Chapter 190: Internal

Chapter 190: Internal

DISCLAIMER: This story is NOT MINE IN ANY WAY. That honor has gone to the beautiful bastard Ryuugi. This has been pulled from his Spacebattles publishment at threads/rwby-the-gamer-the-games-we-play-disk-five.341621/. Anyway on with the show...err read.

Internal

High Mana Capacity (Passive) LV1 EXP: 0.00%

An ability given to the rare few that are born with an extraordinary ability to handle mana in all its forms.

Mana-based attacks and defenses are 40% stronger.

25% less MP used for all abilities.

Greatly increases total MP.

Doubles additional MP received per level.

Improved Mana Regeneration (Passive) LV1 EXP: 0.00%

An ability given to those who are naturally able to recover mana at a tremendous pace.Read latest chapters at novelhall.com Only

Increase MP regeneration by 300%.

As expected, the first two skills were improved versions of the one's I'd received when I improved my INT to a hundred. Even so, this degree of improvement was rather amazing.

Needless to say, I was more than pleased to have my MP regeneration improved again. I'd reached the point where the gains from improving Wisdom were fairly marginalenough so that I'd need to double my present score to make truly meaningful gains. But just by improving my INT and gaining Improved Mana Regeneration, I'd effectively tripled the restoration of my power. As I was now, I could go from zero to full in less than ten seconds, constantly enjoying the level of power I'd previously only been able to us when my MP was low and Mana Reactor activated. And if my MP dropped below ten percent, that value would only improve further, giving me an even greater amount of power to work with per second. I didn't want to interfere with what I was currently doing or cause damage with the side effects, but once I had a chance I'd be able to greatly increase my Acceleration and, through it, the growth of my other skills.

And that was before accounting for the changes to my MP. The increase to my Capacity seemed to work retroactively, increasing the slight boost to MP I'd gotten from each level as well as my general supply. Added to the cost and effect adjustments, I had once again improved my power greatly, increasing both the strength of my skills and their usability. If nothing else, I could be certain that my training would benefit from this greatly, which meant I'd be able to prepare myself more quickly for what was ahead of me. I was happy enough that it wouldn't have been a surprise if I felt weightless.

Which did not at all explain why I actually felt weightless. I noticed it the moment I began to run and it hadn't faded in the slightestit wasn't an emotional reaction, I'd made sure of that by calming my own, and yet it wasn't a physical one, either. I could tell from the feeling of contact and my effects on my surroundings that I exerted weight and pressure and such, and I was aware of those things in my head, but I feltlight.

I was used to not feeling exhaustion or painor, at least, only feeling them for brief moments, before they faded awaybut this was something else. My body moved easily as I ran, without any feeling of weight or strain, as if I wasn't exerting my body in the slightest even as I ran. It was something different, even subtle in its own way, but I felt at once aware and removed from things, as if my body were a construct I manipulated with my Psychokinesis.

It was odd, to say the least.

Still, I was used to weird things happening to my body and, though I noted it for future reference and research, I got used to it fairly quickly and remained focused on what was actually important.

First things first. Cloaking us in an illusion of invisibility, I guided Adam and Gou up the side of our now usual building and paused for a moment to use it as a vantage point, surveying the city carefully.

There was more to it then met the eye and it made my suspicions come back to me. I didn't have anything to compare it to, having seen Conquest and War in different ways, but could this be what I was looking for?

After a moment of consideration, I took a closer look, focusing on the gem. I felt pressure build in my forehead, gathering in an area that wasn't so much inside my brain as parallel to it, and then pushed forward, opening my senses wide. I peered into her soul, noting details as I wentthe color, the intensity, the composition of itbut what I wanted was settled like a stone in her heart. When I used Observe on someone, it would often give me a summarized background that touched upon the events that had determined who someone was as a person. It didn't cover anywhere close to everything, at best touching upon a few major issues, but it was usually enough to get a rough grasp of why someone was who or what they were, in a very broad sense of the turn.

As I looked at Cinder, I tried to do the same thing, but through Ajna. And as I did, I saw flickering images take shape within her soul, given shape and substance by the flames. The pictures weren't a clear as I might have liked, but it was enough to see a few details. I saw men and woman flick through the flames of her soul, some of them collapsing and fading away while others burnt more brightly and changed color. A figure at the center of the image grew as the pictures flickered and faded around her, growing from a small girl into a young womanCinder, I assumed. Several figures seemed to enter and exit the image with some frequency; a man and a woman that eventually faded like blown out candle flames and didn't return. Afterwards, the most common figures were a trio ofwomen? It was a little hard to tell when they were shaped from fire, but I thought that was right. They surrounded Cinder, burning more brightly as she seemed to dim until I thought for a moment that she would go out entirely.

But then something new entered the image, the only part of it that wasn't born from the flames. A tiny shard of black crystal floated into the display, resting quietly in a container of some kind. It remained in the picture for several scenes, waiting in the edges and the corners as silent discussions carried on around it, until the three figures seemed to step off the stage and only Cinder and the crystal remained, with the latter drawing closer to center stage. For just a moment, color flickered into the image, bringing it to lifeas if this one scene was more important than anything that had come before it and deserving of such a thing.

There was a young girl, in her teens perhaps, and I recognized her as a younger looking Cinder, though it was hard to tell how much younger. She seemed to notice the crystal at last and grasp it in her hands, staring at it silently for a long moment before closing her eyes. She mouthed something like a prayer and the crystal glowed in her hands as if heated by the surrounding fireand then faded into dust and circled Cinder's form as she returned to flames. A moment later, the fire woman was in her dress of steel and crystaland then the whole thing came to an end.

I took a deep, slow breath and then exhaled slowly.

"Find anything?" Adam prompted, looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

"Maybe," I replied, trying not to let my annoyance show. I'd definitely found something, I just wasn't sure what to think about it. Mainly, I thought that Observe was more convenient and Ajna seemed to be its more artistic but less useful stepbrother, but I supposed I shouldn't complainObserve wasn't telling me anything right now. Even so, I couldn't help but think that Observe would have spelt all this out plainly if I could only use, probably with a title or status effect that confirmed whether Cinder was or wasn't playing host to a Rider. As it was, I mainly just had even more confusing and circumstantial evidence dressed up in metaphor.

And yetwithout a doubt, that black crystal was suspicious as hell. Even putting aside the fact that it shouldn't have been there at all, it was a black crystal that was hanging out in someone's soul. I'd already noticed the similarities between it and the patterns written invisibly into Cinder's skin, which was definitely making me lean towards Rider, thought that I hadn't been thinking along those lines from the beginning.

But for a moment, when I first glanced at itI'd thought it was a Dust crystal, but there wasn't any type of Black Dust to my knowledge. Sure, the rumors about it were endless and the supposed counterpart of White Dust was literally mythical, showing up as the plot device in what must have been a thousand stories, but as far as I knew, there was no evidence of it actually existing and no one had successfully recreated it. Not that that necessarily meant anything when Mankind's scientific knowledge was periodically steamrolled by fleets of monstrous assholes, but still, if it was as powerful as it was said to be, you'd figure it would come up more often, what with thousands and thousands of people hard at work exploring the possibilities of Dust every day.

Then again, what did I know? Maybe Babel had come up with something; I'd need to run it by Keter. Thinking about it, I didn't know how the Angels or Archangels had handled Dust at all.

But even if it did exist, what were the odds that a random young girl would just happen to come across it. Though her story hadn't been particularly clear, it didn't look like Cinder had been particularly old at the time; fourteen or fifteen years old, maybe. How would she have gotten ahold of it?

Given the choice, I'd be more inclined to believe there was something more at work, which made me lean further towards the Rider explanation. Though I suppose they weren't necessarily mutually exclusiveI'd already considered the possibility that one of the Riders was associated with Dust and this might just support that idea. Given the original purpose of the Qliphoth, it would make sense; besides Aura, Dust was the only means Humanity had to touch upon the supernatural and was oftentimes more reliable. An attempt to make an artificial type of Dust crystals or to recycle existing ones might have made sense.

But what bothered me was that one clear image that had appeared, wherein Cinder had grasped the crystal and seemed to pray. There wasn't enough information to determine the context, but had she known something about it when she did it? Had she been fooled, perhaps; deceived into taking up the Rider? Or could she have, for some reason, done it willingly, even knowing what it meant?

That couldn't be. Right? I mean, I was the king of desperate times calling for desperate measures, but things would need to be pretty damn bad before hosting an apocalyptic parasite came onto the list and I had something that protected my mind from it.

As usual, there had to be more to thing than met the eye.

"Damn it, Cinder," I muttered. "There should be a limit to being vague and mysterious unless you're me."

Butat least I had a place to start. Those figures that had been around her in those scenes had been important enough to merit mentioning in her story and I was betting they'd played a part in the ending. Had they been her family?

I suppose I'd better find out.