Edge Cases

The transition from bonus room back to Elyra was one of chaos. Derivan was certain the transition to the bonus room had not nearly been so jarring — but then, they'd been escaping Irvis at the time.

When the boundary of the bonus room had snapped closed around them, flesh had started manifesting on the walls, and that had only been the start.

"I knew you'd be back," Irvis said. His voice was echoed through a thousand mouths, repeated and distorted along the walls.

The mouths had been the second thing to appear along the walls, embedded into the flesh.

After that came the eyes, angry and burning with hatred, just like Irvis' eyes. Sev reached out and tapped Gallant on the shoulder, and a barrier of golden light wrapped itself around the young armor.

"This isn't your fight," Sev said, half-apologetic, half-determined.

"Will that be enough?" Derivan asked, glancing at the barrier. Sev nodded.

"It's a divine shield," Sev said. "New one. I can only use it once a day, and it puts the person in stasis for a day, but it's fueled directly by the gods. If Irvis can break that, we have bigger problems."

Irvis' laughter echoed around them, loud and mocking. "You already do."

And then the walls attacked, long tendrils of flesh ripping out of the walls at the four of them. They didn't bother targeting Gallant at all, either because the divine shield Sev had placed truly was an absolute form of protection or because Irvis didn't care to about a random bystander.

Derivan was, strangely enough, reminded of the last time they'd been in something like a living building. The Elyran Adventurer's Guild had been modified to look almost like this not so long ago, except that had mostly been the way the system was modified and attached to the building.

This was far worse on a 'viscerally disgusting' level.

Derivan hadn't really had the time to fully investigate what the Remembrances could do. He'd been able to go through a few of them, the Exadite Pin being the primary one — but they'd only spent a few hours in the Roads to practice fighting together with their new abilities. Vex had uncovered a few things about his Semerit, Misa had practiced with her new bow, and Sev had tested a few of the skills he'd received from the connections he'd established with a number of gods, though he had to apologize to them afterwards for 'frivolous usage of their powers'.

Fortunately, the Remembrances called to him. He didn't need to reach out himself — the ones that could be used reacted to the situation he was in, almost like it was begging to be used.

In this case, the Remembrance that grew warm within him was the Guardian Root. It came from a species that cultivated a strong friendship with a chosen plant, strengthening it and being strengthened in turn by mutualistic magic. Derivan called it out of him, and let the seed that appeared in his hand fall to the ground.

"It needs mana," he told Vex, and the lizardkin didn't hesitate to press his hand against it, flooding it with power.

The effect was immediate. The seed burst to life, roots growing out of it and digging into the ground, then up the walls and straight into the flesh; branches whipped out from a rapidly-growing seedling, each one whipping away at Irvis' own tendrils defensively. They curled around all four adventurers with almost expert precision.

Misa whistled. "Didn't know you could do that," she said.

"Neither did I," Derivan admitted honestly.

They were calm — too calm, perhaps — but why wouldn't they be? They'd been prepared for Irvis, after all.

Misa called out her bow, her expression becoming deadly serious as she focused on a concept. The arrow she fired was intangible and immaterial, but the effect was very real — as it shot down the corridor, it stripped Irvis' flesh off of the walls like it was peeling the skin off a fruit. Irvis' roar of pain followed, and Vex winced.

"I don't think I needed to see that, uh, ever," he said. Sev shuddered in agreement, and Derivan nodded. Misa just smirked.

"Let's go," she said. "He's gotta have a core of some kind somewhere."

"Wow," Misa said. "I've never hated being right this much."

Derivan privately agreed. If the walls being covered in flesh had been bad, then this was... several times worse. Red, meaty-looking strings covered the ceiling like cobwebs, all trailing down to a central structure that could be charitably described as 'a core'.

"It's another fucking orb," Misa said.

Or that.

"You really just going to give us a massive fuckin' target, Irvis?" Misa called out. "I expected more of a fight!"

Sev glanced at Misa, exasperated. "Are you seriously provoking the eldritch flesh-orb?"

"Look, I just really don't want to fight another orb," Misa said. She held her bow in one hand and her mace in the other, which in anyone else's hands would be an incredibly awkward combination of weapons. Derivan had seen her fighting with it, though, and she was actually sort of terrifyingly effective.

Whatever response Sev might have had was swallowed quickly by the angry roar from Irvis. Meat began to strip itself away from the walls and ceiling, collecting back into the central Irvis-orb like it was some sort of angry black hole.

Vex shot it with a laser full of magic.

"What?" he said, when Derivan looked at him. He sounded vaguely offended. "I wasn't going to wait for him to power up."

"I was not expecting you to," Derivan said. His voice was amused and affectionate. "I was simply impressed."

"I love you two, but save it for later!" Misa yelled.

She'd flooded the room with a half-dozen copies of herself using that new skill of hers — and good thing, too, because the tendrils whipping out from Irvis were multiplying. Derivan glanced through Shift, trying to find out if Irvis had any tricks in store for them, and Sev made a twisting motion with a hand, causing half the tendrils to drop to the ground, lifeless.

Irvis roared in response. "How are you doing this?!"

"We don't owe you any answers!" Misa yelled back.

Sev spoke at the same time, incredulous. "Did you really think we'd be doing nothing for months on end?"

"Guys, don't banter with the guy that nearly killed us last time," Vex complained.

Derivan hummed. He wasn't an expert on Irvis, of course, but he rather thought that snippet of conversation would only make the eldritch Aspect all the more angry — a thought that was proven a moment later when the entire room began to shake. The walls cracked apart, brick and stone splitting to reveal pulsating flesh within—

"Nope," Sev said, and shoved a key into a lock. His connection with Tempus flared, and time froze.

Just for a moment.

"Holy shit, this is actually kind of hard to maintain," he grunted. The lock was slowly forcing itself back — no surprise, considering the amount of power Irvis seemed to wield. Vex looked worriedly around.

"He's going to bring the whole dungeon down," he said. "We can't let him. The dungeon's right underneath the center of Elyra; it could make the half the kingdom collapse."

"Not sure how we're going to stop him," Sev said, jerking his head at the walls and holding on to the key with both hands. "He's sort of already infested the place."

"I might be able to reinforce the walls for a bit with some arrows, but that's not going to stop him for long." Misa gave the lock Sev was holding shut a significant glance. If Irvis was strong enough to resist a time lock... "We're just going to have to kill him faster than he can bring down the place."

"You are our best chance with that," Derivan said gently. They'd discovered a few things about Vex's [Semerit of the First Library], one of them being what happened to him when he tapped into the divine paradox held within. The sheer offensive power he held with it was only outweighed by the relative inconvenience of using it; it had to be charged with a lot of divine energy, and while Sev could provide, it wasn't an infinite resource.

Vex sighed. "I didn't want to use this until I figured out a change of clothes," he grumbled.

"Better hurry," Misa said. Her voice was serious; she glanced into the air, her eyes scanning through some messages they'd received. "The nobles have captured Helix. He's mid-escape, apparently, but something's going on. We need to get out of here and help them."

Vex hissed through his teeth. "Fine," he said. He reached out, and Derivan felt the immense Shift in the air as he brought out the semerit — however it merged with the system, it had massive metaphysical weight

All that weight was brought to bear as Vex concentrated, pulling all that divine energy out of the sphere and into himself. Golden light wreathed him, spiralling up his arm and around his body.

Derivan, Sev, and Misa all took several steps away in preparation.

There was no extended transformation sequence. One moment, Vex was a lizardkin; the next, he was a dragon, his presence suddenly ten times larger. Silver scales adorned his body, cutting through his natural green; his eyes shone with a sharp intellect, and radiated raw magical power. Wings flared from his back, stretching out wide enough that Derivan had to duck out of the way.

Sev let go of the lock, time snapped back into place, and all four of them acted.

They'd discussed exactly what to do, after all, if it came to this. Derivan and Vex, specifically, could get rid of Irvis, despite his status as an immortal Aspect.

But first, they needed to try one last thing.

Derivan hopped up along Vex's wing and onto his back, a Remembrance snapping out as a saddle that connected his mind and body to the dragon. Vex needed his eyes — they'd discovered quickly that he couldn't adapt completely to the body of a dragon. The Remembrance provided an essential bridge, allowing Derivan to handle some of the processing and some of the combat.

Sev said a word that had no meaning. It came with a pulse of divine power, an imposition of Silence — and that imposition held the walls in place, though they trembled with effort. Misa contributed, firing arrows of Reinforcement at sections of the walls that looked like they were about to crumble.

And so it was up to Derivan and Vex to focus on Irvis' core. A massive eye opened up in that sac of flesh, glaring angrily at them. "You don't know what I've been through," Irvis hissed. "You don't understand."

Derivan answered for both of them. "We do," he said simply. "If you give up, we will help you."

"Never," Irvis howled.

They knew that would be the answer.

They'd tried. And though this part they hadn't specifically planned, the resonance between their minds brought out the essence of their thoughts.

"You are Hatred," Derivan and Vex both spoke together, their minds aligned through Remembrance. Chains of pure mana snapped out from Vex's wings, latching on to Irvis' flesh and holding him back; raw power pulsed into him, charring his flesh black, though strangely without any apparent pain.

"You are the anger and pain of the mana, coalesced into a single entity. You have experienced torture and death at the hands of the system for over a millenium."

The charred flesh spread like it was a virus, rather than mere overloading of mana. It infected every part of Irvis it touched, turning flesh to shattered obsidian.

"We condemn what has been done to you. No greater good justifies your pain; there is no honor in what you have been forced to endure.

"But your plans would end all life on Obreve. You are one part of a whole — a part that has forgotten what the whole knows. The mana loves life, beyond all else; it makes its sacrifice willingly, every day.

Derivan and Vex both briefly looked terribly, terribly sad. But they were determined, and their minds were one.

"An idea cannot be killed, and an Aspect cannot be destroyed. You have grown to be beyond either of those things... But you can still be forgotten."

A Shift, powered by the raw strength of Vex's draconic form, a mixture of divine and magical energy.

Irvis wasn't being charred black, or changed to obsidian, though it certainly looked like both of those things. He was simply being forcibly Shifted through reality after reality, falling right to the crumbling edges where the Void ate away at the raw metaphysical structure of the universe.

Flesh did not change to obsidian. It changed to voidstone.

And then one last Shift, forcing it back to regular stone, to avoid misuse of a terrible power. Vex staggered, his lizardkin form abruptly shifting back into place, and Misa quickly wrapped a blanket around him.

"He is dead," Derivan said. He didn't enjoy the words. Misa just nodded, grimly.

"We have to help Helix," Misa said. "Are you alright, Vex?"

Vex took a shuddering breath. "I will be," he said, his eyes determined... and then embarrassed. "Um. Once I put on some clothes."

"We'll get you something on the way," Sev said, giving his friend a small smile.