Vol. 3 Chap. 102 Rat Down A Drain Pipe

Vol. 3 Chap. 102 Rat Down A Drain Pipe

Truth ran. Fast as he could, he ran. They knew he was in the sewers. This whole place would be flooded with golems and seeker talismans and demons in a hot minute. So he had to run. Get his head down and push. Ignore his aching channels, sore from being pushed so hard. Ignore how his body drew in thundering gasps of cosmic energy, trying to replace what he burned in just a few minutes of combat. Ignoring the burn of that energy coming in too. Ignoring the cuts. The lingering damage the needlers left behind. The caustic burns. The biting pain where curses tried to burrow in. Obliterate had destroyed any ongoing magical effects, but the damage left behind was still there.

All he could do was ignore the pain, and run. Pass as many intersections as he could. Expand the search radius as wide as he could. Push Abners Amble to the limit of its ability and blurr through the tunnels. Pour more strength into the Blessing of the Silent Forest and hope like hell it was enough to keep the diviners from getting a lock on him.

Shit, the diviners! Truth came to a slamming halt and urgently cast Cup and Knife. All my blood, hair and bits belong here, with me! Oh there was a hellish struggle! It seemed someone that knew what they were doing had got a hold of something, and wasnt about to let him have it back. Still, he must have been quick enough- gasping, he collapsed to his knees. Complete. N0v3lTr0ve served as the original host for this chapter's release on N0v3l--B1n.

I have not managed today well. In fact, I suspect I have not managed my return to Harban particularly well. The identity of the Prince has its uses. Very informative. Helped me grow as a person. Which is super, but this is Harban. Social attacks are probably least effective here. At least against already wealthy and powerful people. What are the odds the Hotel contacted Internal Security as soon as the Succubae checked in?

Too damn high, he figured. Way, way too damn high. He pulled himself to his feet again. Took a few more gasping breaths. Let his body pull in a little more energy. And pressed on. Deeper into the sewers, and whatever dreadful thing lay beneath them.

The sewers of Harban were a modern wonder. While other places made do with toilets that simply desiccated and sterilized waste for later disposal, in Harban, waste flowed through a series of pipes into long tunnels. Tunnels big enough for people to stand in, with walkways running alongside the canals of filth. Not lit, but then, that had long ceased to be a problem for Truth.

He grinned mirthlessly. When he got out of the well, it was just massively improved low light vision. Now? It was damn dim, but he was able to navigate. Well. He was able to run without falling into the sewage. Navigate would imply he knew where he was going. He just followed the current.

Truth moved like a speeding ghost through the dark. No fences to jump here. No cameras to evade, or personas to maintain. Just speed. Speed, and fading into the dark. He had been the Prince. Now, it was time to return to his roots. Just another slumrat. Though this sewer had no rats, nor vermin of any kind.

Truth watched the air demons dart around, consuming the miasma that should be reeking from the sludge. Water demons toiled below them, keeping everything flowing, breaking up any jams or blockages that threatened to form. The sewers were accessible by humans, but in truth, there was little need for human intervention at this point.

Truth watched an entire ecology at work. Demons, most barely more than imps, happily kept the system working. They got theirs. This was, literally, their calling. Servants of a vast system they neither understood, nor cared to understand. And naturally, they knew better than to overstep their bounds.

There were more intersections now, the sewage channels wider and deeper. At the speed he was moving, kilometers must have past under his feet. He didnt let that give him a false sense of security. If he could run this fast, how fast could Clavegaugh? Or some purpose built golem? Enormous rooms, circular, with high walkways, where the rivers of sewage met and combined, carefully channeled by architecture and demons alike into a wide, rushing torrent. Waterfalls of poisoned blackwater, millions of liters a day. Tens of millions. More? He didnt know. Onward. And down.

The dome of the ceiling was covered in thin constellations of spells and dotted with constellations of Names and abjurations, a spell-bowl sky pressing down on the waters and earth below. Trapping the demon within.

Truth quietly watched the demon. It floated between heaven and earth. The only God of this tiny world. A serpent, vast, far bigger than the limited dimensions of this room could express, consuming its own tail. It gently turned through the air, the steam rising through the annulus it formed. Becoming purified. The chaos of Hell pacified and transmitted through the sky to the world above. For what purpose, Truth didnt know. He just knew there had to be something at the end of the sewer. He found it.

The serpent his mind skittered away from the word. This wasnt a snake. It wasnt a snake even to the extent that Botis was a snake. This was some terrible principle. Some distant echo of a being so profound, language broke down trying to describe them. Like trying to describe the entirety of a galaxy, in all its minute detail, using only the language of the streets.

The shadow of the Eminence pressed down on this place. It defined what was, and was not. The citys waste flowed in, processed and refined by endless demons into the very stuff of Hell. Then that Hell-stuff was refashioned under the Eminence's will, and returned to the world above.

Some faint, screaming part of Truths mind wondered what happened to all the water. The water level neither rose nor fell. There was no rain coming down from the dome of the sky. So where did those hundreds of millions of liters of water go? Then even that thought broke down.

The Serpent that Ate Its Own Tail was slowly spinning in the air, turning like a millstone. Truth felt himself being ground down by it. He had thought himself terribly real. That he was surrounded by ghosts. By the ghosts of ants. Beneath the Great One, he wasnt even a larger ant. He had no more significance than the rising steam.

The millstone turned, turning wheat into flour. Truth desperately fortified himself against the pressure. He embodied the scales as strongly as he could, established the area immediately next to his skin as his zone of orthodoxy, even dropped into the Meditations. There was no shortage of cosmic energy here. There was more than he could use, almost more than he could stand. There would be no cultivation here. Not under this crushing pressure. If he dared try to do more than survive what he was passively enduring, he would surely explode.

He didnt know how long he stayed there, locked in a losing struggle against the refining pressure. Between everything, he kept the impact to a tolerable level, but it was wearing him down. This was something greater than Truth. To destroy and remake was its nature. Someone as insignificant as Truth couldnt dream of stopping it. But he had to endure it. The longer he could stay in the one place he couldnt possibly be, the wider search would have to spread. He had just been looking for a place to hide. In a sense, this was better than he had hoped for.

In a sense.

In another sense, this was going to kill him. It might make something purer or better at the end of the process, but he, Truth Medici, would be quite dead. Still, the grinding process was slow. He could endure it for a while. Hours. Maybe a day. It wasnt all bad. The Meditations struggled against the pressure, making the improvements somehow more solid. Truth got the impression the nine angelic worms approved. They were big on refinement through pain.

Truth slipped into a mindless sort of meditation, visualizing a strong, powerful body. One unstainable by curses or evil magics. One strong enough to survive what was to come, that could seal cosmic energy inside itself without letting it escape. Creating a body like spell armor for the end of days. The minutes trickled into hours, flowing downward to an awkward end, like pissing in the sink.

Blissfully unaware of the chaos that had exploded across Harban.