cursebearer, at least one that's starting, has the power to sunder entire continents; presumably, somewhere below the level of a Titan, roughly on par with a high Reality Former or a low Grand Solipsist, I'd wager, although I'm not sure exactly where.
For comparison, Haeliel - a High Cursebearer - has been stated and implied to be on a level where planetary-level threats would be utterly meaningless even in very significant quantities.
The, "Level 1 Million" is "Infinite" power might have been some kind of hyperbole. One of the main themes in the Rihakuverse, that I've seen time and time again, is that no matter how far you ascend, there's always a power greater still. To a normal human, the power of a Combat-type would seem to be actually infinite on a bare glance, but to a Combat-type, Haeliel would seem to be infinite, and to Haeliel, the Accursed still remains at the top of the food chain.
Beyond that, we can't even be sure: is there anything higher? There probably is - if there weren't, how would the Accursed remain... well, accursed? I realize it's a clever reference to one of Rihaku's previous quests, but the point stands.
As for the system that determines how common those "infinite" level opponents are, or if there is one, I don't really know, and I've never concerned myself with it. Geas of Indenture seems to not care too much about matching tasks to the capability of the wielder if that's what you're concerned about; a new Progression-type is prime victim material for any given abomination, orc, monster, or another foe, and those seem to appear with sporadic frequency at the beginning of Geas tasks. Which is both frustrating and threatening.
As for your analysis, at the bottom, remember: It's not about quantifiable numbers, it's about forms, ideals, and concepts. Abstraction can be quantified if you try hard enough, but certain values are far beyond numerical comprehension. To even attempt to do so is folly. Even quantifying low stages of statistics and translating how they work in "reality" is difficult; we're dealing with multiversal beings here, so I definitely wouldn't rely on that.
To summarize: I don't know why infinite-power beings don't occur constantly. Maybe it's because they have a tendency to kill each other, be petty, and subjugate other creatures rather than uplift them. Even someone like Haeliel may have enemies above her.
Anyway, that was my analysis of the entire phenomenon, but the reason I actually started making this post was to introduce another episode of the Gabrielos Gaiden omake to the thread.
Here it is, boys and girls; the long-awaited!
Gabrielos Gaiden X: Glad Bromance
After spending the majority of the afternoon figuring out the basics of Surgecraft, it was time for Gabriel to visit his girlfriend and change bases.
"Prolessarch, is the magic carpet ready?" Gabriel asked.
He focused on sustaining pressure being ejected from his open palm, represented by a purplish-violet flame that danced and twirled in response to the subtlest motions of his thought and will. It was mesmerizing to watch it do so, and if circumstances permitted it, Gabriel would have been happy to do so for hours, like a moth clinging to a lantern or a drunkard staring with love towards the bottle that maintained his state.
Gabriel snuffed the flame out, pressure returning under the skin. Prolessarch's analysis suggested to a rather substantial degree that Surgecrafting was as much magic as it was a mutation of the cells; a sacred fusion of enlightened biology and magical alchemy.
Gabriel made a mental note to work on increasing his mana stores, or whatever the equivalent was. There didn't seem to be one, other than depth of his vigor. He supposed that Progression and natural training would reap their benefits and increase his maximum potential on their own, with no specialized procedures necessary.
"The Sorcerous Domains are complicated," Prolessarch declared. He dipped the paintbrush once again into its bucket, then continued with a graceful, swift stroke, painting another half of the circle to the bottom of the carpet. With virtuosic swiftness and precision, he created a sigil on the interior of the carpet, like a banana with a double-cross in the very center of the curve. "The Domain of Enchantment is difficult to access. I'm not sure if this will fly properly."
Gabriel considered that for what it was. Prolessarch had access to a Grand Diagram that was capable of global teleportation, but it took an uninterrupted seven hours of spellcasting and its powers only persisted for a total of seven uses, after which it had to be recast. They'd agreed that having a reliable, permanent vehicle for short-range travel would be more valuable for now, but it was starting to look more and more like a losing proposition.
"We could take a train instead, but that's dangerous, given the Doom of the Rival and the Apocryphal Curse," Gabriel admitted, folding his arms and approaching Prolessarch, leaning down to look more closely at what he was painting.
"If you want the carpet to fly reliably, I'll need another three hours or so," Prolessarch declared unashamedly, despite his earlier confidence in his peerless magic-crafting skills. There was a tinge of annoyment painting his voice, though, that Gabriel noticed only because he'd lived in the lich's presence for a handful of days now. "Magical items, even as simple as this, are not so easily made. Especially with common paint instead of actual reagents."
Gabriel frowned, looking up at the very large, wall-mounted clock. "How fast will it fly?"
Prolessarch held up a bony finger to his bony chin and considered deeply. "Just below the speed of sound when airborne, and it'll produce a friction bubble to make sure we don't fall off."
The Ring of Prowess flashed minimally, streamlining mundane thought into clarity.
"We'll be in the air at nine PM, and we'll be there at roughly nine forty-five PM if the speed is right. She'll be either asleep or…" A wave of realization struck Gabriel. The current day was Friday. "She'll be playing Dungeons & Dragons at that time. Which means she won't be at home."
"Perfect!" Prolessarch declared, and then quietly added, "I'll bring my character sheet."
Gabriel was unamused by the lich's witty remarks. "Which means there are other people who might or might not be chipped like the mailman was," he said, licking his lips and sighing in grumbly frustration. This couldn't have been that easy. "You might say that the same could go for my friends and girlfriend, but I'd know if they suddenly stopped answering my texts for a couple of hours and then came back as if nothing had happened. I can't know the same for strangers. We'll have to be prepared."
"Or, you can shoot them with Affectfire," Prolessarch answered blandly. He made a complicated series of brush motions, painting a mark similar to a six-petaled flower made out of perfect circles in the bound of the first circle he made. "If they're not enemies, they won't die."
"So…" Gabriel stopped to think, but the answer came instinctively to his mind. "I'll spend these three hours training; any particular thing you think I should focus on?"
"You probably haven't noticed, but your physical growth is beginning to plateau, or at least it'll start to, soon enough," Prolessarch calmly mentioned, painting orbs of red in the spaces in the middle of each flower petal on the carpet's bottom. "You've attained levels past the peak-human, which means that you'll need another source of physical strength. I suggest focusing on magic for now, in order to derive optimal growth. Such is the providence of those who become Captain America."
Gabriel raised two surprised eyebrows, protruding his lower lip slightly in a disbelieving pout. "Already? Alright, magic it is."
"Yes, Gabriel. Already." Prolessarch dipped the brush into the bucket without looking up. He sounded a little miffed. "Ordinary mortals cannot punch through concrete."
Gabriel shrugged and sat in the corner of the room Prolessarch was in - one of the perks of the apartment was the living room's considerable size. It was big enough to comfortably host both of them; however, Gabriel's aunt's farm was big enough to comfortably fit training space for ten people, if you gave everyone a decent, garden-sized chunk of land. And that was not counting in the house itself, the pens, and the massive barn.
He expected one of the pens, or maybe the barn, to become Prolessarch's laboratory and study, or something along those lines.
Gabriel crossed his legs, closed his eyes, and let out a long, deep breath. He let his mind relax as if letting go of the anchor that was reality and flying out into the astral reaches beyond. All of his trained thought was abandoned, Gabriel focusing only on his physical sensations. The coldness of the tile beneath his bottom, the air going in and out of his nose, the sun's gentle rays hitting his exposed skin, and warming him up.
There was a numbness in Gabriel's body, which soon turned to tingling, and then back to a soft, kind numbness that enveloped his entire form.
Gabriel let out one long breath, and his mind stepped out of his body and descended deeper into the supernal realm of the spirit. He'd already meditated for countless years before the Accursed gave him the offer, but this was far past his loftiest dreams of meditation. As he went deeper, Gabriel could observe facets of himself like the tessellated hyperdimensional parts of a whole mirror, each one reflecting a different part.
He continued to meditate for a good hour, when Prolessarch said, "Well, that's not fun. Do you know anyone from a, 'Guardia di Finanza?'"
"My dad," Gabriel said offhandedly, trying not to take his focus away from his meditation. The Cursebearer concentrated to the best of his ability, eyes closed.
"What's your dad look like?" the lich continued pestering.
"Bald," Gabriel replied placidly.
"Well, then someone who isn't your dad and his partner appear to be arresting one of the neighbors for alleged fraud," Prolessarch remarked plaintively.
Gabriel raised an eyebrow and opened an organic eye. "So?"
"Someone else who isn't your dad and his partner also appear to be arresting another neighbor. And someone who might be your dad and his partner appear to be arresting someone else. There are lots of them, arresting lots of people. All surrounding us, for the same fraud crime."
"My dad doesn't do fieldwork anymore," Gabriel said, opening his eyes.
"I was joking, smart guy," Prolessarch declared, standing up from the floor and dusting off his robes. "None of these are your dad. I know what he looks like."
"They're here for us, we need to go," Gabriel concluded, frowning. "How's the carpet?"
"At this stage, we can't use it for anything except maybe a projectile weapon," Prolessarch said with clear regret. He snapped his fingers and the carpet rolled itself up magically, then shot up three feet into the air, hovering in a spot and then following him at a set distance as he strode for the entryway. "It seems like it's our extralegal paranormal department friends. I'm betting they placed the paddy wagon outside my warding range."
Gabriel focused on the Ring of Prowess and closed his eyes.
He started feeding information about the current situation into the Eye, hoping it'd give out something useful or helpful. The information was rated as uninteresting and not very useful, but the Eye provided him with knowledge about how to carve wood in an optimal way using a mechanical lathe.
"Fuck," Gabriel said, clenching his fists.
"We'll have to fight our way through," Prolessarch answered with a casual shrug as if he'd done this a hundred times before. With his nature as a lich, he may well have. "It's no biggie, dude. Nothing we haven't done before, right?"
Gabriel looked at the lich, and then down at the ground for a moment. Doubt flooded his mind, like overwhelming physical darkness. The idea that he'd be forced to kill didn't sit right with him, especially when he wasn't completely sure if these people deserved it or not. Even if they didn't and he could force himself to not care - to elevate his own interests above their lives - the Doom of Judgement would not be so easily swayed. It would punish him with actual physical detriment for any egregious sin against conventional morality; although Gabriel hoped that it would be kind enough to at least understand this was self-defense.
The darkness expanded as he remembered the dead mailman that had been sent to kill him. It threatened to swallow Gabriel's mind.
The Cursebearer banished that feeling like a grand wizard slamming his staff against the concrete floor of the mental realm, casting everything in pure-white light and giving himself clear space to consider, think, and feel about the situation. He decided that he might as well ask the expert: Gabriel looked at Prolessarch once more.
"Do you… reckon we'll have to kill them?" His voice didn't tremble, but it had a certain hopeless edge to it.
"They'll die sooner or later." Prolessarch shrugged neutrally, the carpet floating behind him raising up to behind his shoulder and a little over it, like a projectile aimed in third-person view. The skeletal Archmagus sounded unbothered by the idea of killing, if slightly displeased. "It's their choice and their will to stand in our path, knowing we have no desire to affiliate ourselves with them. Last time, I was sitting in the library and calmly reading a book, and I was met with a cavalcade of fragmentation grenades, lightning bolts, and armor-piercing ammunition. They have no mercy, so I intend to extend none of my own. You, Gabriel, are free to do as you wish."
Gabriel shook his head, looking at his hands. He focused on the pressure beneath his skin and released it in the form of a violet-purple coating of flame, surrounding him like an exalted animus.
"If even one bullet dares to fly, I'm defending myself," he said, although he felt a heavy ballast being placed inside his chest cavity at the thought.
Prolessarch appeared to realize something calamitous, looking at Gabriel with sudden interest and concern. For a moment, the lich debated with himself and came to some kind of conclusion, nodding slowly.
"If we let one bullet fly, you may not be able to. Here." The lich raised a hand, then a dazzling orange light came into existence around Gabriel's skin, compressing and stretching around his limbs. Its surface flickered with motes of light, like TV static.
Looking down at his own hands in amazement, Gabriel asked, "What's this?"
"A forcefield." Gabriel looked up, but Prolessarch didn't seem like he believed there was enough time to explain the exact metaphysics of the barrier in question, even if he would've loved to. A fact that Gabriel noticed was that the smug lich enjoyed giving protracted lectures on various topics, but the Magics of the Diagram were his favorite.
"Alright, fair enough," Gabriel accepted, nodding with finality. He was still nervous about having to kill people, but this reminded him they would be killing him back, even before he could try.
Gabriel looked at his room longingly. There were some items of sentimental worth he'd like to take and obviously spare clothes. "Should I pack my stuff?"
"No." Prolessarch raised a hand in a wide, more comprehensive application of the same barrier spell.
He created a wide bastion that covered pretty much the whole entryway, moments before an explosion threw the door off its hinges. It slammed against the barrier uselessly, then fell to the ground. "I'm afraid we have incoming," the lich declared.
Gabriel frowned. He turned in the direction of the doorframe, pushing energy into his palms to create a pair of concentrated balls of violet Affectfire which flickered and pulsated with a life of its own.
Prolessarch dropped the barrier for a split moment. A hailstorm of rounds went through him, leaving shredded marks in his robes. Unbothered, he released the carpet which blasted off with a gunshot-loud noise, unfolding into a flat configuration mid-flight. Gabriel heard a pair of screams which cut off as soon as they started.
Wordlessly, Prolessarch dashed out of the room and into the hallway, then cast the same offensive spell he used against the mailman intruder, producing over a dozen dark purple flame balls that surrounded him, before shooting forth and homing in on a number of assailants in tactical armor.
After a second of delay, all of the lights in Gabriel's apartment shut down.
Gabriel dashed after Prolessarch. He was unsurprised by his own excellent speed; he managed to keep up with his wizard friend, which was something he wouldn't have been able to do without the Accursed's influence.
As Gabriel ran, suddenly a portion of the wall exploded. Before the dust could even settle, his combined hearing and sight managed to form the silhouettes of two men in tactical gear. He didn't even hesitate or think, lobbing both fireballs at them and leaping as the staccato of gunfire started to ring from their guns.
With a noise like the hissing of a kettle magnified a hundredfold, the fire exploded on them and spread over their armors like a seeking, grasping and deadly amoeba, crawling over them as if to absorb them, but instead of that, only burning into the kevlar and making them thrash around in a futile attempt to put it out. Gabriel didn't watch for longer than a second, turning to regard his erstwhile partner in crime and the rest of the battlefield.
Prolessarch raised a hand, causing another duo of soldiers to drop to the earth, clutching their chests desperately as if having a seizure or a heart attack. Some kind of black viscous energy sparked out of their torsos, which then flowed into Prolessarch's outstretched hand. As it did so, the minute flaws in the skeleton's bones were fixed, the holes in his robes mended, and the soulfire in his eyes strengthened by a fraction.
The Doom of Judgement appeared to dislike Gabriel's murder of the soldiers. It wasn't as egregious as he expected; only a handful of grams for each person killed, but that was only because they were armed and had malicious intent towards him and Prolessarch. It was self-defense and the defense of another, which preemptively decreased the weight of those sins. He'd be able to burn them off with some manner of simple kindness, like offering a candy bar to a stranger or another benevolent gesture.
But for now, if he wanted to survive, he needed to stop thinking about gestures and focus more on the fact that he needed to get out of here alive.
Gabriel started to formulate a plan in his head, even while Prolessarch cut a deep spearhead through the swathes of armored foes near the entrance of the building. The lich appeared to be battling them in a defensive manner, conserving its stronger Diagrams and spells for later, content to use life-consuming bolts and other basic attacks.
Finally, Gabriel located a window that led outside the building. "Follow me!" Gabriel shouted for Prolessarch.
He faced the window, took off with a running start, grit his teeth, and finally leaped, jumping through with his feet in front of him.
Glass shards rained down on the other side, but Gabriel stopped a moment later as there was a deafeningly loud crack and a sensation of intense pressure on his forehead, as if someone jabbed him with their index finger with as much strength as they could.
That could have been the end, he realized in a split-second.
Gabriel mentally thanked Prolessarch's orange barrier, as he realized he had just been shot in the head by a high-caliber sniper rifle. To avoid any such complications again, Gabriel spread a wide field of Affectfire around himself to cover his rough position.
Prolessarch stepped through the broken window a second later and dropped to the earth next to Gabriel.
The moment he did, there was another deafening crack and suddenly the upper left portion of his skull was missing, shattered bone fragments flying onto the dirt trail nearby. The lich clutched that part of his head for a moment, clearly without pain or shock, but with a kind of numb surprise.
"Snipers in the forest," he declared immediately, then stepped his foot down and started casting a Battle Diagram. "I'm going to show them precision. Cover me!"
Gabriel stabbed a hand in his direction, and at his behest, violet fire erupted from the tip of his foot. It rose and expanded around them in a crescent, then moved even further to cover and obscure a wide space: a titanic monolith of violet fire, like a comet fireball. There was gunfire and clearly the fire wasn't strong enough to melt or vaporize them instantly, because Gabriel felt and saw half-melted slag impacting into his chest moments later, although at half their usual strength. His shield was filling up with static, implying it wouldn't take more punishment.
"Aaand… done!" Prolessarch declared, then stepped forward.
Not even a second later, Gabriel heard a distant artillery explosion and an accompanying tremor in the earth, then another one, then another. He looked up at the sky above the forest and saw them: bright orange with a near-black inside, trailing burnished dust and specks behind them. Meteors.
The fucking Prolessarch called down a miniature meteor storm in order to solve their sniper problem.
There was a globe of near-liquid Affectfire clinging to the portion of his skull that had been destroyed, and it was gradually filling out the missing bone, not fast enough to be called regeneration, but faster than anything resembling healing. Gabriel watched the process, slightly mesmerized, then remembered his own shield had been weakened.
"Can you refresh my barrier?" Gabriel asked.
Prolessarch gestured, and Gabriel's barrier gained a stronger, orange hue. "There. What's the escape plan? We're surrounded," Prolessarch said worriedly, looking up. "Sixty-eight troops deployed around and in the building. I can see armored trucks moving into range, and what appears to be a battle tank."
Gabriel had an idea. A simple one, that relied on the assumption that Prolessarch could perform up to expectations, but an idea nonetheless. "Can you make bodies?"
"Bodies? Not… at the moment," Prolessarch answered. With sharp vigor, he added, "I can turn those fuckers into bodies if that's what you want. I don't know who they think they are, but when I'm through, your country is going to need a bigger graveyard."
"Fake bodies will do. They can fade in a couple of hours for all I care: just leave behind decoys so that they think they got us," Gabriel proposed. He took a look around, but it appeared that no one was fully aware of their current location. He could hear the noises of movement in the building they'd abandoned, but not much else.
"They can use magic," Prolessarch answered. "I'm not sure they'll be convinced with a meat puppet or illusion."
"Are they good enough to see through your magic? And be honest on this," Gabriel refuted, raising a skeptical eyebrow. He was feeling anxious, but at the same time, he knew Prolessarch was one hell of a wizard.
"Fuck it." Prolessarch snapped his fingers and instantly, a portion of the earth molded itself at his behest, creating a pair of human-shaped mounds. He started casting his Battle Diagram of Seeming, the one he used regularly to conceal his appearance. "Let's try it your way. Cover me for a moment. Your Affectfire won't cause collateral damage, so go out a little and spread it around, don't let those fuckers get too close. If you can, stop casting when they start shooting to make the ploy seem genuine."
Gabriel nodded, and let the Ring of Prowess flare at its top efficacy, also extending the effect to Prolessarch.
He stepped out of his cover and, raising both hands, began spreading a thick napalm-like spray of walls and towers of Affectfire from them; soon enough, there was a fiery storm surrounding him, covering the faces of buildings and creeping into windows.
There was a loud distant sound before something heavy, large, and fast slammed into the earth ten paces to Gabriel's right with enough force to almost send him flying. His barrier was nearly shattered in some places, showing cracks and having shrapnel lodged in it.
Was that a tank shell? It was a fucking tank shell, Gabriel realized, or at least something similar.
He used that as his chance to dash out of sight, hiding where no one would be able to see him. The Ring of Prowess wasn't a perfect teacher, but it was much better at its job when the stakes were the user's life. Gabriel heeded the rough direction, augmenting his stealth and camouflage until he was basically undetectable, in a patch of Affectfire so thick that thermal recognition would yield no aid, but so small and off to the side that none of them would think to check it specifically. It was located in a mound of natural rock formations, meaning that even if stray gunfire appeared, it wouldn't do too much to him.
Prolessarch approached a moment later, ostensibly sensing Gabriel's presence through the wards he'd put around the neighbourhood, and said, "It's done. What's the next step of your plan?"
"We go through the abandoned construction site to our left, leave the bodies behind, and gun it as fast as we can towards the woods where the snipers weren't," Gabriel said resolutely, a knot slowly forming in his stomach.
"Lead the way." Prolessarch started casting another spell, finishing in a couple of seconds. Gabriel suddenly felt invigorated and full of stamina, as if he'd just woken up from twelve hours of sleep and then had an entire mug of hot coffee to himself. "Do you have the Mailman's Pistol?"
"I never managed to put it down," Gabriel said, pointing at the inside of his leather jacket. "Let's go."
Prolessarch nodded, then quick-stepped out of the fire and into the cover of the bushes. Gabriel followed, lagging a little behind but managing to keep up nonetheless.
Their path through the forest was slow but, despite the relative cold of midnight wind, actually refreshing. There was a relaxing value to it, perhaps derived from the fact that Gabriel was desperately running for his life and the spell that Prolessarch cast on him was starting to sharpen his thinking and physiological processes.
In slightly less than two minutes, although what normally would have been a five-minute jog for ordinary mortals, the construction site came into view.
Looking onwards, Gabriel silently sprinted for the construction site's main gate; he jumped over a fence that was five feet tall like it was nothing without even breaking momentum. Prolessarch used his airdash-spell in order to ascend right onto the railing and then leaped off it, following and lagging only slightly behind the Cursebearer.
Soon enough, Prolessarch and Gabriel found themselves deep in the innards of the construction site. They decided to stop through a wordless, instinctive communion, in order to hear for the sounds of combat outside and better establish their status.
The construction site wasn't a nice place to be. It was a haunted-looking place, spooky most of the time, but especially right then, when it was night. The main building was a tall, wall-deprived, incomplete skyscraper with metal scaffolding and two medium-sized cranes, with one more crane being twice as tall as the building was. There were emptied pallets, gray airbricks lying in loose stacks, and entire piles of gravel and sand that had been dug up to even the foundations at some point. There were some tools too, like broken jackhammers and sledgehammers.
The place had been repurposed as a junkie and party hangout spot, at one point, and it showed much in the same way that being a miner showed in the black coal dust covering one's body. Syringes, glass bottles, and cigarette butts were abandoned everywhere on the ground and the walls were covered in random, colorful graffiti sketched in simple, unartistic lines.
While Prolessarch was casting a spell in order to gather more information on their surroundings, Gabriel picked up one of the sledgehammers and raised an eyebrow at how light it was. He realized a moment later that he had reached peak-human levels of strength and surpassed them by a good margin. He gripped the sledgehammer more like a one-handed sword, near the bottom of the shaft, then swung it as casually as one might a stick.
Deeply impressed by his own arms' exceptional ability to deny inertia, he took on a battle stance, Ring of Prowess flaring, then started a brief, versatile offensive kata with a pretend-opponent, fighting with a sledgehammer as if it were a sword. After a moment of this, both he and the Ring decided this wasn't fully efficient, and instead mixed together that style with a more standard approach of brutal, swift, downwards vertical attacks. It would have been utterly deadly: if Gabriel were so inclined, he'd be able to enter a shopping mall and butcher at least half of the people in there with nothing but this sledgehammer and his own body.
It was a very grim thought. Such power couldn't be spent in reckless ways, he knew, but it was also thrilling to realize that he could now pick a man up by his throat and then run with him just to use him as a projectile weapon against his own allies.
The Cursebearer stopped after roughly a minute, deciding the sledgehammer was inefficient in form, although suitable in a pinch. The Ring agreed heartily, and suggested a path of ameliorating that.
"When you're done, can you transmute this in something more… functional? The hammer's head is too small for fighting," Gabriel said.
Prolessarch turned. "What do you want me to do with it? I don't have any Diagram that creates matter ex nihilo," the lich explained swiftly. "As far as the Sign of Stone is concerned, my Sigil lets me transmute and control matter at a distance, and my Battle Diagram lets me rain down meteors. The Grand summons an army of stone warriors."
"Ah, alright," Gabriel said, shaking his head, feeling a bit disappointed he couldn't have his own warhammer. "Sorry to bother, I'll let you do your spells."
"What you have is a good weapon as it is," Prolessarch answered. He pointed a finger, adjusting the sledgehammer's head to be more like a mace with incredibly sharp, wicked-looking steel barbs at the end. The shafted adjusted itself, becoming slightly thicker but shorter. "It's not like the balance is going to bother you too much."
Gabriel nodded. He used his other hand to take out the Mailman's Gun and decided he'd use both in conjunction, learning how to dual wield. The Ring seemed to emit feelings of curiosity at that idea as if it were novel and interesting.
Suddenly, Prolessarch's head snapped up in danger. Only a tenth of a second later, Gabriel heard the sound of five pairs of feet hitting a metal beam. He followed the lich's gaze and saw five individuals there, crouched down on the beam and hunched over in a manner vaguely reminiscent of vultures.
Each one appeared to wear a high-tech version of the tactical armor the other soldiers had been wearing, with full-face visors that contained a number of interesting sensors and even a couple of antennae, giving them a feel that was between Cyberpunk SWAT Elite and Star Wars bounty hunters. All of them were equipped with an entire armory of weapons, ranging from rifles slung over the back to bandoliers of grenades and bombs on their chests. One of them appeared to have a wakizashi clipped to his belt, alongside a number of scientific gadgets the use of which Gabriel couldn't even guess at. Some of them must have been more grenades, judging by the pins.
The one in the middle also, notably, had a glowing red-hot blade attached to his forearm, one-and-a-half feet in length and had a sidearm on top of that, almost like a super-technological, more advanced version of the fighting style that Gabriel selected moments ago.
For a moment, it appeared as if a fight was going to break out any moment. Prolessarch looked no more than a snap-gesture away from casting one of his necromantic Diagrams, but the five men didn't initiate any hostilities, so both of the sides watched each other in numb, tense silence.
Gabriel made no movements, a frown appearing over his face.
He observed and silently fed the appearance of these men to the Eye, attaching assumptions of what their equipment might actually do, aside from the obvious. The Eye, in return for his knowledge, offered a compressed explanation of the foundations of marine biology, which Gabriel brushed aside.
The one in the middle stood in a deliberately slow and languid manner, then reached into a pouch on his belt in the same way. The deliberateness was meant to be a mark of non-threatening behavior, but neither Archmagus nor Cursebearer lowered their guard.
Without digging around even a moment, the soldier pulled out a small PDA, not dissimilar to a modern smartphone but with some buttons on the bottom. He showed it to both the lich and the boy as if presenting fire to cavemen and then tossed it down. The PDA clattered six paces away from Gabriel's feet.
Prolessarch didn't pry his gaze away from the soldiers, but instructed, "Pick it up. I'm ready to cover you."
Gabriel nodded. Instead of leaning down and exposing himself, he gently hooked a foot under the PDA then kicked upwards with prodigious speed, using his hand to snatch the PDA as it rose to level with his eyes. He did so as quickly as possible, his heart racing with the possibility of being shot in the back of the head by the soldiers.
The moment his fingers touched it, the screen flickered to life and showed the face of a man in his early forties. His eyes were like dark charcoal and rather striking, but otherwise he looked very bland; no different from an average joe Gabriel might have expected to meet on the street at any given moment.
"Am I speaking with Gabriele?" the man asked calmly. He possessed an ideally bland Italian accent, clearly marking him as a native, but Gabriel couldn't place the exact location with any precision. The man spoke with an easy and rich timbre, like the voice of a man ten years his junior, affable, and flowing.
Gabriel immediately started to understand there was something more to this situation, and the Ring of Prowess intensified that feeling with the improved negotiations and political skills that it could impart on him at a moment's notice. Gabriel drew on those aspects and understood the absence of other soldiers belonging to the extralegal organization meant the person contacting him right now wanted to keep this meeting hush-hush. The presence of armed soldiers, however, suggested he was ready to order him executed if he did not receive what he wanted.
It was a precious position to be in, and Gabriel wasn't sure if he could fight the super-soldiers who'd managed to approach their location without alerting Prolessarch's wards to their presence, even if said wards had been assembled with haphazard spellcrafting in only a handful of minutes. Prolessarch was incredibly talented as a magic caster, which suggested these people were at least incredibly talented at assassination and combat.
It was troublesome. Gabriel's heart somehow refused to race, terror was ablated away, and Gabriel outright dodged the incoming fear that came with this situation.
Instead, there was only resolve to pull through and see what this was about. Surely, the fact he wasn't being attacked yet was an auspicious sign?
"He may or may not be me, who is asking?" Gabriel asked back, keeping his gaze stern and cold. He held back emotion, hoping that his anxiety was not showing through his eyes; the window of the soul.
"For our purposes, call me, Dr. Serpenti," the 'good' doctor introduced himself. Gabriel's eyes widened by a millimeter at the use of such a dubious moniker. 'Dr. Snakes.' Not a friendly nickname.
The man continued, heedless of Gabriel's inner suspicions, with an easy and pleasant voice, "I am an Advanced Weapons Research & Development engineer, with some notable influence in the sections of Advanced Bioweapons and the Thaumaturgy Division of the esteemed organization I work for: the Paranormal Operations Department. The organization that is, of course, hunting you currently."
Gabriel cut right to the chase. "What do you want?"
"I want to make a deal," he said.
"You don't shoot at people you want to bargain with, Dr. Serpenti," Gabriel noted dryly.
He smiled placidly, as if in deep amusement. There was no mirth to that smile. "I assure you, the shooting is not being done by me. My superiors appear to be convinced that your skeletal friend is a dangerous multiversal terrorist and that you are a burgeoning threat from the beyond, infested by some vast entity. Our preliminary scans also suggested you are so intensely cursed that even the best efforts of our black magic department don't hold a candle to it. Frankly, I'm somewhat impressed you are alive."
Once the doctor was done with this part of the explanation, Gabriel looked towards Prolessarch with a raised eyebrow, referring to the part about multiversal terrorism. The skeleton shrugged. "I didn't do shit," he casually remarked, eyes on the m en in armor.
Should I reveal the threat on this reality? Gabriel thought, frowning deeply, If these people are actually after this planet's well-being, they're our allies.
"Either way," Dr. Serpenti continued smoothly. "They appear to believe that getting rid of you is going to cure them of their problems. Unfortunately, that belief is costing me time, money, and valuable influence over some important people. The man who attacked you? The one with the magical gun? An experimental prototype in the creation of advanced homunculi, made by my design. So much research wasted for something so pointless. I'm sure you see the reason that my superiors' decision is as vexing to me as it is to you. That's why I think we can help each other."
"Enlighten me," Gabriel requested in a neutral tone, keeping it polite but dry at the same time.
"I'm going to put it in simple terms. I don't want you hunted, because the longer you are hunted, the more my bosses will want you dead. And the more they want you dead, the more they'll pull on my leash," Dr. Serpenti explained, raising one hand. As he started to speak again, he raised the other, as if a countervailing force or a mirrored equivalent: "You don't want to be hunted, because the longer you are hunted, the more likely it is you will die."
Symbolically, he brought both of his upraised hands together. "I propose a mutual arrangement. I can provide you with the locations of the people in charge, the information you'd need to get rid of them. I might even slip in some gadgets no one will miss. You deal with the threat to your life and, in doing so, clear a path for me to retake some of my influence back. We help each other, no one knows, and the world is better for it."
Gabriel considered.
The possibilities were twofold. The first was that this man was telling the truth, and then Gabriel would have a half-ally in Italy's red seats, or... he was lying, and this was a deeply planned trap, something that might come and bite him in the ass later on.
The Cursebearer's first instinct was to look at Prolessarch. "Do you think he's lying?"
Prolessarch was keeping an eye on the armored super-soldiers on the steel beam above them. The skeletal mage shrugged, then whispered mentally, into Gabriel's thoughts. It was a deeply uncomfortable, dissociative communication; so unpleasant that Gabriel understood at once why they didn't use it often. Prolessarch's question was, 'Do you think he might be the Rival or would that be one of the people he calls his bosses? Ask him if there's someone who particularly wants you dead or hunted down.'
"Is there anyone in your organization who is particularly keen on wanting me dead? If so, why do they think killing me is a good idea?" Gabriel asked, looking to the PDA with placid curiosity.
"Particularly keen?" the doctor asked, sitting back and considering deeply. He seemed to be stuck in rumination for a moment but eventually said, "Yes, actually. Now that I think about it… Now that I think, this whole mess started when our initial scan foray showed the appearance of your signature on the thaumasensor network.
"After that, I swear it's like Progenitor Red became possessed. He was always the bloodthirsty one out of the Progenitors, but I have never seen him advocating someone's death so fully. In passing, he mentioned once that after you die, he'll attain a higher state. I'm not sure what that means, frankly, but he is a nutty hundred-year-old vampire. Who knows what he could be thinking? It surely doesn't matter to me, however. I have my own concerns, separate from yours and his."
Gabriel looked towards Prolessarch, and the two exchanged a nod. "Your answers have cleared up a doubt of mine, but I would like further proof that this is not a trap. What can you offer, as evidence?"
"For starters, a gift of friendship. Those people standing above you are my personalized… let us call them, 'bodyguards.' At least, on the papers. GRUP, or the General Reconnaissance Unit: Paranormal. They possess the tools and expertise sufficient to bring you out of the search zone and then mask your presence from the POD's scanners."
The doctor sat back in his chair, making it creak over the PDA and waving a hand magnanimously, "If you accept the offer, I'll have them escort you wherever you wish, and should you wish it further, stay with you and offer their expertise as bodyguards and assassins. They will not, however, assassinate our leadership for you, even if I think they reasonably could with enough preparation. That would expose me."
Gabriel considered for a long moment. "And what if I don't want them?"
"If you'd rather not reveal your position to me, I'll also be fine if you choose to order them to return to me at once." Doctor Serpenti managed a one-shoulder shrug, clearly not caring much for Gabriel's final decision on that front. "It's a resource I offer, and it's at your disposal if you accept. Even if you accept, there's nothing binding you to them. I'm leaving those details in your hands."
"Very well," Gabriel said, with a nod. He sighed, and then said, "I accept."
"Good man." The doctor nodded. "You can use the PDA to contact me using the middle button. I will not be available for a vast majority of the time, but pressing it will be enough to notify me, and I'll contact you at the soonest available juncture afterwards. Feel absolutely free to contact me for additional information, or, when you are ready, for the information regarding our leadership and structure. Until then, my men will heed your orders. As an additional precautionary measure, however, I'd like to establish some form of password or code we can use in future conversations - to verify each other's identities."
A code? There was something that sprung to Gabriel's head. An old joke that only he, and possibly a handful of other people knew. It wouldn't be recognizable and probably wouldn't be crackable to most people, even if it was stupidly rudimentary. Even the Ring's suggestions appeared to indicate so.
But stupidly rudimentary was something that an expert code-breaker wouldn't expect, thus making it perfect.
"Head hit, mind fuck," Gabriel said, seriously.
"That's our codeword and code response?" The doctor seemed to be surprised, but not off-put, exactly. More like, exasperated.
"No one in all of Italy knows the relevance of those four words in connection to each other, to the best of my awareness," Gabriel said, though his facade of seriousness dropped, and he had to hold back a snort. The doctor stared at him for a long moment, the very opposite of amused.
Ultimately, the man acquiesced to the idea.
"Very well." The doctor nodded. "In that case, when we contact each other you start with 'head hit,' and I shall complete the code. Until then." The PDA screen winked out; Gabriel pocketed it.
A moment later, the five soldiers on the metal beam casually jumped off, landing a handful of steps away from Gabriel and Prolessarch - who reluctantly dropped his guard.
The elite super-soldier in the middle of the wedge formation introduced himself, the energy blade on his forearm shuttering off as he saluted. His voice was cool and professional, with a stentorian tinge, but also a certain distance to it. It was almost like he wasn't entirely there; like a ghost, or someone haunted.
"GRUP Commander Hound, at your disposals, sirs. These are my subordinates, GRUP Crow, GRUP Weasel, GRUP Ox, and GRUP Eagle. You can distinguish between us via the animal emblem on our armbands. I specialize in close-range melee combat and general thaumaturgy, as well as tactical leadership."
GRUP Crow stepped forward, saluting, "I specialize in reconnaissance, scouting, and long-range sabotage."
GRUP Weasel stepped forward, saluting. A female voice, this time, spoke, "I specialize in demolitions, explosive ordnance, and ritual thaumaturgy."
GRUP Ox stepped forward, saluting. "I specialize in long-range marksmanship, heavy weapons use, and summoning thaumaturgy."
GRUP Eagle was last, stepping forward, saluting, and then speaking: another woman, it seemed. "I specialize in the use of sniper weapons, destruction of armored or protected targets, and hit-and-run tactics."
The Hound spoke once again, "We can work together as a team, and that's what we do best, sir, but if you feel our skills are needed in separate places, we can also work separately at no reduction to our strength. We are at your command."
So far, Gabriel found himself liking Eagle the most, although he worked hard to extricate that feeling. Sniper girls were a slight fetish to him, but pleasure and business should never be combined.
And there was something far more important that he noticed.
Gabriel sensed an opportunity and clamped down on it with steel teeth like a bear-trap refusing to let go of its prey. In front of him, Gabriel saw the benefits of the best deal he'd ever made, just after the Accursed's transaction.
It did not escape his sight that Hound appeared to use a fighting style at least tangentially similar to what Gabriel was intending to utilize once he was sufficiently practiced with it: a one-armed melee weapon and a sidearm for medium-range combat at decreased power.
With the Crystal Eye of Knowledge and the Ring of Prowess, learning such a style on his own would be particularly quick and easy. With a tutor to boot, it would become a trifle in terms of effort, in exchange for staggeringly titanic gains. It was the equivalent of having a $20 bill on one's person and having such a knowledge of economics that you could turn it into $5,000 by next week. It was being offered to him for free: a total multiplication of his fighting experience, from an entire group of experts that were at least on his level, if not superior. There was boundless versatility and power to be gained there, with only minimal effort.
How could anyone pass up such a perfect opportunity?
The Cursebearer exchanged a glance with Prolessarch. They appeared to be thinking the same thing, and confirming that it was a good idea, the Prolessarch inclined his head in the subtlest nod.
Gabriel smiled in a pleasant, sunny manner then looked back at the soldiers, without revealing his smugness. "That's understandable. But once we're at our safe house, you'll be giving me lessons. You'll be teaching me all you can, about combat, magic, and other practical matters. I'd like you to teach me as many advanced techniques and concepts as possible, without slowing down to wait for me. Don't worry about the basics, and don't worry about me keeping up, I'm a fast and intuitive learner, and I have more than enough willpower as to withstand whatever brutal regimen you'd like to throw at me."
"Understood, sir," Commander Hound obediently said. He actually appeared a touch excited. "We'll be as brutal and as fast as you need us."
Gabriel smiled and nodded, cracking his knuckles and leaning back to crack his back.
"Alright, it's time to go. If we go at our fastest…" Gabriel evaluated the bodies of the GRUP squaddies, and the Eye and Ring filled in the gaps. Their physiology appeared nearly as deep into the superhuman spectrum as his own, with slightly less than a fraction of the same potential to grow, to his pleasant surprise. "We should arrive at the safehouse by tomorrow morning if we don't stop. If anyone attacks us, we take them out swiftly and take what we can, unless your distant cousins' equipment has tracking devices."
"It does, sir. It's standard protocol," Hound offered, then reached into a pouch and whipped out a pair of talismans: black sturdy leather attached to silver pentagrams with the diameter of a fingernail. They looked incredibly easy to conceal. "These are anti-scrying talismans. They are useful for masking your presence against long-range extensive scans, but not short-range intensive scans. They can keep you from being found via magical divination either way, regardless of location. We each have one."
Gabriel nodded, and took one of the talismans, handing the other one to Prolessarch who stared at it for a moment, pondering, before deeming it adequate and wrapping it around his wrist. Gabriel slung his talisman securely over his neck instead.
"Shall we move out, sir?" Hound asked with a stentorian voice. "I personally suggest that Crow and Eagle scout the terrain and move one kilometer ahead of us for security. It'll help us avoid needless conflict. I'm afraid the POD combat agents have discovered your ploy and they've restarted their search approximately eighteen seconds ago."
"One of you should lag five hundred meters behind, just in case someone wants to follow us," Gabriel noted, waving a hand to them as if to say, 'you decide who.'
"Good idea, sir, but to the best of our knowledge, no POD combat operative currently in the field beside us is fast enough," Hound said, before glancing at Ox and giving a subtle nod.
Ox nodded back, then moved his fingers in a deep, graceful pattern, while muttering something in Latin. Weasel stepped back away to clear space, and Gabriel did the same in reaction. Several instants after he was done, space contorted and hiccuped.
Suddenly, there was a floating tornado of butterflies with iridescent wings floating in the middle of the abandoned construction site. They appeared to flutter there, innocent and hypnotically beautiful to Gabriel's eyes. An entire rainbow of flickering, darting colors, dancing together in a spiral like a united being. There was a slight distortion of wind between them, flowing and smooth, but without upsetting the butterflies' movements; rather, it appeared to work in concord with them. It was like an abstract piece of art, but one that had been ripped out of its painting and pushed into the fabric of cold reality, providing it with a flush of wonder.
"Basic air spirit," Hound clarified, after noticing that Gabriel seemed to be amazed by the sight. Prolessarch, in contrast, was definitely curious but not 'amazed' by any stretch of the imagination. "It'll stay behind us and track any changes in positional movement from POD agents. It should be sufficient, sir."
"Very good, now let's move out," Gabriel said with a resolute, determined nod.
At his order, both Crow and Eagle started running in the direction that Gabriel indicated, while Hound looked at Gabriel and asked, "If I may, sir, where exactly is the site we're looking for?"
"Sartua," Gabriel noted. It was the location to the farm he'd be using as a base. It was a town in the mountains that's hard to reach, and had been fully desolate for over a hundred years? It was a ghost town in more ways than one. If he ever became a convicted criminal, it would have been on his list of places to go.
"An excellent choice for a hiding place, sir," Hound commended with surface-deep admiration and appreciation.
"It'll be a very large farm," Gabriel noted, pursing his lips for a moment. "Very remote, easily defensible. It has the potential to become an impenetrable bastion or an undetectable ghost-zone if we play our cards right."
Hound didn't appear to have a response to that, at least not an immediate one.
Prolessarch had stayed quiet for most of the conversation, perhaps not seeing much reason in communicating with the soldiers he didn't trust. But now he saw fit to speak up with, "I'm calling dibs on the barn if there is one. I need a place to meditate that's quiet and away from natural sunlight like all the other goth kids do. Also, a place to store books, sketch Diagrams, open portals... you know, stuff like that. I suppose the basement would be a good concession."
Gabriel nodded. There was plenty of space at the farm. "You can have either one, no problem."
Hound released a polite semi-chuckle that clashed a little with his strict voice and super-soldier manner of dress. Gabriel looked at him, as he began speaking, "We'll be fine wherever, sir, although if you want us at maximum effectiveness I'd request a bed for each of my subordinates."
"Granted. There'll be plenty of rooms, and if we don't have enough, we'll simply go buy some bedrolls, or something," Gabriel offered, to which Hound nodded without hesitation. It seemed like the idea of sleeping in a bedroll didn't bother him overmuch.
Smoothly, he passed onto the next topic, "Eagle and Crow reached the length of one klick, I suggest we hold position for a moment to confirm we're safe then move out."
"Do so."
Upon offering the command, Gabriel approached the Prolessarch and motioned for them to move off to the side. Commander Hound appeared to read into this and instinctively comprehended that he was to not approach, instead edging way to the other end of the construction site in order to give them privacy.
"What do you think?" Gabriel asked for the wise lich's counsel, without looking back at the soldiers. "Can we trust them, keep them with us? It seems me to like Serpentis' offer is mostly genuine, but we can never be sure. It might turn out that he's the actual Rival here, and he's just using me as a tool for getting rid of his opponents."
Prolessarch seemed to be thrown into a moment of deep thought due to those words, as indicated by the narrowing of those soulfire specks in his eye sockets that served as metaphysical eyeballs, or replacements of thereof. When he spoke, almost ten seconds later, it was with a surprising lack of conviction. "I don't know. This is a dangerous situation we're getting ourselves into, but the potential rewards are immense." The lich gently rubbed a hand on the anti-scrying talisman he'd been gifted.
"It's a question of risk versus reward, and... I'm not sure if the risk is worth it with the Apocryphal Curse you've been afflicted with," he decided after a moment, before seemingly turning his opinion back around, "At the same time, the possible rewards to be reaped... You could progress much, Gabriel, with their tutelage. I can school you in magics, but I am lacking when it comes to any form of traditional combat. Even I could benefit some from analysis of their magic. That summoning was interesting, and the spirit itself is as well."
The lich glanced back at the tornado of butterflies, which maintained a steady position over the spot that it had been summoned to.
Ox wasn't paying much attention to it, focused on discussion with Hound and Weasel. The former glanced in Gabriel and Prolessarch's direction once, as if indicating that they were ready to move out at any moment.
Prolessarch looked back at Gabriel and said, "I'll leave it up to you. I'm afraid that if I make the choice, it might actually be a mistake in the end. My prodigious intelligence and the Grand Diagram of Knowledge I possess mean that I have a tendency to overanalyze. I feel like this decision might benefit from a simple, grounded perspective."
Gabriel nodded, even if that wasn't the kind of insight he was looking for. He wanted advice on which choice to make, but the advice he received amounted to, 'you will be able to make the best choice if you have no advice from me.'
There was a much darker risk the doctor and the soldiers were playing a medium-term con on him. Feigning support in the now to avoid resistance, so they could slit his throat under the cover of the nightly sleep, even if Gabriel's need for such things decreased significantly over the last couple of days.
It'd be worse if he took Hope, Sante, and Francesca to the farm.
It would be a risk of clashing ideologies, fear, and maybe even conflict. They certainly wouldn't like having to live next door to a band of highly-trained killer mercenaries who practiced magic and were equipped to the brim with technological gadgetry like some kind of discount, wrist-mounted lightsaber.
But he promised himself that he'd protect his friends, no matter what, and he'd already gathered some Coterial Orbs.
As soon as they reached the farm, he'd introduce them to the magic and make sure they could use their Surgecrafting-derived abilities. Maybe even teach them how to access the Pentex. With the Ring of Prowess on his finger, it shouldn't be much harder to pass on such knowledge than it was to learn it.
After a long minute of going back and forth, intense thinking, and falling into the last annals of consideration, Gabriel looked up at Prolessarch.
"Alright," Gabriel decided ultimately, with a bold resoluteness he didn't feel before. "We are going to keep them with us. Worst case scenario? We'll have to kill them, but that's not a problem. By that point, I'll have learned mostly everything I needed from them, and even more on my own."
"Very good," Prolessarch said, before his voice boomed with an exuberant quality. "You can trust me to watch your back, but I expect the same courtesy, alright? Nothing less than bros for life." The lich extended a fist in an offer.
"Fine with me. Bros for life." Gabriel completed the fistbump, then turned around. "Alright, we're ready to go!"
Hound nodded and radioed in the message, presumably to Crow and Eagle. At once, Prolessarch dashed and broke into a sprint, as did the remaining GRUP members. Hound waited a moment, looking at Gabriel then starting off in a sprint of his own.
Gabriel sighed and sprinted after them all.
This is going to be a wonderful adventure, eh? The Apocryphal seems to already be doing its job, as well as the Doom of the Rival.
"Prolessarch, is the magic carpet ready?" Gabriel asked.
He focused on sustaining pressure being ejected from his open palm, represented by a purplish-violet flame that danced and twirled in response to the subtlest motions of his thought and will. It was mesmerizing to watch it do so, and if circumstances permitted it, Gabriel would have been happy to do so for hours, like a moth clinging to a lantern or a drunkard staring with love towards the bottle that maintained his state.
Gabriel snuffed the flame out, pressure returning under the skin. Prolessarch's analysis suggested to a rather substantial degree that Surgecrafting was as much magic as it was a mutation of the cells; a sacred fusion of enlightened biology and magical alchemy.
Gabriel made a mental note to work on increasing his mana stores, or whatever the equivalent was. There didn't seem to be one, other than depth of his vigor. He supposed that Progression and natural training would reap their benefits and increase his maximum potential on their own, with no specialized procedures necessary.
"The Sorcerous Domains are complicated," Prolessarch declared. He dipped the paintbrush once again into its bucket, then continued with a graceful, swift stroke, painting another half of the circle to the bottom of the carpet. With virtuosic swiftness and precision, he created a sigil on the interior of the carpet, like a banana with a double-cross in the very center of the curve. "The Domain of Enchantment is difficult to access. I'm not sure if this will fly properly."
Gabriel considered that for what it was. Prolessarch had access to a Grand Diagram that was capable of global teleportation, but it took an uninterrupted seven hours of spellcasting and its powers only persisted for a total of seven uses, after which it had to be recast. They'd agreed that having a reliable, permanent vehicle for short-range travel would be more valuable for now, but it was starting to look more and more like a losing proposition.
"We could take a train instead, but that's dangerous, given the Doom of the Rival and the Apocryphal Curse," Gabriel admitted, folding his arms and approaching Prolessarch, leaning down to look more closely at what he was painting.
"If you want the carpet to fly reliably, I'll need another three hours or so," Prolessarch declared unashamedly, despite his earlier confidence in his peerless magic-crafting skills. There was a tinge of annoyment painting his voice, though, that Gabriel noticed only because he'd lived in the lich's presence for a handful of days now. "Magical items, even as simple as this, are not so easily made. Especially with common paint instead of actual reagents."
Gabriel frowned, looking up at the very large, wall-mounted clock. "How fast will it fly?"
Prolessarch held up a bony finger to his bony chin and considered deeply. "Just below the speed of sound when airborne, and it'll produce a friction bubble to make sure we don't fall off."
The Ring of Prowess flashed minimally, streamlining mundane thought into clarity.
"We'll be in the air at nine PM, and we'll be there at roughly nine forty-five PM if the speed is right. She'll be either asleep or…" A wave of realization struck Gabriel. The current day was Friday. "She'll be playing Dungeons & Dragons at that time. Which means she won't be at home."
"Perfect!" Prolessarch declared, and then quietly added, "I'll bring my character sheet."
Gabriel was unamused by the lich's witty remarks. "Which means there are other people who might or might not be chipped like the mailman was," he said, licking his lips and sighing in grumbly frustration. This couldn't have been that easy. "You might say that the same could go for my friends and girlfriend, but I'd know if they suddenly stopped answering my texts for a couple of hours and then came back as if nothing had happened. I can't know the same for strangers. We'll have to be prepared."
"Or, you can shoot them with Affectfire," Prolessarch answered blandly. He made a complicated series of brush motions, painting a mark similar to a six-petaled flower made out of perfect circles in the bound of the first circle he made. "If they're not enemies, they won't die."
"So…" Gabriel stopped to think, but the answer came instinctively to his mind. "I'll spend these three hours training; any particular thing you think I should focus on?"
"You probably haven't noticed, but your physical growth is beginning to plateau, or at least it'll start to, soon enough," Prolessarch calmly mentioned, painting orbs of red in the spaces in the middle of each flower petal on the carpet's bottom. "You've attained levels past the peak-human, which means that you'll need another source of physical strength. I suggest focusing on magic for now, in order to derive optimal growth. Such is the providence of those who become Captain America."
Gabriel raised two surprised eyebrows, protruding his lower lip slightly in a disbelieving pout. "Already? Alright, magic it is."
"Yes, Gabriel. Already." Prolessarch dipped the brush into the bucket without looking up. He sounded a little miffed. "Ordinary mortals cannot punch through concrete."
Gabriel shrugged and sat in the corner of the room Prolessarch was in - one of the perks of the apartment was the living room's considerable size. It was big enough to comfortably host both of them; however, Gabriel's aunt's farm was big enough to comfortably fit training space for ten people, if you gave everyone a decent, garden-sized chunk of land. And that was not counting in the house itself, the pens, and the massive barn.
He expected one of the pens, or maybe the barn, to become Prolessarch's laboratory and study, or something along those lines.
Gabriel crossed his legs, closed his eyes, and let out a long, deep breath. He let his mind relax as if letting go of the anchor that was reality and flying out into the astral reaches beyond. All of his trained thought was abandoned, Gabriel focusing only on his physical sensations. The coldness of the tile beneath his bottom, the air going in and out of his nose, the sun's gentle rays hitting his exposed skin, and warming him up.
There was a numbness in Gabriel's body, which soon turned to tingling, and then back to a soft, kind numbness that enveloped his entire form.
Gabriel let out one long breath, and his mind stepped out of his body and descended deeper into the supernal realm of the spirit. He'd already meditated for countless years before the Accursed gave him the offer, but this was far past his loftiest dreams of meditation. As he went deeper, Gabriel could observe facets of himself like the tessellated hyperdimensional parts of a whole mirror, each one reflecting a different part.
He continued to meditate for a good hour, when Prolessarch said, "Well, that's not fun. Do you know anyone from a, 'Guardia di Finanza?'"
"My dad," Gabriel said offhandedly, trying not to take his focus away from his meditation. The Cursebearer concentrated to the best of his ability, eyes closed.
"What's your dad look like?" the lich continued pestering.
"Bald," Gabriel replied placidly.
"Well, then someone who isn't your dad and his partner appear to be arresting one of the neighbors for alleged fraud," Prolessarch remarked plaintively.
Gabriel raised an eyebrow and opened an organic eye. "So?"
"Someone else who isn't your dad and his partner also appear to be arresting another neighbor. And someone who might be your dad and his partner appear to be arresting someone else. There are lots of them, arresting lots of people. All surrounding us, for the same fraud crime."
"My dad doesn't do fieldwork anymore," Gabriel said, opening his eyes.
"I was joking, smart guy," Prolessarch declared, standing up from the floor and dusting off his robes. "None of these are your dad. I know what he looks like."
"They're here for us, we need to go," Gabriel concluded, frowning. "How's the carpet?"
"At this stage, we can't use it for anything except maybe a projectile weapon," Prolessarch said with clear regret. He snapped his fingers and the carpet rolled itself up magically, then shot up three feet into the air, hovering in a spot and then following him at a set distance as he strode for the entryway. "It seems like it's our extralegal paranormal department friends. I'm betting they placed the paddy wagon outside my warding range."
Gabriel focused on the Ring of Prowess and closed his eyes.
He started feeding information about the current situation into the Eye, hoping it'd give out something useful or helpful. The information was rated as uninteresting and not very useful, but the Eye provided him with knowledge about how to carve wood in an optimal way using a mechanical lathe.
"Fuck," Gabriel said, clenching his fists.
"We'll have to fight our way through," Prolessarch answered with a casual shrug as if he'd done this a hundred times before. With his nature as a lich, he may well have. "It's no biggie, dude. Nothing we haven't done before, right?"
Gabriel looked at the lich, and then down at the ground for a moment. Doubt flooded his mind, like overwhelming physical darkness. The idea that he'd be forced to kill didn't sit right with him, especially when he wasn't completely sure if these people deserved it or not. Even if they didn't and he could force himself to not care - to elevate his own interests above their lives - the Doom of Judgement would not be so easily swayed. It would punish him with actual physical detriment for any egregious sin against conventional morality; although Gabriel hoped that it would be kind enough to at least understand this was self-defense.
The darkness expanded as he remembered the dead mailman that had been sent to kill him. It threatened to swallow Gabriel's mind.
The Cursebearer banished that feeling like a grand wizard slamming his staff against the concrete floor of the mental realm, casting everything in pure-white light and giving himself clear space to consider, think, and feel about the situation. He decided that he might as well ask the expert: Gabriel looked at Prolessarch once more.
"Do you… reckon we'll have to kill them?" His voice didn't tremble, but it had a certain hopeless edge to it.
"They'll die sooner or later." Prolessarch shrugged neutrally, the carpet floating behind him raising up to behind his shoulder and a little over it, like a projectile aimed in third-person view. The skeletal Archmagus sounded unbothered by the idea of killing, if slightly displeased. "It's their choice and their will to stand in our path, knowing we have no desire to affiliate ourselves with them. Last time, I was sitting in the library and calmly reading a book, and I was met with a cavalcade of fragmentation grenades, lightning bolts, and armor-piercing ammunition. They have no mercy, so I intend to extend none of my own. You, Gabriel, are free to do as you wish."
Gabriel shook his head, looking at his hands. He focused on the pressure beneath his skin and released it in the form of a violet-purple coating of flame, surrounding him like an exalted animus.
"If even one bullet dares to fly, I'm defending myself," he said, although he felt a heavy ballast being placed inside his chest cavity at the thought.
Prolessarch appeared to realize something calamitous, looking at Gabriel with sudden interest and concern. For a moment, the lich debated with himself and came to some kind of conclusion, nodding slowly.
"If we let one bullet fly, you may not be able to. Here." The lich raised a hand, then a dazzling orange light came into existence around Gabriel's skin, compressing and stretching around his limbs. Its surface flickered with motes of light, like TV static.
Looking down at his own hands in amazement, Gabriel asked, "What's this?"
"A forcefield." Gabriel looked up, but Prolessarch didn't seem like he believed there was enough time to explain the exact metaphysics of the barrier in question, even if he would've loved to. A fact that Gabriel noticed was that the smug lich enjoyed giving protracted lectures on various topics, but the Magics of the Diagram were his favorite.
"Alright, fair enough," Gabriel accepted, nodding with finality. He was still nervous about having to kill people, but this reminded him they would be killing him back, even before he could try.
Gabriel looked at his room longingly. There were some items of sentimental worth he'd like to take and obviously spare clothes. "Should I pack my stuff?"
"No." Prolessarch raised a hand in a wide, more comprehensive application of the same barrier spell.
He created a wide bastion that covered pretty much the whole entryway, moments before an explosion threw the door off its hinges. It slammed against the barrier uselessly, then fell to the ground. "I'm afraid we have incoming," the lich declared.
Gabriel frowned. He turned in the direction of the doorframe, pushing energy into his palms to create a pair of concentrated balls of violet Affectfire which flickered and pulsated with a life of its own.
Prolessarch dropped the barrier for a split moment. A hailstorm of rounds went through him, leaving shredded marks in his robes. Unbothered, he released the carpet which blasted off with a gunshot-loud noise, unfolding into a flat configuration mid-flight. Gabriel heard a pair of screams which cut off as soon as they started.
Wordlessly, Prolessarch dashed out of the room and into the hallway, then cast the same offensive spell he used against the mailman intruder, producing over a dozen dark purple flame balls that surrounded him, before shooting forth and homing in on a number of assailants in tactical armor.
After a second of delay, all of the lights in Gabriel's apartment shut down.
Gabriel dashed after Prolessarch. He was unsurprised by his own excellent speed; he managed to keep up with his wizard friend, which was something he wouldn't have been able to do without the Accursed's influence.
As Gabriel ran, suddenly a portion of the wall exploded. Before the dust could even settle, his combined hearing and sight managed to form the silhouettes of two men in tactical gear. He didn't even hesitate or think, lobbing both fireballs at them and leaping as the staccato of gunfire started to ring from their guns.
With a noise like the hissing of a kettle magnified a hundredfold, the fire exploded on them and spread over their armors like a seeking, grasping and deadly amoeba, crawling over them as if to absorb them, but instead of that, only burning into the kevlar and making them thrash around in a futile attempt to put it out. Gabriel didn't watch for longer than a second, turning to regard his erstwhile partner in crime and the rest of the battlefield.
Prolessarch raised a hand, causing another duo of soldiers to drop to the earth, clutching their chests desperately as if having a seizure or a heart attack. Some kind of black viscous energy sparked out of their torsos, which then flowed into Prolessarch's outstretched hand. As it did so, the minute flaws in the skeleton's bones were fixed, the holes in his robes mended, and the soulfire in his eyes strengthened by a fraction.
The Doom of Judgement appeared to dislike Gabriel's murder of the soldiers. It wasn't as egregious as he expected; only a handful of grams for each person killed, but that was only because they were armed and had malicious intent towards him and Prolessarch. It was self-defense and the defense of another, which preemptively decreased the weight of those sins. He'd be able to burn them off with some manner of simple kindness, like offering a candy bar to a stranger or another benevolent gesture.
But for now, if he wanted to survive, he needed to stop thinking about gestures and focus more on the fact that he needed to get out of here alive.
Gabriel started to formulate a plan in his head, even while Prolessarch cut a deep spearhead through the swathes of armored foes near the entrance of the building. The lich appeared to be battling them in a defensive manner, conserving its stronger Diagrams and spells for later, content to use life-consuming bolts and other basic attacks.
Finally, Gabriel located a window that led outside the building. "Follow me!" Gabriel shouted for Prolessarch.
He faced the window, took off with a running start, grit his teeth, and finally leaped, jumping through with his feet in front of him.
Glass shards rained down on the other side, but Gabriel stopped a moment later as there was a deafeningly loud crack and a sensation of intense pressure on his forehead, as if someone jabbed him with their index finger with as much strength as they could.
That could have been the end, he realized in a split-second.
Gabriel mentally thanked Prolessarch's orange barrier, as he realized he had just been shot in the head by a high-caliber sniper rifle. To avoid any such complications again, Gabriel spread a wide field of Affectfire around himself to cover his rough position.
Prolessarch stepped through the broken window a second later and dropped to the earth next to Gabriel.
The moment he did, there was another deafening crack and suddenly the upper left portion of his skull was missing, shattered bone fragments flying onto the dirt trail nearby. The lich clutched that part of his head for a moment, clearly without pain or shock, but with a kind of numb surprise.
"Snipers in the forest," he declared immediately, then stepped his foot down and started casting a Battle Diagram. "I'm going to show them precision. Cover me!"
Gabriel stabbed a hand in his direction, and at his behest, violet fire erupted from the tip of his foot. It rose and expanded around them in a crescent, then moved even further to cover and obscure a wide space: a titanic monolith of violet fire, like a comet fireball. There was gunfire and clearly the fire wasn't strong enough to melt or vaporize them instantly, because Gabriel felt and saw half-melted slag impacting into his chest moments later, although at half their usual strength. His shield was filling up with static, implying it wouldn't take more punishment.
"Aaand… done!" Prolessarch declared, then stepped forward.
Not even a second later, Gabriel heard a distant artillery explosion and an accompanying tremor in the earth, then another one, then another. He looked up at the sky above the forest and saw them: bright orange with a near-black inside, trailing burnished dust and specks behind them. Meteors.
The fucking Prolessarch called down a miniature meteor storm in order to solve their sniper problem.
There was a globe of near-liquid Affectfire clinging to the portion of his skull that had been destroyed, and it was gradually filling out the missing bone, not fast enough to be called regeneration, but faster than anything resembling healing. Gabriel watched the process, slightly mesmerized, then remembered his own shield had been weakened.
"Can you refresh my barrier?" Gabriel asked.
Prolessarch gestured, and Gabriel's barrier gained a stronger, orange hue. "There. What's the escape plan? We're surrounded," Prolessarch said worriedly, looking up. "Sixty-eight troops deployed around and in the building. I can see armored trucks moving into range, and what appears to be a battle tank."
Gabriel had an idea. A simple one, that relied on the assumption that Prolessarch could perform up to expectations, but an idea nonetheless. "Can you make bodies?"
"Bodies? Not… at the moment," Prolessarch answered. With sharp vigor, he added, "I can turn those fuckers into bodies if that's what you want. I don't know who they think they are, but when I'm through, your country is going to need a bigger graveyard."
"Fake bodies will do. They can fade in a couple of hours for all I care: just leave behind decoys so that they think they got us," Gabriel proposed. He took a look around, but it appeared that no one was fully aware of their current location. He could hear the noises of movement in the building they'd abandoned, but not much else.
"They can use magic," Prolessarch answered. "I'm not sure they'll be convinced with a meat puppet or illusion."
"Are they good enough to see through your magic? And be honest on this," Gabriel refuted, raising a skeptical eyebrow. He was feeling anxious, but at the same time, he knew Prolessarch was one hell of a wizard.
"Fuck it." Prolessarch snapped his fingers and instantly, a portion of the earth molded itself at his behest, creating a pair of human-shaped mounds. He started casting his Battle Diagram of Seeming, the one he used regularly to conceal his appearance. "Let's try it your way. Cover me for a moment. Your Affectfire won't cause collateral damage, so go out a little and spread it around, don't let those fuckers get too close. If you can, stop casting when they start shooting to make the ploy seem genuine."
Gabriel nodded, and let the Ring of Prowess flare at its top efficacy, also extending the effect to Prolessarch.
He stepped out of his cover and, raising both hands, began spreading a thick napalm-like spray of walls and towers of Affectfire from them; soon enough, there was a fiery storm surrounding him, covering the faces of buildings and creeping into windows.
There was a loud distant sound before something heavy, large, and fast slammed into the earth ten paces to Gabriel's right with enough force to almost send him flying. His barrier was nearly shattered in some places, showing cracks and having shrapnel lodged in it.
Was that a tank shell? It was a fucking tank shell, Gabriel realized, or at least something similar.
He used that as his chance to dash out of sight, hiding where no one would be able to see him. The Ring of Prowess wasn't a perfect teacher, but it was much better at its job when the stakes were the user's life. Gabriel heeded the rough direction, augmenting his stealth and camouflage until he was basically undetectable, in a patch of Affectfire so thick that thermal recognition would yield no aid, but so small and off to the side that none of them would think to check it specifically. It was located in a mound of natural rock formations, meaning that even if stray gunfire appeared, it wouldn't do too much to him.
Prolessarch approached a moment later, ostensibly sensing Gabriel's presence through the wards he'd put around the neighbourhood, and said, "It's done. What's the next step of your plan?"
"We go through the abandoned construction site to our left, leave the bodies behind, and gun it as fast as we can towards the woods where the snipers weren't," Gabriel said resolutely, a knot slowly forming in his stomach.
"Lead the way." Prolessarch started casting another spell, finishing in a couple of seconds. Gabriel suddenly felt invigorated and full of stamina, as if he'd just woken up from twelve hours of sleep and then had an entire mug of hot coffee to himself. "Do you have the Mailman's Pistol?"
"I never managed to put it down," Gabriel said, pointing at the inside of his leather jacket. "Let's go."
Prolessarch nodded, then quick-stepped out of the fire and into the cover of the bushes. Gabriel followed, lagging a little behind but managing to keep up nonetheless.
Their path through the forest was slow but, despite the relative cold of midnight wind, actually refreshing. There was a relaxing value to it, perhaps derived from the fact that Gabriel was desperately running for his life and the spell that Prolessarch cast on him was starting to sharpen his thinking and physiological processes.
In slightly less than two minutes, although what normally would have been a five-minute jog for ordinary mortals, the construction site came into view.
Looking onwards, Gabriel silently sprinted for the construction site's main gate; he jumped over a fence that was five feet tall like it was nothing without even breaking momentum. Prolessarch used his airdash-spell in order to ascend right onto the railing and then leaped off it, following and lagging only slightly behind the Cursebearer.
Soon enough, Prolessarch and Gabriel found themselves deep in the innards of the construction site. They decided to stop through a wordless, instinctive communion, in order to hear for the sounds of combat outside and better establish their status.
The construction site wasn't a nice place to be. It was a haunted-looking place, spooky most of the time, but especially right then, when it was night. The main building was a tall, wall-deprived, incomplete skyscraper with metal scaffolding and two medium-sized cranes, with one more crane being twice as tall as the building was. There were emptied pallets, gray airbricks lying in loose stacks, and entire piles of gravel and sand that had been dug up to even the foundations at some point. There were some tools too, like broken jackhammers and sledgehammers.
The place had been repurposed as a junkie and party hangout spot, at one point, and it showed much in the same way that being a miner showed in the black coal dust covering one's body. Syringes, glass bottles, and cigarette butts were abandoned everywhere on the ground and the walls were covered in random, colorful graffiti sketched in simple, unartistic lines.
While Prolessarch was casting a spell in order to gather more information on their surroundings, Gabriel picked up one of the sledgehammers and raised an eyebrow at how light it was. He realized a moment later that he had reached peak-human levels of strength and surpassed them by a good margin. He gripped the sledgehammer more like a one-handed sword, near the bottom of the shaft, then swung it as casually as one might a stick.
Deeply impressed by his own arms' exceptional ability to deny inertia, he took on a battle stance, Ring of Prowess flaring, then started a brief, versatile offensive kata with a pretend-opponent, fighting with a sledgehammer as if it were a sword. After a moment of this, both he and the Ring decided this wasn't fully efficient, and instead mixed together that style with a more standard approach of brutal, swift, downwards vertical attacks. It would have been utterly deadly: if Gabriel were so inclined, he'd be able to enter a shopping mall and butcher at least half of the people in there with nothing but this sledgehammer and his own body.
It was a very grim thought. Such power couldn't be spent in reckless ways, he knew, but it was also thrilling to realize that he could now pick a man up by his throat and then run with him just to use him as a projectile weapon against his own allies.
The Cursebearer stopped after roughly a minute, deciding the sledgehammer was inefficient in form, although suitable in a pinch. The Ring agreed heartily, and suggested a path of ameliorating that.
"When you're done, can you transmute this in something more… functional? The hammer's head is too small for fighting," Gabriel said.
Prolessarch turned. "What do you want me to do with it? I don't have any Diagram that creates matter ex nihilo," the lich explained swiftly. "As far as the Sign of Stone is concerned, my Sigil lets me transmute and control matter at a distance, and my Battle Diagram lets me rain down meteors. The Grand summons an army of stone warriors."
"Ah, alright," Gabriel said, shaking his head, feeling a bit disappointed he couldn't have his own warhammer. "Sorry to bother, I'll let you do your spells."
"What you have is a good weapon as it is," Prolessarch answered. He pointed a finger, adjusting the sledgehammer's head to be more like a mace with incredibly sharp, wicked-looking steel barbs at the end. The shafted adjusted itself, becoming slightly thicker but shorter. "It's not like the balance is going to bother you too much."
Gabriel nodded. He used his other hand to take out the Mailman's Gun and decided he'd use both in conjunction, learning how to dual wield. The Ring seemed to emit feelings of curiosity at that idea as if it were novel and interesting.
Suddenly, Prolessarch's head snapped up in danger. Only a tenth of a second later, Gabriel heard the sound of five pairs of feet hitting a metal beam. He followed the lich's gaze and saw five individuals there, crouched down on the beam and hunched over in a manner vaguely reminiscent of vultures.
Each one appeared to wear a high-tech version of the tactical armor the other soldiers had been wearing, with full-face visors that contained a number of interesting sensors and even a couple of antennae, giving them a feel that was between Cyberpunk SWAT Elite and Star Wars bounty hunters. All of them were equipped with an entire armory of weapons, ranging from rifles slung over the back to bandoliers of grenades and bombs on their chests. One of them appeared to have a wakizashi clipped to his belt, alongside a number of scientific gadgets the use of which Gabriel couldn't even guess at. Some of them must have been more grenades, judging by the pins.
The one in the middle also, notably, had a glowing red-hot blade attached to his forearm, one-and-a-half feet in length and had a sidearm on top of that, almost like a super-technological, more advanced version of the fighting style that Gabriel selected moments ago.
For a moment, it appeared as if a fight was going to break out any moment. Prolessarch looked no more than a snap-gesture away from casting one of his necromantic Diagrams, but the five men didn't initiate any hostilities, so both of the sides watched each other in numb, tense silence.
Gabriel made no movements, a frown appearing over his face.
He observed and silently fed the appearance of these men to the Eye, attaching assumptions of what their equipment might actually do, aside from the obvious. The Eye, in return for his knowledge, offered a compressed explanation of the foundations of marine biology, which Gabriel brushed aside.
The one in the middle stood in a deliberately slow and languid manner, then reached into a pouch on his belt in the same way. The deliberateness was meant to be a mark of non-threatening behavior, but neither Archmagus nor Cursebearer lowered their guard.
Without digging around even a moment, the soldier pulled out a small PDA, not dissimilar to a modern smartphone but with some buttons on the bottom. He showed it to both the lich and the boy as if presenting fire to cavemen and then tossed it down. The PDA clattered six paces away from Gabriel's feet.
Prolessarch didn't pry his gaze away from the soldiers, but instructed, "Pick it up. I'm ready to cover you."
Gabriel nodded. Instead of leaning down and exposing himself, he gently hooked a foot under the PDA then kicked upwards with prodigious speed, using his hand to snatch the PDA as it rose to level with his eyes. He did so as quickly as possible, his heart racing with the possibility of being shot in the back of the head by the soldiers.
The moment his fingers touched it, the screen flickered to life and showed the face of a man in his early forties. His eyes were like dark charcoal and rather striking, but otherwise he looked very bland; no different from an average joe Gabriel might have expected to meet on the street at any given moment.
"Am I speaking with Gabriele?" the man asked calmly. He possessed an ideally bland Italian accent, clearly marking him as a native, but Gabriel couldn't place the exact location with any precision. The man spoke with an easy and rich timbre, like the voice of a man ten years his junior, affable, and flowing.
Gabriel immediately started to understand there was something more to this situation, and the Ring of Prowess intensified that feeling with the improved negotiations and political skills that it could impart on him at a moment's notice. Gabriel drew on those aspects and understood the absence of other soldiers belonging to the extralegal organization meant the person contacting him right now wanted to keep this meeting hush-hush. The presence of armed soldiers, however, suggested he was ready to order him executed if he did not receive what he wanted.
It was a precious position to be in, and Gabriel wasn't sure if he could fight the super-soldiers who'd managed to approach their location without alerting Prolessarch's wards to their presence, even if said wards had been assembled with haphazard spellcrafting in only a handful of minutes. Prolessarch was incredibly talented as a magic caster, which suggested these people were at least incredibly talented at assassination and combat.
It was troublesome. Gabriel's heart somehow refused to race, terror was ablated away, and Gabriel outright dodged the incoming fear that came with this situation.
Instead, there was only resolve to pull through and see what this was about. Surely, the fact he wasn't being attacked yet was an auspicious sign?
"He may or may not be me, who is asking?" Gabriel asked back, keeping his gaze stern and cold. He held back emotion, hoping that his anxiety was not showing through his eyes; the window of the soul.
"For our purposes, call me, Dr. Serpenti," the 'good' doctor introduced himself. Gabriel's eyes widened by a millimeter at the use of such a dubious moniker. 'Dr. Snakes.' Not a friendly nickname.
The man continued, heedless of Gabriel's inner suspicions, with an easy and pleasant voice, "I am an Advanced Weapons Research & Development engineer, with some notable influence in the sections of Advanced Bioweapons and the Thaumaturgy Division of the esteemed organization I work for: the Paranormal Operations Department. The organization that is, of course, hunting you currently."
Gabriel cut right to the chase. "What do you want?"
"I want to make a deal," he said.
"You don't shoot at people you want to bargain with, Dr. Serpenti," Gabriel noted dryly.
He smiled placidly, as if in deep amusement. There was no mirth to that smile. "I assure you, the shooting is not being done by me. My superiors appear to be convinced that your skeletal friend is a dangerous multiversal terrorist and that you are a burgeoning threat from the beyond, infested by some vast entity. Our preliminary scans also suggested you are so intensely cursed that even the best efforts of our black magic department don't hold a candle to it. Frankly, I'm somewhat impressed you are alive."
Once the doctor was done with this part of the explanation, Gabriel looked towards Prolessarch with a raised eyebrow, referring to the part about multiversal terrorism. The skeleton shrugged. "I didn't do shit," he casually remarked, eyes on the m en in armor.
Should I reveal the threat on this reality? Gabriel thought, frowning deeply, If these people are actually after this planet's well-being, they're our allies.
"Either way," Dr. Serpenti continued smoothly. "They appear to believe that getting rid of you is going to cure them of their problems. Unfortunately, that belief is costing me time, money, and valuable influence over some important people. The man who attacked you? The one with the magical gun? An experimental prototype in the creation of advanced homunculi, made by my design. So much research wasted for something so pointless. I'm sure you see the reason that my superiors' decision is as vexing to me as it is to you. That's why I think we can help each other."
"Enlighten me," Gabriel requested in a neutral tone, keeping it polite but dry at the same time.
"I'm going to put it in simple terms. I don't want you hunted, because the longer you are hunted, the more my bosses will want you dead. And the more they want you dead, the more they'll pull on my leash," Dr. Serpenti explained, raising one hand. As he started to speak again, he raised the other, as if a countervailing force or a mirrored equivalent: "You don't want to be hunted, because the longer you are hunted, the more likely it is you will die."
Symbolically, he brought both of his upraised hands together. "I propose a mutual arrangement. I can provide you with the locations of the people in charge, the information you'd need to get rid of them. I might even slip in some gadgets no one will miss. You deal with the threat to your life and, in doing so, clear a path for me to retake some of my influence back. We help each other, no one knows, and the world is better for it."
Gabriel considered.
The possibilities were twofold. The first was that this man was telling the truth, and then Gabriel would have a half-ally in Italy's red seats, or... he was lying, and this was a deeply planned trap, something that might come and bite him in the ass later on.
The Cursebearer's first instinct was to look at Prolessarch. "Do you think he's lying?"
Prolessarch was keeping an eye on the armored super-soldiers on the steel beam above them. The skeletal mage shrugged, then whispered mentally, into Gabriel's thoughts. It was a deeply uncomfortable, dissociative communication; so unpleasant that Gabriel understood at once why they didn't use it often. Prolessarch's question was, 'Do you think he might be the Rival or would that be one of the people he calls his bosses? Ask him if there's someone who particularly wants you dead or hunted down.'
"Is there anyone in your organization who is particularly keen on wanting me dead? If so, why do they think killing me is a good idea?" Gabriel asked, looking to the PDA with placid curiosity.
"Particularly keen?" the doctor asked, sitting back and considering deeply. He seemed to be stuck in rumination for a moment but eventually said, "Yes, actually. Now that I think about it… Now that I think, this whole mess started when our initial scan foray showed the appearance of your signature on the thaumasensor network.
"After that, I swear it's like Progenitor Red became possessed. He was always the bloodthirsty one out of the Progenitors, but I have never seen him advocating someone's death so fully. In passing, he mentioned once that after you die, he'll attain a higher state. I'm not sure what that means, frankly, but he is a nutty hundred-year-old vampire. Who knows what he could be thinking? It surely doesn't matter to me, however. I have my own concerns, separate from yours and his."
Gabriel looked towards Prolessarch, and the two exchanged a nod. "Your answers have cleared up a doubt of mine, but I would like further proof that this is not a trap. What can you offer, as evidence?"
"For starters, a gift of friendship. Those people standing above you are my personalized… let us call them, 'bodyguards.' At least, on the papers. GRUP, or the General Reconnaissance Unit: Paranormal. They possess the tools and expertise sufficient to bring you out of the search zone and then mask your presence from the POD's scanners."
The doctor sat back in his chair, making it creak over the PDA and waving a hand magnanimously, "If you accept the offer, I'll have them escort you wherever you wish, and should you wish it further, stay with you and offer their expertise as bodyguards and assassins. They will not, however, assassinate our leadership for you, even if I think they reasonably could with enough preparation. That would expose me."
Gabriel considered for a long moment. "And what if I don't want them?"
"If you'd rather not reveal your position to me, I'll also be fine if you choose to order them to return to me at once." Doctor Serpenti managed a one-shoulder shrug, clearly not caring much for Gabriel's final decision on that front. "It's a resource I offer, and it's at your disposal if you accept. Even if you accept, there's nothing binding you to them. I'm leaving those details in your hands."
"Very well," Gabriel said, with a nod. He sighed, and then said, "I accept."
"Good man." The doctor nodded. "You can use the PDA to contact me using the middle button. I will not be available for a vast majority of the time, but pressing it will be enough to notify me, and I'll contact you at the soonest available juncture afterwards. Feel absolutely free to contact me for additional information, or, when you are ready, for the information regarding our leadership and structure. Until then, my men will heed your orders. As an additional precautionary measure, however, I'd like to establish some form of password or code we can use in future conversations - to verify each other's identities."
A code? There was something that sprung to Gabriel's head. An old joke that only he, and possibly a handful of other people knew. It wouldn't be recognizable and probably wouldn't be crackable to most people, even if it was stupidly rudimentary. Even the Ring's suggestions appeared to indicate so.
But stupidly rudimentary was something that an expert code-breaker wouldn't expect, thus making it perfect.
"Head hit, mind fuck," Gabriel said, seriously.
"That's our codeword and code response?" The doctor seemed to be surprised, but not off-put, exactly. More like, exasperated.
"No one in all of Italy knows the relevance of those four words in connection to each other, to the best of my awareness," Gabriel said, though his facade of seriousness dropped, and he had to hold back a snort. The doctor stared at him for a long moment, the very opposite of amused.
Ultimately, the man acquiesced to the idea.
"Very well." The doctor nodded. "In that case, when we contact each other you start with 'head hit,' and I shall complete the code. Until then." The PDA screen winked out; Gabriel pocketed it.
A moment later, the five soldiers on the metal beam casually jumped off, landing a handful of steps away from Gabriel and Prolessarch - who reluctantly dropped his guard.
The elite super-soldier in the middle of the wedge formation introduced himself, the energy blade on his forearm shuttering off as he saluted. His voice was cool and professional, with a stentorian tinge, but also a certain distance to it. It was almost like he wasn't entirely there; like a ghost, or someone haunted.
"GRUP Commander Hound, at your disposals, sirs. These are my subordinates, GRUP Crow, GRUP Weasel, GRUP Ox, and GRUP Eagle. You can distinguish between us via the animal emblem on our armbands. I specialize in close-range melee combat and general thaumaturgy, as well as tactical leadership."
GRUP Crow stepped forward, saluting, "I specialize in reconnaissance, scouting, and long-range sabotage."
GRUP Weasel stepped forward, saluting. A female voice, this time, spoke, "I specialize in demolitions, explosive ordnance, and ritual thaumaturgy."
GRUP Ox stepped forward, saluting. "I specialize in long-range marksmanship, heavy weapons use, and summoning thaumaturgy."
GRUP Eagle was last, stepping forward, saluting, and then speaking: another woman, it seemed. "I specialize in the use of sniper weapons, destruction of armored or protected targets, and hit-and-run tactics."
The Hound spoke once again, "We can work together as a team, and that's what we do best, sir, but if you feel our skills are needed in separate places, we can also work separately at no reduction to our strength. We are at your command."
So far, Gabriel found himself liking Eagle the most, although he worked hard to extricate that feeling. Sniper girls were a slight fetish to him, but pleasure and business should never be combined.
And there was something far more important that he noticed.
Gabriel sensed an opportunity and clamped down on it with steel teeth like a bear-trap refusing to let go of its prey. In front of him, Gabriel saw the benefits of the best deal he'd ever made, just after the Accursed's transaction.
It did not escape his sight that Hound appeared to use a fighting style at least tangentially similar to what Gabriel was intending to utilize once he was sufficiently practiced with it: a one-armed melee weapon and a sidearm for medium-range combat at decreased power.
With the Crystal Eye of Knowledge and the Ring of Prowess, learning such a style on his own would be particularly quick and easy. With a tutor to boot, it would become a trifle in terms of effort, in exchange for staggeringly titanic gains. It was the equivalent of having a $20 bill on one's person and having such a knowledge of economics that you could turn it into $5,000 by next week. It was being offered to him for free: a total multiplication of his fighting experience, from an entire group of experts that were at least on his level, if not superior. There was boundless versatility and power to be gained there, with only minimal effort.
How could anyone pass up such a perfect opportunity?
The Cursebearer exchanged a glance with Prolessarch. They appeared to be thinking the same thing, and confirming that it was a good idea, the Prolessarch inclined his head in the subtlest nod.
Gabriel smiled in a pleasant, sunny manner then looked back at the soldiers, without revealing his smugness. "That's understandable. But once we're at our safe house, you'll be giving me lessons. You'll be teaching me all you can, about combat, magic, and other practical matters. I'd like you to teach me as many advanced techniques and concepts as possible, without slowing down to wait for me. Don't worry about the basics, and don't worry about me keeping up, I'm a fast and intuitive learner, and I have more than enough willpower as to withstand whatever brutal regimen you'd like to throw at me."
"Understood, sir," Commander Hound obediently said. He actually appeared a touch excited. "We'll be as brutal and as fast as you need us."
Gabriel smiled and nodded, cracking his knuckles and leaning back to crack his back.
"Alright, it's time to go. If we go at our fastest…" Gabriel evaluated the bodies of the GRUP squaddies, and the Eye and Ring filled in the gaps. Their physiology appeared nearly as deep into the superhuman spectrum as his own, with slightly less than a fraction of the same potential to grow, to his pleasant surprise. "We should arrive at the safehouse by tomorrow morning if we don't stop. If anyone attacks us, we take them out swiftly and take what we can, unless your distant cousins' equipment has tracking devices."
"It does, sir. It's standard protocol," Hound offered, then reached into a pouch and whipped out a pair of talismans: black sturdy leather attached to silver pentagrams with the diameter of a fingernail. They looked incredibly easy to conceal. "These are anti-scrying talismans. They are useful for masking your presence against long-range extensive scans, but not short-range intensive scans. They can keep you from being found via magical divination either way, regardless of location. We each have one."
Gabriel nodded, and took one of the talismans, handing the other one to Prolessarch who stared at it for a moment, pondering, before deeming it adequate and wrapping it around his wrist. Gabriel slung his talisman securely over his neck instead.
"Shall we move out, sir?" Hound asked with a stentorian voice. "I personally suggest that Crow and Eagle scout the terrain and move one kilometer ahead of us for security. It'll help us avoid needless conflict. I'm afraid the POD combat agents have discovered your ploy and they've restarted their search approximately eighteen seconds ago."
"One of you should lag five hundred meters behind, just in case someone wants to follow us," Gabriel noted, waving a hand to them as if to say, 'you decide who.'
"Good idea, sir, but to the best of our knowledge, no POD combat operative currently in the field beside us is fast enough," Hound said, before glancing at Ox and giving a subtle nod.
Ox nodded back, then moved his fingers in a deep, graceful pattern, while muttering something in Latin. Weasel stepped back away to clear space, and Gabriel did the same in reaction. Several instants after he was done, space contorted and hiccuped.
Suddenly, there was a floating tornado of butterflies with iridescent wings floating in the middle of the abandoned construction site. They appeared to flutter there, innocent and hypnotically beautiful to Gabriel's eyes. An entire rainbow of flickering, darting colors, dancing together in a spiral like a united being. There was a slight distortion of wind between them, flowing and smooth, but without upsetting the butterflies' movements; rather, it appeared to work in concord with them. It was like an abstract piece of art, but one that had been ripped out of its painting and pushed into the fabric of cold reality, providing it with a flush of wonder.
"Basic air spirit," Hound clarified, after noticing that Gabriel seemed to be amazed by the sight. Prolessarch, in contrast, was definitely curious but not 'amazed' by any stretch of the imagination. "It'll stay behind us and track any changes in positional movement from POD agents. It should be sufficient, sir."
"Very good, now let's move out," Gabriel said with a resolute, determined nod.
At his order, both Crow and Eagle started running in the direction that Gabriel indicated, while Hound looked at Gabriel and asked, "If I may, sir, where exactly is the site we're looking for?"
"Sartua," Gabriel noted. It was the location to the farm he'd be using as a base. It was a town in the mountains that's hard to reach, and had been fully desolate for over a hundred years? It was a ghost town in more ways than one. If he ever became a convicted criminal, it would have been on his list of places to go.
"An excellent choice for a hiding place, sir," Hound commended with surface-deep admiration and appreciation.
"It'll be a very large farm," Gabriel noted, pursing his lips for a moment. "Very remote, easily defensible. It has the potential to become an impenetrable bastion or an undetectable ghost-zone if we play our cards right."
Hound didn't appear to have a response to that, at least not an immediate one.
Prolessarch had stayed quiet for most of the conversation, perhaps not seeing much reason in communicating with the soldiers he didn't trust. But now he saw fit to speak up with, "I'm calling dibs on the barn if there is one. I need a place to meditate that's quiet and away from natural sunlight like all the other goth kids do. Also, a place to store books, sketch Diagrams, open portals... you know, stuff like that. I suppose the basement would be a good concession."
Gabriel nodded. There was plenty of space at the farm. "You can have either one, no problem."
Hound released a polite semi-chuckle that clashed a little with his strict voice and super-soldier manner of dress. Gabriel looked at him, as he began speaking, "We'll be fine wherever, sir, although if you want us at maximum effectiveness I'd request a bed for each of my subordinates."
"Granted. There'll be plenty of rooms, and if we don't have enough, we'll simply go buy some bedrolls, or something," Gabriel offered, to which Hound nodded without hesitation. It seemed like the idea of sleeping in a bedroll didn't bother him overmuch.
Smoothly, he passed onto the next topic, "Eagle and Crow reached the length of one klick, I suggest we hold position for a moment to confirm we're safe then move out."
"Do so."
Upon offering the command, Gabriel approached the Prolessarch and motioned for them to move off to the side. Commander Hound appeared to read into this and instinctively comprehended that he was to not approach, instead edging way to the other end of the construction site in order to give them privacy.
"What do you think?" Gabriel asked for the wise lich's counsel, without looking back at the soldiers. "Can we trust them, keep them with us? It seems me to like Serpentis' offer is mostly genuine, but we can never be sure. It might turn out that he's the actual Rival here, and he's just using me as a tool for getting rid of his opponents."
Prolessarch seemed to be thrown into a moment of deep thought due to those words, as indicated by the narrowing of those soulfire specks in his eye sockets that served as metaphysical eyeballs, or replacements of thereof. When he spoke, almost ten seconds later, it was with a surprising lack of conviction. "I don't know. This is a dangerous situation we're getting ourselves into, but the potential rewards are immense." The lich gently rubbed a hand on the anti-scrying talisman he'd been gifted.
"It's a question of risk versus reward, and... I'm not sure if the risk is worth it with the Apocryphal Curse you've been afflicted with," he decided after a moment, before seemingly turning his opinion back around, "At the same time, the possible rewards to be reaped... You could progress much, Gabriel, with their tutelage. I can school you in magics, but I am lacking when it comes to any form of traditional combat. Even I could benefit some from analysis of their magic. That summoning was interesting, and the spirit itself is as well."
The lich glanced back at the tornado of butterflies, which maintained a steady position over the spot that it had been summoned to.
Ox wasn't paying much attention to it, focused on discussion with Hound and Weasel. The former glanced in Gabriel and Prolessarch's direction once, as if indicating that they were ready to move out at any moment.
Prolessarch looked back at Gabriel and said, "I'll leave it up to you. I'm afraid that if I make the choice, it might actually be a mistake in the end. My prodigious intelligence and the Grand Diagram of Knowledge I possess mean that I have a tendency to overanalyze. I feel like this decision might benefit from a simple, grounded perspective."
Gabriel nodded, even if that wasn't the kind of insight he was looking for. He wanted advice on which choice to make, but the advice he received amounted to, 'you will be able to make the best choice if you have no advice from me.'
There was a much darker risk the doctor and the soldiers were playing a medium-term con on him. Feigning support in the now to avoid resistance, so they could slit his throat under the cover of the nightly sleep, even if Gabriel's need for such things decreased significantly over the last couple of days.
It'd be worse if he took Hope, Sante, and Francesca to the farm.
It would be a risk of clashing ideologies, fear, and maybe even conflict. They certainly wouldn't like having to live next door to a band of highly-trained killer mercenaries who practiced magic and were equipped to the brim with technological gadgetry like some kind of discount, wrist-mounted lightsaber.
But he promised himself that he'd protect his friends, no matter what, and he'd already gathered some Coterial Orbs.
As soon as they reached the farm, he'd introduce them to the magic and make sure they could use their Surgecrafting-derived abilities. Maybe even teach them how to access the Pentex. With the Ring of Prowess on his finger, it shouldn't be much harder to pass on such knowledge than it was to learn it.
After a long minute of going back and forth, intense thinking, and falling into the last annals of consideration, Gabriel looked up at Prolessarch.
"Alright," Gabriel decided ultimately, with a bold resoluteness he didn't feel before. "We are going to keep them with us. Worst case scenario? We'll have to kill them, but that's not a problem. By that point, I'll have learned mostly everything I needed from them, and even more on my own."
"Very good," Prolessarch said, before his voice boomed with an exuberant quality. "You can trust me to watch your back, but I expect the same courtesy, alright? Nothing less than bros for life." The lich extended a fist in an offer.
"Fine with me. Bros for life." Gabriel completed the fistbump, then turned around. "Alright, we're ready to go!"
Hound nodded and radioed in the message, presumably to Crow and Eagle. At once, Prolessarch dashed and broke into a sprint, as did the remaining GRUP members. Hound waited a moment, looking at Gabriel then starting off in a sprint of his own.
Gabriel sighed and sprinted after them all.
This is going to be a wonderful adventure, eh? The Apocryphal seems to already be doing its job, as well as the Doom of the Rival.
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Lealope
Not yet invincible
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The Geas specifically tends to put people into worlds that they can actually work towards interacting with in some meaningful capacity. There's probably universes where everything from the smallest blade of grass to the dolphins to the people are beyond level one million but a scrub-tier Combat-type wouldn't be sent to that world for a task. And otherwise, this world is big enough that they aren't just constantly popping out of fucking nowhere to destroy all the worlds, though that would certainly happen to some worlds.
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
Peak of Grand Solipsism, actually. It was in the EFB Cursebearer teaser posted in this thread a while back.
Lealope
Not yet invincible
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It depends on their remittance and the balance of that remittance when it comes to power, potential and utility. If they decide to focus on power, they'd end up at peak Grand Solipsist. If they focus one of the other two, it could end up mid-tier Grand Solipsist, or possibly dip even lower.
- Location
- 1
Hm... I suppose that could be the case, but I really don't think the use of infinity is hyperbole. Some parts of the system in A Simple Transaction (the one with seram law) casually (well, sort of. it was the cursebearer (progression) one.) mention a nonspecifically(infinitely?) large number of transfinite cardinality escalations-
. Like, this isn't just "at level 1 million you have infinite power"; they specified that a ~1 million person would be infinitely powerful specifically in the sense that they can employ 'transfinite quantities of energy' and they (separately) mentioned both higher-dimensional realities and transfinite cardinalities, which don't seem to me like the kind of thing you'd bring up if you were using hyperbole instead of a setting where people really, actually have infinite power and echalons within that power.
these two explanations, on the other hand, I don't see any flaws towards
...I get the feeling there's something else I meant to say which I've forgotten but I'm not sure what, so whatever.
Birdsie
Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy
- Location
- Poland
What it refers to, if I recall, is specifically defense against mental intrusion. And frankly, given how the Infinite Singularity Husk works, I... wouldn't actually trust the fact that it says, "NaN," at least not entirely. Although if the Accursed felt it absolutely necessary to vanguard a Cursebearer in such a manner, he probably could.
- Location
- 1
yeah, it was a specific subtype of defense, but 'this stops mental intrusion of infinite power of types X' still kind of implies you've got infinite power of types X, since otherwise a higher infinity would prooobably be able to overpower it by force/destroy the relevant mind and remake it in their image or some such.
I'll have to take your word for it about the husk, since I haven't read that far yet. If I were making a guess -based on, I should be clear, absolutely no evidence- I would guess the husks soul/mind/whatnot was removed but not harmed or something( hm, or maybe it was something on the <soul> which was not a 'known intrusion parameter' until after the fact), but as far as I know that could be implausible, which it's probably not worth explaining since I'll read it Eventually on my own.
Rihaku
The Internet
There's no hyperbole involved, it's just a matter of strict definitions. Infinite power is not omnipotence unless power is defined very generally.
There is a distinction between:
1) Infinite energy emission
2) Infinite capability within the bounds of logic / causality (able to perform any non-self contradictory feat that can be conceived, assuming no outside actors of equal/greater power, such as creating/obliterating an infinite number of infinite-dimensional universes and freely dominating reality within). Most locally 'omnipotent' beings are here.
3) Infinite capability beyond the bounds of logic (as above, but also create a rock you can't lift then lift it anyway, make 2 + 2 = fish and have reality remain coherent and make sense afterwards, etc)
4) True Omnipotence (Do anything, even against people with the abilities of the above tiers)
Level 1 million = infinite energy emission and the capability to defend against such attacks
Oftentimes the only difference that we can conceive of between True Omnipotence and the tier immediately below it is that the true omnipotent would prevail utterly in any sort of contest. To them, there may be countless distinctions that we cannot comprehend. No effort is made to explicate these distinctions for obvious reasons, and the quests and stories here don't typically take place at the levels of power where they would matter. The Accursed and his High Cursebearers are fathomlessly above 3) but still below 4), with the Accursed being as close to 4) as anyone is known to have ever gotten, even in his diminished form.
The level system as witnessed by Seram applies extreme compression at the higher end, to where the Accursed gaining or losing one level would be worth infinite cardinalities of escalation beyond the ISH to a degree that we could not accurately describe with the tools, reasoning, etc of this universe. It's essentially an artefact that succinctly conveys to Seram "this guy is really strong, but not the True Omnipotent."
Combat-types are typically weak compared to the true high-ends of all creation, yes. They're big fish in a small pond, and comprise a very small fraction of the High Cursebearers. That said, most ponds are small.
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Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
Obviously this is speculation on my part, but I think that a potential angle to take with distinguishing finer distinctions within your third category might be describing how much we need to 'strengthen' logic in order to make the relevant being's abilities no longer inconsistent. IIRC there has been some real world research into things like this, though I don't think it's in the context of describing powerful entities so much as in the context of describing large cardinalities.
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Rihaku
The Internet
Update in 20-30.
Lord Hunger spoke his wishes, and the Seraph nodded once. Then her power poured forth, a limitless ocean as to shatter all bounds, surging might that climbed ever-higher as if to engulf the universe entire - for what was this dismal place but a speck of a sliver, infinitesimal before that angel's eye, the regard of Heroism Itself which was potential attained and in all ways exceeded ad infinitum? Even this ocean, which to him appeared to encompass all realities that he could or might ever conceive, paled before the infinitely vaster strength that Haeliel bridled still, contained for fear of annihilating him by mere exposure, fury and grandeur such that the scarcest reflection seared his mind even to contemplate-
The fever dream broke, and time resumed, power beyond reason rewoven into a handkerchief the color of the Seraph's hair, which appeared wrapped around Hunger's right arm.
Haeliel smiled softly. "Go forth, my Hero. You, who have wished only for even greater burdens, should bear them with pride."
Hunger, still bowed, returned her smile. "Stop by and visit at any time. I'd like the others to meet you, once they can withstand it."
"Then you must ensure they keep up," She teased, "For I am only ever growing stronger! Now that I've imparted you my favor, I expect you to join our ranks someday."
Lord Hunger spoke his wishes, and the Seraph nodded once. Then her power poured forth, a limitless ocean as to shatter all bounds, surging might that climbed ever-higher as if to engulf the universe entire - for what was this dismal place but a speck of a sliver, infinitesimal before that angel's eye, the regard of Heroism Itself which was potential attained and in all ways exceeded ad infinitum? Even this ocean, which to him appeared to encompass all realities that he could or might ever conceive, paled before the infinitely vaster strength that Haeliel bridled still, contained for fear of annihilating him by mere exposure, fury and grandeur such that the scarcest reflection seared his mind even to contemplate-
The fever dream broke, and time resumed, power beyond reason rewoven into a handkerchief the color of the Seraph's hair, which appeared wrapped around Hunger's right arm.
Haeliel smiled softly. "Go forth, my Hero. You, who have wished only for even greater burdens, should bear them with pride."
Hunger, still bowed, returned her smile. "Stop by and visit at any time. I'd like the others to meet you, once they can withstand it."
"Then you must ensure they keep up," She teased, "For I am only ever growing stronger! Now that I've imparted you my favor, I expect you to join our ranks someday."
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
Is Catherine even going to be empowerable if we wait too long?
- Location
- US
Hold your horses, it's just been five minutes since the preview. We can wait a while yet.