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Chapter 801 - Dead Man Walking
🕑 Added 2023-07-22 22:45:42 +0000 UTCEnjoy!
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“That’s to be expected.” Blaze looked up at the table, then back down at Serenity where he sat on the floor. “Let’s move a little ways down the hall, then I’ll check you over. I think you got all of it but with something like that you want to be really certain.”
Serenity grabbed his shed top and robe before they moved out; the created items would dissipate on their own within the next day or so. “So what is it? I think you got a good look at it?”
“Yeah.” Blaze’s tone was absolutely flat. “It was nasty, some variant of cursed fire that intended to linger and slowly change everything around it to be like itself. Even with your limited healing, you’d have fought it off eventually. Someone else, however? That would depend heavily on the person. Many would need outside aid.”
Blaze waved Serenity into a room. It was empty, but this time he didn’t ask Serenity to make a place to sit. He simply set a hand on Serenity’s shoulder and stayed standing throughout the process. When he finished, Blaze shook his head. “There are only aftereffects left. The fact that they’re taking this long says just how nasty it was.”
Serenity wasn’t quite ready to abandon the topic. “Is it only Gods that can lend out power long term over large distances?”
Blaze seemed to still then turn slowly towards Serenity. “It’s the most common. It takes some pretty serious effort for others to do it; generally it requires an item or a preset effect of some sort and is temporary.”
That lined up with what Serenity knew. “Boosting someone by several Tiers. Destructively, in a way where they can burn the power as an attack at the cost of their own life or perhaps simply crippling injury.” He couldn’t think of any way to do that without the power of a god. He didn’t even think that most gods could do it.
Which wasn’t to say that Serenity had never seen it done; he had. He’d simply never seen it done so stably. When he’d seen it done in the past, it was usually an item that was used and generally destroyed by the process; it temporarily added a lot of strength to someone by allowing their Skills to be overcharged. Items like that were rare, probably expensive, and generally harmful to the person who used the item, so it wasn’t seen that often. Most armies preferred to keep their soldiers fighting unless they absolutely had no other choice.
It was interesting that while the Voice was perfectly willing to hand out berserking-type Skills that would temporarily boost performance for a later cost, Serenity had never heard of a Skill that boosted Tier. There could be a number of different reasons for that, of course.
Blaze snorted. “You should have just run.”
“What?” Serenity hadn’t even considered running. It really hadn’t looked that dangerous until after he was hurt. Well, until after he noticed he wasn’t healing, really; the injuries themselves were nasty but not disabling as long as they were healed quickly. He’d also more than half hoped to be able to capture the man to get information; knowing where he came from would have been very useful.
Blaze shrugged. “He was a dead man walking if he ruptured his Tier advancement. That’s nasty; it takes a lot of skill to prevent death and often isn’t possible. For an artificially enhanced advancement, I can’t see recovery as possible.”
It figured that Blaze had seen the injury even if he didn’t know how to enhance someone’s Tier. It sometimes seemed like Blaze had seen everything, in his books if not in reality. “How long would it have taken? Could you have held him together long enough for him to talk?”
Blaze froze in thought, then answered the second question first. “No, probably not. Not if he didn’t want to be healed; if he was using power pulled from his advancement to attack it’s a good guess he wasn’t going to help me heal him. As for how long, I don’t know. Probably not long if he kept putting out a lot of what he burned you with, but if he could slow it down … it could be a while.”
Serenity nodded. “Sounds like I need to keep him from doing that in the first place next time. That might not be easy, I don’t think there was a physical movement required. What did I do to push him into it?”
Yes, he’d unmasked him as a summoner with a demon, but was that really enough to attack? Had he just been waiting for the best moment?
Blaze shrugged. “No point worrying about a next time, he’s dead and I don’t think you’ll be raising him from the dead.”
“It’s not him I’m worried about, it’s the next person. The Voice said there was some way to find the people working for whoever it is that wants to sink A’Atla. This almost has to be what it meant; if this was done to one person, why not others?” Serenity stopped in his tracks and turned around. “You’re brilliant, even if you’re wrong; we need to get back to the body.”
“What?” This time, it was Blaze that was clueless.
Serenity chuckled. “I am going to raise the body. We need information; he has information. Why wouldn’t I try to get it?”
Blaze seemed shocked. “You can do that? I thought … no, that can’t be right, there are undead species that can talk. Why did I think undead can’t talk?”
Serenity chuckled. “You’ve probably seen people who weren’t very skilled raise the undead. If you aren’t careful, they can be damaged by the process. Undeath Affinity is particularly likely to have that happen; it’s well suited to making many different types of undead but not good at maintaining what they were before.”
Blaze frowned but didn’t say anything. He didn’t seem upset, just thoughtful.
They walked mostly silently back to the site of the fight. When they got close, both Serenity and Blaze started seeing some off magical hot spots. It didn’t take long to determine that everywhere the black fire had sprayed, it had left behind fragments of itself. Blaze didn’t want to go anywhere near it, so he stayed outside the room.
Serenity decided to start with cleaning up the mess. The problem was twofold, really. He didn’t want to accidentally step in it; while he could heal any damage it caused, he’d rather not have to. The second and more important reason was that it might interfere with his spell to raise the dead summoner. Remnant Affinities usually didn’t, but Serenity didn’t want to count on that “usually” when the residue was as odd as the black fire.
Especially not if there was any chance it was deific; deific magic had a tendency to look like it broke the rules of reality, even though it really didn’t.
This was one of the rare times when Serenity almost wished he followed a god himself; one of the places where holy magic excelled because of its type and not just its quantity was in dealing with other gods’ magic. On the other hand, he was supposed to BE a deity, wasn’t he? This wasn’t a dungeon, but did that matter?
Probably. Gods were powerful but limited.
The easiest way to deal with remnant Affinities was to move them where they wouldn’t matter and let them degrade. It would usually work in time, but as far as Serenity was concerned, it wasn’t really dealing with them. It was, however, good enough in most cases so there really wasn’t much he could say against it.
He couldn’t trust it in this case.
The better solution was to actually remove the Affinity from the mana. It was impossible to completely get rid of an Affinity; that was the province of the natural world. It would be cleaned once it made its way to a ley line and entered a dungeon.
A dungeon. Why had he forgotten about that? Dungeons could cleanse mana. Serenity sighed to himself. If dungeons could do it, it only made sense that he could, too. He simply needed to figure out how.
Serenity pulled some mana out of his mana pool and sent it to the first small spattered spot he saw. He wanted to start small; small should be easier. At first, he used the techniques he already knew; they weren’t common at low tiers, mostly because they were very precise, but cleansing an area was very useful for both rituals and runework. There were other ways to do it, but Serenity liked the control granted by handling it himself.
The spot was tenacious, but Serenity was able to clean it up well enough for most purposes. While he could still see a slight stain, it was slight enough that he might well be willing to perform a ritual in the area, as long as it wasn’t something that would be adversely affected by a little extra fire. Truthfully, it was clean enough he was willing to raise the corpse. Unfortunately, it was only that spot, not the whole area.
So how did a dungeon do it? They’d take it in and use it for other things, wouldn’t they, eventually pushing it back out as raw mana into the ley lines. It was almost the opposite of what a mage did; not a formal controlled process but something natural to dungeons.
This wasn’t going to be any fun at all, was it?
Serenity moved over to the next spot. He’d try his first attempt at “the dungeon method” there, then compare the two. That way he’d know if there was an advantage to one or the other.
Serenity set his hand on the tiny spot of glowing blackness. It hurt, but instead of flinching away or trying to snuff it out as he’d done before, he tried to pull it into his mana pool. To take it over and make it his instead of trying to neutralize it.
It wasn’t comfortable, but the discomfort didn’t last long; the mana was met by an equal amount of his own Essence. When they met, they merged and Serenity knew he could do something with it. A monster; it had to be a monster. The first thing that came to mind was a slime; the pain was all too similar to the mild acid burns of a slime.
Moments later, Serenity was staring down at the smallest slime he’d ever seen. It was about the size of a pea and seemed incapable of movement, but it was definitely a tiny monster. Serenity stared down at it with the realization that he’d finally discovered why dungeons made monsters.
They had to.
It didn’t quite explain the dungeon he’d created on Tzintkra that didn’t make monsters, but that dungeon had been in an area where there really weren’t any people. On top of that, it wasn’t even on a ley line; it was a true aberration of a dungeon. Maybe the oddities were related.
If all it took was essence and the idea of a monster, Serenity could definitely manage to clear the rest of this area relatively easily. Serenity looked down at the first monster he’d summoned and carefully crushed it. He’d use something other than slimes; he didn’t want a fight, but slimes were simply annoying to deal with, especially if you had to clean them up afterwards.
Like a monster in a dungeon, the slime evaporated into nothingness soon after Serenity killed it. That was good; whatever he made, he wouldn’t have to clean it up after all.
Even so, Serenity decided that he’d go for wooden golems. They’d be straightforward to fight and that was all he wanted. Blaze would also be good against them, as long as it was old dry wood.
It wasn’t until after they’d cleared the area out that Serenity realized he’d missed a test: he should have seen if the golems would obey him. Dungeon monsters did sort of obey dungeons, didn’t they?
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Author's Note: Yes, if you want a giant stitched-together Frankenstein monster, you should probably use the Undeath Affinity if you have a choice. Skeletons are also generally easier with Undeath, at least if you aren’t starting with an already cleaned skeleton. Zombies vary highly; the ones that are just “undead that happened to have started to rot when they were raised” are probably Undeath (yes, that includes the brain-eating variety), but ones that are basically just flesh puppets that don’t continue to decay are usually Death Affinity.
Banshees and Wraiths and the like are often classed as undead, but most are actually not - they were never alive, they’re simply spirits of (usually) Death. Well, most of the time - there are exceptions. Ghosts are a difficult topic and one Serenity generally avoids. SOME of them are remnant souls…
Either Affinity can do all of these things, but one is better than the other for some of them. Of course, that requires you to have a choice; some people can, but others - like Serenity - don’t get that choice. I could go into how to get the Undeath Affinity, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?
Oh, and as for Serenity’s discovery? It’s a little more complicated than he thinks, but this is still a huge insight.
