Blue Core

It was difficult to grasp the idea of creature the size of an entire continent, let alone one trying to attack. The impossibly vast creature, somewhere between a Leviathan and a winged snake, seemed to move with slow deliberation. But that was an illusion, because what was moving was so very big. There was no sound, since the fin-like appendage coming our way was moving faster than that. The atmosphere-blurred outline of the limb resolved itself into smooth skin, then the skin into ridges and whorls. The ridges and whorls turned into mountains and valleys, every one of them rivalling the greatest mountain peaks in the world, complete with icy peaks, waterfalls, and jungles, all coming at us faster than the sped of sound.

“Uhh, Ansae?” I knew she wasn’t idle, since I could see complicated magic spinning up around her, something that was beyond even her normal incomprehensible finesse, but the timing seemed a little bit tight. Shayma turned silver as she hardened her armor, density shooting up to insane levels, both magical and physical. I wasn’t sure if even dodging into the Phantasmal Realm would quite manage to avoid something like that, considering the soup of mana involved, but I needn’t have worried.

Ansae’s spellwork shot out, carrying us along with it. It was a bubble similar to Shayma’s domain, but rather than denying that the outside existed, it cut through it instead. It was similar to her teleportation step, but it was very clearly not so instant. In truth I wasn’t sure why she didn’t simply teleport past, but it would take a lot of distance to get out range of a continent-sized beast.

It seemed for a moment that she was punching through with brute force, but I realized after trying to track the crazily wheeling landscape, which was actually the skin of the thing, that Ansae hadn’t actually engaged with the gigalife at all. Her complicated spell had shot us just skimming along the enormous creature’s skin, or perhaps it should be called a crust, whipping along mountains and valleys at what certainly felt like relativistic velocity. However the spell worked, it absolutely ignored inertia, changing directions with dizzying frequency.

“So not that I’m complaining, but why this instead of just teleporting forward?”

“Trying to do anything outside your mana field is like trying to move in soup,” Shayma answered for her. “It’s unbelievably thick out there. I think there’s a Field in place. Over this whole area. But it’s thinner around these…” She struggled with the naming convention for the gigalife for a moment. “These things.”

“Oh damn, that’s a big Field.” It was also a reminder that I was nowhere near the power cap for dungeons. “Still, though. It’s Ansae!”

“Teleporting through a hundred miles of this would be no problem. But I can’t even sense the bottom, so it’s at least ten thousand miles away.” Ansae responded. “Teleporting into an area heavy in hostile mana that you can’t completely sense is sheer folly.”

“Fair point.” I was actually happy that it wasn’t a matter of power. I was completely relying on Ansae to be more powerful than anything we ran into, since while Shayma was fourth-tier there were still limits. Like continent-sized gigalife floating in an atmospheric chamber larger than most planets. I had my [Starlance] and some truly terrifying [Fields] but I was afraid of making direct contact with a huge dungeon and getting overwhelmed.

We zipped along the body of the immense, sinuous form before shooting back out into empty space. It started to turn after us, ponderously and deceptively quickly, but Ansae had firmed up the bubble surrounding us and could move faster than it could. I extended my own [Rejuvenation] Field out as far as possible, both to aid in replenishing Ansae’s mana and to help with the pressure of the foreign Field, and actually could feel the weirdly dense mana outside now that I was paying attention and actively pushing against it.

For that moment we actually had enough space to properly see the thing, and it made me very uneasy. Not the size or the impossible biology, but the fact that there were metal bands capping enormous jutting horns, and rings piercing fins and tendrils. They were worn, the patterning on the decorations faded from time and erosion, but they were very clearly not natural. Either the enormous beasts had been some race’s mounts and lavished inconceivable amounts of resources on decorating them or, far more likely, they’d been sapient themselves. Something like the Scalemind by the way of Leviathans, on their way to personhood.

At least until depletion happened. Whatever burgeoning intelligence they may have possessed had been erased, since everything there was clearly ancient and unmaintained. The creatures were just as mindless as all the other blightbeasts. Some of the huge shapes, mere smudges in the distant haze of atmosphere, might have been remnants of their first attempts at civilization but it was impossible to tell. Not that we had time to properly explore.

“Are you two seeing that?” I might not have been able to sense like they could, but I also didn’t need to focus on anything other than keeping my Fields up, so I had plenty of time to rubberneck. “I can’t imagine what those things would be if they ended up with full Status.”

“Maybe like air Leviathans,” Shayma suggested. “By the time they got out maybe they’d be smaller. This is too big.”

“Or maybe they’d be like, self-contained mana-rich planets, going out into space.” I couldn’t spend too much time considering it, because we were approaching another one of the beasts, or maybe the reverse. In a void that was just a blue haze lit by Field rather than by any source, it was really hard to have any real bearings.

The beast below us blinked, nictating membranes the size of countries sliding over an eye of unbelievable proportions, then it vanished behind a blur of lightning-shot black cloud. Bad enough that the gigalife could flatten mountains with a casual gesture, they could also cast spells. Oddly, despite the scale, it wasn’t really as potent as I’d expect from something so large. It was actually no more powerful than what The Hurricane had put together, though I had no idea whether that massive Field helped or hindered it.

“Right, I’ll stop being dead weight I guess.” I’d destroyed The Hurricane’s titular storm with a [Starlance], which was not something I would expect from a purely physical phenomenon, so it seemed to me that I could make history repeat itself. I had made another few [Contained Stars] as we descended, since the scale of everything we were dealing with sort of demanded it. Sure, Ansae could probably disperse the spell or something, but she had her hands – or rather, claws – full with inertialess movement. I pushed the seed-ship forward within our travel bubble and extended out some [Firmament] to shape the [Starlance] detonation.

Ansae was kind enough to alter her spell to accommodate me, though it might have been a necessity, because when I triggered the [Starlance] it probably would have torn through her spellwork and not just the incoming vortex. I hadn’t used a full [Starlance] all that often, and it was easy to forget exactly how ridiculously powerful it was. Shayma’s Sungun was a smaller version, true, but by being tamed it lost some of the wild ravening chaos that made it truly terrible.

I actually used [Reified Manastone] as a backing to the [Firmament]. My seed-ship was stationary, with no acceleration, Ansae’s inertialess spell shoving around space rather than us, so I could blatantly cheat with my immovable object and indestructible metal. Which was good, as otherwise my seed-ship would have been blown backward by the force of the explosion. A tremendous beam of blue-white fury reached out in front of us, shredding the storm back into its constituent parts and blowing apart the clouds in its wake, a visible shockwave racing outward and turning cloud into air.

As it faded I could see that it hadn’t stopped with the storm, blasting a massive hole into and even through the gigalife’s side. I hadn’t been expecting that, but even for something as big and powerful as the serpentine flying continents, being downrange of a supernova was unhealthy. It thrashed in pain, but surprisingly silently, having no jaws to speak of and being coated in magic that kept it from making sonic booms with every movement.

“I forgot what that was like,” Ansae remarked, angling us away from the injured gigalife. “Not much can actually compete with one of my Cataclysm-level spells, but a [Starlance] comes close.” It amused me that she had an actual class of spells meant for that level of destruction, but I supposed if I could eradicate continents I’d name those attacks too.

“Poor thing,” Shayma said, looking off at the injured, possibly dying gigalife. “I guess it was doomed the moment depletion happened.”

“Yes, whoever or whatever is responsible has a lot to answer for. Even though it’s not likely to be still around.” Ansae said darkly.

“Ugh. I hope it’s not, else we’re going to have to go check all the other Great Dungeons.” If we could get through this one, the others would be doable, but I couldn’t see anything good coming of doing so much damage to healthy Great Dungeons.

We moved through the massive inner chamber for the best part of an hour. I mostly focused on growing my filter net over the top of the exposed rift, only sparing enough attention to keep my mana pushed out past Ansae’s bubble. It seemed my mana still beat out the Great Dungeon’s mana for some reason, but it was hundreds of kilometers from one side of the breach to the other. Even when I was pushing, it took time to grow stone out that far.

It was really a testament to the enormity of the spatially-expanded Great Dungeon interior that the chamber was something like half a million kilometers in diameter, and still wasn’t at the center of the place. At least according to Ansae; the mana density below us was still greater, which meant we weren’t at the center of things. It also showed why the mage-king dungeon-bane weapons had never done more than kill the first few floors. All the mana flowed outward, rather than cycling like mine, and any amount of bane making it so deep into Great Dungeon was unlikely.

“Why even bother with a planet? What’s in here vastly outstrips what’s out there.” It was more an idle question, but one that Ansae had an answer for.

“What’s in here is controlled, structured,” Ansae said with conviction. “Outside the Great Dungeons may be smaller, but it is free.”

We didn’t see much more gigalife, as it apparently was clustered nearer to the top of the world-sized cavern, but there were big chunks of island or, for all I knew, gigalife corpses drifting here and there, though there was oddly not much in the way of weather. It was almost relaxing, at least up until something way up on the surface got my attention.

Twenty mage-kings sat in a richly-appointed room, with a slowly approaching view of the rift visible from the windows. Without the ever-present storm the rimwall set above the bare cliffs seemed useless, appearing to defend from without rather than within. They all looked various degrees of grim and stunned, seeing the transformation of the place they’d battled all their lives.

“What, exactly, is that?” One of them demanded, gesturing at the half-built latticework extending over a massive hole in the ground, limned with the fire of [Corona]. “And how did Blue do it?”

“More importantly, how do we do it?” Another conjured up a closer view of the scaffolding, where it was growing visibly. “If we had access to a dungeon like that…” He didn’t finish the sentence, just shaking his head.

“That is why you are there.” Rol Siw’s projection spoke, pulling their attention away from the sight. He wasn’t there in person, but his cold, emotionless face looked out over them. “Blue is toying with forces he cannot comprehend, waking a slumbering beast that we have been taking care of for centuries without issue. Until he started meddling.”

“But what about The Silver Woe? Isn’t that monstrosity around?”

“The Silver Woe has moved on.” Another one of the mage-kings waved at the sky, where the moon was no longer eclipsing the sun and so not visible. “Besides, even The Silver Woe would not be immune to depletion. It’s not a Controller nor a monster. I don’t imagine there will be any objection to re-establishing our containment.” There were a few skeptical looks, but nobody actually argued. It was true that it was very difficult to miss The Silver Woe’s presence, but a few hundred thousand miles of dungeon space was sufficient to make it seem like she wasn’t nearby.

“So are we attacking Blue?”

“We are taking back our fortresses. With sufficient dungeonbane weaponry we can drive him off and claim these fast-moving cores for ourselves.”

I’d heard enough. Part of me was boggled that the mage-kings still had not learned their lesson, but it wasn’t like they had many choices. Mostly they could choose whether they died immediately or later, since I wasn’t really feeling like offering them the same deal as Tor Kot had. He had actually cared about depletion and its effects on people, rather than just his own power.

“Ansae, I’m going to need you up top,” I said, as the very bottom of the vast chamber came into view. It was an ocean to rival all other oceans, and who knew how deep. “Mage-kings are making noises about trying to dungeonbane me until I leave so they can steal the new and improved cores. I mean, damn, what is their issue.”

“Even the most cowardly creature will snap and snarl when they are cornered. What choice do they have? It is attack or cower and wait for death.” Ansae didn’t sound sympathetic at all. “I’m sure you can manage to go deeper while I attend to the surface.”

“If nothing else I can Starlance my way through,” I assured her.

“Or I can just go dense,” Shayma suggested. “I doubt even that super-tough stone can stop me if I do that.”

“Then a portal, if you would be so kind?” Ansae let her travel spell vanish, turning to look at the seed-ship. I obliged, connecting the ship, however deep it was, with the fortress nearest to the floating islands. Ansae’s aura enfolded the portal as she stepped through, frankly doing most of the work considering the energies involved now that she was Purified, and she took to the skies.

I could only keep half an eye on her because I had an ocean to consider. Fortunately water wasn’t really an issue for either of us, since my seed-ship was just a chunk of rock and Shayma had her Leviathan form. The only snag might be if there was something big in the depths. Which there probably was because everything in the gigalife chamber seemed built to an improbable scale, but it wasn’t like anything could threaten us so long as my [Starlance] material held out.

We plunged into the ocean and were immediately swarmed by some sort of horrifying tentacled shark things that had no ability to get past the metal of my seed-ship with its incidental flailing, let alone Shayma’s armor. Nevertheless, her Leviathan form flashed with [Corona] as she flash-vaporized the chaff along with quite a bit of seawater. I followed her down with brute force gravity drive, hoping we didn’t have another umpteen thousand miles of ocean to plow through.

At the same time, far above, Ansae flexed her will and halted the approach of the three flying islands toward the rift. Even if I’d seen far greater feats in the past few hours, I was still impressed when all those billions of tons simply froze in place. Her Presence blanketed the area, the islands groaning under the pressure of her glare.

“Mage-kings,” she said, her voice a deep rumble. “I call you to account.” Her words were heavy with import, and with a flicker they were all lined up in front of her rather than in their fortresses. A few of them tried to struggle, but however Ansae was holding them wasn’t disrupted by futile flailing. Under the blanket of her will they couldn’t even use their Skills, not that it would have done them any good.

“You come here flush with petty jealousy and wounded pride, to take that which others have labored for,” she continued ominously. “You took the charge of containing this rift upon yourselves, which was laudable. But now you to seek to reject the efforts of someone who can finally purge it? That compounds your crimes, not excuses them.”

I wasn’t entirely certain why she was monologuing at them, but there was a certain tenseness to the air that made me think it wasn’t just theatre. Ansae was a Power, and she’d alluded to having a duty of dispensing a certain brand of justice, so it might actually be a requirement. It was hard for me to tear my attention away and keep the seed-ship on course, and not just because I wanted to see it. There was something actually compelling about her words.

“One of you will live,” Ansae said ominously. “To carry a message to the others. Your attempts at holding the rift, however poor and misguided, have earned you one chance at respite. Forsake your cores, renounce all your powers fueled by depletion, and you may yet live. Attempt to hold even the smallest mote of it for yourself, and you shall surely perish.” She surveyed the hapless mage-kings, pointing at one, possibly the youngest of the lot.

“Go. Tell your fellows, ere The Silver Woe comes for them.” The one she was pointing at vanished instantly and she made a dismissive gesture at the rest of her victims. They puffed into dust. It looked effortless, but I could see her mana and stamina dip from the show, so I knew her power wasn’t actually infinite. Now that she was [Purified], though, they started rising again rapidly.

“That’s a little bit terrifying.”

“I am being merciful,” Ansae said with scorn. “They have but one chance to survive. Any who still cling to their ill-wrought power when we are done are doomed.” Her words still carried an odd sort of echo, her Power mode still in effect. I didn’t have any mind or soul that magic knew about, according to Ansae, so the force with which they resonated was something put into reality, not magic affecting me directly.

“Well, you didn’t miss anything down here. Just ocean, ocean, and more ocean.”

Not that Ansae’s little detour had taken much time. All the effort and terror of fighting the mage-kings in the early days was gone. Now they were the terrified ones.

“I’ll clean up here and return,” Ansae said, sparking another ball of plasma on the tip of a claw, aiming it forward and letting it multiply into a swarm. They dove into the islands to burn out anything that might still be dangerous to me, but it wouldn’t really matter even if they wrecked everything inside. It wasn’t like we could use anything the mage-kings made.

Not that I even needed their stuff anymore. Between the Chiuxatli and Tarnil and my insane resources I could get anything made that I wanted. Still, there was some reflex that felt a little disappointed by everything that was scoured away by Ansae’s flames. Except for the dungeonbane weapons, which I was absolutely not sad to see go.

Even in the short time it had taken Ansae to chastise the mage-kings, Shayma and I had gotten deep into the ocean and had to deal with an almost constant swarm of things coming in. Nothing was as powerful as the gigalife, and so it didn’t really stand any chance, but it was still annoying. Shayma used a combination of Fields and silver-clad Leviathan tentacles to clear things out as they swarmed, from shark-squids to piranha-eels to inky black octopi with eerily human eyes.

I was pretty sure that we could see the bottom, though, as there was a backdrop of darkness down in the depths. The Field that provided illumination and who knew what else was still present even in the water, so anything other than fuzzing from sheer distance was suspect. That surmise proved true just as Ansae finished relocating the islands so I could absorb them. She had simply physically grabbed them in her claws and flung all umpteen billion tons to bump up very precisely against the walls of the ring.

“Give me a minute,” I told Shayma, pausing at a silt-covered seafloor peppered with brine pools, and concentrated on absorbing the war cores. It was easier than it had ever been, my mana practically scorching its way through the island bulk before I converted the red core at the center of each.

Iniri and Cheya were getting a lot of documents and trifles from the places I’d taken, piles and piles of them in a vault underneath the Palace. It would take longer to go through them than it had to take the entire rimwall, though considering I was planning on wiping out the mage-kings entirely I didn’t know how useful any of it would be. There were probably implications for the populace Iniri’s appointees would be taking over, but that was exactly the kind of mess that I didn’t want to handle.

“Okay. I wonder if I can just [Starlance] through that stuff,” I speculated aloud while I pulled over another [Contained Star]. It felt maybe a little profligate to use so many but I had the resources to do so, and I’d rather Ansae use her magic to deal with stuff like gigalife rather than boring rocks.

“That sounds dangerous,” Shayma remarked through her Domain, shifting down to her normal form and clinging onto the back of the seed-ship. Her armor condensed to something that could almost tear through the metal coating of the seed-ship, as she used her domain to sweep away the surrounding water and give me a clear shot at the silt. “There, now it’ll be fine.”

Once again I grew out my immoveable, indestructible backstop for the [Starlance] and an annihilating stream of light, plasma, and mana blasted through the bottom of the ocean. Shayma’s Domain couldn’t stay intact around the beam and she had to collapse it down to more of a hemisphere, but it hardly mattered. Even after the water collapsed in and some of it turned to steam, Shayma’s armor kept her perfectly undisturbed and the seedship didn’t much care either. The [Firmament] and [Reified Manastone] between them kept us protected.

I was expecting the ocean to start pouring into the kilometer-wide hole, but it didn’t. When I dropped down it just bent weirdly and let us pass through into open space, forming a liquid ceiling above. It was an absolutely bizarre sight, but it kind of made sense. That was probably the same phenomenon that kept the oceans from flooding the Underneath and what my doors used to keep magics separated.

Bizarre or not, it meant it was much easier to make a portal back for Ansae so we could continue our descent. My [Starlance] had burned through some twenty kilometers of cave-riddled dungeon stone before breaking into another pocket on the other side, though one clearly smaller since I could actually see the far side. Ansae took one look at it, spotted some weirdly parachute-winged tangles of limbs reeling from the shockwave, and growled.

“So that’s where those went. I never was satisfied they were all dead.”

“Wait, what?”

“Wait, what?”

Shayma and I had the exact same reaction. Given how old Ansae was, it shouldn’t have been surprising there was something in here that linked back to something she knew about, but it was still bizarre.

“Two thousand years ago, they tried to absorb every mind on the planet,” Ansae relayed clinically. “Naturally I wasn’t going to let that happen, and most people don’t even know about the grand ritual I had to purge. I believe the Summerlands cover most of the area I erased.”

“How could they even do that?” Shayma looked down at the distant silhouettes, still large but only dragon-sized, not gigalife.

“Mind Affinity, just like Scalemind. Though the Scalemind seem fairly responsible with theirs. The Yvint saw everything that wasn’t them as a poor unenlightened animal to be taken and their mind overwritten.” Spellcraft flared around Ansae as we descended, her eyes cold and hard.

“Pleasant folks.” It was actually a little terrifying to consider it was even possible to hijack minds on a planet-wide basis, though on further consideration it probably wasn’t actually possible. Most people underestimated how big a world was, and considering all the varied magics and peoples I’d seen already, there would have been a lot of resistance to their attempt no matter how grand the ritual was. “But how’d they get here without, you know, dying of depletion?”

“Two thousand years ago, there was an area where depletion happened. I suppose it was here, though I’m not certain exactly what turned it from a single island to an archipelago. Back then, it was just another magical hazard. So maybe it wasn’t as deadly then? Or whatever process changes monsters to people happened in reverse.” Ansae flicked her tail dismissively. “It hardly matters. They’re blightbeasts now, and I’ll be glad to be finally rid of them.”

We fell and flew down into the cavern proper, headed toward yet another hole below and a big swath of burning foliage. The Yvint looked pretty terrible closer up, more like the weirdly proportioned deep-sea life than anything normal, with a tiny central body and overlong limbs. Maybe if they hadn’t been blightbeasts and if they’d looked more like what I considered normal life I would have felt a little bad about Ansae genociding them, but as it was, I was fine with it.

She didn’t use the hegemonizing plasma swarm, which was a bit of a surprise considering how effective it had seemed, but I didn’t know spellcraft. Besides which, she was still running a two-hundred-thousand mana deficit from her work with the mage-kings. It was refilling fairly rapidly, but her reserves weren’t actually unlimited. Instead a barely-visible ripple shot out toward the nearest Yvint blightbeast, and it went crashing into the conflagration below. Followed by the next nearest, then the next, all aiming for the same spot as if drawn by an invisible magnet.

At the same time, the fires that had been burning through scrub and trees intensified, going from ordinary flames to something intense and blue-white. It seemed oddly indirect, but maybe it was just a statement of her distaste. Or, given that she was reusing existing fire, it actually was an efficient spell and the drag was some distortion of their existing air Affinity.

Either way, we flitted through the cavern to the sight of creepy telepathic fliers smashing themselves into immolation. The next level was something completely different, more appropriate to the Underneath than the surface. It was chock full of crystals, red and purple and orange plants, and there were lakes on the ceiling as well as the floors. Nothing there was worth commenting on, but Shayma did snag some interesting samples from the surroundings on the way down.

In some ways it was a shame we couldn’t take our time. There was so much stuff inside the Great Dungeon that entire lifetimes could be spent wandering around and looking at it all. Which was true of any megastructure, really, and the Great Dungeons absolutely counted. As mind-bogglingly big as planets were, a single Great Dungeon was worth probably thousands.

It expanded my concept of what the gods really were. Clearly mana itself was a terribly impossible thing, flagrantly violating entropy and all associated laws of physics. Which was most of them. Impressive as it was, though, it had seemed mostly a local thing. The fact that I’d been able to make my Stellar Affinity showed it wasn’t even anywhere near to complete, even if it did probably qualify as omega-minus dimensional mastery.

The Great Dungeons were more like a Type II civilization, with artificial spaces exceeding natural ones by multiple orders of magnitude. There was clearly far more intent to the planet setup than I’d initially thought. Sure, I had known that the Great Dungeons were huge before, but actually seeing it made me fully appreciate the scale of things. Whoever had set things up really had thought big.

Not that such musing helped us or shed light on what we were doing. A malfunctioning megastructure was still malfunctioning, and still had to be dealt with. It only drove home how important it was that we did fix it, or at worst, destroy it. Unless I purged the mana in the whole dungeon, the amount of depletion was enough to saturate the planet several times over, and that would basically be the same as the end of the world.

Our plunge through the Great Dungeon continued, interrupted with occasional [Starlances] to open a new path and closing in on a million and a half kilometers down by my best estimates. The various Climates and caverns blurred by, none of them duplicating the planet-sized one but plenty of them larger than continents. Air Affinity was most in evidence, with a huge chunk of the blightbeast life flying, but also too large to fit into the passages between caverns. Terrifyingly, the blightbeast outpouring that we’d seen was the minority of stuff. Or, at least, the smaller stuff.

Far above, my efforts to cover up the rift opening became even more important, since now a lot of it could get out. Not the gigalife, thankfully, but floating eels and animate trees and magma-winged boulders all came pouring up the giant hole Ansae had punched into the Great Dungeon. I didn’t complain of it to her, since frankly bringing overwhelming force had seemed like a good idea at the time. Besides, we were still boring massive holes through the floors. When it came to that absurdly hard dungeon stone, there was no such thing as subtlety.

I still didn’t have the extensions I was growing outward finished, but with my fields I could project far enough that nothing terribly immense could squeeze through. Though it didn’t seem like things really wanted to. My non-depleted mana was like a siren call and they aimed right at me. Which wasn’t all that intelligent considering that [Corona] and [Hungering Dark] between them could destroy most everything in a matter of seconds.

It was the worst kind of intense, where there wasn’t anything particularly exciting going on but every tedious bit of concentration was necessary to do the job right. Shayma and Ansae were discussing Great Dungeons while I mostly was letting the seed-ship move forward on its own so I could keep growing my cap without overstretching and having a giant stone beam fall off and down into the hole. Again. I’d already made the mistake once and I was just glad we were so deep it’d be hours and hours before it could land on our heads.

“Wait.” Suddenly Ansae stopped our headlong dive, wings beating as she turned a full circle. I could feel her Presence stretch out even further than usual, the fiery crown appearing for a moment before she banished it. “We’ve reached mana equilibrium. The core must be nearby.”