NOVEL NEXT 240. Lock In
Rhys dove down the hatch. Sid followed after him, in no particular rush. Beneath the ice, Rhys started dragging out items from his trash star—things that were sturdy and adamant, which emanated a desire to stand and survive. He piled them against one another, quickly building a shabby lean-to or hut.
He could run deeper into the ice and avoid the herd, hope that the depth of the ice would save him, but on two accounts, he refused. First, if the ice was going to collapse anywhere, it would collapse everywhere; being deeper into the ice just meant he had further to dig himself out later. Sure, what with static friction, physical integrity, and so on, it was less likely that the deep tunnels would collapse than the shallow ones, but fundamentally, this was akin to being in a mine during an earthquake; anything could collapse, so better to be near potential help than deep beneath, where nothing would help you. Second, this close to the surface was the best place to push his limits and further his techniques. If he went deep into the ice or tried fleeing the beasts laterally, he wouldn't have the opportunity to test himself the way he would here, at the edge, right under the rampaging beasts.
Sid watched him unblinkingly, with the kind of intense, silent focus Rhys most associated with drug addicts under the influence of some kind of powerful upper or hallucinogenic. He did his best to ignore the bug man, and didn't build defenses around Sid the way he built them around himself. Sid had already declared several times that he would be fine even if he got trampled, and furthermore, if Sid wanted to be protected, he could walk over to Rhys and stand within the confines of the trash hut Rhys was rapidly assembling. Since he didn't, Rhys could only assume he wasn't interested.
The trembling grew ever stronger. Rhys had lodged his trash items deep into the ice below, and equally supported them with mana, or else the makeshift hut would have collapsed from the shaking alone. He stepped into the hut, then slotted the final piece into place behind him.
There wasn't a lot of room in the hut. It was big enough to stand up in, but that was all. If Sid had wanted to join him, they would have had to get uncomfortably close, but the man didn't look concerned at all, even as tidbits of ice and snow started raining down on them and the floor and ceiling rocked frighteningly. He put his hands behind his back and gazed up, surveying the ice ceiling above them.
Rhys put Sid to the back of his mind. The thudding of the beasts' footsteps was so loud that it drowned out all else, as if the beasts were on top of them right this moment, though the shaking continued to intensify, indicating that they were still on their way. Touching his hand to the materials that made up his hut—a crossbeam, a broken pillar, a sturdy table leg, and so on, all of them strong materials that had once supported something important, and longed to once more take on that role. He called out to that urge within them: the desire to be strong, to support, to hold weight and take on a burden. The items responded, all singing together, instantly understanding one another's intent, because they all shared the same intent, at least as Rhys had defined it.
Compared to melding intents at lower tiers, it was almost shockingly easy to meld them now, but maybe that was exactly it. He'd grown, and his skills had grown. He wasn't the same person he'd been at Tier 1 or 2.
Still, activating and melding intent wasn't the hard part. The hard part came next. He gazed upward, through the glowing blue light of the items' intent at the roof above. It cracked and sagged, already giving way before the beasts even reached it. Before long, it would fall and strike the top of his hut, and that was when things really got started.
Louder and louder. The shaking grew stronger and stronger. Beside him, Sid continued to gaze up, until, abruptly, he met Rhys's gaze. "They're here."
Instantly, the ceiling collapsed. Chunks of snow and ice fell toward Rhys's hut and Sid's head. Rhys narrowed his eyes and thrust his hand upward, willing the intent of his hut outwards, beyond the limits of the hut and toward that collapsing ceiling. This was what it had to hold. This was the new burden for these items to bear.
Blue light burst from the top of his hut and stretched out across the ceiling. The light arced as it hit the ceiling, gathering into thicker tendrils that acted as support beams, while a thin net of pale blue light stretched between them.
The ceiling fell into the light, and the weight of all of it at once hit Rhys like a truck. He grunted and dropped to a knee, even though it was his mana and his magic that took the hit, not his physical body. It felt like his body. It felt like the entire ceiling was pressing on his head and shoulders and pushing him down.
And then the beasts hit, and he gritted his teeth as pain hammered into him. Every step was another slam against his mana, like a spike into his brain. Thousands of steps, a rush all at once, hammering down on him over and over in a horrible rhythm. Rhys coughed and spat blood. His hands trembled. His mana, or rather, the trash, tried to flow backward through his veins. He gripped it with his will and forced it to run forward, refusing to allow the technique to collapse. This wasn't going to fall. This ceiling would hold.
Ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum. The beasts' hooves drummed against the ceiling. The weight of their blows pounded Rhys, breaking him down—no. Rhys took a deep breath and refocused himself. He wasn't just holding on. He had deliberately taken on this burden for this moment, this purpose. Those weren't the beatings of a thousand destructive hooves, but the pounding of a thousand hammers, reforging him into something stronger, denser, more powerful.
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Before, he'd burned his body, allowed it to get contaminated, and then reforged it from the fire. But in all that time, he'd never reforged it from this kind of pounding, heavy strikes. Reforging required both: heat and the force of the strikes. Under the weight of the beast's hammering feet, he didn't collapse and burn away the way he had under his impurities, but instead, tightened. All the gaps, all the empty space, was forced out. All the places he hadn't perfectly reformed himself were destroyed and hammered away. He had been strong, but bloated. Now, he allowed the beasts to strike him over and over, and force him to become the ultimate power he could be.
His body grew tighter, stronger. He stood once more, able to physically bear the weight, to the extent he bore the weight. With his body, his foundation, reforged, he steeled himself, then let the beasts' blows fall instead on his mana passages and the gunk flowing through them. Stronger. Tighter. Denser! His mana passages began to erode from the ferocity of the reinforced gunk, and so he applied fire, burning the weakness away, then rebuilding under the hammering strikes of the beasts' hooves.
But that wasn't enough. No! There was more to be gained from this activity. Rhys roared, then bared his very core to the beasts' strikes. Nothing stood between the technique and his core itself. Not his body, not his mana passages. No filters, no dampeners—nothing. The destructive, powerful blows rained directly down on his core.
Normally, such an idea would be suicide. Normally, a core was a delicate thing that had to be preserved and kept safe from the world, lest it break and throw away all one's hard work. But Rhys didn't have an ordinary core. He had a trash star, and the star—the star wasn't perfectly dense. Under the strikes from the beasts, he could see what he'd been blind to before: the gaps, the empty holes, the places where the trash stuck out of the pile or didn't fit perfectly into it. All the way down to the very heart of the trash star, there was emptiness.
No! To call this pitiful heap a star was itself pathetic. To think, he'd had the hubris to consider such an imperfect, weak, hollow heap a star. It was nothing but a big burning pile of garbage, and he could do better.
Rhys's eyes blazed with determination. As the beasts hammered his core, so, too, did he focus inward, compressing, pushing, shoving it down. Denser. Tighter. He took the beasts' strength and directed it, deliberately slamming it into the parts of his core that were weakest and least dense. Trash shattered, twisted, broke—and his core grew denser. Over and over, over and over. The force slammed into the core and burst it open, throwing bits of trash outward. Pushing down the violent sick sensation that accompanied the break, Rhys grabbed the trash and pulled it back into his core, and forcibly pulled the broken pieces of his core inward. He had formed this core from scratch with nothing but rubbish. A little tear, a small break—that was nothing to be afraid of. He'd made it once. He could make it again, and again, and again, as many times as he needed to until it was perfect.
He hammered his core again, and this time, nothing broke—not at that location, anyways. There were still weaknesses. Eyes shining, he redirected the force, once more hammering it into a weak point. Once more, his core broke; once more, the intense sick feeling nearly overtook him, and he coughed and saw blood on the snow, felt blood running down his eyes and nose. With a manic grin, he ignored it all and forcibly pulled his core together again, only to lift the hammer that was the beasts' strikes and attack his own core once again. This isn't enough. Not until it's perfect; not until there's nowhere I can strike, and do damage to myself! Determined, he grabbed the beasts' force again, and again, and again, until at last there was nowhere that crumbled.
Rhys stood tall. He was stronger. His mana passages, more pure. His core, denser. Every part of him felt more, as power coursed through his veins and energy sparked through every cell in his body. He had been forged anew, hammered in ways he hadn't previously attempted. And now… now, the pitiful intent before him looked like it could use a boost.
He reached out to the objects he'd chosen and called out to them. Was this it? Was this all the more they could do? They'd once supported buildings, rooves, grand tables and more. And this sloppy shape, this misshapen lump of mana—was this all the better they could do? Surely there was more to their strength. Surely there was more to them!
The items responded with a fierce roar. Yes! There was more! Their wills intermingled, and as they did, Rhys brought down the hammer onto them, reforging them from trash, into something new, something stronger, something immensely more powerful than what any one of them had been before, more powerful even than the sum of their parts moments ago. The hut condensed, with Rhys barely sliding out of it before it came together. The pieces of trash all flew at one another, eager to be part of this new, grander thing. They melded together, as if they were under the effects of Trash Enchanting, though Rhys was still only using Trash Intent. A table leg, a cornerstone, a crossbeam—no longer. They merged into one solid pillar, and the entire spell changed.
The organic, root- or branch-like strands of mana climbing over the ceiling turned into powerful arches, regular and strong. The pale blue netlike mana between them became a solid ceiling. All of it called forth from the trash's intent itself, from its memories, from its desires. The crossbeam, the cornerstone, even the table, and everything else—all of them contributed what had made them strong, made them sturdy, allowed them to bear so much weight. Rhys's mana coursed through them, but Rhys himself was no longer part of the equation. The pillar itself held up the roof without his intervention, save his continuous application of mana. The trembling stopped. The ceiling ceased cracking. Even the endless drum of the beasts' hooves faded away, growing quieter before the force of Rhys's construct.
Sid raised his brows. "Impressive."
"…I've seen a lot, but… even I'm at a loss," Daran murmured half to himself, somewhere between disbelieving and awestruck.
Rhys looked Daran in the eye, then grinned. "Skill issue."