Chương 123: Chapter 116

Cale The cafeteria was louder than usual. Arclight's main hall at lunch ran at a baseline that would have registered as a disturbance in most residential neighborhoods. I had learned to filter it like ambient mana in a dense environment, logged without being dwelt on, so I did not spend capacity on it. I kept quiet because none of what people were saying was important. Or even correct.

I set my tray down across from Rade, who was staring at his crystal interface with all the gravity of watching a natural disaster develop in real time. Darren had his own interface out. Mikel was reading over Darren's shoulder and making sounds that suggested he had lost the ability to decide whether to laugh or be genuinely alarmed. I picked up my fork and started eating. The bacon was incredible today. I should really try it with chocolate. I almost dropped my fork. How could I have not thought of that before???

Chocolate and bacon. I was a genius. There was no way that was not going to be good. The Chocolate Bacon Concoction was an amazing insight. What was not amazing was everyone's sudden obsession with the Ghost of the Wastes.

"He fought in the Hundred Year War," Rade said, without looking up and without preamble.

"The Wastes' first documented incident was one hundred and thirty-eight years ago." He turned his interface so I could see it. The feed showed a projection post with several thousand responses and a timestamp from four hours ago.

"The Hundred Year War started one hundred and twenty-six years ago. He predates the war by twelve years. The man was already a veteran before the bloody thing even started. He was already operating for over a decade." Nobody said anything for a moment.

"One hundred and thirty-eight years," Mikel said slowly.

"At minimum," Rade said.

"The earliest documented incident is one hundred and thirty-eight years ago. The record before that point is either lost or has not been found yet."

"Can you imagine that," Darren said.

"I know high-level Expression users live for a long time, but damn."

"If the documentation is accurate," Rade said, "he has been around a lot longer than people think. He did not just pop up fully formed. The guy would have needed time to develop skills like his. He has to be much older than that." Across the cafeteria someone had a projection running at visible scale. The image was paused on the Ghost of the Wastes standing at the center of the Gala floor, mask fully active, the skull configuration that meant something had shifted past the point of management.

Wrapped around him like a dark koala was Thessaly the Scion. She looked like a woman who was either about to kiss him or stab him and was having trouble deciding between the two options. Her hand was on his chest, the other around his neck. He looked at her, the white mask a contrast against the light of the grand ballroom. The crimson and stormglass violet of his eyes were clearly visible. The image had forty-three million engagements.

More than the battle footage, more than the analysis of the Vera and Ava political fallout. It had more than the funeral announcement for Prince Ardeshir. Significantly more.

"Things are going to get complicated," Mikel said. He had said it, or thought it, three hundred times already, and he was still turning it over.

"Thessaly the Scion kissed him in front of everyone. The Ghost of the Wastes is famous, but Thessaly the Scion is hot and infamous. She is only twenty-five years old. Number fifteen on the Mercenary List. Head of the Dusk Assembly. And bold as anything. Kisses the Ghost of the Wastes like she is staking a claim in front of the entire Western Bloc and now the rest of the Nexus through the World Tree Lattice. You can say a lot of things about her, but you cannot say she is not committed.

The woman does not half-ass anything."

"Forty-three million unique engagements that quickly is insane," Darren said.

"And the story is not losing momentum. The engagement is climbing. People are going to be talking about this for weeks. Months even." I overheard the table next to ours.

"She called him Amore," a girl said, to her companion, at a volume that suggested she did not care who heard.

"I looked it up. It means lover in old Frurick. She literally called him lover in front of everyone on the Lattice."

"They have history," her companion agreed.

"Obviously they have history. Thessaly the Scion is like the hottest thing out there right now. The only one who even starts to compare is Sael Vourne." The first girl shook her head.

"Sael Vourne is a little lamb. Thessaly the Scion is a lion. Do you remember what she did to that Crown Prince from the Eastern Bloc, Prince Harden I think his name was, when he tried to drug her drink. She castrated him. She castrated a crown prince from a political rival bloc. He took nearly a year to recover. She is the ultimate professional. But apparently she likes old men." The two girls leaned closer together. The people around them did the same.

"She acts like that and then gets all soft with the Ghost of the Wastes. It is like watching a crimson tiger sit down and have tea. What is unbelievable is how much has gone under the radar. We know almost nothing. But she knows him. She has to. Watch the positioning right before her flash technique. He knew her movement pattern. He knew exactly what she was going to do. She has done that to him before. He was ready for it. He was literally holding out his hands before she crossed the distance." I continued eating.

Who is this girl. Her analysis is insane. Is she going to notice the Ghost's eye color and spot me across the room. Kidnapping is wrong. I probably should not be selling anyone either. I should find out who she is.

"The Kelveth Basin engagement," Darren said. He had found something on his interface and his expression had shifted from amusement to straight-up wonder.

"Rade, are you familiar with it." Rade looked up from his own interface.

"Absolutely. I saw it mentioned a day or two ago. Where did you learn about it?" Darren grinned. He looked at me and Mikel.

"What about you two." We both shook our heads, though I was not exactly being truthful at that point. Darren rubbed his hands together.

"Buckle up because this is wild. Seventy-two years ago almost on the dot. The Kelveth Basin is a border town between two Dominions on the Middle Plane of Soren. A border dispute developed between the Dominions of Candor and Warsus. The Arcane Artists of Candor were slaughtering villages in Warsus. They have a mana bloodline trait that turns their skin blue. Some Priest from the Orthodox Church claimed they were cursed with corrupted Sanatio. They killed a lot of people. The Ghost of the Wastes issued a warning.

One they did not listen to." He paused.

"The Ghost of the Wastes made good on his threat." Darren turned his interface toward the table. The projection showed archive footage, grainy and partial, as documentation from seventy years ago tended to be, but clear enough. A figure in a skull mask rising above a battlefield. The temperature drop visible in the footage as condensation formed on every surface within range simultaneously. The arcane spellcasting moved so fast it was like watching a Technica interface being created and manipulated in real time.

There was an influx of mana rushing in around him and then a wave of power dropped from the man in the sky like a god passing judgment. The footage ran on. Nobody spoke. The ice formation that descended on the Kelveth Basin was not a spell in the conventional sense. It was a restructuring of the atmospheric moisture across an area roughly the size of a small city, drawn upward, compressed, and dropped so that it landed where it was meant to, worked out before the ascent and executed on the descent.

The footage showed the descent of the wave and the basin after, which was a different place entirely than the basin before. The place was an ice wasteland.

"Are we sure he is not a god pretending to be human," Mikel said.

"The man floated into the air like gravity was a suggestion and then wiped out a whole valley with a single spell. I know what he was doing is possible, but damn."

"You do not know the half of it," Rade said, slower now. This was outside his frameworks, and it showed.

"The mana application here is fascinating." He pulled up his own interface and threw a projection into the air, highlighting various sections as he walked through the footage again.

"So check this out. That ice formation was a combination of Advanced Aqua Elementa Arcanum with an Arcanum mana siphon at extreme scale. He was using at least four Expressions simultaneously, three of which are from different cores. The temperature drop alone would require sustained Arcanum output across the entire atmospheric column while simultaneously pulling mana from an external source and not allowing the Arcanum to bleed and dispel or completely wipe out his reserve.

While floating in the air he was most likely reinforcing himself with Ignis Elementa Arcanum while casting that cold spell. He would have to maintain the spell while ascending and then release it at precisely the right altitude to achieve that distribution pattern." He paused.

"That type of spell does not get taught anywhere outside of military bombardment schools and classified think tanks. It is not designed to kill an enemy. It is designed to destroy an area. Complete domain control. That requires the kind of purity that can only come from advanced Arcanum." Darren looked at him.

"So it is not just powerful Aqua Elementa."

"The form this spell is taking is well beyond foundational Aqua Elementa. Foundational Expressions have a scaling problem at this level. You have to gather that much mana, combine it correctly, and run it through your core with a purity that does not suck you dry." Rade set his interface down.

"Aqua Elementa explains the ice. But that is only the exchange from point A to point B. Look at the pure application, the instant freeze, the controlled descent, how everything in the atmosphere seems to change. He is not only manipulating advanced Arcanum and Aqua Elementa. There is another advanced Expression in there." This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Gravity," Mikel said.

"Obvious from the floating, yes, but I think he is using gravity manipulation to place the ice formation exactly where he wanted it. So if I am reading this correctly he was manipulating three Advanced Expressions simultaneously: gravity, Aqua Elementa, and the mana siphon, which is a highly advanced Sanatio manipulation, taking what little mana exists in the air and combining it with his own." Rade's voice turned to something close to awe.

"And to be clear: gravity manipulation does not fall under the Elementa category. Gravity is not a conceptual element. Wind, fire, metal, earth, lightning, water. All of those fall under Elementa. Gravity is something categorically different. It is a manipulation of a physical law of the universe, which is completely different from a physical element." He picked up his interface again.

"Most of us will not even start discussing this until graduate study, if we reach it at all. But what you are seeing is Gravia Arcanum. One of the Advanced Expressions under the Arcanum discipline. You approach it through absolute saturation and at some point the discipline opens into gravitational control as a natural extension. Most practitioners never get there. The ones who do are—" He stopped.

"Are what," Darren said.

"Are the kind of people who appear in the historical record doing things like this," Rade said, nodding at the footage.

"The technique itself has a name. Iudicium Glaciem. The Ice Judgment. It appears in exactly two theoretical papers and one historical account before Kelveth Basin. After Kelveth Basin it appears in considerably more." The analysis hung there for a moment.

"So he has an Advanced Expression," Mikel said. He said it like a man saying words he understood and had not yet felt the weight of.

"We kind of expected that, right."

"He has more than one," Rade said.

"Gravia Arcanum is obvious from the footage. He also has whatever he used at the Gala with those golems, which based on every commentary feed combined at least three foundational Expressions simultaneously and possibly more. The standard academic framework tops out at two stable simultaneous Expressions for most practitioners. Three is considered exceptional and rare. Four simultaneous is theoretically possible and practically unverified.

Though as you get into the top ten mercenaries or the Saints of the Priesthood of the Twelve, they all keep their abilities largely hidden."

"Until now," Darren said.

"Sort of. It has never exactly been a secret that the Ghost of the Wastes is capable," Rade agreed.

"But the more you study his exploits, the more you can see the guy is just an absolute beast of a mana user." I ate my food and looked at the table and thought about the feeling of being very high up, and how Gravia Arcanum bent the natural order like nothing else I had known. I was perfectly content staying on the ground. I could punch holes in mountains, but the whole idea of floating in the air was simply not something I enjoyed. Gravity should go in one direction.

My master had taught me all about Gravia, and I fought her on it every single session. She had also explained that Iudicium Glaciem was the name of the cold technique, which was one I actually liked because it sounded like judgment. I had a fond memory of her getting furious when I ran out of ice in the Wastes and cast it over some of her stitching. She was not happy. The memory made me smile.

"You know what has been bothering me about the whole Gala," Rade said, and his attention snapped back to his interface. He had found a thread worth pulling.

"The Covenant Token. Someone in the top ten issued one against what looks like a contract to capture the Princess at the Gala. Do you know what a Covenant Token is."

"A Mercenary Oath, right," Darren said.

"A tradition for joining any of the guilds in the Upper Planes. If you give somebody a Covenant Token it is basically an oath. You cannot decline it. If you try to go against it, if you break the spirit of the oath or the direction given, it can get you killed."

"You read the book I gave you," Rade said with a smile.

"A Covenant Token from someone in the top ten carries the weight of at least a platinum-level mercenary. Most of the top ten are sitting at that level, but they are rarely actually tested. A Covenant Token can literally cause an individual's magic to work against them if they fail to execute or attempt to break it. It makes you persona non grata. The binding Technica that creates the mercenary system literally issues a kill order for those mercenaries.

Not only do you have your own magic working against you, but pretty much any mercenary who crosses your path is going to be trying to kill you, with a binding order from the system itself." None of them had anything for that. He paused.

"What I am saying is that Covenant Tokens are serious business. Do you remember the Dominion of Moria." Mikel nodded.

"I have read my Western Bloc history."

"According to the official record, someone used a Covenant Token connected to the Ghost of the Wastes' name and likeness to start committing atrocities across multiple Dominions," Rade said.

"The Ghost found out. He did not take kindly to the breach of protocol." Darren and Mikel stared at him. He looked around the table.

"The point I am making is that Covenant Tokens have real power. Real strength to affect those who issue them, especially when you are as powerful as one of the top ten. So some heavy hitter issued a Covenant Token through a mercenary in the top ten connected to the Dusk Assembly. They used it to issue a contract to kill Prince Ardeshir and kidnap the Princess of Vera.

And the only reason the whole thing did not become a complete disaster is because the Ghost of the Wastes threatened to destroy the Dusk Assembly and Thessaly invoked the Assured Destruction Clause."

"What is the Assured Destruction Clause," Darren said.

"I saw an explanation but forgot."

"It is a provision in the original mercenary Binding Oath. Not everyone is bound to the oath, but anyone who gets seriously involved with the bigger guilds has to abide by it. It was codified by the Grand Master about two hundred years ago and enforced by the Arbitor Stone. You bind yourself to the guild, no matter what it is, and you take an oath to abide by the five basic tenets of the mercenary code. Covenant Tokens are one of those.

You can issue a Covenant Token for just about anything, but it is completely binding." He pulled up an image of a large stone that looked like a combination of Technica and marble, something between an advanced memorial and a measuring instrument.

"So you have the Binding Covenant and you have Covenant Tokens. But the Grand Master wanted to make sure there was some relief available. If a Covenant Token is going to do irreparable damage to the organization or the individual, the Assured Destruction Clause is an internal provision that allows any mercenary with vertical integration on leadership to suspend a Covenant pending review.

It is some really advanced Arcanum, Technica, and Sanatio combined, stepped directly into the Arbiter Stone that each mercenary guild holds." Rade set his interface down. He looked up at the ceiling, his voice dropping slightly.

"So take a moment to think about what happened at the Gala. The Ghost of the Wastes threatened to destroy the Dusk Assembly because of the actions of the Legion. Thessaly voided that contract based on his threat, meaning she believed he could actually do it." Darren had stopped typing.

"She technically suspended it," Rade corrected himself.

"There is a legal distinction. The Token is still active pending review. Which means whoever issued it is still out there and still wants the Princess of Vera." I set my fork down. He was right. I had not thought about that. Talena could still be in danger. Across the room the archived footage of the Kelveth Basin was still running on Darren's interface, the basin after the ice, the stillness of a place permanently rearranged by something that came down from above and hit exactly where it meant to.

I picked my fork back up.

"He was protecting her," a third-year girl with frizzy hair and large spectacles at the next table was saying.

"The princess. His positioning at the moment of escalation, watch the footage and then watch it again, he was covering one specific person. It could not be anyone else. It has to be her."

"The princess," another girl with large green eyes said.

"If it is the princess, why not just say the princess. His words were deliberate."

"There is a person, and it is a her. He was already there for the princess. It makes no sense to make an allusion to someone and not say her name if it is her."

"It makes absolute sense. He is trying to make them understand the princess is important to him without putting a bigger target on her back."

"They were literally there to kidnap or kill her. I am not sure they could have put a bigger target on her back."

"Cale," Rade said, in the quiet register. I looked at him. He looked back. He had assembled a number of pieces, and he was deciding whether to name what they made. He did not name it.

"Interesting times," he said, and returned to his food. The practical Aura application class met in the lower training hall after the midday break. Instructor Vehn had taught foundational Aura technique for fifteen years and had seen every way a student could get it wrong. He ran the class methodically, unbothered. The exercise was Aura infusion, general application of Aura to the body's systems to produce enhanced output. Speed, strength, reaction time, physical processing.

General application did not wander into the Aura subspecialties like Kinetica, Fortis, or Reinforcement. It was a foundational technique, a simple increase of every aspect of an artist's individual capacity that Aura could touch. For people like Aura swordsmen this was where the entire discipline came from. At this level students were expected to achieve basic infusion across two or three systems simultaneously, hold it for thirty seconds, and release cleanly. The pairing had been assigned.

Mine was a girl named Petra who was here on an academic scholarship from a scholar family in a sister city on one of the single-Dominion Middle Planes whose name I did not recognize. Quiet and reserved, she was clearly more capable in theory than in practice. The kind of practical discrepancy that usually had a reason. The reason became apparent approximately thirty seconds into the exercise. She was trying to push Aura into her leg systems for the speed application. The technique was correct. The output was wrong.

Not from bad form or thin mana. It was mana trying to move through a pathway that was partially blocked. It got through, but not cleanly, and the effort required to push it through was consuming mana she should have been directing toward the application itself. I watched her reset twice, her frustration held down tight, worn smooth by however long she had been living with it.

"Your meridians," I said. She looked at me.

"The blockage is in the lower meridian junctions. Both legs, but the left is worse. It is not a technique problem."

"I know," she said.

"I have been told it is mana hardening. The academy's Sanatio practitioners said it would require extended treatment by a Level 7 Sanatio." I looked at her flow again. Mana hardening. A calcification of the meridian walls from years of improperly directed and insufficiently purified mana flow. A common issue when you tried to direct and form Aura without the right technique or a properly developed core. The walls stiffened, the passages narrowed, the body compensated by routing around the blockage.

Standard treatment was external softening through alternating regenerative Sanatio and strengthening Aura, multiple sessions, weeks at minimum, months for a case this developed, and required a Sanatio specialist with a purity level of at least seven. It was clear why it had not been treated.

"Can I try something," I said. She looked at me. She had been offered solutions to this problem before, and had learned to keep her expectations modest.

"What are you going to do."

"The Sanatio approach works from the outside in," I said.

"Inside out is faster. It will feel like something warm moving the wrong direction. It is going the right direction." She nodded once, looking uncertain. I placed one hand at her shoulder and one at her opposite hip and ran a thread of Sanatio wrapped in a thin layer of Aura alongside her Aura current. I fed the combination into the junction points. The Sanatio softened the calcified walls.

The Aura moved through the softened material as water moves through warming ice, the pathway opening as the application moved rather than being forced open against resistance. The left leg cleared in twelve seconds. The right took longer. The calcification there was older, with compensatory routing built up around it that needed redirecting rather than clearing. Twenty-six seconds total. I stepped back. Petra stood very still, processing a change her body had not experienced before. Then she ran the infusion.

Both systems. Clean output. No compensation. The mana going exactly where she directed it without resistance. Her eyes went wide.

"That is—" She stopped.

"How did you do that."

"Aura and Sanatio combined," I said.

"More precise from the inside." She looked at her hands.

"I have had that blockage since I was eleven years old."

"I know. You can feel how long it has been there in the routing that built up around it." I became aware that several people near us had stopped working. I also became aware, slightly too late, of a crystal interface held at chest height two pairs down from us, the small amber indicator light active. The interface went down when my gaze reached it. The girl's expression told me the capture had already transmitted before I looked. I looked at Petra.

"Your name," she said quietly.

"I should know your name."

"Cale," I said. She nodded and turned back to the exercise. I turned back to the exercise too, and did not think about what was currently moving through the World Tree Lattice, and was almost successful at it.