NOVEL NEXT 123 - Shattering the Glass Ceiling In a Somewhat Metaphorical Way
"I dreamed I was getting screamed at. By a voice from beyond the sky," Mary said again, her voice shaky. She tried to sit up.
"Woah there," Rory said. "You've been through a lot. Why don't you rest until you're sure you can stand up?"
"Thank you for your consideration, heir Redmont."
Mary leaned back. She closed her eyes for a second, and Archmund grabbed her hand.
"Try to stay awake," he said. "At least for now. We went to so much trouble to wake you, it'd be a shame to do it again."
"If you insist, young master."
There was a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
"Has anyone ever told you you're shit at comforting people?" Beatrice said. "Let me handle this."
He looked at Mary, since he didn't think they got along, but she nodded slightly.
"I'll… just let you get your bearings, then," Archmund said. He walked to the other side of the room.
Gelias joined him.
"Granavale," Gelias said, "that's quite some power you're showing. Forget about weeks or months — you're on the verge of Second Awakening now. Just what were you doing in the past ten hours?"
Making monsters cannibalize themselves, really. But… this was quite the surprise. Second Awakening was supposed to be an achievement. Attaining it while fucking around truly proved the brilliant potential of just doing things.
"Then why haven't I reached it?"
"There's something you haven't realized," Gelias said. "At the Second Awakening, you gain the power to break your Skills down. To do so, you must know them by heart, and know what you're doing."
"I got a Skill at a crucial moment. Wouldn't that mean I'm even farther from understanding them well enough to break down?"
Gelias shook his head. "Not quite. As far as I know, the two are associated, but… I'm hardly an expert on this. You know the order of the second and third Awakenings flips every few hundred years or so? Its like they're not actually linear but more parallel, but you need both to get to Fourth Awakening."
"Wow," Archmund said. "That's useful."
It was the first he'd heard of Fourth Awakening, that much was for sure.
He paused. "You're not going to tell me there's some deep and meaningful truth about myself and the nature of my power that I need to realize, are you?"
Gelias grimaced.
"You've got to be kidding me. That was a joke."
Gelias's grimace grew grimmer. "Sometimes the universe likes to follow stupid rules."
"I mean, yeah, it turns out that I like having Mary around. And all of you around. And if it wasn't for all of you Mary wouldn't be doing too well right now. So I guess this whole adventure has taught me to value other people."
"I don't think that's it," Gelias said. "You've been able to see the value in other people before. Otherwise you wouldn't have bothered recruiting soldiers for your honor guard."
He looked across the room. Mary gestured at Beatrice's frilly dress. Beatrice blushed, then cracked a smile.
"You're not going to convince anyone that you thought other people were worthless before this whole adventure," Gelias said. "Whatever revelation is keeping you from unlocking your Second Awakening will be more subtle than that."
"Isn't it different?"
Gelias frowned. "Is it? Do you think there's a noble alive who doesn't see the use of fielding an army?"
Maybe Gelias had opened up to him, because this was less cryptic than he'd remembered. It was actually kind of pleasant.
But it was different.
"Thank you, Gelias. You've given me a lot to think about."
"What's the plan?" Rory said when Archmund slumped back in the big chair behind the desk.
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"You're still deferring to me?"
"It's not like we were doing that much better," Beatrice said. "Plus, you spent time linked in with this place. So… if anyone can sense something wrong, it's you."
"Mary, how are you feeling?"
Mary pushed herself to her feet. "Right as rain. I think I'll be more than able to walk."
"We might have to fight our way back out of here," Archmund said. He wasn't sure he was up for it. He'd sort of assumed that when he got back here and broke the seals preserving Mary, he'd get the bulk of the power he'd invested in protecting her back. But that wasn't the case. It was gone, lost, returned to the Dungeon.
He could feel it at the edge of his soul, tempting him, calling to him. He could almost reach out and embrace it once more and become strong.
But he wasn't going to. Strength without self-determination and self-mastery wasn't worth it. It was an absolute last resort.
"It's just odd," Archmund said. "It just feels like it's been too easy. At the end of a Dungeon you'd expect a fight or something. A boss battle."
His friends shared a dubious look that he didn't miss.
"Are you sure that wasn't you?" Mary said.
The idea that he'd been the end boss of the second tier of the Dungeon. A most dubious possibility.
It didn't feel right. Granted, "feel" was an awfully nebulous guideline, but the fact of the matter was that this had been far too easy for all of them entirely. This wasn't over. Mary's nightmare could have been just that, but Archmund didn't want to discount it.
"That would be easier," Archmund said. "I guess we can plan to leave. Do we have enough power to fight our way out, or to fight against something strong?"
"The path we followed should be clear," Gelias said. "So we could make it back. We probably have a few more days before Monsters begin to respawn in mass."
Power. Status. Wealth. He'd been chasing these for as long as he'd remembered, and he'd finally been dumped into a world where attaining each was paramount to attaining all the others. He was, to his chagrin, still a small fish in a vast ocean. He had his knowledge of the old world, but he still had to study matters of charisma and psychology, of manners and moral divergences, of politics and strategy — a field where he had a distinct disadvantage compared to those who had lived and died here.
And yet…
And yet…
And yet…
These were the ingredients for a comfortable life, and chasing them would bring him comfort, but in neither this life or the last had they made him happy.
They'd just burned him out. Jaded, unwilling to achieve further, unwilling to continue upon the destined path. The beaches of Salamar felt ever more alluring.
He sighed and leaned back in his seat.
And he looked up. Not at the hanging stalactite skyscrapers of the world outside his window, but at his ceiling.
In all the hours of his management labors, he hadn't looked up — or perhaps he had and had forgotten, or perhaps he had put his head down and worked as hard as he was able. He'd stopped looking upwards and forwards, because a part of him had come to believe there was nothing more to look to. Oerhaps he had looked up and dismissed it as an illusion of the Dungeon, another perception trick that made no sense and meant nothing.
But now he looked, really looked, for the first time. With eyes of flesh and eyes of soul.
The ceiling was made of transparent crystal, or perhaps glass.
And beyond it was repugnant, amorphous darkness. A darkness that felt like it gazed at them malevolently, that rippled with a tearing urge — though there was a net of white about it, a crackling, rippling binding.
"Do you guys see that?" he said, his voice betraying him.
The darkness felt familiar. But he'd spent so long in this dark, how could it not?
They looked up. They grew still.
"What is that?" Beatrice asked in horror.
The darkness drew nearer. A twisted, cackling face, like the monopoly man from the board game monopoly, sneered down at them, reaching out its grubby avaricious hands.
That, apparently, had been where all his excess power had been going. When he forcefully amalgamated Gems together, some small fraction of power was wasted, burned up and sent elsewhere, not returned to the ecosystem of the Dungeon in a reasonable time. He'd thought it was held in reservoir because he'd assumed a form of conservation of energy had been in effect.
It seemed the reservoir had been above him all along.
Rory grabbed his staff and slammed it into the ceiling. The creature drew back — but it seemed amused, retreating less out of fear than amusement, like a little girl playing with action figures.
"Can your death rays pass through solid objects?" Rory asked.
Yes, yes it could. Infrared light passed through many transparent objects quite readily. Glass windows let sunlight and heat through. Some would get absorbed or lost, but so long as he didn't melt the crystal, the barrier would remain resolute.
Archmund let his Ruby of Energy float free and fired an Infrared Lance.
It pierced through the darkness, but as soon as it passed, the cloud of shadows knit back together as if nothing had happened at all.
"Maybe this is fine," Mary said.
"I understand commoners like you constantly live under the looming specter of death, but usually it's not so literal," Beatrice said, though she didn't do it meanly.
"Look, it's behind an impenetrable barrier. Archmund can shoot it, but all it can do is leer at us. It might take a while, but eventually he'll wear it down and he'll win!"
That didn't seem like such a bad idea. Archmund peppered the monster with rapid-fire Infrared Lances, swiveling his angle, searing tiny holes through the bulk of the darkness. Yet the shadows knit back together in the milliseconds between the firings of his lance, as if he'd never hurt it at all. It could take ages, eons, to make any meaningful dent.
"Maybe we should just get out of here," Archmund said.
No sooner had he said that did the leering face reappear. A dark claw-like hand slammed into the ceiling from the other side.
There was a cracking noise.
"Impenetrable?" Beatrice said, looking at Mary.
She blushed. "Have you ever known of Gem to break?"
Spiderweb cracks appeared on the top of the ceiling.
"At high levels of performance it's not uncommon, actually," Gelias said. "Which should indicate what we're dealing with."
"I don't think I want to be caught down here when all that darkness breaks through," Archmund said.
Privately, he was wondering if there was something metaphorical about all this. A "glass ceiling", in corporate slang, meant a systemic barrier that prevented certain people from rising to be the true bosses of an organization. It was hard to break from below, but as far as he was aware there wasn't much literature about your boss breaking it from above in order to kill you.
"Move!" Rory said, as the entity smashed a claw against the ceiling again, and the cracks spread throughout the whole. "Get into the corridor!"
The five of them ran for it, and slammed the half-broken door behind them just as the glass ceiling shattered and the darkness flowed down.