Vigor Mortis

Chapter 105: No Good Deed

This is probably a bad idea.

There are… I would have to guess over two thousand people in the range of my soul sense. A quarter of them are dead. No doubt that percentage will increase significantly the closer I get to the impact site. I have no idea where I should start, if I should focus on retrieving dead souls before they are devoured or saving the trapped live ones before they die. They don’t train hunters for disaster relief, and they certainly don’t train anyone on the best way to save people when they have options like mine.

This is probably a bad idea.

I feel like I will find the most use helping the dead. After all, no one else can. I make a beeline towards what is now a massive hole in the middle of the city, collecting as many dead souls as I’m able along the path. The final tentacle demands the full force of my attention whenever I glance its way, and I make the mistake of doing so just as its rage seems to quell, the violent thrashings slowing down until, at least for a few moments, the tendril just looms ominously above the city, taller than the greatest walls and thicker than the largest buildings.

As the city of Skyhope is built inside a crater, it’s much easier to see things in the center than things on the rim. The middle of the city is lower than the outer sections, although the crater is large enough that it’s difficult to tell when you’re just standing in the street. Still, even with the impact site so far below the outer walls, the Mistwatcher dwarfs them with nothing but the tip of a single errant limb. When it moves again, it moves with relative slowness, although given the distance and scale involved I would not be surprised if that slowness is only a trick of perspective. It curls over, kicking around at the rubble created by its own entry, searching and prodding. With a rumbling scrape, it pulls objects of apparent interest into the hole, where they begin the many-day fall down to the mists. Exactly what the Mistwatcher deigns to acquire, I don’t know, and don’t have any intention to get close enough to find out. But if this incomprehensible divine beast is wrapping up its business here, well… the last time this happened, the spirit tendrils arrived just shortly after the physical ones left. I pick up the pace, although I don’t really have many leg bones left to break. Penelope is going to be furious with me.

Everywhere around me, there is either death or those who brushed with it. The living suffer, crying out for aid, but I convince myself that I can trust others to help the many people this far away from the fancy new hole in our island. As I collect souls by the dozens, however, I start to fear that my body will not be able to hold many more. I can save a few hundred, I think, but then I will start having to make choices on who gets a chance for rebirth and who does not. I suppose I could free up space by making Revenants, but then of course I run the risk of those Revenants being found by the swarms of Templars that are no doubt on the way, Not to mention the High Templars that are already here.

This is probably a bad idea.

That refrain keeps flashing through my mind. And honestly, it’s right. This is a risk, an entirely unnecessary risk. I don’t know these people, I don’t really care about these people. At my core, I’m someone that looks out for myself first, and that part of me knows this is just going to bite me in the ass for nothing. Whenever I try to do a good deed, that’s what happens. I would probably accuse someone of whining if they said that the world is stacked against them, but in my case it cannot be more literally true. From my earliest memory, I have been starving, an owner of nothing. The abilities I was born with and never asked for are illegal enough to get me killed. The actual, physical world annihilates my essence when I try to push it outside of my body, and I risk getting slapped by god if I glance off the edge of the island at the wrong time. I am not a good person because I do not have the luxury of being a good person. So why the fuck am I doing this?

The people I respect are good people. Lyn and Rowan are criminals, sure. But they sacrifice a lot for the sake of kids that, at least initially, they didn’t even know. Lyn literally got beaten by mobsters, ordered around and abused, just so that my siblings and I could have a bite to eat. Rowan, for all his flaws, thinks a lot about what is and isn’t right. He’s always encouraging me to be a good person, and I know that he would approve of what I’ve chosen to do now. Even Penelope, for all the ways she’s as fucked up as I am, fights against her baser nature and focuses on trying to do good for the world. She’s not just a healer, researching ways to heal better. No, Penelope wants to figure out how to make healing obsolete. Penelope wants to not just stave off death, but destroy it forever, and something about that beautiful, arrogant audacity makes her hard not to love. So sure, I’m a monster. But I’ve had a lot of time to think over these past two months, to look ahead and try to make an actual plan. What would make me happy? I’m okay with being different, I’m okay with being a soul-eating nonhuman creature masquerading as a girl, but… I’m not okay with being someone that can’t live with the people I care about. I want to be someone they’re proud of, not someone they have to be afraid of.

So here I am. Even though it almost certainly is a bad idea. People need help, I can help them, and so I should. That’s how morality works, right? It’s the decent thing to do.

I feel a group of children trapped together, hiding in a cellar that they can no longer leave. After a brief deliberation I break off to help them. They’re alive, and they will probably be fine until someone else comes by, but… I don’t know. I go anyway. There are dead souls down with them, and at the very least I want to collect those so the kids don’t have to suffer the likelihood of a zombie rising in their midst. The home, like almost every other, is little more than rubble. I get to work grabbing and tossing away the largest chunks of stone I can hold, tempted to put Norah in my gloves and start smashing through but unwilling to pull her out of my body when the Mistwatcher could be about to harvest at any point.

I dig as quickly as I can, uncovering as much as I’m able of the staircase leading to the survivors. I soon come across what I already know I will find: a woman’s body, crushed between the stairs and the debris, having shepherded her children to safety mere seconds before the roof collapsed on top of her. I store her soul, toss her body out of the way with the rest of the rubble, and keep digging. The three children below me can hear me, although I’m not sure they know I’m here to save them.

I can tell from the feelings in their souls and the positions of their bodies that they are praying, and it disgusts me.

I genuinely cannot imagine the kind of willful stupidity necessary to make praying to the Mistwatcher while the Mistwatcher kills your family seem like a good idea, and I am tempted to just give up on these people. It’s obviously not showing you idiots mercy! If nothing else, though, it would sort of make all the time I’ve already spent trying to dig them up a waste if I do that, so I toss away the stones as quickly as I’m able and finally break through to their cellar.

“Hey,” I snap at them. “I’m gonna make this hole little wider, and then I’m gonna pull you out. Get back.”

They scramble away, and even with the limited light my soul eye can see them pretty clearly now. The oldest can’t be more than eleven years old, and the other two are significantly smaller. I stomp the rubble around the hole, letting some of it pour into the cellar and finally getting enough of an open space to pull them through. I stretch my arm down.

“Okay, grab on.”

They approach, the oldest of them lifting the youngest into my hand. I grab her by the armpit, hoist her out of her ruined home, then take the second and finally the third. I feel them notice, one after the other, the corpse of their mother splayed where I tossed it earlier.

“Okay,” I tell them, raising my voice enough to take their attention. “You all need to get out of here. Head uphill, towards the outer walls, as quickly as you can. Now.”

“You’re the blue girl,” the oldest one says quietly.

I blink. What? Oh, because of my eyes? Are there enough rumors about me for random kids to hear them in their homes?

“I’m a hunter,” I tell him. “Just do what I say and go.”

Credit to the oldest kid, he doesn’t freeze up. Grabbing his younger brother and sister, they start to get out of here. I sigh. That was way more work than just collecting dead souls. I turn around to continue towards the center city, and end up face-to-face with Braum the Ubiquitous.

“Fuck!” I swear, jumping back in surprise. Basically nothing can sneak up on me anymore, so that really scared the shit out of me!

Soulless and expressionless, the illusion of armor regards me impassively for a short moment before speaking.

“Noble of you,” Braum comments.

I blink at him, not really sure how to respond to that. This is a man that I just watched clone himself hundreds of times and then beat the shit out of a bunch of rocks a mile in the sky, after all. So, wait, if he can make tactile illusions somehow (actually, how the fuck does he do that? You can’t make solid light, that’s not a thing.) he could probably help clear rubble.

“There’s a family of five trapped four yards down, twenty-three yards that way,” I tell him, pointing. “Other spots… six yards down, fifty-six yards that way. Forty-three yards that way, ground level, but not moving. Ninety-eight yards that way…”

He stares at me for a few seconds as I give instructions, then nods, more illusions popping into existence above the spots I designate and starting to move rubble. There are a lot of people stuck underground within my range, so I spend about a minute reporting all of them, then immediately turn and run towards the center city without another word. Braum doesn’t follow me, thank fuck, but I suppose I have to assume that I’m being watched now. I don’t sense any obvious Inquisitors, at least, and if there’s any I can’t sense I’m fucked anyway. It doesn’t matter if I grab souls or eat them or make a goddamn Revenant in the middle of the city, an Inquisitor will notice that my body is full of souls that aren’t mine just by glancing at me. So I continue to collect them, at least until I hit my limit. Then I have to start making uncomfortable decisions.

I eat the souls of gang members first, since I know that they are probably bad people, opening up more space for those that are hopefully better. Next, I eat the biggest souls in my inventory, Norah and Penta excluded, because one big soul frees up enough space for two or three children. Every single soul that doesn’t end up in my body will be either shattered or eaten by the Mistwatcher, and I don’t really have time to figure out the best way to save people. This method allows me to maximize the number of people I can hold inside me, which is certainly a method but I’m not sure if it’s the method Penelope or my family would argue for. Penelope might like this, but I think she might prefer me keeping as many large souls as I can so we can eventually revive the people that have the most skill.

So I decide that, because I can’t figure out the correct moral answer, I will take the moral answer that allows me to eat the tastiest souls. As arbitrary tiebreakers go, it’s not really a great one, but it gets the job done. Every soul I encounter that I can’t fit inside my body, I just eat… because again, it’s either me or the Mistwatcher, so it may as well be me. What I would prefer to do is make all the souls into Revenants—that would obviously be ideal, because then no one would have to be eaten. I can’t do that, though, because then anybody who watches me would know I’m an animancer, and then I would die, and then nobody would get saved. Fucking Templars.

These are the kind of thoughts I focus on to avoid thinking about the unprecedented devastation that I personally failed to stop. I’ll be the first to agree that my life is fucked up, but even my experiences on the streets don’t compare to the ocean of rubble and death in every direction. This city, my city, has been reduced to ruins, parts of it utterly and completely annihilated from existence. As I get closer to the center, as I get closer to that damn tentacle, the sheer density of the dead crowding my senses gets more and more oppressive. The living are worse. The weight of despair crushes me on all sides, the feelings of hundreds and hundreds of people pressing at the edges of my mind, each and every one of them broken and terrified. For perhaps the first time, I try to focus as much as I can on my body rather than my soul, as my extra senses are now the ones that threaten to drive me mad. Surrounded by shattered families, destroyed lives, desperate and frightened people… it’s a bad time to be an empath.

The great tendril of the Mistwatcher finishes its destructive hoarding session and finally slithers back underneath the island. Some part of me watches its departure with a sliver of disappointment, as I can’t deny that no matter how much I hate it, the Mistwatcher is truly beautiful. In some sick way, it feels like something to aspire to. Although, when I actually take more than a second to think about it, I do find myself disgusted at the idea of maintaining and farming people like livestock on the scale of… what, billions? Trillions? I have no clue how many people there are when you consider all the islands. I don’t even have the faintest ghost of an idea about how many islands there are. The point is, I love food. But as long as I’m getting enough to not die, it’s clear that there’s more to life than just eating.

My thoughts are abruptly cut off as hundreds of Mistwatcher spirit tendrils cleave the dead asunder.

It happens startlingly fast, and it’s over just as quickly. The ephemeral, insubstantial tendrils rise up through the ground in an instant, sweep through every soul in my range, presumably every soul in the city, then slither back down through the ground with as much plunder as they can carry. I flinch, my body and soul twitching as thousands and thousands of people are shattered into irreparable chunks on a scale unimaginable to me. Then the tendrils descend down below the island, a hundred gluttonous fingers disappearing at once. Even a single spirit tentacle of the countless the Mistwatcher sent steals more human souls than I have eaten in my life, and in an instant, they’re gone, all gone, except for the leftovers. Thousands of shards are left behind, but this is not a relief to me.

Because each and every one of them starts seeking a corpse to inhabit.

I force my stunned body to start moving again, rushing towards the biggest concentrations of shards and bodies that I can find. If all these zombies animate, they will start seeking out the survivors, who will of course die and then get eaten by the Mistwatcher, potentially shattering and making more zombies… this is bad. Very, very bad. But I can kill zombies just as easily as I can make them.

Soul strength directly correlates to magic resistance, so the zombies are easy pickings. All around me, they start to rise, Dregs upon endless hordes of Dregs. Most of them, thankfully, are trapped under rubble, no more able to move than so many of the living. The zombies that can free themselves, however, start to move, seeking the nearest living thing. I seek them right back, threshing them like wheat. They fall in droves, each one dying the moment it gets inside my range. A range that, because of today’s feast, is slowly growing.

I fail to stop a smile from creeping up my face as I move, body and soul thrumming in harmony as I assert dominance over my domain. I burst over rubble, wind in my hair as my tendrils lash out in every direction, snatching delicious, broken morsels and thrusting them down my metaphysical gullet. The undead, en masse, are a terrifying threat to the city, one that even the High Templars might struggle with. Not because they can’t kill them—the high Templars absolutely, unquestionably can kill them—but because the enormous destructive wrath they demonstrated against aerial threats can’t be used on the city itself. How is Galdra supposed to justify carpeting a city block in flames when it’s impossible to know how many survivors are hiding there? When it might be difficult to tell the difference between a shambling Dreg and an injured survivor from a distance? I, obviously, have no such difficulties. I’m in my element. I shouldn’t feel so good about it, but damn. I do.

“Hey,” I tell one of the zombies. “Turn around.”

To my disappointment but not my surprise, the dead woman with a shard of rock impaled through her forehead does not obey my command. Naturally-occurring Dregs don’t have my shard planted inside them, obviously, which I guess I can now confirm is what allows me to order my zombies around. In fact, there seem to be a few interesting differences between my Dregs and natural ones. The shards of soul animating the corpses surrounding us still create branches of soul power to anchor and pull on the inside of the body, but the branches are uneven, inelegant. They don’t spread with purpose, instead propagating somewhat randomly. One zombie walks with a limp, not because it has a seriously injured leg but because its soul has a veritable bush of power inside the right leg and a single anemic branch growing down the left. It’s kind of funny to look at, and it gives me a smug satisfaction to know that fragments of myself are so inherently superior to these Watcher-made ripoffs. I kill the one I’ve been staring at and move on.

Behind me, at the edges of my senses, I start to feel an influx of living souls heading my way. Well, not my way specifically, but towards the impact site of the perception event. Judging by the sizes of the souls, I’m guessing it’s either Templars, the Army, or a collection of both. Which is good! At the other end of my senses, near the impact site, I start feeling something particularly curious. Lots of people died on impact when the Mistwatcher’s tendrils hit, but their corpses were then flung vast distances away or absolutely annihilated by the Mistwatcher’s rampage. In other words, there are a lot of soul shards in the area, but not very many intact bodies.

As a result, a lot of shards start gathering into one single body, where they end up floating inside, finding other shards, and sticking to each other. It sort of reminds me of a splice, with the shards trying to fit completely ill-matching fragments of being to each other. Unlike Capita’s soul, however, this isn’t two halves glued together. This is several dozen shards, all piling into a body that can’t really fit them, all trying to heal themselves using the energy of the others, all trying to assert control… and somehow, it starts to work.

I start running towards the interesting undead, feeling the shards pull at each other’s power, gluing to each other, fighting each other, and somehow kickstarting the entire macabre conglomerate into a horrifying facsimile of awareness. Each shard inside the monster, each fragment of a person so small that they could never possibly be rebuilt from it, begins to remember that it is indeed a fragment of a person. Each shard tries to fight for control, overwhelmed with confusion, pain, and loss. As I approach, I spot the body they all inhabit, clutching his forehead and twitching wildly as each and every echo of a person attempts to give contradictory orders to the incestuous mass of threads running through the corpse. This creature, this wretched dead thing, is madness personified. The mass of shards finds only one course of action that they can all agree upon. Unlike the many Dregs swarming the city that don’t even remember such an action exists, this horrible undead moves its lungs and inhales.

Then it starts to scream. A wretched wail of pain, giving the voice to the dozens of tortured, dead soul fragments that comprise it. Poor fucking thing. I approach it as quickly as I can, intending to end its misery.

As I start to get close, the twitching stops. In a singular motion, the creature’s head and arm snap to point at me. And I feel mana move through it as it activates its talents.

All of them.

Every single fragmentary fraction of a talent, combined into one.

I leap to the side immediately, before I even feel any stirring of a spell. That saves my life, as the resulting outpour of chaotic magic disintegrates everything in a line, lancing out from the undead’s hand in the direction of where I was standing less than a second before. If not for the curve of the crater, I suspect the blast might have kept going all the way through the city, annihilating everything in its path and punching a hole through the outer walls and the many people no doubt huddling by them for protection. As is, the blast instead bores a hole deep into the wall of the crater, only killing about six people on the way. On top of that, dozens of discrete effects assault the exact spot I had been standing, explosions and implosions fighting each other for dominance, torrents of flame and lightning, a strobing, screeching blast formed from the fury of the dead. Throughout it all, the body wails in pain.

In response to the devastating attack, I hear the bellowing voice of Braum the Ubiquitous ring behind me.

“Wight!” he roars, and all around me his illusions appear.

Wight. I’ve heard the name before, in fearful whispers. A legendary undead, one known for its destructive potential and capacity to grow even more dangerous over time. They have always been a tempting, beautiful idea, but of course I had no idea how to make one. Now I suppose I am thankful for that ignorance, because if I ended up creating one without knowing what it was I probably would’ve been killed by it.

Braum’s illusions converge on the tortured creature, and in moments his fists have blown it apart. Somewhat literally, in fact, although not in a good way. When the body of the screaming undead breaks, one—and only one—of the shards composing it shatter. The rest are scattered, launched in various directions, and immediately they start seeking out new bodies to inhabit. Wherever large chunks of them land together, they start to form another Wight.

A Braum clone suddenly appears beside me, and immediately starts talking before I can even recover from jumping in surprise.

“You started moving towards this one before anyone else saw it. Can you do it again?”

I blink.

“Six hundred and seventy-ish yards that way,” I say, pointing at where a second Wight is starting to form. “And I think maybe another one, about eight hundred-ish yards that way, but it’s much weaker.”

He nods, and off in the distance I see more of him starting to appear.

“How did you know?” he asks. There’s an intensity to his words that worries me.

“Uh, I didn’t really,” I say honestly. “I’ve never seen a Wight before. But I felt something really weird forming here, and I figured I should probably destroy it. I was a bit too slow, I guess.”

The illusion nods again, and I desperately wish I had some way to feel the soul of whatever man is controlling it.

“I’ve been watching you,” he admits, which is more or less what I expected. “Your talent seems incredibly effective against the undead. You’ve killed more than entire squads put together.”

“I’m a hunter,” I answer carefully. “I’m good at killing monsters. And speaking of, there are a lot in this city that still need killing. So…”

I try to move past him, and the illusion steps in front of me. My breath catches, muscles tensing and heart racing. So this is it, then? This is where my good deed goes wrong. The world has decided that I’m being too nice, and this time it has sent a High Templar to fuck me up.

“I’d like to talk,” Braum says firmly.

I gesture around us, trying to seem exasperated rather than terrified.

“Is now really the best time? This really doesn’t seem like a sit down and chat kind of situation.”

“You directed me to many, many people that needed help. But you only saved a single family. Why?”

What the fuck? I don’t really know what he’s getting at with the question, so I just answer honestly.

“I… my talent is good at killing, not saving. I guess if you were watching me, you saw how many zombies I could destroy in the time it took me to get those three people. It’s a better use of my time to get to where all the dead people are, prepare myself to fight them. I just thought I could minimize casualties that way.”

I, of course, leave out the fact that rescuing dead souls is a more important priority than rescuing living ones, since I’m the only person that can do the former, but Braum still nods like it’s a convincing argument.

“I see. What drove you to save that family, then?”

I shrug helplessly.

“They were just kids. Orphans. I know that there are a bunch of people like that now, but… it resonated with me, I guess. If I could have gotten them out faster, maybe I would have kept saving all the people that I could detect.”

Braum’s illusion stares at me with an almost tangible intensity. I wonder what he’s doing, exactly. How does his magic work? He seems to be a damn good multitasker, not to mention the incredible range of his ability, and all of that speaks to it likely being a talent instead of learned magic. I doubt a learned mage could develop anything like this, it’s just too big, too advanced. Magic is hard to use at range, getting exponentially more difficult to shape the further it is from the caster’s body… with the frequent exception of talents, which often have the ability to safely push power into range or magic resistance penetration that a normal caster would balk at trying to match. Basically, talents can cheat. But a talent that allows him to make tangible, soulless clones of himself at a range longer than my frankly absurd sensory range isn’t just cheating, it’s writing ‘Braum always wins’ directly into the rules.

“Did you cause this?” Braum asks bluntly, motioning towards the giant hole in the island that was once half the city.

“No!” I snap angrily, no longer having to feign my emotions. “Of course I didn’t fucking cause this! I live here, you dick! I have a family here! Is this seriously about that investigation?”

“The investigation has, for all intents and purposes, been concluded,” Braum answers calmly.

I swallow. Fuck. Fuck! When? How? Was it an Inquisitor outside my range? One in my range that I didn’t notice? Okay, calm down. Think. Braum can make clones from really really far away, but his range can’t be unlimited, and neither can his stamina. This is probably the most magic the guy has channeled in ages, it’s an absurdly huge crisis and he seems to be handling a massive percentage of it by himself. If this comes to a fight, he won’t be able to follow me out of the city and defend the city at the same time, so if I make it to the outer walls there will quickly come a point where…

No, wait. If I leave the city, then any of the other crazy absurd High Templars can just apply scorched-earth tactics to wherever I happen to be standing. They’re probably exhausted right now, but I wouldn’t put it past Galdra to have exactly enough energy left to fuck me over in particular. So do I fight them head-on? That would mean needing to find Braum’s real body and killing it without getting my ass blasted by any of the other High Templars in the city, or even any of the squads of normal Templars. I’m… kind of screwed.

…Except, maybe, for the fact that Braum is talking to me, not murdering me.

“U-um,” I eloquently stutter. “What did you conclude?”

Again, that silent, penetrating gaze seems to press on me, the High Templar’s deafening quiet setting me on edge.

“Hunter Vita,” Braum asks slowly, “what are you?”

I say nothing. I… don’t really know what to say.

“As you consider your response,” Braum continues, “I feel it only fair to confirm to you something that you may have already suspected, namely that the Inquisitorial branch of the Templars does indeed, by necessity, participate in the sin of animancy, primarily because it is necessary in order to perceive animancy. Sometimes, we must shroud ourselves in evil in order to find it. It is regrettable, but we have had you under surveillance. Your sensory range is impressive, but also on record at the Hunter’s Guild, along with predictions for how quickly it increases in radius.”

Ah. So I only ever felt one Inquisitor because they only needed one to test my reaction to noticing an Inquisitor. Or hell, maybe that was an accident and the Inquisitor was heading home from lunch when they noticed me at random. The rest of the Inquisition, meanwhile, are apparently a lot more competent.

“I don’t ask this to force you to implicate yourself,” Braum explains. “It’s a genuine curiosity to me. I am not personally able to see what my allies in the Inquisition see, I have only heard it secondhand. So I ask again: what are you?”

I take a deep breath, trying and failing to think of a plan. If he wants to talk, I will let him talk. Hopefully he’s not stalling, because I sure am and I’m not sure I actually get anything out of it if I succeed.

“I don’t know,” I answer honestly.

There’s only one thing I can really do here. I have to rely on the fact that the Templars are going to be running on fumes, after dealing with the disaster in the sky and the aftermath thereof, they have to be low on even their own incredible amounts of power. I have to risk it. I don’t really have a choice.

“I see,” says Braum. “Well, I need to ask that you come with me.”

“I refuse,” I say, starting to move past him again. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

The illusion of an armored hand grabs my shoulder, though I don’t feel the cold chitin that I expected. Braum’s hand thrums, a pressured vibration of such intensity that it acts as a wall.

“I’m afraid I must insist,” he tells me. “The souls trapped inside you must be freed.”

Fuck. They’re after the souls. They’re after everyone I came out here to save. They’re after Penta, Norah, and Angelien.

“I believe you when you say you are here to help,” Braum continues. “But you are misguided. Come with me. We will help those you are hurting, and afterwards we can speak of clemency.”

I shove a tentacle into the illusion and pump it full of mana. With a screeching sound, the magic dissipates, and I turn to run.

“How did you do that?” Braum asks, immediately reforming beside me.

Instead of answering, I simply perform the trick again, his clone detonating with another sharp noise. Fuck him and fuck this, I have to get out of here. The question is: where do I go? Normally, I would try to lose my pursuers in the sewers, but they’ve all collapsed and I doubt the tunnels underneath them have fared much better.

I need cover. I need a place where they won’t want to follow. I need… the forest. Really, it has to be the forest. It’s the one place I can reliably survive better than anyone else. But how do I survive the space between the city and the forest? How do I cover all that ground? I don’t really have a good answer, but the best idea I can think of is to run inside the wheat fields, keeping low and giving Galdra a brutally costly consequence for just going full fireball on me. The city is going to need all the food it can get now that everybody’s a fucking refugee, right? If the Templars have to make a call between killing me and starving themselves out… well, I’m sure they have ways to minimize damage, actually. Damnit! Is this it? Is this where I fucking die? I am as far away from the forest as I can physically be. Being stuck in the ruins of the center city means I’ve got a literal uphill battle ahead of me, but what else am I gonna do?

Braum reforms another clone, this one outside the range of my tendrils. I veer away from him, moving towards the highest concentration of zombies that I can find.

“Please surrender peacefully,” Braum requests. “This doesn’t have to get violent.”

“What, you want me to just serve myself up on a platter to die?” I snap at him. I pull half a dozen shards out of the shambling undead nearby, continuing on to the next group.

“I am actually under explicit orders to not kill you,” Braum responds. “I assure you, your fears are unfounded.”

The Templars want me alive!? That sounds even worse!

I find a group of another dozen Dregs and yank all the shards out of them. Then I gather them up and shove them all into a single corpse, adding a few of mine for good measure.

“Vita, we have a place for people like you,” Braum insists. “We can help you. You’re not the only person that hurts others by nature of your birth. We can show you the right way to use your abilities.”

“Kill everyone in white armor,” I order my Wight, having no idea whether or not that will even work.

A chaotic explosion detonates at the Braum clone’s position, so I assume it works. Fuck yes! A dozen copies of Braum replace the destroyed one and converge on my Wight, obliterating it in moments. But that’s fine. That was just a proof of concept. That Wight had twenty-two shards. The one that nearly killed me had over forty. Braum easily destroyed them both, but I don’t exactly have a shortage of shards around me. Plus, some of the surviving shards from the destroyed body ended up clumped together, and those are about to form another Wight. From the way that Braum insists on destroying them with extreme prejudice, they are going to be great for wearing him out. And once he obliterates one, another, weaker one forms somewhere else!

I like these things! At least, I would if they didn’t involve the excruciating torture of the Wight itself, the death and shattering of dozens of individuals, and the absurd collateral damage from the fact that they are basically guaranteed to have chaos magic. But, you know, in this specific situation they are pretty convenient.

“You have no idea what sort of horrors you are unleashing,” Braum tells me, once again following my retreat towards the outside of the city.

“Sure I do,” I tell him. “It’s a Wight. You just told me that. And if you would just leave me alone, I’ll happily go back to destroying them instead of making more. But I’m not gonna let you kidnap me, you fuck.”

“Then we won’t give you the choice.”

A blast of air suddenly knocks me off my feet, sending me sprawling backwards. From far above me, I feel a terrifyingly powerful soul, deep green and wild, like a raging squall ripping leaves off of trees and dancing them through the air. I try to stand up and immediately another blast of air knocks me to the ground, then another. I flail about with my tentacles, trying to find and disrupt the mana flows, but whatever spell this is isn’t close enough to me for me to affect. The blast of air is being sent at me from well outside my range, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. When the flying High Templar gets about twenty feet above me, she hovers there, maintaining a constant, crushing column of air above me. I fight it, trying to rise, feeling muscles strain and bones crack as I push the inside of my stupid meaty shell to and past its limits, but I can’t move. I can’t even budge.

“Thank you, Cassia,” Braum says, nodding his head politely at his flying comrade. “Apologies for needing to bother you.”

“Did she just make a Wight?” Cassia the Maelstrom asks. “You sure we can’t kill this one?”

“They think she might be another Lich.”

“Oh. Oh, shit.”

At that, I feel the pressure start to intensify around me, and a bubble of mana starts to form around my head. Fuck! Immediately, I shove tendrils in, push out my own mana, and destroy the effect. The floating high Templar tilts her head, and a bubble of mana appears again, twice as dense. I barely destroy it, and then it reforms again with even more power behind it. So much mana gets thrown into the single spell that I can’t destroy enough of it in time to stop the effect.

“She really is a scary one,” Cassia comments. “Weird metamancy on top of all the other shit. I can see why you were having trouble, Br—”

The spell completes, and her voice is cut off as my head plunges into near-complete silence. The only sound I can hear comes from my own body, the beating of my heart and grinding of my bones. Air pulls itself out of my lungs as my head becomes encased in a vacuum. I shut my eyes as the mucus on their surface starts to boil, my tongue instantly going dry. I fight with all my strength, but barely fifteen seconds later my thoughts go blurry, and I start to pass out.

I try to keep my soul awake, but I am, as always, still trapped by my flesh. When my body stops, so too does my soul drift into sleep, not knowing where, when, or if I will wake up.