Master of the Loop

Chapter 171

The Gift Given

The first to strike wasn’t Sylas but rather some abomination from his rear. There was a muffled sound of thunder that was followed by a blast of spiked icicles stretching out in a straight line. Sylas spun around for a moment and, after a glance, ignored them, opting to instead jump on the woman. The latter, surprised and shocked, awkwardly stumbled backwards, using several well-armored, plated knights as the vanguard shield.

They welcomed him with shields raised, deflecting his probing strike. Using the force of the collision, Sylas somersaulted backward, over the incoming iced spikes, and landed back where he started from. Without wasting a moment, he sprinted left; by now, there were dozens of attacks heading his way, anything from the ice bolts to hidden daggers and shadow mists looking just about ready to poison him to death.

If there was one area of death that he still left largely unexplored, it was exactly that. Sylas still wasn’t certain how his body would function while poisoned—whether it would easily defeat the poison or simply delay the effects. And while it would be a fun experiment, he mused, to figure it out, now wasn’t the time. He simply wanted to see the extent of the dead’s forces and whether he alone would be enough to deal with it.

He had lied to Asha a bit—there was no reason to wipe out the dead or ensure they didn’t send out their mercenaries. Most, if not all, castlefolk will leave on the trip south, once it begins. As such, the fears of invasion post-departure were mostly exaggerated. The primary reason for coming here was to test himself further, with the secondary being to see if he could learn a few new things. There was also the hidden one, curled about his soul—anger.

While he had grown dulled and hollow, there was still a fire inside of him. He kept it burning and warm and part of the fuel were these things beyond the northern border. He had never liked them but was always too weak to do anything about it. The sanctimonious hypocrisy and whataboutism didn’t impress him, even less so coming from the creatures selling their own kind as though they were slaves.

They were war profiteers, the same kind as back on Earth who would sing and exult that they had merely sold the weapons but never pulled the trigger. It was deflection of the highest order, though perhaps for vastly different reasons. In fact, there was no reason why the dead wouldn’t

broker deals. There was no bond there, no love lost—it, for all intents and purposes, was a business. But just because in the technicalities it lived up to the moral opus didn’t absolve them. Not for him, anyway.

Dancing around the numerous attacks, he suffered those he could easily heal and dodged those that appeared more dangerous, rushing toward the woman again. She seemed shocked, as did most others, and reacted too slowly to his strike. For the first time since coming, he imbued a faint wisp of energy into his strike—and easily obliterated her. Even he was faintly shocked, for a simple thrust that should have simply destroyed her heart caused her to balloon and implode into a shower of blood and gore, most of which washed over him.

There was silence for a moment as everyone, including the girl watching from above, slowly processed what they had witnessed. In the meantime, Sylas felt exulted; his energy was far stronger than he expected. Then again, the Shadow did warp how he viewed himself. Comparing to the creature that lived longer than this Kingdom and fought against the Gods certainly doesn’t procure the perfect image of strength. While he still had to use some tricks to kill the Shadow, there was no need for the tricks here.

By the time others recovered, he had already begun his rampage—electing to use his vast energy reserves, he began slashing with the enhanced blade, easily cutting through the armored knights and causing them to explode in similar fashion to the woman. Similarly, every time he’d scrape a surface, he’d leave behind a massive gash denoting the strike. Soon enough, buildings began to fall and crumble into dust and ash, and blood began to somehow lighten the obsidian stone.

“Enough,” a voice spoke softly, though Sylas quickly realized it wasn’t meant for him. As soon as the voice spoke, those still surrounding him retreated into the mist and vanished, though their eyes never left him. Sylas put back his sword and moved the hair that had glued itself to his bloodied forehead before looking up where he saw the girl observing him still with clarity in her eyes. “Come in.”

Her words were like a trigger that caused the gate in front of him to swing wide open, revealing an unimaginably tall and wide hall with staunch, ashen-gray pillars shaped out of hundreds of figures stacked on top of each other holding up the upper floors. The ground was made out of some strange, black stone—unlike obsidian that they used for the exterior, this one wasn’t purely black but rather had strange, silver twains ‘within’, barely beneath the surface.

It was dark, yet he could still see with clarity—without needing to use any energy. It was mystifying, in more ways than one, causing him to look around like a tourist. Nobody hurried him either as he made his way forward through the massive hall. The only reason he knew where to go, though, was the ghostly ghoul that was guiding him. Whenever Sylas would stop to stare about, the ghoul would stop too and wait for him.

There were many doors and many stairs, some leading up and some leading down, though, for the most part, the grand hall seemed… eerily desolate and empty, as though a remnant of some time before when it was full and brimming. Eventually, he reached its end and crossed into an arched corridor leading deeper into the citadel.

A shift occurred some fifty feet in where the black stone slowly became gray and then the gray one became white. The corridor opened up eventually into a sauna-like room, though Sylas knew that he had gone through some sort of a magic circle that had to do with space.

The room was round and relatively wide, with a steaming pool of clear water positioned in the center. Beautiful, hand-carved pillars rounded it, six in total, sprawling out toward the top and bleeding into the flat ceiling. At the edge of the pool, dipping her feet into the water, was the girl he saw standing on the top of the citadel. The ghoul who guided him was gone, he realized, meaning it was just the two of them.

The girl looked up and at him, her eyes dense with primordial feeling that Sylas had never experienced before. It was as though the whole of history was ingrained within them, and she could watch it all like a movie any time she wanted. She gestured with her right hand, pointing toward the other side of the pool.

“Dip your feet in,” her voice had strangely cleared up, becoming one that matched her perceived age. Young and jubilant. “This is primal water—though diluted considerably over time. It should help, a bit, with your hearts. There is darkness growing in them.”

“…” Sylas remained silent though went ahead and dipped his feet as she suggested, sitting on the edge as well. The water was eerily cool and warm at the same time, and he felt a tangle of vines between his toes and yet, when he looked down, he saw nothing. The strange kind of energy, the alien kind, began to surge from the tip of his toes, but his body wasn’t alarmed. In fact, it seemed almost excited and in want of the strange energy.

“Long, long ago, mortals and immortals alike drank from the Pool of Infinity,” she said. “They were all giants, fifteen-twenty feet tall, and lived to be thousands of years old before finally returning to earth.”

“Sounds made up,” Sylas said, reveling in the energy. For some reason, as soon as it touched his heart, he felt strange feeling of weightlessness wash over him. It was easier to breathe all of a sudden, as though a clog had been demolished.

“Most old things do, today,” the girl said. “We call them myths and legends for they paint a world too vastly different from the one we know.”

“… you seem rather indifferent to the mayhem I caused,” Sylas probed. “Weren’t they your people?”

“Hmm. I suppose?” the girl titled her head as her legs began to dance around in the water. “Though calling what you did ‘mayhem’ seems a bit generous, no? Now, what you are planning to do… that will likely be considered mayhem. Perchance, some day in the distant future, it might just become a myth unto itself. The story nobody would believe, for how could one man never die, no matter how many times he is beheaded?”

“…” though the girl looked like she could see through him entirely, yet again, Sylas wasn’t alarmed. If anything, he felt relaxed. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Depends on who you ask,” the girl replied coyly with a smile.

“I’m at a loss here. You seem to know a lot about me, and I am blind.”

“Nothing wrong with being blind,” she said. “In my experience, the happiest souls who have ever lived have all been blind. To know is to suffer.”

“You seem happy. Does that mean you’re quite blind too?”

“No,” she shook her head. “Unlike most, though, I did have many lifetimes to learn to live with elan. You have turned out… different from what I predicted. That doesn’t happen often,” she leaned forward slightly, resting her head on her hands and staring at him with a quaint smile. “I have had grasp on human nature since before humans knew what kings and queens were. And it’s not often that I’m surprised and blindsided.”

“When was the last time? Before me, I mean.”

“You read about him, I believe, a long time ago,” she said. “The man who stayed north, when his love called him south. I was beyond certain he would follow his heart. Well, he did—though not in a way I imagined.”

“… you know?” Sylas frowned deeply.

“How could I not?” the girl giggled strangely. “After all, I’m the one who gave you the gift of life, Sylas. Or, perhaps, is it a gift of death? Whatever she says, I suppose. Little ones are like that, always in want of being right.”