Chương 119: Chapter 105 - Panic and Confusion

++If you ever want to see what maximum chaos looks like in any given situation, try abruptly flooding it with enough ambient mana to be measured in multiples of a God. The results will literally always be interesting. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. The air was hot, unnaturally so. Orapathaqi was always desert-adjacent in its climate, but this chamber was insulated from that by the depth of stone it lay under. Not now.

Now the temperature soared to devastating heights, changing so quickly it made my skin itch, like the nerves were confused. We could have lit a bonfire at each corner of the room and then set up a blast furnace in its centre and not achieved so pronounced a heating effect. Some men actually screamed, crying out as their skin began to ache or even blister. I shielded myself without even thinking about it, as did Sakhent, and was then forced to focus more on cooling the air as I breathed it in.

If I had not, my new lungs may have been scorched from the inside-out. The heat was vast, but compared to the magic it was nothing at all. The magic was rushing through the chamber like we had created a new leyline, pulsing around us and threatening to cave the very world itself inwards. I felt it as a vast pressure against my arcane senses, a crushing force around my Vessel. It made me want to vomit. To run. To call on all my powers in some futile attempt at staving off the rush I felt now.

None of that would change anything however, because what I was feeling was a magic superior to even the Gods themselves. It was also aimless, without thought or direction. If it had not been, I imagined the concentrated force of it could have vaporized Orapathaqi, Estalia and a sizable portion of Irucci all in a single instant. Perhaps the larger planet beneath this continent would follow shortly after. Perhaps the solar system after that.

But for now the energy was just mindless power rushing by in all directions, totally harmless. We were not concerned with the power, but with the creature that lay in its midst.

"Zameka!" I called out to Sethira.

"Where is she?" I was going to scoop that God out of her prison and, in her weakened state, devour her magical power like an oyster to be slurped from its shell. Alternatively, Sethira would get to do so first, and I would gain the most powerful ally I had ever known. But Sethira's face was not triumphant, it was run through with cold fear.

"I…I don't know," she gasped.

"The God, it should be here it…we made a miscalculation, a mistake." She could have cut my throat and not sent the blood pouring out of my face so quickly, because this miscalculation was the greatest disaster that could have happened. There was not the slightest chance our enemies would fail to feel it.

The magic hit Aryqatan like… what were those primitive tools the mortals used to break things otherwise too strong for their strength? One of those. It hit her like one of those in the hands of a Demigod. She thought it was Nglaru himself for a moment. She'd stood in the Great God's presence only once and felt his power for brief seconds and no longer, and still she recalled the extent of it. The ocean-boiling, mountain-crumbling, sky-splitting magnitude. This was that times a thousand.

It was something elemental and primal, split apart to leak into the world. Her first instinct was to just collapse and pray, because surely there was nothing else she could do. She was less than an ant before this sort of magnitude. Then she felt it more keenly, and realised there was not even the slightest hint of a direction for it. Whatever was calling on this, it was not the owner of the power. They had done nothing but crack open the floodgates to some indescribably dense stockpile of ambient mana.

Aryqatan's mind became rife with questions and dazed confusion, but before she could formulate anything close to an answer, Nu'chista's own reaction made itself apparent.

"NO!" he screamed.

"NO! This can't be, what is this? It's not possible it… it… NO!" He stamped his foot, and the stone floor beneath them both was blasted apart like Nu'chista's own weight in dynamite had gone off with the motion. In an instant they stood not where they had been, in the middle of a thickly built warehouse, but in a blasted-out crater left totally free of any human structures. Still, he continued to vent his rage, lashing limbs out through the air and sending great wind currents unfurling in all directions.

At any other time, Aryqatan would have watched the display of power—easily twice her own—and felt reassured, but compared to the mana they were feeling it was still less than nothing. She couldn't afford a panicked, frantic ally now. Nu'chista needed to calm down or he'd get himself killed and take her with him.

"Your Divinity," she cut in, using the honorific to which he was entitled to try and calm him.

"Wait, this isn't as bad as it sounds." He didn't seem to hear her, and it took Aryqatan several more efforts to pry some semblance of calm from him. Fragile and unstable as it was, it was still, at least, a few moments where he was quiet enough to hear what she said more clearly.

"This isn't directed mana, whoever is conjuring it can't control it. If we act quickly, we can—" —"Right." Nuchista's demeanour changed instantly, and he kicked off with a single, titanous leap. Now he had a mission with a clear chance at success, he was all duty.

"How did this happen?" I demanded as I charged up my magic missile.

"You assured me a sacrifice was necessary, the sacrifice of a magical genius." I paused.

"Nesariyah, did you manage to get yourself killed somehow, you idiot?"

"N…No," Nesariyah squeaked from where she sat just off to one side. I growled. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Then what is happening?"

"I don't know," Sethira snapped. Her own magic missile was loosed just a moment after mine, and both impacted the priceless mechanisms we had been working so long to hone. Compared to the background levels of mana now rushing through the chamber, our own power was almost impossible to feel. That did not dampen its physical effects, however. We rended steel, shattered marble and melted the thinner mechanisms. Only the orichalcum was safe from our aim. That stuff, we intended to salvage again for later use.

Besides, it was still intact now, channeling all of this mana directly through it and into the physical world. I did not think we could have even noticeably heated the stuff with a prolonged assault.

"Give me a hypothesis then," I snapped back.

"If we do not work out what caused this, any later attempts will fail just as spectacularly." Or, to be more precise, succeed just as prematurely. If Zameka was hidden somewhere in this unearthly magical flow, neither of us could sense her over the ambient rush of the Depths being portalled into. Nor did we have the machinery to consume her as initially planned. We simply were not ready for this.

"I must have weakened the veil without realising it by doing this ritual the last time," Sethira said at last, firing off another magic missile.

"Or else something else is lurking on the Depths, something that was exerting its own pressure on the veil from this side." Ah. My own hypothesis came shortly after that. In being reincarnated as a child, I had left all of my previous power, even my previous Vessel, behind in the Depths. That had caused the long and miserable rise to new strength that I had worked at so far. But what if my old power was not gone? A lich's existence was difficult to describe.

We were partly physical, in that we required a solid anchor to the physical world, but had long since left our pure matter-bodies behind and separated our selves from the fragile, decaying meat of our brains. I could accurately be described as a being of thought and magic, and every scrap of that being was connected to the rest. Eager to reunite. The veil, and my power being left in the Depths, would have prevented this from happening.

So what if the veil weakening from our preparations had let that power cause a breach? What if I waited, now, to give that power a chance to find me? I banished that thought and fired another magic missile as fast as I could. We did not have the luxury of taking chances like that. With this level of mana being outputted, the Demigods of Orapathaqi could not possibly have failed to feel it.

They would take some time to find it, and maybe the custodians of Sethira's crypts would buy more time still, but neither of us was under any illusion about our ability to fend off both those beings at once. Even if Sethira still boasted the power of Sakhent, as I suspected, I doubted she could match Nu'chista alone.

"Focus," she snapped.

"You're old enough to know better than hesitating to destroy work that only serves to endanger you." She seemed to have assumed I was reluctant to undo my own efforts. Good, it would keep her from investigating my pause. Fortunately, though our instruments were made for extraordinary mana-resistance, they were not especially durable against the physical energies mana could be used to conjure. No more than any objects made of high-quality steel and stone, at least.

We made short work of them, and Sethira's subordinates and apprentices were quick in salvaging what we could to make a run for it.

Agrian was no doctor, but he was pretty sure he had a seizure. Blacked out, dimly aware of his body jerking its limbs around without taking the time to consult his brain. He came to with a frightened Korig standing over him and a face drenched in drool. And a location in mind. Because he knew what had caused his reaction, he'd registered it just before blacking out. Magic like nothing he'd ever felt before, magic he couldn't describe. What words could a shit-covered rat use to do justice to the sight of the sun?

None, it would just squeak. But Agrian had more important things than a little awe.

"Agrian, you're alive," Korig practically deflated with relief as he stepped back to give Agrian room to stand.

"Thank the Gods. Are you okay? You collapsed when that magic rolled out. What is that, it's…I don't know, like nothing I've ever felt. And it's so close too!" It was close, maybe a quarter-mile away. And below them. Agrian could feel that keenly, though Korig looking around blindly as he did made him think that the other boy's senses weren't as precise. Maybe that was why he hadn't collapsed.

"I need to go," Agrian said in a daze.

"What?!" Korig's alarm took over everything instantly.

"No, hang on Agrian, you need rest—you doctor a surgeon to look at you." He put a hand out to halt Agrian, but Agrian just shrugged it off. Isabel was alive. He had no idea how he knew it, he just did. No idea how he could see her visibly in his mind's eye, standing in a room with that teenaged girl who'd kidnapped him with the necromancers, hurling magic missiles at some giant machine he couldn't even begin to describe, but he could. And that meant that she was in danger. That danger meant Agrian had to save her.

Days of misery and uselessness melted away from him almost in an instant, like someone had just injected him with liquid courage. Actual liquid courage, not just booze. He was spiraling. Agrian took off at speed.

"Agrian!" Korig started sprinting after him. Agrian studied his mental image of Isabel and saw her cooperation with the girl. He didn't understand that, didn't have time to make sense of it anymore than he had time to figure out where this vision was coming from, but he knew that it would pose bad news if anyone else became privy to it. Especially Korig. He was a good guy, but he had an understanding of nuance that was closer to that of a missed artillery shell than an intellectually considered person.

Fortunately, he also had shorter legs than Agrian. And, after a moment of work, a giant barrier of aether in his way. Agrian turned a corner and took off all the faster, helping himself along with conjured winds. He didn't know how he knew when he'd reached the spot to descend, he just did. Could just picture Isabel down there in his mind's eye as visceral as everything. Maybe he was just a madman. Well what did it matter?

This madman was the closest thing to saving his sister, so Agrian didn't hesitate to blast into the ground and punch through the sandstone. It was several feet thick and took him a good few carefully spaced hits to manage it, then he de-dusted the cavity with a blast of wind and jumped down. Darkness everywhere. Thicker than oil, impossible to see through. Agrian fixed that with a ball of conjured light and started walking. He almost regretted the light.

It exposed the creatures around him, the bizarre, black crystal hounds with glowing teeth and glowing eyes and power so strong it felt like it ought to have glowed too. Maybe it would've been better to have them just silently slither over and kill him instantly in the dark. Agrian's musings on that ended, the creatures, all three of them, struck as one.