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252 - Remnants [Sturmblitz]
🕑 Added 2023-06-16 21:02:12 +0000 UTCAfter a brief exchange with her opponent immediately preceding his death, Zefaris returned to them with a strange rolodex in hand.
“Let’s make camp. We’ll have to stay overnight,” she said.
Without a moment’s questioning, the four of them sprung into motion around Lydia and had a campsite ready within minutes. Jorfr sat by the fire, using a cast-iron pan to simmer cuts of pork from Arthal while Victor looked on, furrowing his brow as he struggled to remember a recipe from Koschei’s time. Strange roots and mushrooms from the nearby forest soon accompanied the meat, and some sort of blueberry and herb sauce bubbled away in a second, smaller pan.
Meanwhile, Zefaris cautiously pulled the rolodex from its case by its rings, and found that it was not paper or wood, but thin sheets of damascened metal with razor-sharp edges. More than merely sharp, in fact, the rolodex exuded an intense aura of sharpness… Yet Zefaris handled it without issue, running her fingers along the edges of its pages without being cut.
Zel peered at the rolodex, but found herself unable to keep her eyes on it. Lydia made the same attempt, and found herself instinctively pulling Vysaga partway from its sheath in defense from a nonexistent attack.
“It seems the scripture can be passed on master to student, through the bearer’s death, or if someone manages to overpower its aura…” Zefaris remarked, cautiously turning a page. She spent the next several hours poring over the text, while Zelsys inevitably took interest in Lydia’s swordsmanship.
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In Willowdale, deep in a subterranean chamber, a retired dragonslayer fog-walked through a solid wall to enter that place of respite. He had felt the severance of a life connected to one of his incense sticks, and instantly knew who it was when he saw which stick had gone out.
“Toza… I hope you fell in battle with a worthy heir, rather than rust away as you so feared you would.”
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Zefaris read, and read, and slowly came to understand the so-called Sword Phantom Scripture. At first, it seemed to be aimed exclusively at sword-specialist cultivators, thus making it useless to her, but this revealed itself to be merely its primary intended practitioners. The scripture explicitly declared itself to be suited for any weapon specialist who walks as one with death, mentioning “The Walking Way of the Eternal Soldier” by name. From her studies, she was well aware that this referred to the cultivation path which she had unknowingly stepped onto and which she now walked with full knowledge of its existence, though she found actual texts on the Walking Way to be woefully nonexistent.
Comparatively, the Sword Phantom Scripture was a godsend. It was all there, every last bit. She briefly considered leaving it be, as just as she got into the main body of it, it seemed to be some macabre method of enslaving the souls of the dead. The scripture, once again, proved this initial assumption wrong as its author went on for several paragraphs admonishing those who would seek to capture and enslave the actual souls of the dead. She found not a single moral argument against it - the scripture’s author solely focused on expressing the opinion that it was a waste of effort and an unnecessary danger to the practitioner. Actual enslaved souls were compared to swords that would try to cut the wielder’s neck at the first opportunity.
On and on the scripture went, alternating between stream-of-consciousness type writing as if the author were simply speaking to the reader, and somewhat more structured, mysticism-steeped specifics on the actual techniques and concepts at its core. Zefaris had developed some degree of skill in peering past the overly-mysticized writing styles in old manuals, and this one was still significantly more straightforward than most. The author complained about how other masters made their manuals unnecessarily obtuse, writing that a scripture ought to be no more or less abstract than it needs to be.
Slowly, piece by piece, the pieces fell into place. They were only a handful out of a thousand, true, but they fell into place nonetheless, and Zefaris understood.
She understood why Toza had come here, of all places, why he had spoken to her as he had, why he had bid her to read the scripture.
Zefaris stood from her seat, and beneath the starlit sky, she strode through the flower-blanketed battlefield.
Slowly she made her way to the peak of that hill, and there, she paid her respects to fallen comrades. She recognized only one or two among them from the small details of their surviving equipment, but they wore doppelsoldat badges to a man. She scaled the tallest part of the ruined fort, such that she could look out over the whole of the battlefield. A blazing-white ray flashed forth from the Philosopher’s Eye as she took to carving a great glyph whose scale she hadn’t attempted since Ubul’s Tomb. This time, it didn’t need a whole storm to power it just for a few seconds; all it needed was to be completed, and it would take effect.
Then, she would see them.
The restless remnants of those who had died with powerful will to continue fighting.
Not truly restless spirits, but mere Remnants, the echoes of a fallen warrior’s fighting spirit. Ripples of a soul long gone.
It took her the better part of half an hour to complete the Remnant Revealing Array, not for some preternatural complexity, but because she was translating someone else’s conception of the glyph into her own format and scaling it up by orders of magnitude on the spot. There was no guarantee it would work - if this battlefield wasn’t as rich in Remnants as Toza had insinuated, her great big glyph would just do nothing and she would just have to try again, smaller.
At first, when she completed carving out the perimeter, nothing seemed to happen. Then, one by one, she formed six man-sized spears of black ice, themselves laden with glyphs, and launched them to equidistant points around the perimeter.
Only then, with an absence of fanfare, the array simply took effect.
They all came into view, all at once. Remnants of the fallen’s will to fight.
