Broken Soul Part 8 (Patreon)

'Fucking goblins!' Myst's avatar complained mentally as he crawled away from where the goblin warlock had dropped a barrier of blades that had nearly ripped him in half, mostly because he didn't want to get hit by the fireballs that the goblins were tossing like it was the Fourth of July.

"Death to the human!" one of the goblins shouted as he continued tossing spells in his general direction, unwilling to admit that he'd lost track of where he was.

He summoned a chicken of doom further down the roof as a distraction then continued crawling while he waited for his leg to regenerate and everything to stop bleeding. 'Note to self, grab some more combat spells.'

"Sweet!" Selena squealed when she checked a small oak lap desk with her magnifying glass and realized the enchantments would be really useful. "The desk has a spell checking feature."

Ron shook his head. "I don't think making sure our reports are spelled correctly is going to help with our current situation."

"Not auto-corrupt, a spell checker! It's like a debugging tool for spells," Selena explained as she handed Ron the lap desk to hold, bounced to her feet and ran over to the cabinet to grab some parchment.

"Oooooh," Ron said, drawing out the word. "Does that mean we can fix the broken techniques that Myst is getting from the goblins?"

"Hopefully," Myst mused as his avatar continued crawling away from the goblins, trying to get enough time to heal so he could find a way to murder the goblins and take their equipment since they weren't running out of mana and were chain casting spells.

"Yes!" Selena replied as she grabbed the stack of parchment and a fountain pen that someone had left for the guests to use in case they needed it. She rushed back over and handed the paper and the pen to Ron. "Just think about your broken technique and push some ki into the desk, it should scribe the technique then we can edit it."

"Sure, I'll give it a try," Ron replied as he put the lap desk on his lap and a sheet of parchment on the desk along with the pen. He thought about the broken technique and carefully pushed some ki into the desk, causing the pen to float over and start writing on the parchment.

"This is going to make it a lot easier to share techniques," Taylor said, looking forward to picking up a bunch of techniques so she could be a hero when she got back.

"Hopefully," Myst agreed as his avatar was hit by shrapnel from an explosive device one of the goblins tossed up on the roof, putting a couple more holes in him and adding to the trail of blood that he was leaving in his wake. 'At least I can't feel the pain,' he told himself as he had his avatar crawl behind a chimney so he'd have some cover while he summoned an army of chickens to deal with the goblins.

"Do you think we could fix the lightning technique?" Amy asked thoughtfully.

Myst shrugged. "It would probably depend on if hitting yourself with lightning is a bug or a feature."

Amy turned to look at Myst. "How is that a feature?"

"I don't have a character sheet or anything that gives me exact details on my resistances, but if I can shrug off a lightning bolt, I'm probably close to having a hundred percent resistance to electricity which means that I might be able to boost it so that I'm absorbing the lightning as health at which point, it's a feature, not a bug."

"Or it's a bug that you're taking advantage of," Amy argued.

Myst yawned, feeling oddly tired from the long day despite the healing energy running through him. "I don't really care if it's a bug or a feature as long as it works."

Ron smiled when the pen finished writing the technique and floated back down to the desk, leaving him with a completed technique. "Can you check the technique…" he trailed off as the desk pulled on his ki reserves and a holographic projection of lines, waves and swirls appeared over the lap desk in two vaguely hand shaped clumps. "Is that supposed to be your hands?"

"I think so…." Amy trailed off as two translucent hands appeared over the swirls and lines, making it obvious that the energy lined up with the hands or at least the energy in the left hand lined up well enough.

"That explains why your hand exploded," Selena mused as she studied the image. "The channels for where the energy is supposed to go after making the change are a mess."

"Let me try something," Ron said thoughtfully as he reached out and grabbed one of the lines in the right technique and pulled it, causing it to straighten out and mirror the line on the left hand.

"How?" Taylor asked as Ron started fixing the lines like they weren't a completed puzzle.

"No clue, I just know," Ron replied, trusting in his Monkey Fu. He finished adjusting the technique then pushed a bit more ki into the desk, causing the pen to float up and change a couple of lines on the diagram. "That should do it."

Selena checked the parchment with her magnifying glass. "The parchment isn't magic, we'll have to learn the technique the old fashioned way."

"You mean we'll have to actually work for our cosmic power? Gasp, I feel cheated," Myst teased.

Selena stuck her tongue out at Myst then went back to identifying the loot, promptly squealing when she found a way to escape that might actually work. "I found a portal technique!"

"What's wrong with it?" Myst asked, knowing there had to be a catch.

"Nothing or at least there's nothing wrong with the scroll that teaches the technique, which isn't to say that the technique is safe," Selena replied, fairly sure there was a catch. "You might as well use it," she suggested as she handed Myst the scroll. "You're going to have the best reserves and it probably requires a decent amount of energy."

"Works for me," Myst agreed and used the scroll, causing it to burn the knowledge into his head.

"So, what's wrong with the technique?" Selena asked.

Myst frowned as he did some quick mental math and realized his new technique was basically useless if you wanted to use ki unless you used a massive ritual and an emperor's ransom in spirit stones or tapped something like a ley line and were willing to destroy it in the process. "Nothing and everything? Opening a portal would probably bankrupt the empire and they'd probably destroy it in the process."

"They were lying about being able to get us home, weren't they?" Taylor asked warily.

"Probably," Myst agreed. "The technique seems solid and I remember a lecture explaining that it was orders of magnitude easier to summon people than it was to open a portal and leave."

"I wonder if that was intentional," Ron mused.

"What do you mean?" Selena asked as she went back to sorting the loot.

"I'm not an expert on magic or ki but I know a couple of mad scientists. Bending the laws of physics generally requires energy and they're probably just using rules that we haven't discovered."

"Magic cheats, it's not the same," Selena argued.

"You're still spending energy to make something happen, right?" Ron asked.

"Sure," Selena admitted, "but the amount of energy it takes depends on a lot of factors, it's more art than science."

"Even art has rules or at least suggestions," Ron argued. "If you cast a fireball spell, it's going to take about the same amount of energy, right?"

"Barring a couple of weird traditions or changes to the ambient mana level, yeah, it should cost the same, why?" Selena asked.

"I can buy that rituals change the cost, maybe because of belief and you're hitting all of the right notes or maybe because it changes the magic in the area or makes it easier like a catalyst but you're talking about an order of magnitude difference in something that should be essentially the same, you're breaking the barrier between worlds."

"It's certainly weird," Selena admitted, as she tossed a torn up leather jacket with fire resistance into her pile to absorb. "What are you thinking?"

Ron shrugged. "If I was a god and I was using a dimension to refine the souls of a world filled with assholes, I wouldn't want any of them escaping."

Myst shook his head. "We don't have any evidence of a god using the world as a dumping ground."

"Other than the fact that the world is filled with assholes?" Amy asked dryly.

Myst turned to look at Amy. "We're surrounded by inhuman monsters that get stronger by raping the land and snorting monster souls like crack, would you expect happy well adjusted people?"

"Not really," Amy admitted.

"Could you set up a ward around the planet that made it harder to leave?" Ron asked Selena.

"Not a chance in hell but I've only been using magic for a couple of years, you'd need to balance the cost against…" Selena trailed off as she started doing mental math.

"And I think we lost her," Akari teased after twenty seconds of silence.

"I was doing math," Selena complained. "A ward might explain their demon problem but that doesn't mean that a god created it. Just because you fell off your horse, stumbled on a pebble and fell face first into a cream pie doesn't mean that Loki was responsible."

"No," Akari agreed. "But if you pissed on his temple or insulted his priestesses an hour before a series of unlikely events happened, you have to wonder."

"Joking aside, does this mean we're stuck here?" Amy asked.

"No, it just means that I have to grind my mana pool until I can cast the spell or I need to figure out how to create a mana battery and use the ritual version of the spell to rip open a portal," Myst explained.

"You could have started with that," Ron complained.

"You were on a roll," Myst replied with a smile as his Avatar's chicken of doom managed to kill five goblins by jumping off the roof and exploding before they could kill it, giving him a much needed infusion of health. "Have you found anything else of note?" he asked Selena.

"Not really, I've been getting distracted," Selena replied as she checked the silver bell in the pile. "Oh, neat, the bell summons a homicidal goblin in a maid outfit when you ring it and push a bit of ki or magic into it."

"Why would anyone make that?" Amy asked.

"I don't know," Myst admitted. "Do they drop loot when you kill them?"

"It doesn't say," Selena replied with a shrug. "Do you think it's worth upgrading with a cursed tile?"

"Sure," Myst replied, not seeing a problem with spending a couple of the cursed tiles since they were a decently common drop from the goblins.

Selena grabbed one of the cursed tiles from the pile and used it to upgrade the bell, causing the wooden handle to acquire inset ivory runes. She checked the bell with her magnifying glass, curious if the improvement was worth the curse. "Neat, using the bell summons a goblin wizard, complete with gear."

"What's the curse?" Myst asked.

"The bell attracts monsters and the wizard is probably going to try to kill you," Selena replied as she checked one of the wands in the pile.

"That sounds more useful than a homicidal goblin maid," Myst agreed, not seeing a problem farming the goblins for gear if they tried to kill him. "Can you toss me one of the elemental resistance items? I want to see if I can push it past one hundred."

"Sure," Selena replied as she dropped the wand in the pile of gear to sacrifice to one of their weapons then grabbed the jacket and tossed it to Myst. "It boosts fire resistance."

"Cool," Myst replied as he grabbed one of the cursed tiles and upgraded the jacket, causing it to change into a bright pink leather cheerleading outfit. "That's an annoying curse."

Selena scowled when she looked at the cheerleading outfit with her magnifying glass. "That's one way to get larger breasts and clear skin, but it's practically useless while we're in the sect."

"Why?" Amy asked, not seeing a problem with getting rid of her freckles since they were blotchy.

"It basically changes your eyes to blue or green, air brushes your appearance and increases your breasts a couple of cup sizes by consuming excess fat. Unfortunately, it also lowers your inhibitions when it comes to sex, you'll fuck just about anyone or anything while you're wearing it and wearing it will increase your desire to wear it which means no one is using it until we're somewhere safe, like a deserted island. It also increased the fire resistance to forty five percent rather than thirty, so we're moving in the right direction."

"Should I try again or would you actually want to use it once we've escaped?" Myst asked as he set the bright pink outfit on the table, easily ignoring the urge to put it on.

Selena shook her head. "I'll pass, Mom has a crystal ball that shows people what they'll look like when they grow up, I don't need the extra cup sizes or the mental issues I'd pick up when the curse broke."

"Can't say I blame you there," Akari agreed, wanting nothing to do with the assholes in the sect.

"I wouldn't mind using the outfit, especially if it can fix my hair," Amy admitted. "But I'm willing to wait."

"Same," Taylor agreed then yawned. "How long do you think it will take to get enough mana to use the portal technique?"

"Getting the mana is easy, the goblins drop spirit stones drop like candy," Myst pointed out as he rested his head against the back of the couch and closed his eyes, "the problem is getting my capacity up to a level where I can contain the mana since I have to convert the ki into mana if I want to use it to power the technique."

"It's too bad that we can't just use a volcano to power the ritual," Selena mused, fairly sure her mother could whip up a decent ritual in like five minutes.

"That would be nice," Myst agreed as his avatar killed the last goblin in the problematic group and got a Gallic-Imperial type legionary helmet that was decorated with a crest for his trouble.

"Huh," Taylor muttered. "I might have a source of corruption, one of the disciples just mentioned a section of the sewers where they toss the sludge that appears when people break through into the first realm."

"Can you get a location?" Myst asked hopefully as he read the description for the helm, fairly sure the sludge would give him a decent amount of mana.

"Shouldn't be too hard, I'll just have one of the invisible spiders follow them," Taylor replied cheerfully, glad that she could keep an eye on the sect.

'At least she doesn't have infinite multitasking,' Myst mused as he had his avatar hand him the cursed helm.

"What's with the helmet?" Ron asked.

"It's cursed, it triples your speed but it causes blindness while you're wearing it," Myst replied as he set the helmet on the table.

Selena pulled a potion out of the line of potions she'd identified and tossed it to Myst. "See if you can reverse engineer the potion, it should give you a short lived speed boost, which would push the flight to three hundred miles an hour with the helmet."

Myst cast his recipe spell on the potion, picking up the recipe. "You'd blow your knees out using this and probably give yourself a heart attack."

"We're going to be using the necklace and the flight ritual will blow your legs apart so it's sort of a moot point," Selena replied with a shrug. "As long as we're wearing goggles and we have a flight suit, we should be fine going a couple of hundred miles an hour."

"Until you hit something, like a duck or a goose," Taylor pointed out.

"By the time we're flying around like heroes, we'll have enough gear to keep us safe, it should fade a bit over the generations, meaning they'll be down to something reasonable by the time it matters or we'll have a decent way to train things," Selena argued.

"Works for me," Myst agreed, deciding that was his future self's problem.

"Cool," Selena replied as she tossed Ron the technique scroll. "See if you can debug the technique, just because we can regenerate our limbs, doesn't mean I want to deal with the pain or the lecture from my father."

"Good idea," Myst agreed as he stood up and headed for the alchemy lab, wanting to avoid anything that would give her father a reason to rip his head off.

"This is going to be awesome!" Ron quickly used the flight technique then started working on debugging it, wondering what Yori would think of the interface that allowed someone to alter Ki techniques on the fly.

0o0o0

"What are you working on?" Selena asked when she noticed that the guys were hovering around the spell table, being suspiciously quiet.

"We’re trying to figure out how to temporarily kill someone's sense of smell," Ron replied without looking up from the complicated diagram that they were working on.

"Let me get this straight, you're going to trust an untested technique on your face?" Selena asked, wondering if they'd lost their marbles. "Yeah, I'm not going to say it but you're probably going to blow your nose off."

"Or figure out how to blow ghost snot," Ron countered with a grin.

"You know, if you want your sense of smell gone, I've got a spell for that," Selena replied smugly.

"Why?" Ron asked.

"Babysitting gigs," Selena replied, thinking about the various demons that she'd babysat for. “Babies may look cute… but the stench of dirty diapers can be horrifying.”

"That works," Ron agreed as he swapped to examining a different technique.

"Who's going with me to the sewers?" Myst asked, wanting some backup since he was going to be distracted purifying things.

"Not it!" Akari said at the same as Amy and Selena.

“Also not it,” Ron added distractedly.

"What?" Taylor asked, having been paying more attention to one of her spirit beasts than the conversation.

"I'm sort of busy doing this," Ron stated, not wanting to go into a monster filled sewer and honestly interested in playing with the techniques.

Myst sighed as he turned to look at Taylor. "So, does that mean you'll help deal with the monsters?"

"We should probably change into the robes that the sect wanted us to wear," Taylor suggested, not even trying to get out of it and figuring they might as well put the ugly robes to use since it would save their clothes from smelling like the sewer.

"Works for me," Myst agreed. "I'll have my avatar store an extra pair so we can ditch them once we're out of the sewer. Are there side effects to the spell?"

"The spell makes food taste rather bland but you're not going to be eating down on the sewers anyway." Selena gestured and cast her scent blocking smell on Taylor and Myst.

"I could have just toned down their olfactory senses," Amy pointed out.

"Point, I'm not used to having a biokinetic on hand," Selena replied.

"That's fair," Amy agreed, making a mental note to give them a check once they back from the sewers to make sure they didn’t catch anything.