Slumrat Rising

The floating sky-lily was tilting over. Systems were exploding now or activating without reason. Mindlessly running. The defenses raked the village, shattering homes, shattering the streets. Shattering lives. Truth looked carefully, but it seemed the heavy needles weren’t coming anywhere near him. Small mercies.

Some people on the flower were trying to evacuate, but for some reason, the clouds of butterflies weren’t coming together like they should. They were just… swarms of insects with no notable load-bearing capability. The flying clouds were doing much better, but then, they weren’t a product of the research center’s magic. They were straight off a factory production line. Truth picked one that was out ahead of the others and lined up his shot.

Infiltration? Starbrite had prepared for that. Assault? The defenders wished you would try. Even dispelling magics or the anti-magic of the anti-theists was prepared for. Backups, redundancies, shunts, emergency preparedness drills, every reasonable precaution taken. At least, that was Truth’s assumption. So, he was deliberately unreasonable.

The enchanted needles were never going to drop the base. Not nearly enough power. Not remotely enough. But the base had plenty of power. He just needed to turn that power against itself. Use the bases’ own power to fuel the enchantments on the needles until the needles burnt out. Overwhelm all the backups and redundancies and shunts by creating faults everywhere, all at once. Force the different systems to compete for resources internally while things break at an accelerating rate.

Truth cast Obliteration on a needle and drilled it into the flying cloud. The driver sensibly wanted as much distance as they could manage from the randomly firing defenses of the base, so they were flying straight over the valley, a few hundred meters up. Whatever they tried to cast before they hit the ground didn’t appear to have worked. Or maybe it did, and he just lost sight of them. Didn’t really matter much. As long as they weren’t flying away.

He quickly picked off all the clouds he could see on the ground or in the air. It must have looked like steam blowing away to the frantically evacuating researchers. Six figures worth of smoke up in the air per cloud. As the flower tilted further and further to the side, it got harder and harder to cling on. Watching the clouds blow away into the night sky.

One bright spark figured they would try to fly. You didn’t see those spells too often. The spells rarely worked well. Bright Spark got up off the platform a ways. Truth got ready to pick them off so as to discourage other quick thinkers, but there was no need. It seemed the system targeting airborne threats was having a bad time. The swirling undead birds tore apart the “invader” before he could cause any harm.

The flower started to slowly spin counter-clockwise. Still tilting further and further up, but starting to roll now. This was not, in Truth’s opinion, a good thing, as it meant finger-long heavy needles and sprays of acid were now being distributed even more randomly. He was a way off from the station, but as his own, comparatively small, heavy needler proved, well within the effective range of the emplaced weapons. It was sliding downwards now too, the motion getting more wild as the spells holding it up came apart.

It was only at this moment that Truth considered what might happen when a giant flower packed so full of magical energy and enchantment that it could keep an entire research campus floating in the air crashed into the ground. Violence, explosions and death, yes, he had his fingers crossed for that. It’s just that he had maybe, just possibly, failed to fully appreciate the scope. For example, just how much energy it would take to keep something that size up in the air.

He grabbed the recording talisman and dove off the roof. The village was built on the side of a mountain, with bedrock a bare thirty centimeters under the surface. But his trainers in the Army had been adamant- if something was going “Boom,” any amount of being underground is better than being on the surface. He called the Tongue to his hand and started madly hacking away at the dirt. Between the sword and Incisive, he had a trench two meters long by two meters deep dug in seconds.

He got in just ahead of the boom.

There was a sudden pressure forcing him into the bedrock. A sort of high-pitched squeal that shifted almost instantly down into an infrasonic bass that vibrated his viscera. The bedrock shook for a second. Bits of the house he had been up on rained down on him, the jagged splinters bouncing off his hardened body. The inane thought- I hope the recording talisman is ok, popped into his head. He checked it briefly. Looked ok. Still recording. He felt lightheaded as he started to stand. Incisive SCREAMED, and Truth dropped flat on his belly.

Something he couldn’t describechanged in the air. Something primal, like bitter aconite on the tongue or the smell of rotting milk. Something in the snake brain, stretching down through your spine and telling you that there was nothing good here. Be a smart snake. Stay low. Steam started boiling up around him, the Blessing of the Brass Sea furiously resisting the changes polluting the world around him.

Truth tried to lay as flat as he could, but he could feel his energy pouring away, the Blessing drawing down his reserves fast as it struggled against the changes. He could feel himself fraying away, boiling away in that same steam. Something was wrong, something was wrong with him. Something was wrong with the world, and he couldn’t stop it couldn’t stop it couldn’t stop it, and it was happening, and there was nothing he could do-

In a fit of desperation, he tried casting Cup and Knife but couldn’t find a target. This wasn’t “sin” or “wounds” or demons or spirits, it was someone’s mistake changing the fabric of the world in ways he didn’t have words for. He flailed with it for a moment, imagining “cutting” away a little coffin-shaped box with him in it, isolated from all the madness around him. He felt something shifting around, like a nail pressing almost, but not quite, through a balloon.

There was quiet. The blessing lightly steamed for a few seconds longer, and then that stopped, too. Truth hyperventilated, trying to bring his emotions back under control. What… was all that? What the Hell just happened? How did that happen? What did he just cast? He could see the air twisting and blurring above him, the night air turning into oil sheens and soap bubble smears of color. Painting the surface of his little coffin. There was still a small drain on his energy, but it was manageable. Not like before.

What the hell was all that? He had expected the… reality warping or overwriting or whatever, devices… or whatever they were, to break. That made sense. But this? How does something explode into whatever this was? How long could it last? It couldn’t be permanent, could it?

Could it?

Even at Level Four, he could only last so long trapped in his little coffin in the grave he dug. He might have stopped most of the bleeding, but he wasn’t replacing his energy either. Sooner or later, he would have to rise again.

Truth tried to get a sense of what he had managed in his desperation. It was a little bubble of isolation. He had defined a little area and cut it off from… what, exactly? He couldn’t tell. Not light because he could see what was directly above his grave. Air? With how small the box was and how much he had been hyperventilating, he would have used up all the air by now, right? He didn’t know. He could feel the rock under him, feel the weight of his body, so he was not cut off from the earth or gravity. So, he could not be said to be cut away from “reality” or the world. Which meant that his original assumption, that this was some kind of reality-warping effect, was either wrong or incomplete.

He forced himself to breathe slowly, to calm his heart and work it through. Funny to think- that was the first time he had freaked out like that in a long time. He really couldn’t think back to when. It was the loss of control. The world was spinning out of order, and he spun right along with it, no longer in control of body or mind.

He smiled bitterly up into the night sky. He might say “okay” to a lot of things, but that was because he decided that it was, in fact, okay. Nobody got to decide for him. Not anymore.

He didn’t understand what Cup and Knife actually did. It took him weeks of practice, a vision of Botis, and daily tuition from an expert to achieve an initial mastery of Incisive. Screwing around with Cup and Knife a couple of times really wouldn’t do it.

Shame he blew up the base rather than infiltrating. He would bet they had a great library, and there were nothing but experts up there. A few minor problems with that plan, but hey, as long as he was dreaming.

It looked like the pollution outside the grave was clearing up. Whatever had happened, it wasn’t permanent. Reality was reasserting itself. A bit of blown-up whatever wasn’t going to overwrite the belief of even a disinterested God permanently. What would happen when he got out of his little coffin? He wasn’t in a rush to find out.

He let the spiritual pollution clear up a bit, then tentatively stuck a corner of his shirt up through the invisible lid of his coffin. It went through without resistance, though it very faintly steamed when he drew it back. Not yet, it seemed. He waited a few minutes longer and tried again. Nothing visibly steaming. No damage to the fabric.

He tested with the tip of his pinky, then his whole pinky. No problems. Nothing at all, actually. No resistance or tingle or warm feeling or any other indication that he had passed through some kind of barrier. Pinky was fine. Wasn’t even steaming. It seemed that whatever reality-bending things had been going on around the village had come to a firm stop.

He burst upward, smashing aside the few boards that had covered parts of his trench. He could smell fires- burning homes and metal and plastics. The house behind him wasn’t on fire. It was just gone. Shattered rubble. He didn’t see anyone moving on the street. He dropped back into the grave, grabbed the recording talisman, and tied it to his chest. The cosmic rays were hitting him now, getting passively absorbed by his body. Not enough to offset the drain from his blessings, but nearly. It seemed there weren’t many people left nor active surveillance. Just in case, he assumed an identity. Starbrite Security PMC, rushing to search through the wreckage for high-value survivors.

He moved swiftly through the ruined, rubble-lined streets. There weren’t as many fires as he expected. The blast seemed to have blown things too far apart for a big blaze to spread. He could see things and people thrashing in the wreckage. Not his problem. He kept moving, eyes on the broken flower. There were survivors, he could see. People smashing at the wreckage, trying to pull out those trapped underneath. High leveled, he assumed, and well warded. Or something.

He came up behind one- a fellow Level Four. Almost anywhere else, he would be an elite. A powerhouse, even if he had never trained in combat. Truth called the Tongue to hand and, with a swing, extinguished one of the finest minds in Jeon. He looked around the rest of the survivors, making sure the recording talisman was snugly in place. He might not cut off Starbrite’s path of retreat with this. But after tonight, it would be a lot narrower. He raised the blade again and got to work.

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