Slumrat Rising

Truth fell on his ass on the forest floor. The noose loosened. He took great hacking gasps of air, snapping the ropes around his wrist with a casual flex.

“Here, have some water. You are probably dehydrated.” Merkovah crouched next to him and handed him a bottle. Truth grabbed it and chugged it down. The cool of the water eased the pain in his throat. Though, now that he was paying attention to it, that pain was fading fast.

“Basically an illusion.” Merkovah correctly interpreted Truth’s expression, having seen it many times before. “You firmly believed you were being strangled, that the ropes could really keep you bound. It wasn’t true, of course. Your neck is never going to be throttled by just your body weight at this point in your development. You could hang up there for a month, and you might be bored and uncomfortable, but you wouldn’t choke.”

Truth nodded.

“It would be pretty strange if the ritual killed the person it was supposed to empower. No, it’s a ritual suffering, the lived illusion of sacrifice, fueling the tiny echoes of divinity still held in the tree. That’s where the magic comes in. We will play with it some before we head home.”

“Stiffed me.” Truth rasped, then coughed and drank some more water.

“Pardon?”

“The fucker ran out on the bill!”

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Truth ran Incisive, trying to carefully remove all traces of his identity. Identity would be what he wished to present, and right now, he didn’t want to present anything. He wasn’t even a hole in the air. He sat with his back to a tree and tried to concentrate on being an absence of meaning.

“Good heavens. You are picking that up very fast. I sort of thought you would, what with everything, but that is still remarkably fast. Possibly a new record.” Merkovah cocked his head as he looked in Truth’s direction.

Truth slowly breathed in and out. “Actually, it’s something I learned back in the slums. Get low, and pretend you don’t exist. That way, the predators are less likely to see you. Funny how I have a spell for that now.”

“Funny… is one way to think of it.” Merkovah looked sadly into the woods. He looked lonely, Truth thought.

“Thinking about the one that got away?”

“Thinking about all the ones that didn’t. It’s all context. That’s why you need to study history. You need the context.”

Truth sat with that thought, breathing in and out slowly. Trying to find the rhythm of the forest, blend that little bit more.

“You aren’t the first kid from the slums I’ve taken here, you know. She said the same thing you did.”

“That fat bastard skipped out on her too?”

“What? No, not… whatever you saw in the vision. No, about holding still and hoping the predators don’t see you.”

“Didn’t know Siphios had slums. Well, slums like I know.”

“Our slums have never been as bad as they are in Jeon but, Hell, we are a monarchy with a hereditary aristocracy. Of course we have slums. We have predators that hunt their fellow humans. Brutalize and exploit them.”

“I sort of wondered, with the way Siphios uses demons so much.”

“Oh, Truth. You are so young, but not so young you don’t know the answer to that.”

Truth just nodded sadly. “The point is that they are other humans.”

“The cruelty is the point. Establishing dominance. Hierarchy. Binding their fellow humans like they were demons and driving them with the same lash.”

“Remind me again why we want to save the world?”

Merkovah laughed. “Force of habit, in my case. My main goal is to kill Starbrite, the C-Suite, and the System. Saving the world is a nice bonus.”

Truth could respect that. He understood it a lot better than altruism.

“You are trying to rescue your siblings, right?”

“Rescue” seems like the wrong word. “Rescue” is step one. Step two through infinity is trying to arrange things so they don’t need rescuing in the future.”

“Delightful. Saving the world is an incidental benefit for me and an unfortunate prerequisite for you. Neither of us has it as our actual goal.” Merkovah went quiet for a while. “What about Etenesh? Or Jember?”

“Oh, I want them safe and sound too. It’s just, they can look after themselves. They don’t need me to rescue them. My siblings probably do.” Truth thought a moment longer. “Maybe not Vig. Boy’s got that demon in him.”

There was a pause. “When you say demon…”

“Not literally. At least the last time I saw him.”

“Just checking.”

A bird landed on Truth. It apparently thought he was a part of the tree.

“What ever happened to that drop?”

“What drop?”

“The drop of extradimensional water we found at Station Six?”

“Ah. That one is need to know, I’m afraid.”

Truth just nodded.

“Got a feel for it?”

“Think so. Lets go for a walk then head back. I want to test it out some.”

Merkovah nodded, and got to his feet. The two wandered off, Merkovah lost in thought, and Truth trying to perfect his grip on his new abilities. Neither noticed that among the dead trees, thin green shoots were emerging.

____________________________________________

Merkovah had an interesting idea for the return journey. He would drive his doubtlessly structurally sound carriage. Truth would run alongside. Truth objected, but was stumped by Merkovah’s brilliant, reply-

“Why?”

Truth was flummoxed for a moment. On the one had, it seemed obvious. On the other hand, he could probably run as fast as the carriage moved normally, at least for short bursts. So… maybe not for the whole journey back to Xandre, but for at least a bit of the journey, he could be comparatively safe from vehicular homicide.

So he ran. The air up in the mountains was cool for Siphios, which made it a steam oven for a Jeon boy like Truth. His sweat quickly glued his clothes to his skin. He stripped off his shirt almost immediately, throwing it through a window into the carriage. He then flagged down the carriage and did the same with his shoes and socks. He knew from running through the desert that pebbles and the like were no threat to him, so really, there was no need beyond habit and comfort. And he was sweating so much that the shoes were miserable little braising dishes.

As naked as public decency would permit, he set off running again. It was effortless. He ran down the road, keeping pace with a carriage doing mountain highway speeds, and it was effortless. Truth finally felt with his body something his mind already knew but didn’t believe. He was utterly beyond the overwhelming majority of humanity, at least on this planet. And he was just Level Three.

“Just” Level Three. Most people in Jeon got to Level One and stuck there. Level Two, you were a God in the slums, though nothing particularly special in the nice part of Harban. Level three? Now you had some status. Maybe not head-turning status, but you were not someone to casually cross. Level Four- Captain Clavagaugh, who ran the Starbrite PMC branch in goddam Harban, was Level Four. That was a position of serious power and authority. She might not name-check outside her industry, but there probably weren’t more than a few thousand people at her level in the city. And it was a big damn city.

Truth wasn’t certain he could take Clavagaugh. She had decades of experience, her own body cultivation, and the System was insanely powerful in skilled hands. But it wouldn’t be impossible. Not with the right arrangements.

The accumulation was showing. The deep study of Incisive, the steady grinding away at the Meditations, the consistent effort he put into proving to his mind that his body could, in fact, handle whatever he threw at it. It was all adding up. When he climbed out of the well, he had a body he couldn’t make the best use of. Now? Now he knew he was strong. Not invincible, but strong.

It was a heady feeling. Racing alongside carriage on the highway and comfortably keeping up. Truth saw a pond just off the side of the road. With a mad gleam in his eye, he sprinted. Hard as he could, fast as he could. Little, quick steps. Taktaktaktaktaktak, swerving off the road toward the pond. Faster now, fast as a sporting chariot on a highway. Fast as he could go. He stepped off the grassy verge and onto the pond. Taktaktaktaktaktak, the water shot up behind him, but he didn’t fall. He was too fast. Fast enough to run on water.

Truth crossed the pond and got back on the road, now just jogging along, damn near laughing himself sick. He was so fast he could run on water. That was a thing he could do. And he didn’t even feel winded. Merkovah pulled up next to him and rolled down the window. “Try concealing yourself and running at the same time.”

Truth shrugged and did so. He still couldn’t quite wrap words around whatever the forest gave him. It wasn’t invisibility. It was just… unimportance. He just faded from attention to the point where it was almost impossible to consciously be aware of him. He wondered how it would work in, say, a crowded hallway.

A cloud of ghosts started forming around Merkovah’s carriage. Seekers, it looked like. They started sweeping up and down the road, clearly looking for something. Truth grinned. He wouldn’t be bored running back to the city.

When they did finally hit the exurbs around Xandre, Truth had reached a couple of interesting conclusions. One, the drain on his energy from using the passive concealment provided by the forest was negligible. About equal to his normal replenishment rate or less. He could effectively keep it going indefinitely. “National Treasure” was a pretty damn reasonable description.

The second, arguably stranger, thing was that he wasn’t dehydrated or overheating. Which… he absolutely should be, right? He was sticky and sweating from the humidity and heat, so clearly, his body was reacting to the temperatures. But was it really? Was this another situation where his brain hadn’t caught up with where his body was at? He ran through the desert like it was nothing, and that was when he was still Level Two. But “Sweat when you are hot” isn’t a conscious reaction. It’s something instinctive. It would be tricky to learn to ignore the weather that way.

Truth had also learned that drivers would unconsciously avoid him while he was concealed. It was a little freaky. From what he could tell, looking in their windows as he did it, both people directly operating their carriages or the bound demon compelled to drive would move to avoid him without seeming to be aware that they were doing so. They wouldn’t get into an accident doing it- they would slow down or swerve as needed, but they wouldn’t go off the road, for example.

That seemed… exploitable. Actually, it seemed bloody terrifying. There must be some counter to it, or Merkovah would have already walked into Starbrite’s corporate offices and murdered everyone there. He would ask later.

In a moment of mischief, he hopped onto the roof of a passing carriage and sat like a gargoyle, leering at the passing traffic.

He had a sudden thrill of mild danger, and he dove off the roof of the carriage, landing on his hands and flipping up into a sprint. A flying dagger had whipped through the hole in the air he had just been filling. It twisted in the air, a little silvery fish dodging about, then dove for him again. There was a cheerful toot from Merkovah’s horn. It seemed he was right about there being a counter. The last leg of the journey was a lot more… intense.

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