Chương 43: The Horror - 3

An artifact was wizard speak for 'an item of great power.' And when HE meant 'great,' he meant great. Artifacts shaped the course of human history. Artifacts gave birth to nations while destroying others. Artifacts ushered in new dreams to reality, giving shape to hopeless imaginings. The fact that one was here, of all places, baffled him to no end. He approached the artifact. It pulsed magical energy but energy which felt foreign to him, as if it had been corrupted by necro-energies.

The artifact looked like a spiky athletic ball. Despite its off-putting nature, though, Warhol was not afraid of the artifact. Whatever this thing was, corrupted or not, it had the same holy radiance as any of the artifacts he had seen planet side, just maybe a little... less so.

"Are you seeing this Signet?" he asked over his comm-piece.

"This thing is called an artifact. It's like a really powerful magical thing."

"I'm seeing it. It looks freaky. Or is that just interference?"

"No, it's freaky. It is covered in strange spikes. It might be corrupted by foul energies from the Horror. I am going to attempt to remove it. Over."

"Attempt to remove it? Are you sure? We don't know what might trigger if you take it from its stabilized center — there might be an explosion, heck, you could become possessed, couldn't you, if it is tapped into the negative energies of this cosmic demon?" Possession hadn't even entered his mind as a possibility until Signet mentioned it. That did unnerve him. But he needed to get out of here sooner rather than later.

Warhol incanted a portal back to Signet so he could jump in the second he had the artifact in hand and determined it wasn't a threat. He turned to the artifact, tangled in wires and monitoring glass, and broke away cables and glass, setting off an array of blinking lights as he did so. He hovered his palm just above the artifact, attempting to determine if the artifact was full of harmful energies.

Because the artifact's aura snapped at him like an angry turtle, he determined that yeah, the artifact had absorbed at least a little bad magic. He would need to purify the artifact. That would take an immense amount of mana — so he'd better get to work! Warhol knew he would need to be smart on how he approached cleansing a relic. It wasn't something any, one person could do — normally.

Obviously, he wasn't normal, but still, to cleanse it within an adequate timeframe, he would need to layer his incantations, which was what he did when he incanted [Cleanse: Corruption]. He set the cleansing incantation in a 'wide' frame, spreading the ethereal glyphs along the perimeter of the incantation shape. This gave him plenty of room to insert a series of small, but tightly charged lesser incantations, [Boost] incantations, mostly.

He next connected the cleansing incant to the booting incants by way of 'amplification cables,' which connected sigils together with synergetic in mind. Next, Warhol incanted a [Union] into the exact center of the glyph, so the magical gravity of the complex incantation would accelerate the flow of mana, thus increasing the incantation's overall potency.

Between the [Boost] and [Purify] and [Cleanse] incants, he now inserted [Hyper-Flow] incantations, which served a similar function as an 'amplification cable,' but encouraged more the speed at which mana flowed through the complex incantation as a whole. His final incant was over the whole of the complex incantation itself: he placed a [Protect: Reinforce Incantation] meta-incantation over the entire spell as well as a [Loop] incant near the sigil's 'exit' channel.

Once he activated the complex incantation by infusing mana through the sigil's 'entry channel,' the incantation would activate in a heartbeat and not stop until he willed it to stop, or mana ran out or the artifact had no more corrupted energies. Whichever came first.

"Beginning the purification now," he spoke into his microphone for Signet's sake. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. He took a deep breath. He exhaled. Then, Warhol began; he pressed his spiritual self to the complex incantation and injected the construction with millions of mana units. His incantation worked as he knew it would and soon he had to avert his eyes for the intense brightness which filled the room.

His complex incantation worked like an engine, with every sub-sigil working together in perfect harmony. With such an immense sum of magical radiance filling the room, Warhol was not surprised when he felt the bunker shake. He wanted to play it safe and float on through the escape portal, but nothing would be gained if he abandoned his quest now. Signet chimed in his ear that their cameras had sights on the lesser tentacle which engulfed the moon.

"It is MOVING, Warhol! It's going to crush the entire moon! You got to get out of there — NOW!" All of reality shook as Signet's prediction came true. He heard the upper levels of the bunker collapse in on itself as the limb of an angry demon crushed all in its path, agitated by the outburst of a holy radiance. Gargantuan 'breaks' took the sound of a million volcanos erupting as Warhol knew that was what a moon's entire body breaking sounded like. He had to hurry and finish the purification.

Terrifying seconds passed by which got him little closer to the artifact's full purification. There was too much corruption inside of the artifact to cleanse it in a timely manner; it was a rash act, but he had to try something — Warhol dispelled the teleportation portal and directed the energies not back into himself, but into the purification incantation instead. It wasn't his favorite idea, but he would need to manually take the relic back to Signet.

Flying through space with but his simple magics by his side was possible, but it was time consuming. Immensely so. Which meant, he needed to get a move on now! The magic dispelled from his [Portal] incantation allowed his purification portal a second and a third gust of wind which pushed the spell into overdrive, nearly to the point of forced dissipation.

Seconds which felt like hours later, and the purification complex of incants finished its task as a show of pale light exploded from the artifact, slamming him against the lab's wall; Warhol still sensed small amounts of corruption inside the artifact, but that was fine, he could cleanse that corruption later. He levitated himself forward, grabbed the artifact, and recasting [Indomitable] and [Reinforce: Skin Armor], he incanted a third spell — [Accelerate].

In a blink of his eye, Warhol rocketed through the roof, rocks, and slithering mass of the Horror, incanting [Pierce] spells reinforced with as much mana as he dared imbue in a day that had stretched his spell usage to its limit. His gamble paid off and after twenty violent seconds of his body acting like a human firework, he and the artifact were shooting away from the moon, him just in time to see the Horror's lesser tentacle crush the moon into dust.

"Shit, shit — you there, Signet? I barely got out, over." His breathing was haggard. Uneven, even. He hadn't felt like this in, well, he couldn't say!

"I saw, Warhol. Damn. I thought you were a goner, won't lie. I'll dispatch a shuttle and have it pick you up once you escape from the demon's expanse. Over and out." He couldn't believe any of what had just transpired — the Horror up close, a corrupted artifact, and now his slow retreat from occupied space. All of it had the stuff which bards sang about! His heart raged a mile per second. He was surprised he didn't have a heart attack. Of course, being so far inside the Horror, he might have a heart attack yet...

it would be hours before he escaped, so who could say what the beast had in store for him.