NOVEL NEXT 62. Archmage Aspirant
"Where are we?" Varni asked, eyes darting everywhere in something that would have been approaching panic in someone else. They seemed remarkably bored despite their frantic motions on him.
"My home." I spoke with a tongue that was like rough gravel in my mouth. I didn't blame him for being paranoid. The place was huge to accommodate all of my experiments, the crates full of venomous creatures I purchased from the Emporium and the vampires, and the venom farm. The price had been high to match. It simply didn't look like a place of residence for a single human being and her pets.
After saying that short sentence, I buckled as a fresh wave of regression ravaged my body. My cells screamed in violent rebellion as I fell to a knee. A groan of torment escaped me but I didn't care. It was only because of my Superego that I was even able to fight the regression. I repeated a mantra in my mind. A mental exercise Mitria showed me to trick myself as to delay potentially lethal regression. 'I am bound. Bound to the form of what I was. And in those bonds, I shall find freedom anew. Freedom to be whatever I wish to be.' I repeated it endlessly in my mind.
Agitjin rolled off the heap we had landed in and howled. That pierced through my haze of regression and brought me to the present. Fuck, I should have healed him when I had grabbed him. Bloodrage followed by the regression had turned me into an actual moron. The legs were shattered and bone punctured the skin in several places, and on top of that, Medea had dragged him through the air and then he fell on those very legs.
I was moving, barely keeping my own form together as I touched him to sever his spine. I didn't know his physical stats but people could go into shock with sufficient trauma and fixing his legs would hurt. Laying him on the floor, I began healing. His mouth opened almost silently and I leaned in closer to listen even as his bones began to snap back into place and new skin grew over it. He spoke again, now barely loudly enough for everyone to hear.
"Not that… I want to… shame you fo- for your proclivities b-but do I have to see your strung up pregnant boar?" His mouth twitched and I giggled despite myself, ignoring the fact that my ribcage undulated with it. Fahria snorted, even Varni chuckled. and then we ended up laughing out loud. It was not even that funny. That boar was just one of my attempts to combine the species of my two Swarm Generals and everyone other than Varni already knew that. It was not funny but the tension and the pain made us laugh anyways. We were all hurt, all tense, and a moment of relaxation was all it took to break the dam.
At some point, I had to grab a chair and sit down because I was too focused on keeping my organs functional to care for my legs. Even with my bone armor, it was that bad. Even with three separate pieces of me focusing on it, it was that bad.
"But seriously, thanks for fending off the metal guy. We wouldn't have managed to survive the other one if he was also fighting." Agitjin murmured. Wait, the other one? I went through my memories. There was no one else.
"Agitjin, what in the Unformed Chaos are you talking about?" A click, a gear shifted into place and I realized. No, I would have noticed that there was someone else who had hitched a ride with us. Whoever they were, they hadn't followed. Or had they? I looked at Vespia. Yep, the new host was certainly humanoid. I checked my notifications and there was a kill notification. Wow. I don't think my situational awareness has been this garbage in years. Judging from the meagre skills the host had and the relative youth of the somewhat butchered body, I had the feeling that they hadn't been a partner but more like something of a protege. A protege who probably had no business being involved beyond just observing, and only revealed themselves to save the man in iron. I remembered the scream of anger that he had made when we escaped. Maybe it was not just professional anymore.
'Please tell me that you at least left the equipment beh—' Vespia buzzed in affirmation. Good, I didn't want to imagine what would happen if the host had put trackers on them. We couldn't fight, not now.
'Mother!' Medea's voice rang out in my head. 'Send a small insect to the window and look. Don't come yourself.' I obliged and through shitty compound eyes, I saw the familiar green smog creeping through the sky. Even as the refineries slowed down, they still ran, burning through a rapidly dwindling supply of Aetherite. And against the familiar green, I saw a drifting whiff of grey with a hint of red. Iron. Iron dust.
He was looking for us. Looking for the killers of his successor.
Carefully pulling the blinds on the window, I relayed what I had seen.
"So what do we do now?" It was Varni who asked.
"We stay until morning. Agitjin and Anya are in no shape to fight, I'm locked out of my mana and missing a hand, and I am willing to wager that my residence is being watched." Fahria spoke, a familiar haughtiness creeping back into her voice. Right, that made sense. I couldn't remember if I had enough food for everyone. Someone should check that. I was still running a mental inventory of food when Fahria turned to me. "Anya, do you think you can handle yourself without going to the clinic for now?"
I nodded stiffly. I couldn't fight my way to Mitria's clinic so it was not a choice to begin with. Just a formalization of what both of us all already knew. Even worse, that meant that I had to somehow keep myself together until dawn. Somehow.
I closed my eyes and began the long and arduous process of reconstructing my mental image of my body. First I thought about the most basic structure, the skeleton. I thought about how bones had connections to each other and how they moved in relation to each other. Tibia and fibula, generally parallel to each other but always slightly flexible to facilitate movement. Stringy muscles, weaved together in a form that was not quite human but superior for the deviation. It was slow going because I was also focusing on keeping myself together in the here and now. Thankfully I could already feel it getting almost infinitesimally easier. Superego did see regression that was a danger to me as a problem to be fixed. Or I was delusional from the strain. As I focused, the world slipped away around me and I could feel the worst of the regressions slowing. Not stopping or reversing but slowing.
I jumped when a pot fell to the floor, loudly. Someone cursed. A look from one of my insects told me what was up. While Agitjin and I were resting, Varni and Fahria had made their way to the kitchen to prepare a meal. Now I would have expected the girl missing an arm to be the reason for the noise, or maybe the guy who had lost a colleague? Brother in Arms? Whatever Varni and Hufgir were to each other. But no, it was one of the more recent spider-scorpion hatchlings that had decided to find a warm place to nap.
Speaking of girls with missing arms, I needed to get my head back in the game. With a monumental effort, driven in no small part by annoyance at my sheer incompetence at the moment, I stood up and walked over to Fahria.
"Your arm. Sorry, but it will have to be a quick job." I held her other hand and I could sense her body, changing even now in ways that ran against my understanding of how a human body should be, not counting my own. Something almost avian about the bone structure, weird but not hard. Medea shrunk down and fetched several rats. Flesh quivered and trembled, rats melted into a fleshy goop and I winced when my control slipped. That never happened. My skill should be preventing that kind of mistake borne of distraction. Good to know that trying to rebuild a separate human while also manually holding my own body's pieces together was a limit.
Still, slowly, using the other intact arm as a reference, I began to rebuild her. The face and eyes were delicate work that I was not really in the headspace to attempt but an arm? That was doable. It would just be extremely painful once I reconnected the nerves. And it was, judging from the hiss that escaped the woman now almost two feet taller than me.
"Thanks." She said when I was done. A beat. Uncharacteristic hesitation. She leaned in closer, breath hotter than it should be. Hotter than any human's should be. I ignored the dozens of ways my skill told me I could kill her. I ignored the images those thoughts led to. She spoke. "I'm sorry for what it is worth. I didn't expect any of my cousins to have had assassins already waiting in the city." I nodded, not really capable of speaking without expending effort. I was, however, struck with how relatively unbothered she seemed to be about the fact that she was blind in one eye and half her face had been burned. Was she actually nonchalant or if it was a front for burning hatred was not something I could guess. She nodded back, expression stiff.
I sat down heavily, once again drifting as Medea watched Fahria staring at the bone construct covering me for a moment longer. Then she looked away. Agitjin eventually managed to force himself to his feet and joined the other two in the kitchen.
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Hours passed, and my breathing grew steadier. Hours passed and night fell. Hours passed and everyone else ate and went to sleep. Hours passed and I could finally stand again. Bone armor slipped away and I stumbled out of my cocoon. Still, a skin-thick layer of bone clung to me. Not for protection but for maintaining shape. It was not perfect but my mind was hardier now, more capable of forcing itself into desired shapes like hammers unto softened metal. I looked at my housemates for the night. Agitjin was awake, idly playing with mana in some exercise too complex for my skill to observe. Using Medea's low-light vision, I sat down and began to draw.
Mistakes, I had made mistakes. So many mistakes. The first was that I had given up the ability to take flight without breaking down into the cancer-bugs. My mass had been too much and Medea's Aviation didn't do anything on something that already lacked the physical capabilities to fly. Hollow bones, thin chitin, or large wings required sacrifices. But in the process of reconstructing my own body, and lining it with subdermal bone plates, I had levelled up Anatomist and Fauna Archive, and with those levels came new knowledge. Knowledge that I should have had since it was already used by aircraft in my old world.
Earth had something called the square-cube law. How I knew the name of that law was something only Quiraion could answer. For any 3-dimensional object, its volume would increase faster than its surface area when it gets larger. It was a problem that, among other factors like air and food, limited how large living things could get. Anyways, that was easy enough to understand. It was also easy to understand that wings had limits and as things gained more mass, the wings had to be larger and stronger to compensate until eventually they stopped. That was what had happened with my Titan aspect. And might end up happening to Medea as it grew unless Aviation evolved to grant some kind of mana-powered flight. But that traded one problem for a different one, mana was not infinite and even if Medea could somehow have its mana regeneration outpace mana consumption, that still consumed mana that could have been used elsewhere.
But, and I can't believe I didn't think of it earlier, if Medea and Titan had an internal hollow chamber or ten with a gas lighter than air in them, and used wings for simple propulsion, then the increase in size would make them better at flying without sacrificing size or armor. I was stupid, so stupid. I just needed to figure out an organic way to produce helium or hydrogen.
I kept drawing while a part of me was castigating me for not using the knowledge I had of an entirely different world. Titan 2.0 looked positively angelic, if angels were misshapen giants with tails and too many limbs. Perhaps demonic was more apt. All that said, it was rather quick.
Medea was going to be more problematic and involved. Still, clutching the pencil tight, I designed a thing that didn't look anything like a spider-scorpion. The chitin exoskeleton was supported by an inner skeleton with a massive gap in the middle. I didn't need it to be so large as to provide all lift by itself, not yet, just offset the weight, and then let evolution take its course. If that, combined with the other idea I had, were not enough to break past the divine limiter, I didn't know what would be.
A vertical cross-section of Medea's new form was next. It would be profoundly wasteful to figure out the design while I was biomancing Medea. Better to do it now. It was impossible for me to sleep without risking catastrophic regression anyways. I briefly entertained the idea of making Medea look draconic but dismissed it, better not accidentally offend another dragon. I already had the one I was barely contending with. Add in that despite whatever the hell the Third Calamity's race was, she was a dragon in feat, her dragonhood earned, and I knew was watching me. No, better to not risk it at all. I didn't know how much influence she still had on the world but the gods had instituted a limiter on her spawn instead of driving them extinct and that said something.
My hand stilled, sensing motion. Medea didn't move but Selene fluttered silently and I saw Agitjin was awake. Slowly extracting himself from the covers he had provisioned, he carried himself outside of the room Fahria and Varni were in. He moved with purpose until he stood behind me. Mana crackling almost threateningly around him. Medea raised its stinger and Vespia moved unseen.
"Agitjin." I didn't look up. No point.
"Anya."
"Is there anything you want?"
"Just a question to satisfy my curiosity." Despite myself, I was aware of how dangerously close he was. And how dangerously outnumbered and outmatched he still was. He didn't know what horrors were hidden in this place, no one would ever know unless they attacked me.
"I won't promise any answers but ask away."
"Are you even a human?" Mana crackled dangerously, a threat that was only perceptible because he wanted it to be. An implicit threat that was functionally an explicit one.
"Yes. No. Kind of. My racial class factors expanded after auto-biomancy."
"That's not what I am asking." Despite myself, my eyes rolled.
"I know. No, I'm not a changeling." We hadn't had a changeling outbreak recorded in centuries. Changelings were another thing that didn't exactly correspond to what I was familiar with from my old world. The best way to explain them was that they were something akin to mental parasites that infected someone and slowly merged their skills together with that of their hosts before eventually taking those and infecting someone else. Standard procedure to eliminate on sight. No one wanted to see how strong they could get before hitting limits, if they had any. Hell, I was almost certain that whatever magic let the city create custom notifications also checked for that.
"You can't prove it." Uh uh? If someone could simply prove they were not a changeling, it wouldn't be a problem, would it? I told as much, voice calm, betraying none of the thoughts churning in my mind. Agitjin snarled, honest to Quiraion snarled.
"Cut out the bullshit! Anya, or whatever the fuck you are. I have known you, or at least I thought I did, for over half a year. No one, no human grows from barely being able to kill a slime to what you did yesterday in that time." I winced at the raised volume and Medea turned to look at the other two to see if they were stirring. Agitjin followed the motion with his eyes.
"Don't bother. They can't hear us." I hadn't even sensed him weaving his mana at all. He hadn't been able to do that before. And now I understood what the mana exercise had been about. Class mastery. He had to have been on the cusp of one. Almost as if waiting for me to realize it, blades of mana formed a cage around me, Medea, Vespia and even one of the hidden insects that lurked in my home. I couldn't tell the thickness but if I had to guess, it was probably just atoms thick at most. He had been preparing for this confrontation. He spoke again, in a lower voice. "I will not be responsible for teaching a skinstealer magic." Well, it was just helping me develop that one spell but I don't even know why the hell that was what I was thinking about and not that the man before me was armed, and more than a little hysterical based on a misunderstanding.
I had been hiding it so far but there is no hiding the fact that I had been growing far faster than any person should, even when focused on just one skill, my Godtouched nature boosted it to the point that it was affecting and pulling up other skills to be on par. Eventually I would run out of excuses. But did I want to reveal it so soon? Could I not reveal it? My growth was suspicious, even if Valdima smoothed things over. I didn't really have a choice.
"Look, Agitjin, I consider you a friend. One of the few ones I still have. I don't want to fight you but you are in my house and I promise you that regardless of whatever your new class is, I won't go quietly."
"Then convince me not to fight you."
"Fine. I just want you to know that if you reveal what I'm about to tell you to anyone at all, it would not matter if you helped me. It would not matter if you are a friend. I will defeat you and then not kill you. I'm sure you understand what it means when coming from a biomancer. Or you can dismiss the mana blades and go back to sleep and we will pretend this conversation never happened. Do you still want to know?" I levelled the full might of my evolved Intimidation and he almost looked like he would be quelled for a moment. More mana blades around me were answer enough. I continued. "I am not a changeling but you are right. I'm growing faster than any normal elvenoid should be able to. Far faster than what my stats and classes should allow for." I paused to take a breath and then the bone around my still healing face fell away and I turned to look him in the eye.
"I don't have any family or friends from before coming here. I didn't know things like history and common sense about the system. Almost like I am from somewhere else."
"Godtouched." Against the darkness, Agitjin's face made a series of expressions that I couldn't have guessed the emotions of in a lifetime. Still, I nodded. He twitched, mouth opening soundlessly and then closing. Then he snorted.
"Right. This is perfect. Just absolutely perfect. Forget becoming an [ARCHMAGE], I was destined to be the tutor to a fucking Godtouched. What next? Ooh, I know how this story goes. The Godtouched moves on to define a generation and everyone she meets either becomes one of her followers, a lover or fades to obscurity." I opened my mouth to interrupt but he raised a palm to cut me off.
"Don't bother denying it. I have read the histories. The Godtouched always find trouble, get caught up in it. They bring it. Like dragons that want to torch down cities. You move on and us mortals get left behind if not dead from collateral damage. Tell me, Miss Godtouched, has that already happened to you? Do you already find yourself outgrowing people like they were simply classes?" I wanted to say no but my mind jumped to the fact that Nerry, the girl in the place I first stayed at, the one who gave me all those books that allowed me to catch up and not look so obviously out of place, was not someone I had really been trying to maintain a friendship with, other than visiting once in months. I fully expected to never ever see Novas again once Kalist was out and I was strong enough to move on from New Delport either. And honestly I didn't even care. Something of that must have shown up on my face because he smiled, not a happy one.
"I will not reveal your secret but you can't hide it forever. But in any case, I'm not really interested in being a side note in the histories to be written. Goodbye, Anya. I wish you well on your quest to reunite the Catrian empire or whatever the hell your task is."
He went back to where the others were sleeping as the mana around me dissipated. The next morning, he had left at dawn, and later I learned from Tiamim that Agitjin had resigned. It would probably be a long time before I saw him again, if ever.