125 - Book 2: Chapter 62: Creative Uses of Power

125 - Book 2: Chapter 62: Creative Uses of Power

Derivan paused, awkwardly, after the blade struck him in the back; he didn't know how to react. The monster that attacked Sev was... well, it was like him.

In a manner of speaking, anyway.

It didn't seem like it was intelligent the same way he was. Its sword struck him, and it did not react to the lack of damage; it simply stepped back and then moved again in a traditional stab. It didn't take much effort for Derivan to simply step to the side and move Sev with him, though he kept the cleric behind him.

In any other situation, he would have stopped to examine this being that was like him, yet not.

But if Vex was in danger... he would leave this for later examination. It took him no effort at all to reach for Patch and snap the one link it held with the system he remembered that link, because it was the same one he'd had. The same one that had taken all three of the others to break before.

The stat suffered a slight decrease from that action, but it was nothing he couldn't deal with.

"Let's go," he told Sev, who raised an eyebrow slightly and glanced between him and the monster that was attacking them. He nodded after a moment, appearing to understand.

"Are we just going to leave it?" he asked.

"...As long as it does not follow us." Derivan glanced back at the armor. The monster had stopped moving, apparently confused without the routines it had been following.

Perhaps it was cruel, to awaken it and then leave it to fend for itself. It was strange that it was so similar to him at all the armor was certainly different, but not by that much. But the one dungeon that had been created with all four of them as a template had been broken and scattered throughout the others.

It was surprising, but... maybe it wasn't that surprising.

Derivan sighed.

"If you are at all like me," he said, not at all unkindly; the armor he spoke to stared at him, uncomprehending but listening all the same. "Then you will be confused. There was a time that confusion was frustrating to me, but I think... I think that it is okay to be confused, and to take your time. Once you figure your system out, you may use it to contact me, and I will help you where I can."

"We gotta go," Sev said, but gave the armor Derivan was speaking to a concerned sort of look not fearful, just worried. "He's right, though. Be careful who you trust, but don't be afraid to ask for help, or accept it."

The armor still didn't respond. Derivan and Sev took that as their cue to leave; it wasn't for several minutes, as they traveled along a surprisingly empty brick corridor, that Sev spoke again. "Also, Derivan, can you just... do that, now?"

"...I did it without thinking," Derivan admitted. "But it appears that I can, at a minor cost to my Patch skill."

"We could get through our section of the dungeon really quickly if you used that."

"I... should I?" Derivan asked, hesitating. "It seems potentially irresponsible..."

"It depends, I suppose," Sev admitted. "On how it works. If you're creating a new person when you do that, then yeah, that's not very responsible. But if you're just freeing someone from being controlled by the system"

"Ah. Yes." Derivan paused. "I see what you mean. That is... I had not considered that."

"You just acted?"

"It was like me." Derivan glanced ahead in the corridor, to see if there was any threat there yet, but everything ahead of them was curiously empty. It was strangely hard to find the words to explain what he'd done. He'd felt a moment of kinship and reacted entirely from that.

Or maybe there had been something more than that. Maybe a part of him had latched on to small elements of something he'd seen in the way the other armor had behaved, and he'd sensed something that needed to be freed...

Or he was projecting.

Which made it all the more worrying when every single other version of her was blown back. Not killed she was harder to kill than that but more than half her health was gone in most of them, from attacks too fast for her to see and block.

Even more worrying was that nothing happened to her here.

"Something wrong?" Irvis asked her, mock-concern lacing his voice. "All I did was move slightly. Why do you look scared?"

"I'm not scared," Misa spat. She wasn't. There was a low anger thrumming inside her instead, calling her to violence. Irvis' words were designed to make her angry, to fight at less than her best.

Like she'd fall for that.

She'd been feeling that thread of anger ever since she'd entered Elyra. It'd be nice to have something to take that anger out on. There'd been too many fights lately where she had to hold back.

She would have burned timelines... but no. Irvis could see into them, for some reason or the other; could even choose how differently he acted in each one. In some way he was aware of her skills, and was using them against her. She had no doubt that he'd do the same if she tried to summon anyone from her village, but that didn't mean that her bag of tricks was empty.

She wasn't one to use skills conventionally, after all.

But first, a little test to see how Irvis reacted to conventional attacks.

Misa leapt forward, drawing [The Blade Arcane]; Irvis met her with a savage grin. She didn't even see him wielding any sort of weapon against her. He wore a standard, well-trimmed suit, and when his reaction to her attack was simply to reach for her weapon, she allowed it. It was clear that something would happen, and that something would give her information.

Arcane mana twisted.

The nature of arcane mana was that in some sense it took on the properties of any mana type it encountered; this she understood in an abstract sort of way, from the half-dozen lectures Vex had given about it. It still surprised her when the sword compressed and warped, eyes and nails and teeth growing along its length in a way that looked unnervingly like Irvis

It snapped at her, and she mentally released her lock on it. Strange mana-flesh faded away almost immediately, replaced once more with the serene purple-red arcane energy that normally formed the blade, and Misa leapt back before Irvis could retaliate.

Not that he seemed to want to. He merely smiled at her, infuriatingly self-satisfied. "Learn anything useful?" he asked, his voice still mocking.

Misa smiled back. "I did."

Irvis was a creature of mana. Just like the mana abomination they'd fought, way back when all this first started.

"Wanna know something really weird I can do?" Misa asked, her tone nonchalant.

"What's that?" Irvis' tone was almost bored.

Misa attacked with [The Blade Arcane] again, throwing it towards Irvis.

It was, technically, a mana-based attack.

The instant before it struck, she blocked it. Reality shifted, and her mace took on a set of rapidly-shifting prismatic colors as she blocked her own strike with a clang, and in that moment in that instant between her mace reverting into a normal mace, while her weapon existed as whatever was optimal for blocking a mana-based attack

She also used it to strike Irvis, as part of the same motion used to block the sword.

The prismatic colors of the mace settled into a single solid tone of blue and rang like a bell; it sent her sword flying, and more importantly, burned into Irvis' flesh with a loud crackle-pop. The thud as Irvis' body struck the wall hit her a second later, followed shortly by an enraged scream.

It was, Misa decided, very satisfying.