NOVEL NEXT Chapter Eighty-Three – A Void Brother is Here
Reality has its own champions...
“Hey, Sama. Let me introduce you to General Moonriver and Maga Skycloud, the commanders of the Sidhete forces here.”
“How do you do!” Shocking the unprepared elves, Sama glided right up, lithe and graceful as a breeze, and pumped each of their startled hands in turn. “I saw that pincer maneuver on the other flank, great timing! And you must have been the one behind those Thunderbolts coming down, hah! Expressing your displeasure in a timely manner!”
Her cheerful manner easily overcame any diplomatic kerfluffles, as the two elven nobles opted to take the high ground and write off any faux pas. There was also the fact that she had taken out that totally horrifying greater demon of Riggibuhl in terrifyingly abrupt fashion, and one just didn’t piss off people who could do that…
“I was just telling them about the Healing Trap,” Briggs noted to Sama, who held up her hand and dove into the appropriate Cabinet, sliding out a drawer and pulling out a disk of pure white marble with some bas-relief carvings of Amanan design on it.
“One unlimited number of once-a-day Healing for everyone who can use it!” she announced, holding it up. A couple impressed elves standing nearby were gestured forwards, and eagerly accepted it, carrying it away towards a circle where the elven Healers were at work treating the injured.
Briggs considered the expression of the elves, who were certain to investigate the Healing Trap thoroughly with designs of making their own. Their own gods could probably empower something similar, if Amana allowed it. Such a thing could only be done by a primary Healing deity, after all.
While very cool and incredibly useful for a large force that needed Healing magic, it wasn’t like some proprietary secret. Amanan Healing Reserve was actually much more useful when it came down to it, since it could deal with any amount of Health damage that applied.
The general seemed especially eager to talk to Sama, who was probably more his style than the overbearing muscle-man Briggs was. Briggs was fairly certain he weighed twice what the slender elf did, despite being muuuuuch younger, and he doubted the elf had ever had dealings with Ancients.
“So how was your second battle, Sir Estemar?” Briggs asked, looking on as Sama engaged with the head warrior and Caster of the elves present, and was dominating the conversation effortlessly with pure energy and her fluid Elvish, surprising the elves.
“The Gauntlets you loaned me were invaluable, and combining them with the Shock Gauntlets was definitely powerful, Master Briggs. While Doc is not a Weapon I would seek to wield for the long term, it certainly brought me through the fight unscathed.” He glanced at Endure, puzzled. “Does your Weapon have a spirit?”
“You mean, like Tremble?” Briggs asked, eyes turning to where wounded elves were being quickly placed on the Healing Trap. Lights shone, grievous injuries to flesh and bone mended in a flash, and they were quickly taken off. It wouldn’t heal missing limbs or eyes or the like, more powerful magic would be required for that, but that was what the Healers were for… and there were quite a few of them!
“Ah, no. When we are strong enough, Paladins can choose between a holy mount and a sword spirit to empower our weapons...” Briggs held up a hand to stop him.
“No. Forsaken. Can’t Summon stuff,” he reminded the Paladin.
“Then why did the enchantments upon your Hammer seem to shift during the battle?”
“Because it did? I switched from Blooding to Vivic to start burning these guys down, once I accumulated enough Naming Karma.”
“You… changed the innate magic of a forged Weapon?” Estemar’s voice rose in disbelief.
“The effect is called Arsenal. It’s not something a Powered can use on a Weapon, but you can easily duplicate it with a variant of Magic Weapon or its more powerful versions… or a Sword Spirit, or Sword Focus, or other powers that are related to Class and not the Weapon.” Estemar blinked. “Because of the flexibility and variability of your Powered Auras, magic, and soul, you overwhelm the Arsenal effect, and it loses access to the variant powers Arsenal allows to be stored in a Weapon. In other words, you Powered are too powerful for Arsenal to work.”
Estemar blinked. “And you… Forsaken… are not?”
Briggs nodded slowly. “Our power is slow, steady, and pure, as it were. It doesn’t change character, it doesn’t change intensity or quantity. A Null like Sama, of course, doesn’t have any at all. Her Aura is totally rigid. Mine is kind of billowy, but slow enough and monotonous enough to have no effect on the magic to speak of. A Void slips right through magic as if he isn’t there, likewise doesn’t disturb it.”
Estemar thought about all of that, ruminating on the meanings behind it all. “It seems to be almost some form of compensation for not being able to actually wield magic?” he proposed, looking for the good in the bad.
“It is, to an extent... except for the fact that it costs a ton of gold or Karma to make real.” He met the Paladin’s eyes. “You can Summon up a Sword Spirit, and change the character of your Weapon for a few minutes at a time, but freely within that time. And except for a true battlefield, that’s usually enough for a normal fight or duel. You’ve got, what, twenty, thirty options to pick from?”
“I-I actually do not know, Master Briggs,” he admitted. Counting up the options a Sword Spirit could give... was kind of strange, but now that he thought about it, why hadn’t he done so?
“Mmm. And on top of that, you could use a spell to give a Weapon a specific Enhancement for literally hours at a time. We, on the other hand, have to Invest the Karmic equivalent of four goldweight for every additional power, two goldweight a day maximum, per power, for each Einz-level Enhancement. That number is sixteen goldweight for a +Zvei, per power. Thirty-six for a +Drei.” He cocked an eye at the Paladin. “Now, do the math on thirty Einz powers and, oh, fifteen Zvei.”
Estemar’s eyes glazed. “That is a considerable amount of investment into a single Weapon, Master Briggs!” he admitted after a moment.
“Aye. It’s a lot of goldweight to burn, a lot of fights to get in… and a lot of time needed for it all to come together. To be perfectly honest, Sama and I want to be fighting each and every day, for no other reason than to grow the Names of our Weapons. A day not in battle is a day that might require Burning gold instead, and a Named Weapon is an endless money-pit of goldweight.” He gestured at the Katar that Estemar still hadn’t put down. Doc had drawn some curious looks from the elves, who associated such things with dwarves, not humans. “You know a Vier-Slot Weapon goes for like sixty-four goldweight, right? More if it’s got special powers and a high Quality Level.”
Estemar lifted up the milk-and-blood hued Weapon, astonished. “I know such things are expensive…”
“The Gauntlets are thirty-two.” Estemar swallowed despite himself. “Yes, that’s a lot of goldweight. But that’s one of the ways you kill your enemy. You spend more on good Gear than they do. It’s not any different than buying armor, weapons, and a shield in the first place. It’s just the next step.”
Estemar fell silent for a time, looking at the corpses being thrown on the piles by those elves still in good health, quickly burning vivic. “So, you fight to gain battle spoils as well?”
“The quickest way to earn money is to take it from those who have it with violent force. If they are unrepentant monsters who think a great use for gold is dipping the severed heads of their enemies in it, well, that works out fantastically from a practical and moral standpoint. Non-Powered don’t have the option to freespend Karma to make magic items like you do. It’s Naming Karma, meaning using them to fight and kill with, or it’s goldweight, in whatever form.”
“But taken to extremes, that seems to justify brigandry,” Estemar pointed out.
“As I’m sure any brigand will argue. Are you a brigand?”
“Assuredly not!” Estemar denied.
“Then why are you arguing a patently immoral viewpoint?”
Estemar seemed slightly at a loss. “It was a reflection on your need for battle and gold as justification for improving your Weapons.”
“No, it was a move from the practical need to the moral imperative behind them, mixed with subtle superiority of you not having such a need.” Briggs glanced at him again, and Estemar flushed. “You don’t have to rub our noses in it. We’re aware you got the goodies. But if you look down on what we have to do to chase after what you have by birth, you’re asking for an attitude adjustment.” Briggs flexed his hands thoughtfully, stones cracking in his knuckles.
“That was not my intention,” Estemar said calmly.
“Then separate the morality and the necessity. You start looking down on people for doing what they need to survive while you stand there with all the Powered gifts, well, you won’t make too many people happy.”
“But do not you and Lady Sama have your own gifts?” he pressed.
“Anything and everything we can do with magic you can do better and faster… and without having to spend goldweight. You may not WANT to, sure. You’ve got better ways of doing them. We are developing gifts you aren’t because it’s not worth your time to do so.
“And that’s totally cool. We’re working with you so that you can develop those gifts, and give us access to things we wouldn’t have otherwise.”
“But… these Forsaken abilities you have, are surely powerful in their own way. From a protective standpoint, they seem exceptional!” he protested.
“Yeah… but they land us in plenty of hot water with Powered who don’t like the fact that we can shut them down. Religions, too, don’t like it when the gods have no power over us. Being called Forsaken isn’t generally a complimentary thing, you know.”
He did indeed, and then Briggs dropped the bomb on him.
“After all, the Brotherhood of the Void are all Forsaken Voids.”
“The Brotherhood of the Void?!” His alarm was unfeigned. “The assassins?!”
“Nope. The Brotherhood aren’t assassins. Assassins are paid. The Brotherhood serve the Land.”
“Fanatics?” he asked instantly.
“Nope. More like conscripts.” Briggs cracked his neck absently. “Voids are like magic filters. Magic passes through them, and they feel it intimately, even if they can neither touch nor control it. Impurities and imbalances in magic are nauseating, painful, sickening, distracting, and annoying to them. So, they wander around getting rid of the imbalances and impurities. To outsiders, it looks like they’re randomly offing things. To them, it’s getting rid of things that want to make them puke their guts out by existing.
“It’s said that the Land loves the Voids the most, and treats them the worst.”
Estemar blinked, never having heard anything good about the Brotherhood before. “They have always been described as assassins or doombringers to me, Master Briggs...”
“Assassins are terrified of Void Brothers. There’s no way a Void Brother could ever take the time or find any meaning in doing wetwork. They are always going from one imbalance to the next. As for doombringing, it’s the other way around. They sense the doom coming, and they gather to it to face it.
“Perhaps one of the very worst things anyone can do is chase off a Void Brother who has come to an area. The doom is going to come, regardless if he’s there or not… and his job is to be there and kill it.”
“That is very different from what I’ve been told, Master Briggs,” Estemar admitted.
“Broadening your perspectives, are we?”
“I shall have to think on it,” he admitted, and frowned. “Why did you bring them up?”
“Because there’s two of them standing over there, staring at me and Sama, and wondering what to do with us.”