Waterstrider

Canvas Town, Tseludia Station, Pantheonic Territory, Fifthmonth, 1634 PTS

The rain fell softly upon me as I attempted once more to attune myself to the flows of miasma. I had opened myself up to the current, and it was all I could do not to be washed away entirely, my soul cleaned out. I was immersed in the process, watching the visualization while I allowed my soul to succumb to the flowing energies of the heavens.

This time, I had succeeded. It was incremental, only the slightest step forward, but nonetheless I had done it. This truly was a method suited for me, I thought as I shook myself free from my meditations and back to the corporeal reality. This was a slow method, and would take years of practice before I would be able to reach the pinnacle of the spirit refinement stage, but in my case, this was beneficial. The faster the method, the more strain it put on the soul, and I doubted mine had the strength to handle it. Besides, I had at least another decade left in me. I could take the time to do it properly.

“End rainstorm,” I said.

As if it could hear me, the steady beating water that dripped from the ceiling slowed and then vanished entirely, leaving me and my robes sopping wet. Rachel had set up some sort of machine to control it according to my instructions. I found it to be extremely convenient.

With my attention returned to the corporeal world, my mind couldn’t help but be drawn to events outside of the sect.

“How’s the situation?” I asked, knowing that Rachel would be listening. I had long grown accustomed to her constant presence, even when I was alone.

“They’re still fighting around that one Celan forward base,” she replied, her sudden presence before me another matter to which I had grown used to.

“Any developments I would care to know about?”

“I’m impressed that they’ve been holding on for this long, actually. But it seems it’s about to collapse now. It was inevitable.”

To our surprise, the war, which we had expected to only grow in intensity, had so swiftly entered into a lull. In theory, the smartest move by the clan would be to eliminate the Heirs’ factories, to reduce their construction of ammunition and their repair and construction of mechs. However, the problem was that their ability to gather information was lacking in this regard. How could they be certain whether a given factory was producing items for the Celans or for one of the major corporations? If they made a mistake, they would need to cover the loss or risk antagonizing the government.

I suspected that they were caught between two bad outcomes- to destroy the factories and accept the government’s suppression, or to simply allow their enemies to continue their industrial advantage. After all, the Celans could simply produce more spirit refinement tier combatants, while for Seiyal, they were difficult to train.

But once the forward base fell, I knew that matters would likely shift in some way. One side or the other would make a move to press their advantage in some regard.

“The clan finally broke through?” I asked.

“More like, they’ve given up, and have set up explosives beneath,” laughed Rachel. “Looks like Karie finally grew impatient.”

I frowned, considering the matter. If they actually blew the top of the stack, this would put them under pressure from the government. I had been hoping something like this would occur. I might be able to use the opportunity to negotiate for benefits the next time they asked me to help. In that regard, this would be a positive development. Still, something about it struck me as off. Even though from what I had seen of her, this Karie was on the impulsive side, I doubted she would have just chosen to take such action when the barrier would soon fall anyway. I felt like some aspect of the situation must have slipped past our awareness, and I wondered how important it might be.

Suddenly, Rachel frowned, a curious expression filling her face.

“That can’t be right…” she muttered.

I turned to watch her.

“Did something happen?”

“It seems that someone activated a sending stone,” she said. “No, that can’t be right. Why would it be there?”

“A sending stone?” I asked, vaguely recognizing the term. “That’s a… Jankari teleportation device, right?”

Rachel had told me about the relic devices previously. Apparently, if one of them happened to be active, there was a chance that her conduit’s teleportation might take us there, instead of to our target location. It was why we only ever used the ability when it was necessary.

“How curious. Hold on, I’m tracking it. As for their target… there’s only four possibilities. The government has one, the Celans have two, and the Drelistai as well. It’s probably a Celan using it, given the point of origin. But I can’t say whether any of those are active right now. Hmmm…”

Her eyes gazed nowhere in particular, though I suspected the senses she was actually using had little in common with vision. Suddenly, her eyes widened, her cheeks appearing flushed.

“Hold on, shit. Shit, shit, shit! Cyrus, get ready to dodge.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Dodge? What are you-”

Rachel quickly interjected with half of an explanation, cutting me off.

“It works both ways, Cyrus. The conduit operates on the same principles as the stones do, and the connection works both ways. Whoever is using it failed to activate their target connection point, which means-”

My face went pale as well, as I finally understood what she was saying. I tensed up, ready to move at any moment.

A dazzling yellow light blinded me, filling the room with a vibrant haze, before a loud grinding and crunching noise resounded. The glow was quickly shrouded in a haze of dust as metal and stone of the sort most of the station was constructed from flashed into existence around me. I was forced to duck and weave as it all crashed down, destroying everything in its path. It felt as if no matter where I moved, the material only sprung up around me. It seemed, I thought, that it was all centered on the conduit housed in a small bag underneath my robe. As I dodged around the falling rubble, I spotted the source of the light slowly render into existence, a stone roughly the size of a child. It was crossed with veins of crystal, and long nails emerged from its surface at uneven intervals, each glowing a resplendent yellow that seemed to burn my vision.

Attached to the object which I knew must be the sending stone was a heavily injured figure who had been hugging it closely. After the stone landed on the ground, the alien man toppled off, splaying out unconscious onto the ruined floor. A few more rocks dropped around me, but the light steadily dimmed, slowly dissipating until all that was left was a slight yellow gleam on the surface of the nails. I let out a long breath, sweeping the stone dust off of my still sodden robes. Now that it was over, I took a look around, disappointed by what I saw.

The meditation room, what had been my favorite place in the entire station, was utterly destroyed, the floor and walls cracked and shattered. The ceiling, too, was heavily damaged by the rocks which had attempted to form inside of it. Water leaked around the boulders and warped metal, pooling on the tiles of what had once been a floor or a counter of some sort.

All in all, I thought, as I sullenly inspected the damage, it was an excellent test of my improvements after becoming a spirit refiner. To avoid the falling rubble, I needed to shift my body, moving myself faster and more agilely than I had ever before needed to. Even then, I had barely managed to avoid it all. If nothing else, this was a great boost to my confidence in escaping any situation I were to find myself in.

Suddenly, I remembered the alien who was still slumbering in the middle of the floor. I turned to look, seeing Rachel peering over at him, her expression ponderous.

I quickly walked over, and frowned as I glanced down at him. Beside me, Rachel was doing something similar. The figure was clearly that of a Celan, a slender but athletic man with his hair dyed an unusual shade of blue. It took me a moment to place him in my memories.

“Isn’t this that Magister?” I asked.

I remembered fighting with him the month before. For a mortal, he had been quite deadly in combat. Rachel nodded at my words.

“He was in command at the forward base. It’s no wonder they were willing to send someone this highly ranked out. It seems our friend here had an escape plan.”

I pursed my lips, deep in thought as I squatted downwards to inspect him.

“What should we do with him, do you think?”

Rachel smiled, glancing back at me.

“Magisters are ranking members of the Epon. I imagine he’ll be a good resource to find out more about our Shade problem.”

“Will the Heirs be able to find out that we have him?”

Rachel shook one of her hands noncommittally.

“I don’t think they would have any way to tell who intercepted him, if anyone. They’ll probably be able to know that someone used the stone, as the activation is fairly overt. But their brink-based technology is still a bit lacking when it comes to tracking such effects. If they could track my conduit, they would never have had such a hard time finding us, back when that was their priority.”

I nodded at that. The logic was fairly sound.

“I imagine they might be able to make guesses, though, if we started to buy Celan food. Maybe we should just lightly interrogate him and then ransom him back to them,” I said.

“Either way, we have some time to think about it. Before we do anything, though, you should probably grab the knife he’s keeping strapped to his waist.”

Obediently, I inspected the man’s leg, where just as she had said, a knife was tightly strapped. It was somewhat hidden, which made me wonder if he kept it attached wherever he went. I pulled it out and inspected it.

The blade seemed to be made of bronze, and was covered in small scribbles in a Celan text that seemed to overlap and cross over one another. I wondered if such blades had some sort of meaning in Celan culture. Ignorantly, I moved to toss it into the air and catch it, a habit I had recently developed from my time training my disciple Shadowblade in knives. However, I was interrupted by Rachel, whose eyes had grown wide, her arms waving rapidly in an attempt to draw my attention and make me stop.

“Don’t toss it! Don’t move it!” she shouted, her voice frenzied.

Perturbed, I halted my movements.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

She let out a deep breath, as if a weight had been taken off of her chest, and gave me an awkward smile.

“I would appreciate it if you’d grab the sheath it was in as well. And keep it inside. If you’re not careful, you could kill us both.”

I paused, my mind immediately flagging on her words.

“Us both?”

She explained, her expression still awkward. Once she finished, I glanced down, the knife appearing far more dangerous in my eyes. I slowly and carefully reached over to unstrap the sheath from the Magister’s leg, sliding the knife back in. Once it was enclosed, I felt like a weight was taken off of my back.

I had never personally seen a lesion before, but my recent experiences with the spirit world had done nothing but cement into my mind the dangers of that realm. The fact that Rachel’s true body lived there did nothing but amplify my understanding of how alien her true self really was. I found myself wary of the concept of a lesion, a wound in reality from which dripped more miasma than even an immortal could use.

It was no wonder, I thought, that naeratanh items such as this knife had been banned. It was probably the most dangerous item in the entirety of the Tseludia System. I glanced back down to the Magister with a frown. He had known this, perhaps even better than I did, and yet he still chose to carry it around with him, had perhaps even used it. Did he have others? Were the Heirs hiding a secret stockpile?

I almost wished I hadn’t found out.

Sending Stones: [Expertly crafted machines utilizing sanguine and extant miasma, sending stones are believed to utilize the Brink as a medium to transport objects which have been rendered nonexistent in the form of information states, and returning them to reality in another location. In practice, this means that they are capable of teleporting objects. Throughout the galaxy, there are said to be potentially millions of sending stones, however their limited range limits their utility. A sending stone cannot transfer an object more than a million miles away, and the transit is not instantaneous. Researchers currently believe that although the stones were designed as a network, the principle utilized by the technology should be theoretically possible to function, so long as the target location can be effectively marked. According to the Pantheonic Government, Staiven scientists are very close to being the first to reverse engineer the technology and manufacture their own sending stone equivalents.]