Slumrat Rising

Truth sat in Borges’ living room. The deadly coin was safely trapped under one of the doctor’s slippers, waiting to be scooped up and returned to the shelf. He needed a moment. It was all kind of a lot. He was gently steaming just sitting there. Sooner or later, the alarm spells would start getting cranky. Probably “sooner,” but he still needed a minute. Just to pull himself together.

He had experienced flashes of unreality before. That sense that reality was a soap bubble, a thin film of being, and humans, Truth in particular, just a smear of color on its side. Soon the bubble would pop, for one reason or another.

Once in a great while, you could see through the bubble. See some little piece of the world beyond, maybe. His understanding of what he saw was essentially nonexistent. The notion that you could paint your own soap bubble, paint it so convincingly that it became the “real” soap bubble when the old one collapsed… he could hardly conceive of it.

Of course, this meant that his “barely an incoherent idea, in no way a viable primary plan,” plan, just got moved into the “urgent action” pile. He would have to do some experimentation later tonight. He stood. There was a brief moment of vertigo. Then he scooped up the slipper and got to tidying up.

Time to go and see what else could be done. Borges wasn’t going to kill himself, and it was quite clear just how valuable he was to Starbrite. Which meant that Truth would have to spend serious time considering his exit strategy, too.

Nobody mentioned how tiring international terrorism was. It just wore him out.

Truth started making his way over toward the giant flower that held the research center, drifting from hedge to tree, hiding behind the corner of houses, and when absolutely necessary, walking right down the middle of the sidewalk. Just a maintenance tech on his way to the next job. He could feel the draw on the scales like a soft but constant tugging. A constant drag on his energy and attention. Making him sacrifice the energy within him.

The image of the ziggurat stuck with Truth. The sacrifice of people to fuel magic. It wasn’t a novel concept by any stretch. It was how magic worked at its core. You made a “sacrifice” of some accumulated magic within you, magic you could have focused on propelling your cultivation or some other purpose, and you burned it up. You forced it into a form the cosmic rays that flooded the universe could interact with. The rays then created the outsized result you were looking for. The main power came from that stellar energy- the indiscriminate blessings of the heavenly demons and, ultimately, God. Remove God’s blessing from a world; if he simply dropped you from his eyes, the stellar rays would ignore you, too.

The magic in you was a sacrifice, and it was leverage. Like a small man throwing a bigger one over his shoulder- you needed some muscle, but the real secret was leverage. And the energy didn’t have to be your energy to work. The universe was indifferent to where the power came from. The demon-summoning terrorist attack Truth stopped in Siphios was an example. All those murdered people fueling the portal.

Truth watched a group of joggers go past, keeping fit. One-two-one-two, chatting about nothing as they ran through suburban streets in workout clothes worth more than Truth earned in six months when he was a kid.

What do you do with all that internal magic if there is no external magic to interact with? What do you do when there is no way to refill, naturally, the internal magic? Use external magic for both.

The death of humans triggered a release of energy that magic could interact with. Sacrifice on a grand scale to bring the rains and drive away floods. Humans breed rapidly under the right circumstances. Keep agriculture going, and you will soon have a surplus of lives. Kings and priests could spend the extra on useful projects like wars or domestic stability. Sacrificing a few to keep the masses content and the elite in comfort and power.

He skulked his way closer and closer to the base station for the research center. Not a very big building- it was there for cargo handling and people coming to and from the village. There was a security office attached to it for the PMC, and a workshop for the golems and other security devices that flooded the area around the village.

He could probably break into the workshop. It wouldn’t be too hard to assume a functional identity in there. Hell, if he had stayed in the PMC, he could imagine himself transferred here, protecting one of the researchers. And he would need some kind of assumed identity. The research station made the village look unprotected by comparison.

Birds perched all over the long, winding vine, flocking in vast swarms or swooping “randomly” about. All hunting for the very smallest bugs that tried to sneak their way in. Wards, complex, multilayered, and powerful, carefully coated the entirety of the flower. Beyond the wards were the endless enchantments that stabilized and maintained the whole structure. A dizzying multitude of systems, all working together.

He couldn’t grasp the entirety of it. He wasn’t even willing to guess what it all was for. The stem wasn’t holding up the flower, that much he could see. He had the vague image of the flower absorbing energy and transmitting it down the stem to be stored in underground roots until it was needed. But he had no real basis for thinking that.

As for more active, less discreet defenses than golems and the PMC? Oh yes, there were plenty of those. Banks of heavy needlers, explosive launchers, nozzles whose purposes he didn’t care to test, traceries of enchantments forming subtle, hair-raising networks, all combining to promise death to entire armies if they dared make an assault. A promise Truth absolutely believed would be fulfilled.

He would not be attempting a frontal assault. Or any kind of assault. Not if he could help it. He found a house with a view of the maintenance depot. His plan to break in and do a light stakeout was immediately derailed by the surveillance system on the house. Visually the same as other basic-tier recording talismans, Truth felt a sudden hard drain on his energy as he approached the back door.

After retreating and a more careful examination, he discovered that the recording talisman was actually bait. The whole back of the house was coated in counter infiltration and high-power surveillance tools. Truth thought he could be considered both experienced and careful, but had to admit, he never would have spotted them without Incisive and his blessings.

It was a dilemma. He needed more information. Surveillance was the lowest-risk solution. But the paranoid bastard that designed this house would make a point of plugging any and all gaps. Truth was privately certain that anyone setting foot into this house, on a whitelist or not, would soon regret their life. He had to assume that other houses with views of the station were likewise rigged. A tiny cost compared to the rest of the installation.

Truth felt incredibly stifled. He choked down the urge to do something rash. That was what the designer wanted, and he would be damned before he gave them the satisfaction.

Truth dithered for a few minutes but eventually concluded that the defenders had won this round. He retreated. He had some very poor ideas to experiment with, some junk food to eat, and then an early bedtime. Tomorrow was going to be another busy day.

He had barely reached the edge of the village before he remembered he also had to check out his escape routes, not just from the village but the whole damn stretch of mountains it was in. Swearing silently, he got to work.

Truth awoke, feeling uncharacteristically sorry for himself. His snacks had run out, the opposition was alarmingly competent, he missed Etenesh and Jember, the ground was uncomfortable to sleep on, and he was pretty sure he smelled. Also, nobody likes digging a hole and taking a crap in it. It’s just not a good time. He did feel damn smart to have bought toilet paper.

Had he stolen it? He couldn’t remember. Not really important. Having hosted his pity party for as long as he would tolerate, Truth started the business of the day. He spent a few hours working on his insane idea, scouted around some more, and then spent a few more hours on the borderline suicidal scheme.

After a hearty lunch of water from a mountain stream, he set off. He ran fast, well outside the village security perimeter. It felt wonderful to finally stretch and move like he knew he could, even with the heavy needler strapped to his back.

Truth made his way to the opposite side of the village from where he had his cache and started his infiltration. He hadn’t scouted this area as much, so it was slow going. He chose to think of it as a dual-purpose activity. Patience was a key virtue, one supported by a positive mindset. He kept at it, just to the point where he could make out the flower holding the research institute. Carefully, he climbed a tree and got a better view.

Using the tree as a brace, he popped up the magnifying sight on the talisman and found a comparatively empty patch of the underside of a petal. Comparative being the key word, as it was still crawling with wards and more esoteric enchantments whose purpose he didn’t care to guess.

He put the distance at about five kilometers. Given the size of the target, precision was more or less irrelevant. He lay a careful series of spells on the needle. First Graeme’s Arrow, then Incisive, then Tool to make sure everything went as perfectly as it could.

Graeme’s arrow was still a struggle to cast, it seemed to buck around in his mind, not willing to put up with being a temporary addition to his arsenal. Silly to say a spell “wanted” something, but these days he was less and less confident in “common sense.”

He gently activated the talisman, loosing the needle between the beats of his heart. Even for him, five kilometers was a long, long way to send a needle. Big target, though. That always helped. The needle whipped between the trees almost silently, a faint ripping noise marking its passage. Truth couldn’t silence it, but he could make it part the air smoothly. It raced across the air in an almost flat line, the whole point of shooting from the side of the mountain, and plinked off the wards. Truth was watching very closely, and as best he could tell, the needle just smooshed into the wards and dropped straight down.

Disappointing, if expected. Now was the important part- the reaction. One, two, three… As quickly and silently as he could, Truth shifted a kilometer away from his firing position. He dove into the prepared blind, keeping his eyes focused on the patch of wood he had just left. He was somewhere between twenty-nine and thirty when the birds came swarming in. Subtly be damned, apparently. They converged from all directions, some flying hard towards the point of origin, others hunting as they went.

Truth didn’t stir out of his blind for the rest of the day. The woods were being aggressively swept, and indeed, his blind was “confirmed empty” six times. Annoying but, again, expected. Of course they would log the impact, trace the direction of impact, measure the damage the impact caused, determine it was not natural, and order a search. It would have been the work of a fraction of a second for a genuine spirit of intellect. It was boring to wait so long, but it was necessary, so he did it.

Once the search died down, driven by a profound sense of malice over the exhaustion the oppressively robust defenses of the research station had caused him to suffer the last few days, he returned to precisely the same spot on precisely the same tree and lined up the heavy needler at precisely the same spot he shot at before. This time, however, he loaded in one of his test needles. It took ages to make, but it was the point of all this. It would be nice to get it right on the first try. Breathe in, out, in, out, hold, wait for that double thump- loose.

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