Broker
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Chapter 144
🕑 Added 2024-09-13 16:00:10 +0000 UTCThis wasn’t a trap, this wasn’t a space created by liberty’s cronies, this wasn’t some trick or nonsense or anything like that. This place was very, very real. What’s worse, Sonya knew exactly where she was. She hadn’t wanted to believe it for the first few minutes of wandering the endless halls, running at top speed. Yet the more she traveled and the stranger this place became to her eyes, the more she had to accept it.
I’m in the Backrooms, the place that Non-Euclidian travels through. Whatever happened, it happened while I was in the process of teleporting. No other explanation. A god damned coincidence.
She wasn’t even sure if it was possible to leave even if the cooldown on her disabled ability ended. That thought alone drove her to keep looking, to keep searching through the endless blank halls that changed every time she turned a corner. Sometimes they looked like the corridors of an office building, other times they were that eerie white-gray stone, and others they looked like something far older. Something ancient.
Ancient and empty. Not a soul, not a trace of anything living. She was alone here and with Ishtar silent and resting she didn’t even have anyone to bounce her ideas off of. So she ran, and ran, and ran, flying where she could. Every ounce of power put into speed to explore every inch she could traverse, searching for something more than the tireless madness of this place.
Tch.
Sonya clicked her tongue as she rounded another corner and found nothing but a seemingly endless hallway stretch out ahead of her. She hovered in the air for a moment, fuming, and glanced back over her shoulder. Do I double back? She swore and checked the clock on non-Euclidians reactivation. Only an hour had gone by since the power had been shorted out by whatever the hell kind of force had acted upon it. Like hell I’m staying here for twelve fucking hours. I need to get back.
She looked up at the ceiling and held her hand out, a steady beam of hardened light lancing out from her fingertips and crashing into the surface. She held it for several seconds, her eyebrows furrowed in concentration before she released it and dropped her hand to her side. She spat on the ground. No damage whatsoever. Whatever this place was, it was resilient. It was also impossible. The angles, the shapes of the rooms, where the rooms led. None of them made any sort of rational sense. She could walk into one room, turn a corner into another, and then again and find herself in a space that was entirely different from the one she’d started in.
And everything is just… white stone. If I wasn’t pressed for time I’d appreciate the post-modern aesthetic but seriously! I can barely make heads or tails of where I’m going.
She pressed her lips together, I could call up a few Legionnaires, send them out in different directions. But would I be able to get to them if they found an exit? She scratched her head. She’d heard of some pretty impressive abilities but this was far beyond that. The world around her was vast and painfully real and she got the sneaking suspicion that the backrooms were some kind of dungeon. Which also doesn’t make any sense, I didn’t enter a dungeon portal, I entered my portal.
She drew herself up and zipped down the new hallway, her eyes scanning her surroundings for anything that seemed even reasonably like an exit or a new sort of path. She was only half-way down when something else caught her attention, a feeling of something else moving in her immediate vicinity, and moving fast. She snarled and spun, throwing her hands out and forming a panel of light just in time for claws to snap out in her direction. The bladed limbs collided with her barrier and instead of stopping, pushed. She let out a gasp as the force of the collision sent her hurtling through the air before crashing into a wall.
“G-ah!” She gasped, pain racing up her spine. She created a berry in her mouth and quickly chewed as she scrambled to her feet. Her eyes snapped around, searching for the source of the attack but there was nothing there. What?
A thrill of sensation spiked in her mind and she threw herself forward, spinning and blocking with both arms as a pair of scythe-like limbs swept together, spindly arms extending out from within the white plaster-like wall. The surface of the wall rippled like water while something inside it shrieked in displeasure before retracting stick limbs ending in dozens of long thin blades. She panted and wiped her upper lip before examining her arms. Small cuts adorned her usually impervious skin.
Sonya swore, “I can’t be wasting my time here!” she shouted and lifted herself off the ground with her flight power before resuming her charge down the hallway. “What if something happens at the camp? They’ve got to be in deep shit by now.”
She felt another rush of movement and dove this time, sliding across the ground and rolling once before hopping to her feet, the claw-like limb of whatever it was had reached out of the ceiling this time and was already retreating. She threw her hand out and a chain of light attached itself to the creature's wrist. “Oh no you don’t!” she bellowed and pulled, yanking it and the rest of the monstrosity out of the wall. It slipped out and… kept slipping out. Soon a creature so large it barely fit in the hallway was crammed in there with her.
It had long, spindly legs and a tube-shaped body that was about as long as a man was tall. The legs were so grotesquely long that they bent at several segments as it struggled to right itself in a space that was too small for its limbs. Its forearms were those same bladed hands while its face was nothing more than a lamprey head, rows of razor sharp teeth in rings. Her lips curled back in disgust. Definitely not some kind of ability. Is this really a dungeon? This place just doesn’t feel like a dungeon. It’s like a real place. Can they be one and the same?
“Anyway,” she rumbled, setting aside the existential confusion this place was causing and pointed her finger at the creature, “Now that I can see you…”
It coiled its limbs just as she gestured at it, the folding segments making its body small enough to get into some modicum of a standing position. It let out a shriek of rage just as she released a narrow ray of light, the beam puncturing it from mouth to end. For good measure she created a dozen blades around it as well, clenching her fist and carving it to pieces. The meaty chunks landed on the ground in a stinking pile as black ichor spilled out around it. She wrinkled her nose at the remains and turned away, gotta keep moving. Hang on guys.
Another half-hour went by without any good fortune, she was attacked twice more by creatures much like the first before she finally stumbled upon something new. An archway that led into an open space filled with, for lack of a better word to her mind, junk. Old wooden tables and chairs were scattered about everywhere and chunks of wood were piled up in corners. There were a few bits of stone furniture as well but it looked like it was made of something that had been dug up rather than out of the same material the place was made from.
She counted the furniture, “Some kind of dining hall?” she said aloud, walking inside. She rubbed her neck as she looked around, “Dammit Ishtar, would you wake up already?” she grumbled only to get that same cavernous silence in response.
She sighed and marched over to one side of the room, lifting up one of the tables and peeking at the wood. Her senses and cybernetic brain told her that the wood had to be ancient but somehow it was still intact, if not completely unweathered. She sniffed and tasted the air. No humidity at all, no wind, nothing. I suppose it makes sense that this stuff would take forever to decay. More importantly, the wood was pine. Genuine pine wood. Not some strange alien species of tree.
Someone’s been here before? Who? She shook her head, Stop getting distracted.
She walked past the table and searched for something, anything else to give her an idea of how to get out of here. She needed a route to take. She searched the piles of wood and bits of stone furniture until she stumbled upon the sole piece of metal present besides the nails that held the tables and chairs together. It was a disk, smooth as a pearl and perfectly round. It was just an inch or so smaller than a compact disk. She turned it over in her hand and tried to examine it with her senses but got nothing out of it save for a familiar feeling.
“It’s receptive to mana,” Sonya said thoughtfully and frowned, “Great, I’m talking to myself again,” she tilted her head up, “Ishtar I could really use some company here!”
Still nothing, damn it, she thought, scratching her head and turning the disk over. There was no way of knowing what the thing did, it could be a bomb for all she knew. On the flip side it could just as easily be some manner of clue to help her navigate this maddening place. She’d been flying at breakneck speeds for almost two hours now and she was growing tired of the maze. She needed to take drastic measures if she was going to get back before things grew any worse. She steeled herself, Nothin’ to lose, everything to gain.
Using magic tools wasn’t difficult, she’d used plenty in her past life and had a few eclectic items she’d acquired from a small selection of dungeons either she or the ASTA guild had conquered. One in particular was a doll from a cavern filled with goblins. The doll was capable of creating a temporary illusion of oneself that would move freely in one direction while rendering the user invisible and allowing them to move elsewhere. The illusion was simple and could break down easily, but even seconds could save a life. It was a shame it would only respond to mana once a week otherwise she’d keep it on her person more often.
Also it’s kind of ugly and hard to hide, she thought with mild irritation.
Regardless, she held out the disk and concentrated. The most basic instinct of using ones abilities was the innate knack for drawing mana into the body to supplement the use of ones powers. Normally it was just a matter of using ones ability and the draw would happen naturally, acting on one’s stamina. It was involuntary. The trick to using an object like this was to, essentially, breathe manually. It wasn’t the same as Chunhua or Lillian’s cultivation methods where they could pull it in, store it, and convert it into growing power though. That required a deeper framework and an innate ability as far as she was aware.
Draw it in, push it out, she thought as she felt mana move through her body like an odd tingling through her muscles. It exited her fingers and the sensation faded. For a moment, nothing happened. Hmm? Oh come on- The disk flashed, light rising from its surface in a narrow disk of its own before slowly parting at one side. The ribbon that formed slowly shrank until it was the width of her finger, pointing back towards the door she’d entered through.
“Aha!” She laughed, “A compass! Woo! Go Sonya!” she shouted, throwing a fist into the air. She stopped half-way through her celebration and sobered herself.
If I have time to be joking around, I have time to be moving, she grumbled as she made her way to the door. She hurried out and checked the light hovering over the disk again, it had clearly moved to point in a new direction. I wonder where it’s taking me.
She kicked off the ground and pulled herself into the air, levitating once more before launching down the hallway with renewed vigor. Every thought in her head was focused on the camp, on getting back, on doing anything she could to throw a wrench into what Liberty had come up with. Her immediate instinct was to just show up and start blasting things, but she knew better. If she suddenly showed up in full regalia that would raise a lot of questions. It wasn’t like the location of the camp was a big secret anymore, but why would someone like Ishtar bother to get involved?
Just to interfere with Liberty? She shook her head, No, if I need to come up with a logical explanation for her to be there then it’s better that Ishtar remains in the background, she tried to think rationally even as tiny moments of panic kept worming their way into the back of her mind. What if her people are too much to handle for them? What if Chunhua holds back too much, what if- she grit her teeth, her heart pounding even faster than before. I am never letting myself get in this kind of shit situation again! She promised herself as she accelerated down the latest hallway.
The hallways wound and twisted, she passed more strange rooms that she ignored in favor of expediency. She needed to follow this arrow to its destination and make new plans from there. She didn’t know when whatever Liberty was scheming would take place but the longer she spent in here the less time she would be with the others and offering what aid she could. She needed to move, faster, faster!
She was like a streak of form rather than a person as she darted around one corner after another, sometimes quite literally smashing through one of the spindly monsters that appeared to attempt to entrap her. She ignored them, solely focused on her destination. Come on, come on come on come on! She thought, trying harder and harder to quell the rising panic. Give me something! She furiously pushed harder, wishing she could turn into a streak of light like Marta, wishing she could teleport, wishing there was some way she could-
She paused.
There. She felt it but she couldn’t believe it for a moment. She needed to be sure. She darted around the latest in a thousand corners. Up a set of stairs and panning to the right. The strange hall opened into another passage. She slid to a stop, catching her breath and waited to feel that sensation one more time. Her hair shifted a little, a fragment of movement, a breeze.
Wind.
Comments
Some BS Deity
That is kinda the point
Wintermelody
Thanks for the Chapter
Klakkers
Teleportation negation, such a specific meta ability
Matthew A Elliott
Bad situation all around.
Gemiae
Thanks for the chapter! God I hate Otis so much, and Axel is being put on the back foot
