An Unborn Hero

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For viewing fast-flowing mana, [Soul's Eye] advances to level 15.

The hero stewed in her blastocyst, watching all her mother's mana being sucked away around her. Some was being sucked from her, too. She could see it; a slightly different colour to her mother's. It was not a pleasant feeling.

With her two new sub-skills acting on top of the mana drain resistance she already had from the [Survivor of Zarklaxxos, the Arcane Infernal] achievement, she risked a short journey from her ball of cells, performing a couple of laps of the womb before dropping back into her home.

"Urk. That was uncomfortable as heck, but I could do it. I can still move around. Now, how do I save Mum from these kidnappers? I need to get that thing off her that's stealing her mana. But first, I need to find out what it is. And where it is. I've just had another couple of levels for [Soul's Eye]. Maybe that'll be enough. If not, I need more quick."

She forced her way outside, but the moment she left the aegis of her mother's body, the world was once again burning and pain.

"Argg!" she thought, bolting back for her safe haven, where she waited again until the burning sensation faded. "I have no pain receptors. I have no nerves. I have no brain! How can something hurt?!"

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For resisting efforts to tear out the mana processing regions of your soul, [Robust] advances to level 5.

"Okay. I wasn't actually expecting an answer, but I guess that'll do."

Frustrated, the hero made another attempt, this time exploring from the inside, carefully following the streams of mana. Moving close to the skin gave her enough light to orientate herself, and she found herself zipping down her mother's right arm, where the heavy, mana-draining cuffs soon became obvious.

"So, I'm dealing with magical handcuffs... Next question: how do I remove them?"

She zipped around them for a while, noting how mana was being ripped through her mother's flesh, but having no idea how to stop it. Her own drain was getting worse this close to the source, too, and she knew she wouldn't be able to hang around for long without things getting dangerous.

And then the hero's world lurched and sunk, and the limb in which she was hiding moved sideways, leaving the little hero's soul once again exposed as Kellela shifted in her seat.

"Argg!" was all she had time to think as she got sucked straight into the manacles.

She could have resisted. Yes, they were pulling on her, but only a part of her. She could have pulled away. Thankfully, she remembered the comment about tearing out part of her soul, and felt—perfectly correctly—that while having an arm torn off would be pretty bad, having a chunk of soul torn off would be worse.

Even unresisting, if not for the fact that her soul matched her body in size, the manacles wouldn't have been able to suck her in. It wasn't often someone a fraction of a millimetre in size learnt [Astral Projection].

"Argg!" she continued to think as the enchantments on the manacles tried to break her down into raw mana. Thankfully, they weren't designed to cope with suddenly sucking up an entire soul—a situation which the designers hadn't conceived of even in their wildest dreams—so they didn't succeed despite the hero's low skills. It continued to hurt like hell, though.

To the manacles themselves, the effect was similar to someone tossing a ball bearing into a perfectly fitted set of gears and cogs. Something gave the magical equivalent of a clunk. There was a quiet ping as runes started to flicker under the strain. There was a brief period of stillness as the universe tried to work out which part of the unfortunate mix of enchantment and soul was going to give, and then the entire thing exploded.

A stressed and battered heroic soul once again flew back to her ball of cells, not stopping to inspect the havoc she'd just caused.

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For surviving... whatever that was, [Robust] advances to level 6.

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Actually, you know what? Have a bonus level. And an achievement.

Achievement unlocked: I Broke The System, And All I Got Was This Lousy Achievement.

I Broke The System, And All I Got Was This Lousy Achievement (Epic)

You have... done something. Congratulations for doing something. Hopefully you know what you did, because we damn well don't. Have a 100% levelling bonus in exchange for not doing it again.

"Yeah, sounds fair," thought the hero groggily. "Perfectly happy to not do that again..."

Meanwhile, on the outside, six knights had drawn swords, all pointing at Kellela, who in turn was trying her best to stifle a scream. The knights wore armour. She did not, and hence now had some amount of steel embedded in her arms and back.

The [Royal Knight] took in her shocked expression and obvious pain, and the fact that none of his skills had detected any falsehoods, and made his decision.

"John, please fetch the duty healer. Kevin, please head to the temple district and see if the church of Zz has any exorcists available. I'm starting to suspect that poor Kellela here is haunted."

Back in the ministry of records, a [Junior Scribe] sighed as the newest light once again started blinking on the Recorder. He grabbed a sheet of notepaper and copied down the latest achievement, barely batting an eyelid at the name. After all, the sooner he got it copied down and sent up the chain of command, the sooner it became someone else's problem.

"That was nasty," commented the [Field Medic]. "You were lucky none of those fragments got through your vertebrae and into your spinal cord. As it is, your kidneys practically contained more metal than meat. I've done my best, but my skills couldn't fix you up completely. You are to take a full day of bed rest. Face down. And no heavy lifting or bending or twisting your back for a few more days after that."

"Thanks..." said Kellela, before gingerly turning back to the [Royal Knight], trying to keep her lower back perfectly still. "What's wrong with me?"

"That's what we hope to find out. I'm afraid that for security reasons, I'll need to insist you remain under watch and far from anything sensitive until your condition is understood, but I accept you have been an unwitting accomplice in recent events."

"Kellela!" came a shout from outside, and the five remaining knights drew their swords once more as Hayedalf barged his way into the interrogation room, thankfully holding his tongue on the question he really wanted to ask: why did you parade her through the streets like a criminal despite what you promised? Admitting that he was the one that sold her out was likely to do far more damage to his sex life than the hero's voyeurism. Instead, he went for the far blander, "What's going on?"

"That's what we hope to find out, and your timing is most fortuitous," said the [Royal Knight], signalling his squad to stand down. "Tell me, what sort of thing could cause mana-shackles to explode?"

"Explode? An overload, I suppose?"

"Not in this case. I may not be particularly mana sensitive, but even I could have felt the amount of mana required to overload them."

"I've never heard of anything else making them explode. Unless you, you know, blow them up externally."

"And yet our hard-working [Field Medic] has spent the past ten minutes plucking shards of steel out of your wife, and I am certain no-one set off a bomb in this room. Speculate."

"Uh... Maybe if someone produced a tiny mana construct with enough stability that the enchantments couldn't break it down? It would clog up the runic circuitry, and something would have to give. But no-one could make a stable construct that small."

The [Royal Knight] frowned behind his helmet, wishing he'd been right a few days ago about the [Chief Scribe] worrying over nothing. This was emphatically not nothing. "What about a really small mana-beast? Wouldn't they be inherently stable?"

"No chance. Something that small, the mana would be ripped right out of it. No way could it remain intact."

"What if it produced its own mana? We know Zarklaxxos is involved somehow."

"If someone has produced something with the power of Zarklaxxos at the size needed to infiltrate the enchantments of standard mana-shackles, then I suggest we get some the-end-is-nigh placards drawn out and go have a party in the streets."

The world missed out on the [Royal Knight]'s reaction to that suggestion on account of another head poking into the room.

"Sorry to disturb you, but you left a standing order to inform you about any new anomalous achievements."

"Oh joy. What is it this time?" He accepted the bit of paper with a sigh. "Yup, as expected, the coordinates are consistent with right here. And as for the achievement itself, it appears that we are all in good company in having no idea what just happened."

He slapped the paper onto the desk, where everyone craned forward to read it.

"If that was all you needed me for, I'll be getting back to my regular duties," said the [Field Medic], feeling a sudden urge to be elsewhere. The [Royal Knight] waved him off. "She's not to walk! When you're done here, make sure she's transported carefully," he advised in a final burst of professionalism before he fled the room.

"The heck?" asked Hayedalf rhetorically.

"Would you permit me to perform a status check?" asked the [Royal Knight] of Kellela.

"What? No!" exclaimed Hayedalf. "That's a massive invasion of privacy!"

"Shut up," snapped Kellela. "Go ahead, if it will help you figure out what's going on."

The [Royal Knight] concentrated, invoking his [Status Check] skill now that he'd obtained the required permission and reading through Kellela's achievements.

"As expected, you don't possess the two most recent achievements. Okay, let's restart. Up until now, we have been looking for a perpetrator. However, now we know that while Kellela is triggering scry wards and alarms wherever she goes and is leaving a trail of inexplicable achievements, she is not personally involved. Could the Zarklaxxos alarm have been due to the inexplicable scrying?"

"Yes," answered Hayedalf. "The wards in that room will fire if anyone tries to scry through them."

"Then my first suspicion would be that some foreign spy had tagged her in some way, and was using her or an item on her person as a scrying proxy, but that doesn't explain the achievements. Nothing explains the achievements other than a sapient lifeform hanging around her and earning them."

"Maybe she's pregnant," joked John. The [Royal Knight] shut him up with a glare.

"One of the achievements was [Early Bloomer I], confirming someone under six years of age is involved."

"It's only six years for humans. Other species vary depending on developmental speed."

"[First Skill], then. No-one takes more than a year to pick that one up."

"True. We are certainly dealing with something youthful for its species."

"Hence my suspicion that she is haunted, or otherwise parasitised by a conscious entity," said the [Royal Knight], looking at Kellela, who certainly looked haunted. No-one would blame her, given what she'd just been through. "She doesn't show any of the usual signs of a possession or hijacking, but I have no better explanation."

"Did someone say possession?" came a jovial voice as the door was shoved open yet again, revealing a slightly plump, balding man in black robes with a manic grin and eyes that never quite stayed still, flickering from one corner of the room to another. His overall appearance gave the impression of someone who had spent too long sniffing the holy incense.

"I did indeed. Please would you check over this mage for foreign influences?"

The [Exorcist] gave her an examination, invoking skill after skill, a look of confusion growing all the while.

"Well?" asked the [Royal Knight], growing impatient and knowing that Kellela really should be in bed.

"I... Err... She's not possessed by anything, but she's also not not possessed, if you get my meaning."

"I do not."

"Uh... It's like she has a tag-along, but it's supposed to be there, not any sort of invader. The closest thing I've seen to this was someone who was pregnant."

John radiated smugness from beneath his helmet.

Kevin smacked him over the back of the head, steel meeting steel with a loud clang.

Unnamed Human

Age: -9 months

Occupation: Hero (L)

Skills:

- Soul's Eye (U) (15/50)

>> Sense Vitality (U)

>> Sense Soul (R)

>> Sense Mana (U)

>> Sense Light (C)

- Astral Projection (U) (9/20)

>> Sure Navigation (U)

- Robust (C) (7/30)

>> Hardened Soul (R)

>> Secured Mana (U)

Achievements:

- Early Bloomer I (U)

- First Skill (C)

- Novice (C)

- Survivor of Zarklaxxos, the Arcane Infernal (R)

- I Broke The System, And All I Got Was This Lousy Achievement (E)