108 - Book 2: Chapter 45: Malus

108 - Book 2: Chapter 45: Malus

Sev woke up gagging.

[Smelling Salts]. He recognized the smell of them; it wasn't the first time they'd been used to force him to consciousness, although he really hoped it would be the last.

"Enough," he said, waving them away; he saw his team staring at him cautiously, worried, and he blinked away the last of the [Sleep]. "I'm okay. Don't worry about me. You made the right call cutting that off when you did, Vex."

The lizardkin in question relaxed a little, looking relieved. Sev managed a small smile. He looked around the room they were in the same room, it looked like, though some of the furniture had been destroyed in the fight. He hadn't even noticed. Lendel was standing off to the side, far enough away to not seem like a threat.

...The sight of the man made a smoldering anger slowly rise within Sev; he closed his eyes and took a breath, letting it cool again.

That anger wasn't his own.

It faded after a moment, back to a burning that was far in the back of his mind. He could remember being angry; that memory was nearly at the forefront. When he'd begun healing Lendel, the divine magic had transformed the nature of Lendel's injuries into memory, as it always did and where those injuries had affected Lendel's mind, Sev had taken them on, feeling the same anger Lendel did. The fact that Misa had to hold him back...

Sev wasn't sure how he felt about it. Ashamed, maybe; the thought came to him that he should have dealt with that anger better. What would he have done, if he'd been able to pull himself free?nove(l)bi(n.)com

On the other side of it... He understood how Lendel had felt now, perhaps better than even Derivan could with Physical Empathy. The anger he'd felt was... unnatural, a soul-injury; an overwhelming sense of violation directed at the person that had caused it and that knowledge had been instant and explicit.

Sev felt an echo of that, though thankfully undirected and loose. It would have been more difficult for him if he'd gained that anger whole, focused unilaterally on Derivan and those associated with him.

Thankfully, that wasn't the case.

"Give me a moment," he said to the others, and tried to settle himself.

He was used to this. It had been a long time since he'd done it, for something that was this significant; it was on the bare edge of what he could do, now. Sev grimaced a little bit, hoped his friends hadn't seen it, and brought up his status.

Sev, Level 49

Class: [Traces of the Lost]

Health: 980/980

Mana: 370/370

Stats:

Strength: 16

Intelligence: 37

Wisdom: 55

Agility: 21

Status Effects:

[Memory Loss] [Malus]

Applied by [Sacrifice to the Lost]. Your maximum memory capacity is limited, and you must sacrifice memories to remember more. Current capacity: 501/500

[Fatebroken] [Malus]

Applied by [Sacrifice to the Lost]. Modified by . Details of this malus are obfuscated. You are not your own.

[#######] [Malus]

Applied by. Details of this malus are obfuscated. You have chosen your path.

Skill List:

"I figured they were up to something. I didn't think they were maneuvering me into my own corner," he said. "I had a project I was already working on, along with Tibeus and Lorella there." He nodded to the wizard and healer he was working with; they nodded at him and shifted, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

"A while back, we thought about how mana crystals are used to maintain a connection to the system," Lendel said. "And we thought we wondered if we could take that process and apply it to something else. Create weapons and shelters that could level alongside us.

"Back then, Tibeus had a [Create Familiar] skill. It's a skill that requires the sacrifice of a grade 1 mana crystal, and it creates a small, low-level creature that bonds to you. We thought maybe the mechanism there was similar; it had the same cost as maintaining a connection to the system, and it created a new creature that was connected to the system.

"But [Create Familiar] doesn't work on objects, obviously. It creates something new, it doesn't try to attach the system to an existing object. For that we had to do research, and for that research we needed gold."

"How exactly would you even begin to do research on that?" Vex asked, frowning. "How would gold help you?"

"By letting us pay people to reveal their skill details to us." Lendel's lip curled slightly in distaste. "People don't like sharing the particulars of their skills, so we needed to find people with uncommon or rarer classes, with a skill that allowed us to retarget an existing skill. That took a lot of people to get through. Can you believe that we eventually found it in a series of common classes? It was a bunch of old, niche skills no one talked about, too."

"Yes," Misa said, her tone as dry as a desert. Sev almost smiled at that; he remembered the image of her village fighting off a swarm of meteor. [Common] skills were easy to get, but they weren't weak. They just needed to be used in combination with one another.

It was stranger that it had taken so long for people to figure that out. But then so much of their history was missing, or just gone entirely...

...maybe people had figured out similar things before. Maybe there was a reason it was hard for rare classes to gather.

Sev shook his head to dismiss the thought.

"I'll spare you the details, but you can look it up, if you want. We kept all the research logs. We had to experiment with a few different variants sometimes skills didn't work out quite the way we expected them to but we eventually got it to work. And Tibeus was able to apply the skill to a candle." Lendel glanced up at his wizard friend, who took it as his cue to step forward and continue the explanation.

"It caused the skill to change," Tibeus said. "I presume we fulfilled some previously hidden prerequisite, but [Create Familiar] became [Bond Familiar]. Red rarity. We're unsure what that means as yet."

Sev exchanged glances with Vex and the others. They'd seen red before; it rarely meant anything good. There were still a few red-coded items and skills they had yet to try...

Error related, perhaps. Or... admin interference. Or maybe just interference in general.

"And [Bond Familiar] could be used on objects," Sev prompted.

"Correct." Tibeus frowned a little, as if he didn't like being prompted, and Sev stopped himself from scoffing. There was a part of him that was still angry at them for causing all of this to begin with. "We used it on the Guild building, but it wouldn't take to the whole building. I had to use it in parts bond pieces of the building at a time, until the whole building had a single status."

"That is not what you did," Derivan muttered, his voice low; he glanced around as he spoke, presumably looking through the room with Patch. Sev wondered exactly what it was that the animated armor saw.

Tibeus glanced at Derivan, but his gaze softened a bit, remembering exactly why he was explaining all of this. "...The new Familiar came with a skill that it offered to us when we stepped and stayed in the building for long enough," Tibeus said. "It's part of the reason we had to be a lot more discerning with who we allowed to work with us it's a powerful buff. If we let anyone get it"

"No excuses, Tibeus," Lindel said, sounding tired. "I know what our logic was at the time. You know it conflicts with the Guild's principles. If we really wanted to, we could have housed them elsewhere. We could have disabled the Guild, like we do when we rotate out. We made a decision because it was easier for us."

Tibeus didn't respond for a moment, and when he did, it was slow, like he was still fighting the idea. "...Yes. I suppose that's what we did."

"The buff the Guild building gave us was [Reinforcement]," Lindel said, smiling a slightly bitter smile. He summoned a system box, and sent it off to the four of them; Sev caught his copy, and then caught his breath.

[Reinforcement] [Buff]

Applied by [Guild's Hope]. Reinforces health, heart, and soul. increase to Health. increase to mental resistance. Reinforcement increases with connection to [Guild's Hope].

The Health increase alone was monumental; it explained why they'd had such a hard time defeating the cleric and wizard, even though neither class usually had much health. But mental resistance...

Not resistance against mental attacks. Mental resistance.

At a guess, targeted propaganda, to make the Guild members believe their ideas; when they were rotated out, they kept the buff, and those ideas stuck, becoming more entrenched.

"Elyra knew about the buff, I take it?" Sev asked, but he already knew the answer.

"The noble families we worked with did," Lendel said.

"And that noble families were...?" Sev's eyes flickered to Vex, who was leaning in.

"Wisfield," Lendel said, and Vex seemed to relax by a fraction but only a fraction. And then Lendel continued. "And Ashion."