Vol. 5 Chap. 90 Hello Again

Vol. 5 Chap. 90 Hello Again

I have no idea what I’ve just done. But I’m pretty sure it’s going to fuck up ALL KINDS of things for Starbrite. So. You know. Going to take the win. Oh, and I just saved the sibs, and myself. And my relatives, assuming any of them are still alive.

Harmony was lying very still on the concrete floor. He was short one relative. Short one Sib. But it wasn’t time to panic yet.

One more time. Cup and Knife.

Death, as Truth knew better than most, was not always a clean cut thing. Alive and dead... weren’t we always dying? And when we ‘died,’ didn’t parts of us keep right on living? The soul was a tricky issue, certainly, but since Mr. Red and Ms. Black’s souls had hung around, presumably Har’s had as well.

The spell sank into the young man’s body. He would be... twenty four now? Maybe just twenty three. Truth had completely lost track of time at this point. He carried himself like he was forty, but hung onto that hard physique he had growing up. A fine body, that had been torn into fine shreds.

Truth guided the spell through the body. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. And it seemed Manda agreed with him. The ripped fibers of the muscles re-knit. The torn sacks of the lungs were sealed again, invisibly mended at the cellular level as the nerves that once regulated them were reconnected. Around them, the snapped twigs of the rib cage were reformed into sturdy branches, guarding the healing organs. Marrow refilled the hollow spaces in the bones, and flushed with blood. The eye that had boiled and burst from the heat was reconstructed, delicate layer by delicate layer.

The spell operated on a subtle level, as well as an obvious one. From between the cracked plates of charred skin, nicotine yellow puss and tar black effluvia weeped out, reeking. Stinking of ammonia and bile. He was puzzled about it. There wasn’t much of it, it was just nasty. It took him a while to realize that it was all the crap Harmony had eaten and breathed that hadn’t been cleared out by his kidneys. All the toxic metals, all the plastics, the pill residue from elixirs, it all added up. Cup and Knife scraped out of him.

The little bones in the feet, shattered by a passing shockwave, slowly fused and smoothed back into their proper forms. The tendons relaxed, reconnected, tightened, became strong and elastic. Turning a bag of brutalized and disfigured flesh into well formed feet.

Like a harp. Truth thought. The bones are the frame and the tendons make the string, but what music is played on it?

Truth was a little lightheaded from it all. The ritual raged around him like a storm, its power lashing out ungoverned, ruled only by such laws as still remained in the ruined ritual chamber. There was chaos everywhere, but Harmony was in front of him, shattered and broken by cruel elders. He knew what to do in this situation. He had lived here most of his life.

I wonder if it’s my past lives that got me through my childhood? I figure the memory of how to fight came from them. It’s why I could use almost any weapon straight away- somehow the memory of using them, of scrapping with my hands, stuck with me. But that’s not what saved me when I was a kid. You can be the best boxer in the world, and still get your head slapped off if you are six and they are twenty five. It was the mindset. It was always the mindset.

The blood was full of poisons. Looking more closely, it was because the flesh was riddled with poison too. The toxic backwash of the curse, as well as the lingering damage of the scarification ritual. Things prevent blood from clotting, to whither flesh, to make bones brittle. Even in death, they didn’t spare him. Necrotic venoms racing up the nervous system, destroying the channels of alchemical lightning as they went. No more of that. Cup and Knife washed it away, healing as it went.

The bone rotting flame from Mr. Red’s flame wyrm hadn’t really landed on Har, but given the level difference, even being in the same room with the unholy stuff was fatal. It, too, was a sort of poison. One that took a great deal of care to root out. Fortunately, it was now a rootless flame- the summoner dead, the spell beast dissolved back into the void. The flame was, even for Truth, an eerie thing. It wasn’t just a strange flame- it attacked on a higher level of reality.

The bone rotting flame was like someone had lifted a spark from a fiery corner of Hell and forged it into a weapon. And in that corner of hell was all the bones of everyone who died in a house fire set by an arsonist. All twisted and blackened and pieces lost in the fallen timbers and swept away with the rest of the trash when the ruins were cleared. He had seen similar fires when he fought the fire demons back in Xandre. The notion that a mage could take the flame and leave the demon, forge it into something wholly human in design, was astonishing. He really couldn’t imagine how it was done. It was a wonder. A truly astonishing achievement at the apex of magical technology.

Bone rotting flames. Behold- the very best we can do.

A lot of people had worked very hard to make that. And now he was lifting its remnants out of Harmony, and burning through oceans of power trying to heal what was left behind. His cultivation was churning, mindlessly hauling in the rioting energy around them and processing it. Dumping the power straight into his apertures and then straight out again into healing Har.

Truth was quick, and by now his body held far, far more power than his level would suggest. Harmony was Level Two, and had never cultivated his body. There were a lot of serious problems to fix, but the final product was never anything really special. It was merely flesh and bone and water. Common stuff.

Truth understood the Ghul a little bit, just then. The body was beautiful, but empty. You could put meaning on it. You could fill it with anything. But by itself it was meaningless. The pitcher shaped the water inside of it, but didn’t the water change the pitcher too? There was all the difference in the world between an empty vessel and a full one.

Truth found Harmony’s soul darting around, a little speck of light. Dim, flickering. Even to his inexpert eyes, it looked badly damaged. Truth had never learned exactly how souls left this world and descended to Hell. Even the demons didn’t seem to know. Har’s soul was still hovering over his body. It was more than good enough.

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He cupped his hands gently around the dancing spark, then frowned. It wasn’t dancing. It was frantic. Hurting. Scared. His mouth set in a grim line, and he gently set some ground rules with the Blessing of the Bronze Sea. Souls should be whole, and not mutilated with bits stamped on them. Then he sent more energy into Cup and Knife. This is not what the soul should look like. They spell charged out, pouring its healing power into Harmony's soul. It seemed that Manda strongly agreed.

“Easy now. Just breathe. You are going to be okay.”

“I lost the System. I can’t lose the System.” It was brainwashing. He could fix Har’s soul, but he couldn’t fix five years of carefully guided thinking. Not yet, anyway. Not with his level of power and understanding. He actually missed his System. That bitter, acerbic bit of his soul. Was it also smoothed away, returned to the seamless whole? Or was it waiting in him, looking for that moment to be reborn?

“How can I be okay? I lost the System. Was I fired?”

“Manner of speaking, I guess. Set on fire, certainly.”

“You are real funny for a PMC hitter.”

“No, I’m not. I will have you know that I am famous for being bad with jokes. The world, however, is occasionally hilarious when looked at the right way.”

Harmony settled down a moment. “I guess that’s true enough.”

“Yeah. Look, this base is utterly fucked and about to get so, so much worse. I’m pretty sure I know the answer to this, but, do you happen to know if there are emergency life rafts anywhere? Or, like, one off flying charms, or literally anything that would get you off this rock?”

“No idea. And probably not, it seems like an insane security risk.”

Truth nodded sadly. It really did.

“Well. You hang out here, then. Don’t come out until the water comes rushing in under the door, or I come and get you. Or use your best judgment, I don’t know. Just... really. Stay on this side of the door if you value life number two. How long since you last ate?”

“Oh... hours ago, I think?”

“Here’s a couple of bottles of water and some instant noodles.”

“I don’t have a way to boil water, though?”

“You ate them raw often enough.”

There was a strange pause.

“Who... are you?”

“Me?” Truth laughed, and Harmony jolted. “Just another ghost. Stay safe now. I’ve got to go see HR about some back pay.”

The door clanged shut before the words finished echoing in the room.

The hallways were chaos. Didn’t matter. Truth’s grin stretched into a skull’s smile. Next stop- Starbrite.