Chapter 15 (Patreon)

Chapter 15

* * *

The capital of the Empire of Ages was a very deep city, and only high-ranking security officers and the top of the capital's guards had a complete map of its dungeons. The vast network of tunnels and catacombs beneath the city could hold another Eternal, with its entire population and even livestock. Frankly speaking, these catacombs were another frontier of the city's defense and a reserve warehouse of impressive capacity.

Unlike Tavimark, these tunnels, though dangerous, populated with all sorts of creatures, monsters, and a couple of dozen weaker analogs of the memorable Trail anomaly, were controlled in a much better way. Tunnels were explored, dangerous areas were fenced off, the most dangerous ones were sealed, and all the tasty locations, located most conveniently or even directly on (non)large energy anomalies, served as transit points, warehouses, training camps, or research sites. The incredibly old stones of the city hid the equally ancient magic that gave it its name, and who better than a dynasty as eternal as the city itself to use that magic to its fullest?

Of course, the underground was used by both simple bandits and a lot of all sorts of people, where it was almost impossible to distinguish one from another. They used it, but only the Imperial Chancellery and the omnipresent Eyes ruled there, the latter in a secondary role. It was easy to hide in these dungeons, but not to be found when the search became serious was incommensurably more difficult. This detail was the main reason why our team did not hide underground, preferring to look for lairs above.

We're not hiding there now, either, but that doesn't stop me from crawling through remote parts of the catacombs, occasionally sawing out the overly brazen and eyeballed creatures of the local biocenosis, leaving bits of mirror bookmarks here and there. As much as I wished otherwise, the likelihood of the Kostik-Misty communication line being traced was beyond all reasonable limits. Counting on fending off or cheating the search, I didn't forget to re-insure my ass in case cheating and hiding didn't work out. Well, to be honest, I didn't think about it myself, but after Tia's kick, who suggested the whole thing with the pieces of mirrors in the subway. I'd just limit myself to the same kind of decoys. The liquidator with too long ears popularly explained that my plan was good, but only because of my class abilities and general awesomeness. But her version, though it required a lot of fiddling, gave me a much larger window of maneuver: the tunnels would work as another network of interference, preventing them from picking up an accurate signal, and the Library's searchers would wonder if the very research labs under the palace were trying to organize industrial espionage.

Although the Library faithfully serves the Throne, the two organizations are in constant competition for funding, grants, and the Emperor's favor. The latter needed both a counterweight to the Library, which threatened to become a monopoly on "hard science," and its scientists, who could work on issues that the Library could not. The two organizations, though the underground scientists were a much more loose collection of separate groups and research institutes, were too different to clash seriously, but the tension was palpable. Of course, such a "trace" would be considered a setup, but in our case, if they opened the communication channel and followed the deceptions, they might believe it. It would hardly be possible to say it was someone who had left a laxity in disguise on purpose, hoping to frame the most obvious competitors. Success, according to the elf, is quite possible, though unlikely, but the minimum confusion will be raised in any case. And in troubled waters, the real culprits are the easiest to escape.

That's how Kostik crawls through all sorts of crap, poking his blanks everywhere and thinking about where to get a new mirror. The old stock is slowly running out. The atmosphere here is quite unpleasant, and I don't just mean the stench of sewers, drain pits, and sewage, nor the stifling dampness of the usual tunnels. These places were full of all sorts of things, and the monstrous fauna was not on the first line or even on the tenth. When I said that the catacombs were inhabited and used, I meant exactly that.

I wish it was a typical fantasy dungeon under the city, where no one controls anything and it's a war zone just a step away from the capital. Alas, there are no fools living in this world, and they wouldn't keep their asses on a deployed anti-tank mine for so many years. Most of the sealed areas were created by the Imperials themselves - at least three full legions of undead with control circuits sewn in were clearly one of the capital's defenses, and a couple (or more, I wasn't looking that closely) of sealed Legends were clearly held in a strong cage, and even if they managed to break free, weakened by the imprisonment and breakout, they would be easy prey for the elite guard. There are plenty of people in the Eternal who can give the legendary a one-on-one fight, and there will be more than one. As I understand it, the prisoned legendary shit is being milked, drawing out their powers, reagents and simply studying them in order to put what they've learned to use in some useful way. And in the far reaches of the dungeon, at great depths and under piles of all sorts of barriers and traps, they are kept just so they won't have time to make trouble if they break out.

In the visions, he dug up echoes of a battle fifty years ago when one of the imprisoned creatures had managed to break free. Incarnate Madness straight from the Dark Plane, powerfully hitting with planar attacks, devouring any energy and souls, replenishing forces at a huge speed, and just unrealistically hard pressing its madness in the mental plane, turning even experienced warriors and mages either into whimpering hulks or into dangerous for everyone maniacs-crazies... Once at large, they were brutally and uncompromisingly slaughtered. It managed to kill only fifty researchers and guards, among whom only a couple-three were valuable personnel, not auxiliary personnel. The locals had long ago become adept at quickly and decisively fixing the consequences of such shit and nothing that could seriously tear the anuses of the entire Metropolitan Guard was stored in the dungeons, having long ago disposed of such inconvenient neighbors or phenomena.

By the way, despite installing dungeon dodgers, no one has even mentioned not putting them all over the city as well. More reassurance and room to maneuver is only a good thing, especially if resources and time allow. Since with my classes and build, all the resources required for this case were limited not by epic-grade (minimum) reagents, not by laborious work of agent networks, and not by mortal risk for deception installers, but only by one very unfortunate summoned with a bag of mirror scrap, the elven dictator and tyrant in one cute face went full force of her paranoia nurtured on the experience of past mistakes. Honestly, I feel like she's just forgotten that no one ever put Yoke on me. She certainly rides me like a horse!

I was not the only one working, but my "class superiority according to Marx" was the problem here, thanks to which I was the only one who could properly install, hide, and secure the deceptions among all of us. Besides, the catacombs of the Eternal, especially their deeper and "tastier" tiers, turned out to be decently protected by all kinds of magic.

And yes, there were sapient being here, too (and not just the permanent human residents), albeit in small numbers - several communities of rats, not monsters, but endowed subspecies, were officially resident here, and they did the work of plumbers, sanitizers, and goldsmiths, knowing the tunnels well and not shy to poke around in the shit. They did not go into the protected areas, safely weaned from foolish deeds, but the upper tiers, drains, and sewers were completely in their power.

I met up with a couple of their patrols, only two individuals of which were level ten, finding myself less than impressed. The unendowed ratfolk looked more like rats than humans. These were distinguished by a very humanoid, albeit not very pleasing to the eye, greater intelligence, and less of the thwarted cruelty for which this subspecies of monsters had gained its notoriety in the first place. How could they, with all their reputation, be tolerated here? No, it's understandable no one wants to swim in shit, and if the toilets are cleaned from above by human goldsmiths, it's dangerous for them to go into the deep drains. Still, I don't understand something in this world, and I haven't for a long time.

The first thing I did was check to see if the head of these guys was called Splinter, but there were no such names among the rats, and that was a pity. However, two of the First Tails, the Third Tail and the Eighth Tail, had the classes of Assassin, Monk, and Tunneler. The latter was the base class for both fighters, keeping their communities in check. Still, they were surprisingly peaceful around here, docile and providing no trouble while floundering in the foul waters. I didn't have time to check really carefully, but I can feel some high-level slavemancers were involved. And, as I suspect, built into the very blood of these tribes and passed on to their descendants by inheritance - it was quite in the spirit of both the Imperials and the whole of Alurei in general.

Alas, or fortunately, there were no reptiloids or turtle-like creatures in Eternal territory, and yet such a reference was missing! If I were someone from the Summoned of the past, I would have put these two ethnicities in the sewers just out of a sense of beauty. Though, how many of them were summoned from Earth or the other world where this cartoon was even released?

The whole operation had taken me less than two days, but during that time, the damn dungeon smell had almost grown into my brain. Even though the shadow steps a priori rid me of any dirt or stench, subconsciously, I kept smelling the damn stench. Honestly, I'd rather it smelled like shit than all that mold.

"Ideally, of course, it would be ideal to plant part of the mirror right in one of the guarded laboratories." Hestia stretched thoughtfully, leaning over Tia's (hand-drawn!) rather detailed map of the city and the deceptions located. "It would be doubly ideal to stage a diversion to release one of the prisoners you've spotted, Tin, the kind of prisoners that are rightfully called Legends."

I leaned over the map, too, though more to hide my eyes, which were almost closed in slumber. Tia's work was very detailed, with a lot of notes that she had lovingly made while she was preparing for the king's assassination. The druid drew some from memory, some from personal observation, some from suspicion or vague visions, but the resulting map would be a great reason to demand a lot of money from any resident, spy, or even a bandit ataman, though getting paid with steel under the ribs was more likely. Not that these details were so unique, but putting them all together on one map was quite difficult, even for a high-powered person. She also had a whole stack of smaller parchments showing individual districts, even if they mostly focused on Imperial Park and the surrounding neighborhoods. The park is drawn almost to every bush and tuft of grass, which is not surprising.

"How bloodthirsty you are, friend," Taria replied just as thoughtfully, trying to think of a couple of new escape routes right now in case the ones she'd already thought of didn't work out. "Is it worth it? The creatures will kill a lot of people, but they'll still run after us, and they'll look harder for us afterward. I don't feel sorry for the швшщеы, but there's a lot of risk and not much outcome."

"I'll agree with Taria's words, albeit not the form of those words." Issuing her strong opinion, the only one of us not looking at the map at all, as she knew it perfectly well from memory. "Diversion will only benefit and take the blow away from us if we are guaranteed to fail the retreat while taking away only some fraction of the enemy's retaliatory maneuver. The risks of installing the necessary mechanisms are defiantly high and unnecessary. Besides Tin to entrust this part of the preparation, which can be honorably and truthfully in words estimated in another flight of lonely leaves, unfortunately, no one. Neither I nor Hestia can make all the necessary preparations quickly and correctly. Or rather, it's not within my power to do it promptly. In a different situation, I would demand that the operation be postponed for several months, or better, a year. With the potential of our group, it wouldn't be hard to turn a third of the Eternal into a prepared ground at once, but knowing Tin..."

She said the last words with such an ineffable intonation that I was embarrassed for a second, but only for a second, no more. Even if I took away the factor of my pain in the ass not allowing me to sit still, I subconsciously felt that I shouldn't linger in the city. I'd spent the day and part of my non-renewable supply of clairvoyance-enhancing potions trying to figure out the reason for my barely-formed premonitions, despite the infuriating yelling of the boys who'd decided to play near the cursed area.

I didn't understand, simply not finding their source, as if all possible vectors along which I could catch the key image turned out not to be blocked, not even disguised, but simply absent. It was as if the very stones of the ancient sidewalk, the creak of decayed doors, and the groans of indestructible walls were speaking to me. There was something wrong in the city, something not specifically directed at me but still ever-present. The long-healed wounds of a body that had almost dissolved into black sludge ached madly, and the image of a beautiful maiden with an empty face and a body that seemed to consist entirely of black pins came back to mind.

"A flight of lonely leaves?" Losius, like me looking at the map simply out of politeness, interjected a term he was unfamiliar with, as he always tried to remain erudite in any situation.

"An operation conducted outside the support of any allied state and entity in which the first petal, the group commander, is left with only his squad and whatever he can use without outside help," Tia replies casually, shifting her nowhere stare strictly to me. "It is considered in case of failure, you are recognized in advance as fallen leaves and have no right to help or even escape. Only death in battle or at your own hands. Tin, is something bothering you? Something to do with your gut?"

She sensed it, though, damn it.

I should not have remembered that skirmish. The memory of her agony and her near-death, which was far worse than death, broke through even my armor of denial. Not much, but my eared colleague, who had worked with me more than once, had enough experience, simple life experience, to catch that brief moment of weakness. And after her words, which she had deliberately said in front of everyone, the whole team looked at me. I could get away from Tia alone, but if I got all of them, especially Taria and her pity-pressure skills, I'd either have to get stoned or go for a walk around the city.

"I remembered when I had the same problem. I couldn't smell anything either." I answered reluctantly, not wanting to remember, nor relive it, nor scare the others with nothing but a too vague premonition of trouble on my hands. "I've developed my instincts quite a bit since then, so I can't be fooled by tricks like that. I'll calculate by the voids. It's just that the situation itself is similar. Silence on all spectrums, like you're banging into a wall of absorbent cotton and feathers."

He spent the next couple of hours recounting his adventures in the Kraj in detail, and with Tia, it was impossible to do otherwise. She listened with an unreadable expression on her face and an equally unreadable tangle of feelings in her soul. I could clearly distinguish only one shining morning star image, the closest analog of which would be "and how you, moron, having learned about the madness going on in the asshole town, did not leave it the same hour, faster than your squeal?". A perfectly understandable reaction, which I fully share. Had I known in advance the scale and danger of the creature lurking in the town, I wouldn't have gotten involved, but at first, I still thought I could take them all down and be that, and then it was too late.

"Black Sky..." She said slowly, literally rolling those words on her tongue like the rarest sort of floral honey or a sip of excellent wine. "And hatred of shadow energy itself. A strong connection to the Darkness, provoking physical mutations and building recruitment chains through distortion. Have you not tried to examine that blackness with your gift as an alchemist?"

"I didn't think about it, and I don't think about it now." I'm choking on that kind of accusation. "It's too nasty and dangerous, especially for me at that moment. I gave the image. Even now, I wouldn't want to touch that stuff, and then I'd have to puke at the thought. And I don't think it was the essence, even if it was distorted. Maybe I could have missed that detail behind my disgust and apprehension, but the last time we met, I literally bathed in that filth. And it's also too invisible as if the stuff doesn't even exist until a critical mass of it builds up, allowing it to manifest in reality. I feel like I've seen not the abomination itself but its imprint on the universe, a marker, if you will. Something akin to the materialized effect of Aegis, an embodied lapse into the Darkness."

For a few seconds, she evaluates my words, obviously going through all the data archives she knows, which are stuffed in there enough to be wanted by every influential person on the continent.

"It was something very ancient." She finally decided on an answer, immediately playing Captain Obvious in all his might. "Ancient and weakened beyond belief. I've read a few scrolls that said something suspiciously similar to the words about the black sky, but they were parchments so old that even those copies, taken from decayed scrolls, were almost crumbling to dust in my hands. Scrolls that spoke of something far older than even the Eternal Forest. I can't say much more until I've done some guided meditations to re-energize the dust-covered memory."

"Take the potions in the common locker." I prompted, remembering if I'd put the memory potions she'd asked me to put in there. "I'm still not sure if it's the same thing in here. Or similar. Different handwriting, different nuances, different everything. Common only in elusiveness to my senses. Maybe this is even a foreshadowing of Alishan's soon-to-be diversion. On the border, skirmishes are already turning into full-fledged hostilities, and the emperor has sent as many as three and a half armies to those regions if you count the Jaeger corps."

"Even so, I won't forgive myself for brushing aside a hunch because of the low chance of it being true." Tia parried, and I realized that I would have to spend the next week alone, as the former liquidator would focus her attention entirely on her new area of interest.

I wondered if she was really worried or if she'd just gotten out of an exhausting joint psychic session. The latter, of course, is unlikely because she appreciates such an opportunity to develop skills and class abilities, but I still feel left out in the cold.

"Yes, yes, I remember Konstantine and the Low Chance Theory. You've complained to me about that before." I waved it off, focusing on the current situation. "Then I'll leave it up to you, and I'll take another look in about four days, see if I can catch anything."

"Someday, I'm going to make you tell me what your full family name is, you bastard." Taria puffed up like an owl, and Lósius and Hans agreed. Why are you making such a big deal out of this?

The discussion went back to the business direction and even managed to enter it, but the same bad feeling of foreboding did not give me peace of mind. It seemed nothing had changed, but somehow it seemed the time before some bad fuck-up had become a little shorter.

Once upon a time, when I was running through the woods in the company of goblins hungry for a cut from my ass, I, a little intoxicated by my newfound abilities, allowed myself a little (not really a little) fun. Killing not only guaranteed and maximized efficiency, sparing to the reserve, but doing it artistically. The power, hitting me in the head, the pressure of a barely formed planar connection, my own idiocy, not yet etched by the blackened steel of Alurei's realities - all these were equally the reasons for some illogic for preferring pathos over correctness.

It has been a long time since then, even if it may seem like a few moments to some. My strength has increased, and at such a rate that there will be a long line of people from here to dinner who want to repeat this explosive growth, even if they pay even more than I refused to pay. On the contrary, the desire to fool around in battle is long gone. I could only tease and jab when the mockery was more painful than the blade, and in other cases, I preferred to kill immediately and without delay. The fate of the first of the legendary creatures I met, who was eaten by the abomination I had summoned simply because it decided to play with food, was more eloquent than any instructions and lessons.

On the other hand, the opportunity to play with other people's dreams, minds, and even souls became a kind of release when I let my slightly (or not so slightly) sick fantasy run wild in the absence of the usual victims for trolling. Let's leave out the immorality of my actions because what I'm certainly not going to do is justify my actions with typical bookish hypocrisy. Far more importantly, if I've ever chased the spectacular, the funny, or the beauty of the moment, it's in my use of the mirror class. The very nature of Dream is such that it indulges this fantasy, calls for it, and forces it to never be repeated. Any creature can be destroyed with roughly the same lump of shadow energy, but every Dream work is unique in some way, dependent on thousands of little things, thoughts, desires, dreams, personality traits, mirror glare, and other principles even less clear even to me.

A Shadow is a hungry beast that will kill you first of all if you only give a slack, if you only stumble once, or if you look away in fear.

A Dream is a lazy and unfathomable striving for something, where the main problem is to preserve oneself on the way to the goal because the price for each step is huge.

So different, but at the same time, so similar in their nature facets of the universe. It's just a question of how much of yourself you are willing to give for the sake of another piece of power, a new title, a level, or a closed skill. Each realm asks for its own, gives its own, and changes you in its own way, but the result is somehow the same. Flirting with planes is like a huge intestine: it doesn't matter how you get on this road, it doesn't matter who you were and what path you followed to the goal, it doesn't matter what the goal was - the output is still just digested shit. However, from my point of view, not only the connection with other planes but also just life under the sky of Alurei has such a nature.

All of us, even the Summoned ones, are his children in some way.

Losius, for example, is quite definitely a child of this universe. When he asked for his revenge, revenge for the terrible and shameful of a proud noblewoman's death, He did not care about the proportionality of his revenge. His mother, the one who had given him life and raised him, had been despicably murdered, and her body and honor had been despicably violated - that would be enough for a moralist to forget about morality. Losius, in spite of my friendship and respect for him, had neither the mild character nor the forgiveness of a Christian passion-bearer. And in asking for vengeance, he wanted the pain, suffering, and despair with which his soul was filled, and with which the soul of his dying mother was filled. For all who were involved, for all who were dear to those involved.

I did not speak in vain about the absence of happy fathers and mothers among the executors of that long ago and, no doubt, already forgotten by them. Because I'm not sure if I could fulfill Losius' request in such a case. Losius is a child of his world. For him to execute the entire clan of his mother's murderers in a torturous manner is an act as good as it is right. Perhaps, just perhaps, he would not have been able to stab with a sword blade a seven-year-old boy whose fault it was to be born of the murderer's blood. Far more likely, he would have simply given the order to the family retinue, albeit through force.

I gave my word that there would be no live performers among those people, and neither would their families. It would have been easy to kill only those who disgusted me personally and to tell the fellow that I had done everything. But that would be wrong to Asterium, who had fought with me shoulder to shoulder more than once, even if he would never know about it if I didn't want him to.

Once you're in, do it.

I don't like hypocrisy unless I can convince myself it wasn't hypocrisy (yes, yes, mutually exclusive paragraphs, welcome), so I wasn't going to justify myself, but it didn't make me feel any better. Fancy dude had sacrificed his future for me, jeopardizing what was left of his family by leaving that family behind. To not repay that decision would have been a disgraceful thing to do. Fortunately, in some moments, the meaning of "terminate the lineage" can be interpreted broadly enough that the carnivorous sheep are fed and the wolves are not devoured by those sheep.

The easiest thing was to create nightmares for the performers - it was not for nothing that I talked so much about the creative space provided by the Dream. Creating a personal hell for several bad personalities in the past (and in the present, too) was a quest in itself, but in this case, I had outgrown that quest a long time ago. Routine, nothing more.

It was also easy to deal with quite a few of the relatives and friends of these very bad people. As a person who really knew their secrets, sins, and real faces, not the social roles they wore, it was a pleasure to work as a prosecutor. Some died in their sleep, some in accidents, and some were killed in street robberies, although by the time the thugs' dagger broke through the head of an individual who had carelessly strayed into the wrong alley, only a walking doll remained of the individual. Too many deaths in a dream could have disturbed the people in the know, and called for attention, and the good grandfather Weaver would have crawled up to that.

The hardest part was the few people I found myself killing somewhat... uncomfortable. In my time on old Earth sons and daughters were not responsible for their fathers, even if such words on Alurei would elicit only a surprised look. Anyone who said such a thing would be looked upon as a madman. In a way, what they got was no better, but we're here to make Kostik feel like he's not a complete wreck, not really to establish justice, right?

Artle Vintirum's younger sister is the only official survivor of her family's demise after a time of turmoil among the aristocracy. Her two brothers, having sensed in time which way the wind was blowing, managed to take refuge with some of their loyalists in a very remote estate, which the prudent Artle had bought and prepared for such a case. I covered them there, making it look like a very successful green-skinned raid. Buying real estate close to the Frontier it's a bad idea. Though, in fact, there were only half a dozen goblins there, who finished off the guards I'd treated, kidnapped the brothers, who had almost been reduced to a vegetable state by nightmares, cooked them, and got so gluttonous that they died of overeating.

The sister was another matter. Once she was held hostage by the honorable hostages, she was clever enough to play the fool and, in all likelihood, even survive. Marry one of the candidates picked up by the captors (suitable for her status). After that, the shrunken property and lands of the noble house of Vintirum smoothly change owners, and Flia herself lives and lives well. And even in that position, she managed to arrange things so she wouldn't be quietly poisoned when the lands changed hands. I could have frustrated the plans by letting her die, or I could have left her alone, but in the latter case, there was a slim chance of reviving the House of Vintirum.

As a result of a long deliberation, a landless knight, a notorious knave and head of his mercenary lance, decided to lead his troop by a slightly different route. Flia, who had known this guy since childhood, remembered her childhood crush, lost her head, and, spitting on her honor, dignity, and possible prospects of keeping the house afloat, ran away in the arms of her longtime love. After all, her brothers are still hiding somewhere, so let them fuck with this house, but she wants to fuck with a completely different person while trying anal sex, which she - it turns out, she always thought so - likes much more than usual. The latter is the secret wish of the knight who tried Sorz whores in his wanderings and was impressed by the skill of the ladies trained by the slavemancers. The indelible shame is worse than death for an aristocrat, but still not death.

How could the girl know that the brothers had already digested in the stomachs of the goblins, who had died of gluttony? She had a better chance of survival, though. A landless knight's spear, which has almost officially become a mercenary unit, could use its own Bookkeeper and Accountant with a sharp mind and a tight ass, and I even helped them "decide" to emigrate away from Melareth to the much calmer Ramadon. It's easy to get screwed over there if you don't have connections and acquaintances, but once you've done it, you do it to the end. A series of induced dreams and sent visions, and the spear squad will successfully find a perfectly suited employer for a long contract, who will be a perfect match for their team. All they need to do is to make sure they don't get chased, and when they do (the opportunity to get the goddamn fucking endowments and capitals of not the weakest and poorest kind has fled!), that they don't catch up. There were messages that didn't get through, sentries that went blind, informers that overslept, a contrabass that decided to betray an old acquaintance, through whose loopholes they would cross the border, slipped, and so on.

A good story has a good ending, doesn't it?

In much the same way, I interrupted the bloodlines of those whom I considered killing to be excessive, even for my psyche. Teenagers who had forgotten their names, families, homes, and everything else, who found themselves in recruitment regiments recruiting new meat, of course, had far less chance of survival than the sons of a village headman, even if he was dead. And the life of a recruit for the lowest and shittiest military units, next to which even the place of service of Hans, who had also had a lot of hardship, was not so terrible, was much harder, but they had a chance to survive and live.

A mother and daughter who, after the death of her husband, decided to become nuns (the daughter) and the second one to sell her body when she is still in her prime and can still get a bigger buzz out of life. So, the first can go somewhere up the clerical branch, even if she forgot her name from a sunstroke. And the second has all chances to collect money for a trouble-free old age, even taking into account that she will not give birth to new children - she lacked sex in her life, and her husband could not satisfy her and did not particularly want to, while the experience and enthusiasm of a couple of elite courtesans inserted in her head will give a good foundation for career growth and pumping profile skills. I'm sure when she dreamed of sleeping with whomever she wanted, she meant something different, but still she also "has" a non-zero chance of life. A shame, too, both for the former, who had gone novice, and for the latter, a perfectly satisfactory revenge for what was about to be done to Losius's mother. The comrade will be more than satisfied and will not demand their elimination.

A good swordsman, already one step away from the first class, dropped everything, ran away from all his acquaintances, and accidentally burned his tongue and face, falling headlong into the fire. And in one night, he forgot how to wield a weapon. All that was left was to join a small troupe of itinerant artists as a fool and live like that, perhaps, having achieved recognition in a new field. It is a disgrace for a warrior and a man, but during his life, he had no time to do anything reprehensible enough, so there is nothing to kill him. And the fate of a fool is more than worthy punishment from the point of view of the hateful Asterium.

Fates, fates, fates.

It was too easy to begin to see my victims as mere toys, gimmicky scenarios that could be manipulated to my liking. It was fear of becoming like Weaver, if only in small things, that made me seek ways to peculiarly spare those I wished to spare while giving them the kind of fate that Losius would deem worthy for the individuals he hated in absentia. He will, I am sure, appreciate the irony of my actions, for Flia as much as for the rest of us, while I will pretend that it was the innocents I "spared" and not the remains of myself, the one I came to this accursed world to be.

In addition to avenging the death of my companion's mother, I was engaged in a very cautious investigation into another "player" who had somehow glimpsed too often at the limits of my sensitivity while I was still in Melareth. Someone who had sicced Weaver (and pretended to obey) on a minor nobleman I'd met in Ostmark. Someone who was at the very edge, through many intermediaries, without direct influence or orders, but still invisibly connected to the slavers of the Red Knot, where I had the opportunity to conduct traumatic treatment of one small elf child. Someone who carefully guided the actions of Sylay Mariun by roundabout intrigue and a web of guiding events, forcing the late Advisor to make the decisions that the mysterious player needed. Someone whose vision, a strange, unaccustomed, and extremely dangerous vision, was invisibly present alongside each intrigue, like the stroke of an invisible brush, the rustle of an easel whose foundation was fate itself.

We missed each other by an edge, like two ships in the fog. At first, I had no power to notice my colleague without having developed my "third eye on my ass" sufficiently. The colleague failed to find me not only because there was nothing to find. The lack of leads and complete anonymity were no guaranteed defenses against an artist who perceives the whole picture of events. I don't know much about his classes and methods, but even the little things I've seen were enough to impress me. He is, in my opinion, the strongest of all of Melareth's seers, even if without access to the Shoreless Eye. And the Eye won't help him, to be frank, because his method of action is too exotic.

Now I've grown up, matured, become better-looking (but still delightfully humble!), and can play on this field in my favor, but still invisibly flickers near the image of Weaver, not letting me relax my buns and enjoy the feeling of my superiority. Yes, grandfather is still hidden, even from me, but after such a long study of this relic, I can recognize his interest by indirect signs, the lightest fleur of residual images.

I have to be careful not to rush things and ideally work through a proxy, preferably not turning it into a doll-like piece of meat, but through a carefully and subtly guided seer. And I have, ever since I escaped from Melareth, a lady with the right class, level, high professional qualities, and a door left in her essence through which I can work properly with the mind of the evil aunt who once almost caught me in the act.

Persea Tiaram, level twenty-seven and the owner of two epic classes at once, the Seer and the recently taken (during the mess left by our sightseeing trip) Comprehenser, is now the head of Melareth's central circle of Seers. She took her position in place of Bernard Dautier, the same wrinkled old man who sought us out through the Eye during our escape through the woods and fields. Bernard had long been feeding the devils in Hells (figuratively, for no one would give his soul with all its secrets to the devils), having chosen the wrong side and, even more accurately, having started to push his rights and demand more privileges for his support of the throne at the wrong time.

The Throne in the person of His Majesty thought and accepted Persea's proposal at the same time, making sure she was superior to the old seer, who was unused to working without the support of the Eye. In fact, Dautier would never have pushed if he had not been sure the pressure would work and there was no danger to him. Persea had successfully deceived her experienced but arrogant colleague, hiding the true reaction of King Arial from him without even showing her face. She was sitting in the waiting room three walls away from the room where Bernard had made his last mistake. She had not forgotten to demand a record of the old seer's summary execution, which the furious King had willed to take place right there. He had a funny look on his face when the lady opened the veil of deceit at the last moment. She was then busy putting the deceased's personal records and image vaults in order - he had been killed, but he had protected his secrets well. He might have been questioned first, but the King was very angry, and the deceased had crossed a line that required an immediate answer.

Persea, having become the main Seer, having confirmed access to the Eye, which she had before, but now she was the one in charge of its use, took up the task and began to cheerfully pump up the level, at the same time multiplying all those who disagreed with His Majesty's policy by zero. Successfully, though, she risked her own life. If Tiaram had destroyed the priceless Mythic, she would have been slaughtered with all the agony she deserved. She'd done it, she'd gotten herself pumped up, and now she was as confident as she could be in the situation.

Who but her to find the traces of one obscure colleague and try to unwind them with the help of both her own forces and the state apparatus and clues of a certain isekai? It is only necessary, for a start, to ensure her obedience to these clues.

It would be foolish to think the mind and will of such a high-ranking and necessary secret carrier were not protected from influence. Even in frankly beaten Melareth, such things were not to be ignored but worked in the usual mode of highly professional paranoia. There were amulets, even in the bathtub, and mental defense of the trained mind, a couple of interesting rituals, and even a very funny early warning system with a dozen triggers left in her brain by her hand. If one of these triggers, one of her beliefs, gets caught, her subconscious mind turns on the alarm. And everything is quite subtle and cunningly twisted. After all, if Persea has a passionate desire to move to Sorz or run away from the yard in the company of one of her lovers, then even a fool would realize it's bad, and if he doesn't, it's too late.

Trigger reactions involve more fuzzy elements of personality that may not cause anxiety at first: if she becomes lazy to do her daily workouts, if some task she had put on her mental list of things to do falls out of her memory, if there are sudden changes in her tastes and preferences, and so on. In the initial stages of processing, such criteria of alarm will help to notice the initial stage.

To say that my task was as easy as eating a pie would be an exaggeration of my awesomeness. No, if I wanted to make a slave, a toy, or a pure agent, even if she didn't realize her new status, it would take much less time and effort. The main effort had to be spent on making sure my actions were not just hidden but literally lost in the labyrinths of her mind. In effect, I was strengthening her defenses, will, and self-awareness, making her a multiply more dangerous target for any brainwasher. In a second layer, I was masking this amplification on all levels of retrieval, both energetic and psychic, forcing her to remain the same Persea Tiaram in the eyes of her superiors and coworkers. It wasn't until later, not even the third but the tenth layer, that I began to weave an imperceptible web of my wishes into her dreams, thoughts, and personality. Yes, they could be used to override direct control or to play with her body and soul, with little or no way to trace the consequences of such games. But far more important is the ability to synchronize her skills, abilities, and class with the image blocks I can send her.

I dare hope that by the end of this project, which can't be done in one week, even Weaver or someone of comparable caliber won't realize that some of Persea's visions, insights, decisions, and plans don't really belong to her. And if the ancient creature or the very artist I seek eliminates her, parsing her actions into their smallest elements, they will see only a very lucky and talented seer whose class and personal talent have blossomed with her appointment to a new position. A seer who has become enough of a nuisance to be eliminated, but definitely not an agent of the very idiot that the same Weaver and likely his ally in the material world is so diligently seeking.

And the idiot himself will be able to follow the elimination from the outside and already this idiot will catch the images of a hunter who came to kill a hare and did not notice that this hare has long been watched by a powerful battle deer.

Or a moose.

Or a сarduelis.

For the current stage of the operation, a separate warehouse was allocated, located on the territory of the same damned manufactory. And I needed a lot more mirrors, both for the communication session with Misty and for hiding the background from the resulting construction. I even had to use Ygra and send her to cut out one of the criminal element's lairs, where stolen or fought goods were stored. I had forbidden to touch them before, well, or not ordered to, since their warehouse was located actually within the city limits of Eternal. Not within the circle of walls but in the suburbs, which had long since become part of the city, even if the capital's inhabitants considered the suburbanites to be some kind of visiting monkeys.

That reminds me of something...

The guards were affectionately and tenderly laid to rest forever, and I had to quickly and technically steal ten bags of mirror fragments and four individual height mirrors from the warehouse. It was even a bit of a shame to ruin such quality merchandise. There was a whole story behind the theft of this shipment, worth a fabulous amount of money, without a single dead body or drop of blood. The story involved two Shamans, an Illusionist, a highly skilled Gigolo, a dozen and a half homeless beggars, and an Alishan runt, but we're not talking about this heist of the century.

We had to haul the mirrors all together since I didn't risk building a mirror portal. Not after the potential exposure at the House of a Thousand Spectacles. Tia supported my paranoia, happily agreeing to take a little more time for the sake of less risk, but Taria and Hans were not so happy. Losius, as the owner of not-too-outstanding stealth and a face that had become quite familiar after his duel, abstained from voting. He was left at the base, reading another historical chronicle. Honestly, if he continued like this, after a couple of years he could get a job teaching at some prestigious educational institution.

The warehouse was turned into one huge mirror labyrinth, and the wooden floor reinforced by Tia was turned into a continuous mosaic of mirror pieces, in the center of which a lovely flower bud blossomed, consisting of larger shards on the edges and whole mirrors in the center of the inflorescence. I look at this horror and realize that with my own hands made an analog of the launching shaft for a nuclear missile. If I really bother and work hard, I can cover a city the size of Tavimark with a single blow without leaving a single living creature there. Or, if I invest not in scale but in cumulative power, I could try to eliminate King Melareth right now, without any preparation, because I had time to get the necessary images from Melanie's memory. The chances of success are high.

Fortunately, all the conceptual changes in the mirrors processed by my abilities are for other actions. Again resorting to Earth terms. I've made a cloaked nuclear mine into a powerful radio tower and radar in one, leaving it still just as invisible to the rest of the world. Work on the design is finished, all associates are instructed, escape routes have been negotiated a thousand times, and things have long since been put into suitcases. Whatever the outcome of today's operation, be it a failure or a smashing success, we will quickly leave the inhospitable Eternal. Or first, we'll hold out until I've replenished my strength, then we'll leave. We're already overrun, and I'm not even sure what I'm feeling.

Fuck it!

We'll change the lair, and lie down, perhaps, right outside the city walls in the company of Ygra, after which we'll give a quick flee from the local population.

I chose a time for the connection to start so Pypysh would be asleep. His daily schedule was as stable as a Swiss mark, like any self-respecting halfling, so we had time to study it thoroughly. Tia could write it down by the minute. Of course, there were occasional stumbles and emergencies, but in the absence of them, he preferred to sleep well at night rather than work late into the night on the next report. He got up very early, though, just to be able to go to bed at a normal time.

The signal was like a fine spoke, a needle even, a red-hot thread making its way to its target. No defenses, no barriers, or complete removal of most of the planes from a certain part of reality would help. It would not help because I was guided by a unique coordinate system, accessible only to the adepts of Dream, where reality or the absence of something is as much a tool as plus or minus for a mathematician.

The defenses weren't perfect, but they were close to it, as close as the Empire of the Ages and the Eternal Library, in particular, could afford. But I didn't break through the barriers, didn't try to seep through the gaps or trick the ever-vigilant enchantments. I was simply linking the existence of the Misty and the mirror flower linking them directly without using the constants familiar to the creators of echeloned defenses.

The connection was established so smoothly - not to count the wild load and a few burned-out elements of the overall construction as such - that I was even confused. I was too ready for an instant retreat or for a whole wagonload of special tricks designed for such clever people. What I certainly wasn't prepared for was getting it right on the first try and without complications. I was so unprepared that I almost lost control by surprise, only at the last moment managing to keep control.

It took me a few seconds to establish a connection with Misty, and I completely disconnected from reality and began to dig into the memory of what was probably the most dangerous halfling in the empire. No, just one of the top five, according to the data I'd gotten from Tia. I'll have to ask her about these guys because I wondered what surprises Frodo's furry-footed followers might give out. The brains of the creature in charge of the Library's communications with the outside world, hiring new staff, and issuing security clearances for visitors were probably better protected than any other sentient being I'd tried to read, except Tia. If I didn't have a cheater Misty who literally flushed ninety-five percent of that protection down the toilet, it would have taken at least a few days of continuous labor, and more likely a couple of weeks, to discreetly open that armor.

The most frustrating thing is that I don't have access to thousands of thousands of secrets, which I can hardly find out any other way (unless I search for something intentionally, but for that, you should at least wish to organize those searches). The limit of time is delineated by the limit of Misty's strength, which is now under heavy strain, literally forcing the construct to digest itself. Time is running out, and I just don't have the luxury to waste it.

Blocks are deceived, rewritten, layered on top of each other, or simply eaten by Mr. Misty's distorted essence. Pypysh is sleeping and having the best erotic dreams of his life, and I am careful, layer by layer, dissecting him like a frog. He has a good chance of surviving - there's no point in killing him. It would be suspicious, and leaving him alive will buy us all time until the next inspection. I'll be able to cover my tracks, but not in such a time crunch, so I'm limiting myself to the essentials, like deception or disabling instant alarm triggers. At least one legendary artifact covered his mind from being captured on Library grounds, with its effect shutting down a fair share of "important" persons. Fortunately, my actions are not wholly brainwashing, mental zombification, obsession, or anything else. Uniqueness helps, so to speak. As does acting from underneath the defense itself rather than from the outside.

Other people's memories, especially those of a strong and pumped up (forty level exactly!) personality, are a labyrinth, and long years filled with victories and defeats, intrigues and secrets, disappointments and achievements, accumulate a huge amount of information, which even with my accelerated perception during sleep and "sleep" is a hell of a lot of time to process. I plunged into work, sparing no nerves, shuffling the most distant memories and fleeting thoughts, as fleeting as they were deep...

...the deep levels of the central building, a warehouse of dangerous but valuable items, holding more than a dozen cursed or unstable legendary artifacts alone, and where the trophy Pedestrian's Canopy had been taken to check for bookmarks or destruction schemes. Entry modes, passwords, tests, and deceptive aura scans, hid another use of the Abiding One's Sight, which was why Pypysh, who was well aware of what was sleeping in the depths of the Library and what the Library was built inside, preferred not to go there without the need...

...need to go to the First Foundation of Inscriptions and Descriptions, located in the heart of the library, where only those books, scrolls, papers, cuneiform tablets, crystals with illusions, or image casts are recognized as truly valuable and unparalleled. Books, the reading and learning of which can automatically raise skills, raise or close to a cap a particular ability for a particular class or group of such, grant a title, or even awaken an arcana. Or just eat the soul, cripple the shells, and drive you crazy because not everyone will able to withstand the written, enclosed in paper. All sorts of material anchors of contracts and agreements are kept there, excluding those of a divine nature or state-political importance. Recently, a stolen item was delivered there straight from Alishan ...

...from Alishan had returned the newly seconded Cerach Podrius Hrass, fully committed to his master and his goal of preventing Pypysh from being promoted to a higher position than he currently held. A halfling with a grip could be allowed to do many things, but not the top three Librarians, who hold the deepest secrets. However, his unwillingness to cede his power isn't the only reason for having a whole group of Podriyas men stationed around him. The Trinity, the old bitch, can't be sure that the non-human blood of Pypysh won't arouse the keen interest of that which slumbers in the Depths, only occasionally opening one of the countless eyes of his...

...his loaders with thirteen tons of first-grade parchment, soaked in alchemical potions that prevented wear and tear and erasure. It would last for a long time; there was a reason he'd made that contract in advance, having waited five long years, holding the goods in personally paid warehouses. The Sovereign's Procurement went exactly as Pypysh had planned, pushing out those who wanted to warm their hands on contracts with the Library in favor of his debtors, partners, and distant relatives. But he had to personally sell three fools who wanted to save money on the quality of their goods to be publicly flogged and given to laborers. There is a limit to any impudence. One must not give Trinity an excuse to sway an honest half-brother, though they had recently warmed their hands.....

...hands of the poor guy are ripped off. No archmage could heal him. Pypysh had helped to get him better prosthetics, for it wasn't his fault that Volume of the Echoing Storms had decided to wake up again just as he was being transported from the reading altar straight to the waiting altar. Lately, written on the skin of ancient orc kin tortured by ancient orcs with the gift of foresight, the book has been awakening more and more often, and it's getting harder and harder to calm it down. The vile thing senses the coming war, which is already from a week to a week will begin quite officially, and feel the smell of blood...

... blood of the Enlightened Za continues to decompose right in his veins at the expected rate, but the prognosis is still very optimistic. Yes, it would be impossible to cure the mighty defector, with whom the Eyes are carrying around as if with a gemstone, from an extremely cunning curse. But among dusty reed tablets, it was possible to find a description of the curse and a method of breaking it. Only to carry it out in the safest possible configuration, it is necessary to wait for the right position of the stars...

... star power he wanted, bastard! How did they persuade him to let the youngster into such dangerous literature? Look like old Magaryda had paid off his four-uncle with her charms, and Pypysh had foolishly sent Benjamin to watch the guest. He, of course, is a clever man but unforgivably considers the intelligent people around him clever too. Everything ended quite expectedly, but still foolish...

... foolish to expect that an outsider would be allowed to enter the central search altar, even with all the precautions and at great expense. The mythical artifact, with its power to encompass all the stored knowledge of not only the Library but most of the capital, held so many secrets that it could not be touched without a position on the Council of Bookworms-not a whim, but a contract. The same contract, directly changing the laws of the universe, will make the heart of the violator stop, and his soul will leave the body, feeding the altar with another portion of power ...

...power sought within the walls of the temple of knowledge, but found only boring routine and career dead end, even pity this bitch, because she is good looking, damn. But now her days are really numbered - to escape from her vows, breaking the contract by sacrificial extremely cunning ritual using two junior employees in love with her, and even on the eve of war - such will not be forgiven. But the ritual was good, really good: to set up a duel to the death between two rams, not otherwise with the help of mind-affecting potions, to treat the walls of the far vault with the necessary signs on their own blood and essence from the heart of an unborn child, and then wait until the two fools voluntarily doom each other's souls in a "fair fight for the sake of their hearts". Beautiful, graceful even, even makes you laugh, only how she managed to survive intoxication from the shreds of other people's suffering ...

...suffering and then some more. The Torture Book of Torture is no ordinary book, but a goddamn legendary artifact that might be considered mythical if it weren't for its near-total uselessness, except for its value to collectors or as an object for study by mages. An embodied spatial fold where a vast labyrinth is sealed, in which languish three hundred bound to unbreakable, as long as the labyrinth stands, contracts of devils from different domains, but invariably belonging to aspects of Agony. Now all three employees, who had miraculously survived the journey through the labyrinth and training with the masters of their craft locked there, had acquired torture skills no less than a master, and in Basil's case, a great master. Mental problems and the threat of desecration by Hell come with it. You ignorant fools, who would mess with such creations with unwashed hands? Yes, the test of the book is activated by willingly given blood, but not necessarily your own - you can't eat roasted sirloin with blood without normal knives and forks, and you should wipe your hands. Balyn-tyrtyryryn yh mogylyshche! A legendary artifact of the devil's essence shouldn't be touched with bare hands! Some people can only be fixed by the grave...

...a grave supposedly belonging to Ana'Terai himself, an ancient warlord of an extinct race that left behind only wild territories and a network of necropolises and burial grounds around the world, was uncovered by three diamond teams from the Adventurer's Guild with the support of Library specialists. Even the Second of Three wasn't lazy enough to get his fat ass off his legendary throne and lend support with personal artifacts. The artifacts, treasures, and, most importantly, books and personal diaries are still being evaluated by the sovereign's commission, but it is already clear that even war with Alishan will not prevent the use of the information obtained to open several more previously unknown tombs...

...tombs are not to be disturbed, even if you don't live near them, but someone from the Eternals is clearly working on a project, or so it would seem. The idea of returning an artifact useless to the Empire of the Ages to its true owners so they can increase their assault on Alishan from the Desert is a good idea, I could swear on my second breakfast! And the diplomat who'd managed to negotiate with the Tomb Kings and get an equally tentative agreement without being turned into a necro-construct was worth a pearl ribbon. He could swear to that even with his first dinner! Yes, if everything goes well, Alishan will be in for a huge surprise. With the return of the Scepter of the Extinguished Pharaoh, the undead onslaught will be multiplied. But now he, who had learned of this plan only by chance, was afraid to even fart too loudly - so many contracts of silence had been placed on him. Where were his brains...

... the brains of the Torshilan are dulled, but the masters of intelligence swear they can restore them. Why shouldn't they, when the Library pays for everything, and the Library charges the families of degenerate women who've failed to do so? Envy of intelligence and beauty, or rather, of their successful combination, makes them do stupid things. For three years already one of the teams of analysts has been without Torshilan like without hands. And it is not someone else's intrigue, not sabotage, but just envy and stupidity. Encyclopedic knowledge does not add intelligence, it is every librarian is beaten into the head with an iron stick, sometimes pushing the truth through the ass. He copy a mnemonic pattern from the brush of one long-dead artist-bimbomancer, and transfers it to the cover of the diary presented as a sign of reconciliation! At least her group was quick to notice before the black-skinned Kushitka started giggling and dumbfounded, but the damage had been done. Class vulnerability against such mind-affecting methods, no matter how one looked at it. For people, who didn't even know who the analyst assigned to their staff (on the lower level of the dossier) actually worked for, were executed the same month. And they didn't even have to help - there was a whole line of people willing to help them get punished, both in the Library and in the capital in general. Even the Third of the Three was said to have had a hand in it, but he was...

...was gone, as well as the money spent on it! The map was an original, but it was useless - the treasure had been found three hundred years ago, in the time of the Fortifier.

...the fortifier said it could be done, but it would cost as much gold as a palace. It is easier not to show off and move the ritual center to another place, or even through the sewer clever people to decide...

..decide to break a contract that was a perfectly workable contract. What did he ever hope for in his madness...

...the madness of rock grabbing. Fatal, despite the best efforts of the healers. Either a fool or someone deliberately set the newcomer up, but the walls of the Library drank him to the bottom. At first, he helped himself with potions, braced himself, and refused to answer questions about rest, but then he lost consciousness, fell into a coma, and was not even carried to the exit. His soul is now...

...now all that's left to do is finalize the calculation.....

... calculation Kondratiy did, and this grandfather does not know...

...knows about the secrecy...

...the secrecy has been pushed beyond all limits...

... limit of the accumulation of potential has not been found ...

I have noticed many times before that working with Dream through dreams or mirrors is one thing. But when you plunge into Dream as a whole, with your whole body falling into the looking glass like your Alice, that's when the fun begins. Even a simple stay in another plane, without taking into account personal bonuses, allowed you to strengthen your techniques by almost an order of magnitude. There were exactly two problems with this seemingly obvious option of pumping and just doing business through Dream.

First: the consequences of long contact with Dream in distilled form. It's not even to infuse the shell with borrowed planar power, which causes the body to literally melt like hot wax. Now you yourself dive into what you used to scoop up and filter! Where before the body, mind, and essence were melting like hot wax in the sun, the closest analogy would be a lump of sugar in boiling water at full tumble. I'm really scared to imagine the degree of affinity with Dream the Weaver has, if it's hard for me, even with my class bonuses, to stay there longer than a couple of hours (in the case of a pre-prepared dive and precautions taken). And that shit floats there all the time while remaining relatively adequate, as adequate as an ancient creature can be. I can only console myself with the thought that he just "successfully" traded his humanity (or elvenness, or dwarvenness, or whatever he was when he was alive, if he wasn't born in Dream), and is not so superior to poor me.

The second reason: is the actual Weaver. In the real world, due to his nature, he is somewhat limited, weakened, and not so powerful. Yes, this "weakness" of his is extremely comparative, but still, in the real world, I have a chance to run away, hide my ass, or slip a decoy. But when I step into his territory, it's not so fun, or rather, it will be fun, but not for me. Once I was in his domain, in his element, it would be harder to hide my existence. So much more difficult that practically all the power freed from immersion in a favorable environment will have to be used for camouflage. Without pre-prepared barriers and deceptions, I have nothing to do in Dream because I will be weaker than outside it.

I have already learned to live with both risk factors, to work, and, if necessary, to overcome them. In this case, the room I created could be not only a radio tower but also a bathyscaphe for diving into the seabed or even a stealth fighter of the latest generation. I couldn't ignore the amplification from full immersion, so I decided not to trifle with trying to fit in more barriers and embodiments of stability, immutability that would protect me-sugar from the fate of sugar in a boiling pot. No, if you're going to play big, then play to the end!

And I played, dragging the entire mirror room into Dream. Outside, all that was left was the perfectly ordinary and phoneless frame of the warehouse, but inside, it was now a chasm in Dream. A sinkhole in which floated a beautiful and ugly at the same time mirror flower, surrounded by dozens of rings of mirror shards that swirled around it in bizarre orbits, like asteroids around a planet. Spinning, protecting, and helping me to imagine the little piece of the unreal as I wished it to be. And there is nothing more real in the unreal than the thoughts and desires of what resides there.

I had allotted myself two hours to rummage through Pypysh's memory, hoping to find what I needed at once. This hope, apparently as compensation for my initial luck, went down the drain along with my plans. It took me four and a half hours to somehow dig through the tangle of threads tangled in forty dimensions as his memory presented itself to me. The exact time, conceptually absent in Dream, I managed to find out thanks to the anchors prepared in advance in the dreams of several workers from the buildings neighboring the cursed territory. I quickly tapped into their brains and found out how much I spent.

I didn't panic only because under the current conditions, even the briefest loss of concentration threatened to make my mix of a planetoid and a spaceship on imaginary propulsion collapse into itself with me inside. The schedule is bearable, of course, but Misty's lifespan isn't eternal, and Tia's rituals are already coming apart at the seams. The obsessed librarian is still asleep and dreaming, but it's probably time for him to wake up if I'm going to get anything out of this idiocy.

The awakening went as usual, and then things moved on as expected. The chain of command, already tried and tested on Ollo, but only now, much more complicated, worked. I send my wish to the radio tower. The mirror structure itself encrypts this wish in the mirror labyrinth, making it practically unreadable madness (which can burn out brains if someone too curious intercepts it), and then sends it to one of the beacon-mirrors scattered around the city in advance, reflecting from randomly chosen deceptions three or four times before reaching Misty, who, in his turn, deciphers the received image, realizes it and makes the desire contained in it into the desire of Pypysh, who is in a light and indistinguishable trance.

It is possible to work even more subtly, sparing the Mist, but the delay between the order and its execution will be unacceptably long. It is also possible to speed it up, at the cost of traumas for the body, shells, and soul of Pypysh and threats of lightening on the sensors, up to repeating the trick from the story about saving elven tits, when you create a glove puppet, put it on, and through it, you create a game. But now I have to choose the golden mean, equally uncomfortable from all sides.

The halfling got this idea, and now he got to his feet, took and activated all the necessary amulets and passes, and then directed his footsteps to the portal from his personal spatial fold. Well, not only his, for there were also some of the offices where the office rats subordinate to him and his department were sitting, but still most of the fold was his chambers, offices, archive, kitchen, bathroom, and a small swimming pool! It was much cooler than his mansion in the nobility quarter and cooler than his palace, too!

Pypysh talked to the workers, for the Eternal Library never sleeps but only changes shifts, answered a couple of people who came to him with questions not directly related to him, and said hello to a few friends and relatively close subordinates. Some, or rather many, noted the extremely uncharacteristic waking hours for a hobbit who valued his routine, for only something very serious, important, or dangerous, or even all of these together, could make him work after hours.

Testing, more testing. Half an hour of waiting for all seventy-nine of the seventy-nine different types of screen scanners at the portal door to the central, most secure areas of the Library to work. A few more badge checks, the obligatory identity check for foreign influence (I got a little nervous here, but the Misty worked as it was designed to), and then another series of scanning screens and fields. Toward the end, I had to sever my connection to the construct and tighten my cloak and defenses, which almost cost me serious injury and guaranteed to cost me an even worse migraine. But I had no other option but to expose the essence of Pypysh with the bare minimum of disguise and only that which covered Misty. The feeling of someone's gaze, already familiar and distinguishable even through the whole chain of transmitters, made me glad for the first time that I was in Dream - it was much harder to shit here.

I'll admit it. I was ready at that very moment to cut the connection and run away from the transmitter, blowing it the fuck up. Because that thing, whatever it was, could only let Misty through by sheer luck. I wasn't expecting the kind of horror I'd seen at the entrance to the Library to be even more scrutinized inside. The possessed man's memory only got in the way because he reasonably stayed away from the subject of what they were looking at at times. And those moments he did know were not detailed and specific enough in terms of magical concepts. Pypysh was an organizer and master of working with information flows, not a classic mage. Nevertheless, having burned half of Misty's cloaking elements from overload, I managed to get that look... No, not to distract or obscure it, but to hide a part of the whole from the whole picture, hiding a piece of the canvas with the help of mirror reflections.

Honestly, it seemed to me for a brief moment as if this something was not looking as intently as it could have. Now, from the venerable Popyatchev's memory, I know that when checking applicants at the entrance to one of the outer portals, the entity was barely awakened from its unshakable slumber. But here and now, it sort of had to be more collected, awakened. And even though this is also a guess based on a previous mistake, I can't afford to ignore my intuition.

Either I got lucky, just lucky, no tricks.

Either I was let in here on purpose, hoping to learn more about the infiltrators of the sacred shrines.

But neither I nor my construction can detect any attention, any premonition of danger, and there are so many reassurances that even Weaver or someone of comparable caliber can't deceive them completely. I'm inexcusably slow, spreading my strength and trying to spot danger in the real world while signaling the entire group to be on high alert. Tia, as a seer, was given a separate assignment and began methodically and continuously sifting through the surrounding attention vectors, trying to discern among them false and disguised ones under which an ambush or assault group was hidden. Most of the good sightings or circles she "knows," so it's highly likely she'll spot something.

But.

I do not believe that the creature who looked at me would go to such a trick as to pretend not to see anything. Not because it is not clever enough but because it is far above such games and has no need to interrupt its immense renunciation of all things for the sake of any cunning plans. No, it would simply strike the supposed spy at the same time raising the alarm in the unlikely event that the intruders who called for his attention dared to outlast that attention.

But.

It let Misty and me through too easily, and I didn't care about all my precautions, disguises, and defenses. If Pypysh had been virtually untouched, as was his mental defense. If Misty had been in a fully coiled state, and if I hadn't been near the construct I'd created, then the odds would have been almost a hundred percent. But I was in a hurry. I made a mess. I miscalculated my strength, and, as Tia had warned me, I relied on blind Fate, and that's why I was in deep shit.

But.

I've been missed. Everything here is too wrong, or the opposite is too right. I don't see any sense. I don't see any reason to play this strange game with me. And that just makes me uncomfortable. What's going on right now? Has my paranoia finally turned from a faithful assistant into a normal mental disorder that complicates life rather than making it easier? Am I getting myself worked up where there is no reason to be worked up? Or am I calming myself down, writing off the desperate cries of my intuition squeezed by confined fields and evil, ancient will on my overstressed and panic-stricken imagination?

Stupid situation.

Stupid world.

Stupid isekai.

Stupid me.

I entered the hall with the information altar of cognition, closed as much as possible, hiding everything I could hide, and what I couldn't hide, I hid anyway. From the side, no matter for living eyes or soulless security charms, a desperately yawning Pypysh entered the huge, soccer field-sized hall, completely empty except for the stone altar of snow-white marble, cursing his curiosity, the late hour, the Second of the Three, and the whole universe in general. With the same expression of "I shouldn't be doing this at this hour, but I can't put it on someone else," he began to remove any protective amulets that might interfere with him, at the same time pulling off all his clothes except for his loose linen pants - the structure of the altar (the real name of the artifact, amusingly enough, was never mentioned anywhere, always slipping into impersonal) might react nervously to unnecessary items.

The Altar...

It was the very Google I cherished in my dreams, in which I am banned by virtue of being transported to another world. An omnipotent artifact capable of pulling knowledge literally out of the ass. Any records, any scrolls - anything once entrusted to paper, leather, birchbark tablets, or knotted writing. All of it sooner or later falls into the net of cognition. Something almost instantaneously, with the same speed with which the letters written down by the author are rendered on paper. Other books, properly protected, which have never been brought to the Library, or even never brought to the capital, come here after many years. Other things come without records at all: secrets, events, conversations, and deeds. In time their images, purest and filtered to crystal clarity, comprehensible even to an individual far removed from the craft of seeing, are poured into the altar, hidden in the whiteness of its smooth stone, in the silence of the always quiet and deserted hall, where no one ever dusts or cleans, but where sterile cleanliness reigns from century to century.

When I learned from the hobbit's memory of the existence of such a miracle, I almost had a stroke. Fortunately, let no mystery escape him, but it does not come immediately. Uncovering intrigues and plots with an altar, though possible, is no better than specialized legendary artifacts. The better the mystery is protected, the further away from the capital it occurred, and the longer it takes to absorb. We're not talking weeks or even months, but years or dozens of them. I was, after all, protected by un-existence, hidden in labyrinths of mirrors and all sorts of precautions. No, such a tasty story as the death of one of the imperial princes would surely fall into the arms of the altar, but not immediately.

Apparently, much of the Empire's success in the political arena, as well as the preference for defense tactics by its generals and the same defense strategy of development, came from this miracle of the miraculous. Yes, you can hide a lot of things from those who see and from the Eyes, but only for a while. Sooner or later, and more likely sooner, any secrets, any preparations, any plans of their enemies will become known. It's hardly possible to interfere because this shit is too slow to react, but it's almost unrealistic to hide from retribution, to cover up the traces of their dirty deeds. Someday, maybe not in this decade, but the truth about my nature and my self-given great mission will be known.

I'd have liked to pump as much Dream as possible through Misty, to smash everything here, and to drown the indestructible altar at the bottom of the river of forgotten dreams so no one would find it. Alas, all the experience and memory of Pyshypyshch directly said that if not even to hit, but just wrongly touch the altar, as you simply will not be. It takes away.

Although the hobbit often felt threatened by the smooth stone, I couldn't distinguish anything. I mean, I could sense the threat, and it was so bad that the bricks from my ass were flowing, threatening to collapse the imperial building materials market, but somehow I was sure I could successfully try to hit the altar. I couldn't destroy it because it was connected to the very structure and nature of the Library.

Pypysh finished undressing and put his dry palms on the cold surface of the stone, falling headlong into a huge catalog with thousands of thousands of links, each of which hid the same thousands of new links, and another, and another, and another... For someone unfamiliar with the concept of the Internet, this amount of distilled knowledge could drive one crazy with the mere realization of his insignificance in front of this infinity. Even for me, it was hard and quite shocking. The Internet might have exceeded the amount of garbage accumulated in the altar, but not by orders of magnitude.

Knowledge.

Comprehension.

Mysteries.

All of them were before me, all of them forever...

...the hobbit's body takes a deep breath.....

...there...

...his mind, his mind begins to search, to make inquiry after inquiry, and Misty and I, hiding behind Pyszcz's mind, sorted through and either discarded or looked a little more closely at yet another mystery...

...locked...

I was almost at the end of my disguise - just enough to reach the possessed man's rooms and eliminate the connection - when the palms of sweating and bone-chilling Pypysh's hands came off the altar, and he stepped away from the altar, staggering and lurching, trying to regain his breath. I'm not quite sure what exactly I got from this operation and whether I got anything at all, but I can be sure that the case of finding the nature of the Shackles has clearly moved from another dead point.

I need to think really hard about this.

I should set up a lair in some small town, perhaps even a large village, and create another clairvoyance amplifier like the one I'd recently created. All the more so because I could feel how close its creation had brought me to get another title, and some system message flashed before my eyes, but I didn't have time to realize it. Maybe I even got the title. My actions over the last 24 hours fit into the theme of suicidal and insane behavior. Yes, I should lay low, create the right conditions, and then take a long and thoughtful look at everything I had gotten from this day.

Explore.

Create a plan.

And start acting in a way that's not completely random.

Before the story of the Stone, I was poking at the walls of obscurity like a blind kitten, and I stumbled upon the fortress itself purely on pure luck, Grandpa Losius's Diary, and the blessing of Saint Randomius. So to speak, it was a lucky roll of the dice, without which I could have spent years looking for a place to start my Quest until I'd pumped up my clairvoyance and mirror class to the right level to get this information.

Operation in the Eternal is no longer blind poking but rather working in total darkness and without night vision, by feel. It's not easy either, but you already know what and where you're looking for, even if you have no idea what it looks like and what form it has taken. I would have finished this stage sooner or later, even if today had been an epic failure. The Eternal and its book depository were not the only good Library on Alurei.

But now.

Now a new milestone in this millennia-long quest has begun.

The possessed man, still grumbling, but now thoughtfully rather than grudgingly, dressed, activated his amulets, and strode toward the exit from the hall. They always come in here without any helpers, so he would have to go out on his own, despite his fatigue, because there was no one to give him a shoulder to lean on. He would have to explain to the Bookworm Council why he had come here because it was not for nothing such a valuable artifact was almost always idle and rarely used for its intended purpose. Even if you remove the risk of simply disappearing without ever returning from the hall, any use of the altar is extremely exhausting to the body and mind, and also rapidly accelerates the build-up of wall pressure - the very debuff that makes junior staff members have to take regular vacations. Dusty would soon need to spend a week or two in the fresh air, too, despite his level and affinity for the walls. Not only he has not left his workplace for decades and never intended to do so, but he also knows a lot of secrets, some of which simply forbid him to leave the other dimension, where there is all possible protection. The story with the scepter of mythical grade, which is planned to be handed over to the undead sitting in Alishan's rear!

When he got about halfway to the door, the halfling stopped and froze, sensing something strange, wrong, and not him in his thoughts. I, as the one who was controlling him right now through that very "not his" shoved in him, was pretty fucked up since he simply couldn't notice my presence. He wasn't at a level and class set where Misty, even beaten up and having spent a fair share of his resources, could screw up the perception and thinking distortion.

But it wasn't me he noticed, no. Another influence, equally subtle and beautiful in its lightness, enveloped both the mind, the aura, and the essence of the elderly bookworm, preventing him from realizing it. He could not notice this influence even with a greater degree of "impossibility" than my own, so perfectly calibrated was it. It was as if someone had taken a long, hard look at all his defenses and distorted them to use them against the one being protected. Even for me, the level of "I'll repeat it, but it'll be hard!"

The only thing was, I'd twisted and jumbled his defenses, and the very presence of Misty actively conjuring inside him was interfering with the second portion of the distortion even more. Strong enough for the hobbit's mind to notice some irregularity. Strong enough to make my panic level rise a thousandfold, and the traitorous thought flashed through my mind that I'd been ambushed and that Kostik should have listened to Aunt Tia instead of charging forward with pure arrogance and pathos.

I tried to distort the host's perception on the fly, making him just silently move on, pretending that everything was fine, wanting to buy some time to cover my tracks, but after such an eloquent pause in his movements, it wasn't even funny. Stanislavsky would not have believed it, and neither would the ambush regiment.

Pypysh's ears heard nothing, his eyes saw nothing, and only his well-developed intuition had time to prick him with a sense of distress at the last moment. He still had time to turn around, and I began to prepare for the collapse of Misty and all the immediate surroundings, as the face flashed in front of the face of one of the employees of the internal sectors of the Library, and quite high, even though the halfling had almost no contact with him, and then frozen in shock good-naturedly smiling man smiled lightly, almost gently touched the cheek of the old man as if caressing his beloved wife.

And the old man died.

At once.

Not with a body or even a shell.

His soul died.

It was as if that soul, from which Misty had distanced as much as possible for the sake of disguise, had been flooded with an unbearably sweet syrup of purest tenderness, a bliss beyond which there was nothing else. And the essence of a reasonable man who had been pumped up to forty, incredibly stable and impossibly strong, dissolved without a trace in a few heartbeats, leaving only an untouched and empty shell. The lights were turned off for a while, cutting me off from controlling or communicating with Misty.

Something I don't understand.

I was tempted to drop everything and run away, but I couldn't. There was still Misty, who was too much my creation for me to let anyone study it or even just poke at its remains appear after the construct self-destructed. I gave the zero-level readiness signal, which included being ready for anything, even before I tried to re-establish communication. Strangely enough, I didn't sense any opposition or attention, as if no one was going to open the possessed man. And come to think of it, did they even know about me? It felt like it was the librarian who'd been killed, not the weirdo who'd taken over his body.

"...will be terribly displeased!" The man's voice, a pleasant baritone did not sound panicked or at least agitated, but there was a touch of nervousness in it. "Terribly, terribly displeased! Why the hell did he come here in the first place? You swore that Popyatchev would not break the sleep regime until he received an order certified by the Eternal Edict! Did I or did I not, dear Shmielae?"

The body's memory was surprisingly well accessible, despite the absence of the soul and the fragmentation of its memory. So Misty, who had taken the deceased's place and covered itself with the remnants of the soul and almost an entire auric shell, for example, "remembered" Shmielae was a half-breed beast folk whose mother had escaped from the Empire of Arms and arranged for her daughter to be an expert in closed fields. A very high-ranking lady, though inferior in influence to Pypysh, she is not the least of the team. She was also checked for lice three hundred thousand times as an immigrant and officially had never even met the very security officer who had killed Pypysh.

Slowly, I take control of the dead man's body, ignoring the threat of exposure. I see through the slits of the eyes what I could not see before because of the veil of concealment, which was as good as my own. I see the bodies of several dozen living and dead sentient beings stacked in a corner, among which I "recognize" several employees, as well as unfamiliar and obviously involuntary people whose whole appearance screamed "sacrificial material". Even the face of Justine Reneal, who seemed to have gone on vacation and was absent from the Library, flashed among the familiar faces.

"...load..." There is no strength in the body, the body is not functioning well, and the hearing does not want to submit to the remote control, picking up only pieces of words or unintelligible sounds, and all the forces are spent on the gradual unfolding of the mirror field of "I'm not here".

"...impossible, we've already lost too much time..." It's the security guard who's indignant, saying something to the catgirl with her ears pressed to her head, her tail flicking through the air around her like a whip.

"...the raised Shroud is not strong enough, it may open its eyes again, and we won't be able to close them a second time!" Almost shrieks another conspirator or something, kind of like an archivist. "We need to complete the Patch now, raise the Veil and the Net, or there's no way to take this out."

Besides the old and decrepit - blow on him, and he'll crumble - archivist lay several open bags covered with glowing runes, which Pypysh's memory also recognizes as a very expensive kind of portable spatial artifacts suitable for transporting living beings. A dream for any saboteur of epic rank but rather a weak legend, and there were three of them. At least now we know where the victims came from. And not only victims but also a bunch of ritual devices that turned a quarter of the hall into a huge sacrificial circle of unknown nature. A circle that I-halfling didn't notice, even though I walked on it with my feet. What about me? This thing was somehow not noticed by the will that ruled here, which always took away any number of visitors more than one!

Whatever the creature guarding (or what is it doing here?) the Library is, it seems to have been fooled and, if I'm deciphering the three conspirators' hurried negotiations correctly, is about to be either sedated or subjugated. And if the clairvoyance gradually turning on through the proxy is anything to go by, they have a good chance of success. Even without the alchemical flair, I can tell you that I can't see a single amulet, reagent, or artifact below epic grade! And all this should merge in ecstasy under the hand of obviously not a simple archivist but a ritualist of the highest class, and this ritualist is a sacrificer by specialty.

And even the presence of Justine and a couple of other similarly lucid but paralyzed servants is necessary to establish a strong conceptual connection between the ritual circle and.... the Library itself? That's why the defenses didn't open me up! It's barely a third of its strength even outside, and inside the hall, it doesn't seem to be working at all.

Waito!

Is it so that if I quietly self-liquidate right now, this fraternity will not only unnoticed anything but will cover all my shenanigans, as long as I don't fall under the punitive hammer of those whom they offend with their actions? That is, given the clearly hostile intentions towards the treasure of the whole Empire, not to fall under the hammer of the whole Empire?

It's worth admitting that sometimes I do get lucky enough to not just get into a story but to do so in an extremely successful, convenient, and useful way for my plans. It's like accidentally stepping into something but not into shit, but into a puddle of water of life, which will restore your youth, youthfulness, erection and grow hair on your long bald head, and all this for free! Having taken a look at the slaves and the hapless Justine, I start activating the schemes and processes that have long been embedded in Misty without the slightest doubts about my actions, so after a second, I can calmly and painlessly...

"Ho-oh-oh-oh, what a bunch of you wicked, wretched bastards, who are trying to offend old, respected intelligent people." In the typical manner of a provincial halfling farmer trolling his surroundings, as Pypysh often did himself, I reproach the evil and unkind, carefully rising to my feet and finishing the transfer of the Misty into combat mode. "It's not God's way. Mother Earth will not approve of it. It's not good to do that.

Well, I can't go away, after all, smartly, without having used all the combat tools sewn into the construct, can I?

"I have pleased your soul, honorable one." Politely said the once fit and somehow subtly changed security guard, keeping his gaze on the breathing and consciously active body of what he had previously thought was a still living but now soulless dead man. "You can't live."

Not a threat, not a surprise, or even a question - just a statement of fact, calm and balanced. Somehow this man makes me nervous, and whether he's a man at all. Now when he's ready for a real fight, his good-natured face, warm smile, and cheerful glint in his eyes look so unnatural that I don't have a single doubt in my mind this is just a creature that has stretched the skin and body of a formerly living man. Perhaps it had done to the soul of the real owner of the body just as it had done to the soul of the halfling half an hour earlier.

"The soul of a true owl is immortal and eternally free, even while in a cage... kind of," I answer arrogantly, buying time to assess my opponent just as much as my opponents are assessing me.

T.N. The owl is a reference. Owl is a slang word for a bitards sitting on the chans late at night. Since there is no registration system, the owl can't be kicked and can come back at any time. That's why the MC says that the soul of an owl is immortal. And able to come back any moment.

The old man shifted his gaze to me, distracting himself for a second from arranging the bone figures in some special order, obviously not made of simple bone, and humming with something subtly evil. The catgirl squinted her eyes and began to purr faintly, mixing something into that purr, but the nature of this sonic (is it sonic?) attack was not yet clear to me. The mimicry fearmonger remains silent and politely assesses my response without commenting. The old man, by the way, clearly gave some signal, and clairvoyance amplified through hundreds of mirrored grains of Misty suggests it was he who demanded not to let me damage the circle being prepared.

"The Nightbird Cult?" The cat exclaimed with genuine surprise, even stopping the purring attack doing something to perception. "But what do they have to do with this? Those shamans have never sent spies anywhere further than the Beastmen tribes! If they could put their initiate in your position through all the loyalty checks and Eye scans, they wouldn't be sitting in the middle of nowhere! And may the night owl be able to retrieve the soul of a fallen fellow in its beak, but not restore it from please!"

How she was hurt! The Soul of Mocker had helped me, allowing me not just to step on a sore callus but to punch it with a fist, press it with a heel, drop an iron on it, and spit on it. It was not just a pain in the ass. It was almost hysterical, knocking down the iron, in fact, self-control of this fury.

"Well, yes, of course, but if you need it, it's a little bit no, just a little bit." Without changing the simple manner of rural coloring, I rebuffed, meeting the pleading gaze of the paralyzed Justine. "If anything, I'll tell everyone that you're right, yes, owls can't do anything like that, only sit in their bakeries without going out to fart."

For a moment, I thought she was going to lunge at me right away. Her hand, at least, quite obviously reached for the seven-tailed whip attached to her belt, which would have looked much more appropriate on a sex shop shelf. She was signaled off by both of her companions at once, bringing her to her senses and giving her peace, focus, and incredible motivation to keep me from doing anything, even screaming.

"You're good, mrrrrmaster kmrrrrlaaa." Abruptly she switched to a purr that enveloped the brain like absorbent cotton. "Can we talk?"

It wasn't just a racial trait that some types of Cat folks possessed, but some kind of extremely harsh mental technique, literally crushing the will and mind, lowering the consciousness to the most primitive level. The ability was clearly enhanced by a one-time amulet or by a title that had a long rollback, but this thing could turn even a warrior of Pypysh's level into a lustful animal without prior preparation, not to mention an administrator not adapted to such tests.

But there was no Pypysh anymore, and it was useless to subjugate Misty. There was no place to put new subjugations and settings, and it was impossible to make this entity even more lustful than it already was by any means I knew. I pretend to stagger, falling on one knee, but in fact, my connection with the puppet is almost absolute, so complete that only distortions of the body and growing new limbs will do.

They deliberately let the cat speak, just in fear of some tricky trick. The thing that pulled on the man as skin is much stronger, but it's not sure it can do it as fast the second time without me raising the alarm. And the cat's reception is obviously designed for such force majeure when you need to urgently shut up at least a couple or three warriors of the fortieth level at once.

"Mrrrr, mroi mrrab, wan mroi pynee?" She purred softly as before, lifting her thin blouse and exposing human breasts with bright pink nipples tense as two diamonds.

Pynee is, according to Pypysh, the crude and deliberately rustic equivalent of "tits" in the halfling language, or, more precisely and literally, "ripe melons that can be fucked." I have no idea how Pypysh would react to that, but I suppose that under such mental pressure, he would hurry to fuck those pynees, even if he would be put directly into the sacrificial circle. I only rested my body with my hands on the floor, leaning even lower, and then I looked up and met with sincere shock in the eyes of the brainiac (and needless to say, no one ever mentioned her talents?), whose best trick, her strongest trump card, turned out to be beaten.

"I don't need your pynees, Shmele," I'm intentionally misrepresenting her name, because she may not understand the reference, but the classics don't die. "I'm already vdryzhne!"

"And maybe my words would have seemed dumb if I hadn't heard a barely audible, but at the same time, such a sound that one couldn't help but hear it even more than Schmielae's purr. The chime of pieces of mirror grinding against each other was accompanied by indistinguishable rustles and whispers of nightmarish dreams long ago dissolved in the river of time."

Dream as a phenomenon was absent in the spaces of the Eternal Library. Dreams were always just dreams, and mirrors remained simple and harmless mirrors. In the space of the Eternal Library, there was no Dream. Not until the day when an idiot who couldn't just walk away from a vat of shit without diving into it found himself in its domain.

Because he brought Dream after him.

The attack field I had created struck suddenly and, more importantly, unexpectedly, directly from beneath the concealing mirror configuration and under the hood of un-existence. The very title he had received for killing the Hero who had failed to step into the portal allowed me to do many things that had previously been unattainable but required long preparation and favorable conditions. Now I had the preparation, the conditions, the bonus from the title, and an opponent who was not expecting a trick from me, or rather, such a mean and weighty trick. But the opponent might have been inferior to the murdered uncle, but he was waiting for something, so there was no beating of babies.

My attack crumpled reality, making it flow, crumpling it into plasticine, while simultaneously delivering a monstrously powerful concentrated blow to the mind. The combination of mental hits infecting the space with a part of unreal, and damage to the very essence of the hit losers, allowed to kill even serious opponents with high efficiency. Without training, I wouldn't be able to deal such a blow myself, even if I didn't spend any effort on disguise and concealment. But only with all the preparations stuffed into Misty and my stationary vessel, I could not worry about the creation of charms, and just activate the ready-made ones, making only minimal, almost cosmetic adjustments.

The impact was terrible. It was as if a part of space had been reflected in a crooked mirror, which then shattered into pieces, and woe to those and what would be in the place of the "break". As if the pure damage wasn't enough, from beneath the shattered and crumbling shards, blue ribbons of equal proportions of lilac threads and dully shimmering mirrors reached for the enemy's bodies, forming nauseating and maddening patterns. And, of course, absolute stupor, nausea, temporary (or permanent) schizophrenia, personality disintegration, and rapidly degenerating thinking. Three vectors and all of the different types, and you only have to miss one, and the others will break through.

I expected the cloaked creature to retaliate as the most dangerous. It was not for nothing that it could dissolve Pypysh's soul with a single touch. I didn't expect danger from the cat, though I took it into account, as it showed itself to be a great mentalist, able to hit both subtly and harshly at the same time, resulting in a lethal mixture. But they both only bounced back from under the first layer of the attack complex, not letting reality crackle where their bodies were. The first violin was played by the old archivist, who never got up from his knees and did not stop his ritual manipulations.

In a sharp, diarrhea-like motion, he slit open his wrist, throwing purple blobs into the air, activating, beyond any doubt, a prearranged trump card. A large barrier spanned the entire bloody hall and was made up of hundreds and hundreds of hexagons, interchanging and reinforcing each other. Each hexagon was no bigger than the palm of your hand, and each could only protect against one thing at a time - steel, chopping wounds, sound resonance, crushing, fire, instantaneous curses based on the power of nature, mental blows of one of several types. The cunning nature of this design made it so that each element absorbed the strengths of all the others, making the overall design almost invulnerable to everything. How many defense types are there, and how many ignored damage types?

Such a thing can even withstand a blow from a divine being, and not just one, but several, as long as it is not pushed through by bare force. Without pure force, without knowing the nature of this strange and, I should note, the non-planar nature of this magical technique, it is hardly possible to open it. And nobody is in a hurry to tell me the keys, as well as possible weaknesses. Rather, on the contrary, they are in a hurry to kill me before I wake up and find out myself.

The revitalized ribbons, aspids of bad dreams created inside the Misty, beat their sharp faces into the barrier, wasting power and phoning in huge amounts of hostile magic. But the barrier indestructible in its perfection, didn't even fade, forcing the half-intelligent constructs to squander their reserves of power trying to seep through some gap. Any ordinary or unusual barrier, no matter how strong it might be, such a thing would deceive one way or another, slip under it, and sting, injecting the poison of disturbed delirium and bad visions. Alas, they were powerless now, as powerless as a blow to the mind, for every shade of which there was its shred, sharing invulnerability with all the others. The cracks in reality collapsed the second the last of the aspids left unreality, crawling into reality without hitting anyone.

The alarm was not even raised, even though the light I gave off would have been enough to sense something wrong even without signal charms! But no, neither the sensors nor the altar, nor the thing that protects it, did not notice what had happened. If these guys were able to just cut off the entire hall from the very concept of being part of the Eternal Library, then I have a bad feeling and bad news!

Not even a fraction of a second had passed since the failed kickoff.

I didn't even have time to think about the sacramental "fuck" before I was answered.

Dozens of carved bone figurines spread on the smooth floor slightly changed the tone of emanations and images. A couple of smiley and cat girl synchronously passed through the barrier that let them through, avoiding the aspids that didn't have time to react to them, and then started kicking hard.

The smiling boy definitely had some kind of un-existence, developed no less than a master because I saw his attack only when I realized that my puppet's existence would be cut off forever after a moment. On bare reflex, I put up my hands, and an open palm strike broke both forearms, elbows, part of the ribs, and spine - hobbits are strong but light. The physical damage was just the tip of the iceberg against the familiar sensation of honey pouring over you, this time dissolving not the essence (did he believe I had defenses?) but the energy and subtle bodies. He struck from some kind of blink without even making a single movement: here, he was standing behind the barrier, and now he had already struck, inflicting on the puppet injuries guaranteed to be fatal for a living creature.

She reached the mincemeat flying away in shock (my shock, as it was a sudden snap on my pride) in a quick, but not too prominent dash, and then, just in case, she swiped her whip as well. I thought it would only hit the air, but each of the tails lengthened a couple or three meters, turning into harnesses of many colorful pyramids. Each pyramid is a closed field with its own supply of concentrated essence. The edges of each pyramid are razor sharp, and the essences themselves are terribly aggressive and poisonous. Oh yeah, and these strange barriers can't do damage just by passing through living bodies like a ghost passing through the stone. The barrier itself can't do damage, but the essence that gets into the body, straight through and through all the defenses, will kill with a guarantee.

The hobbit fell to the ground not as a hobbit but as an ichor-bleeding, roasting, freezing, and rotting piece of stinking shit. I should try to make a construction like this whip for myself because although the weapon is fabulously expensive to maintain and fill with consumables, it's the best thing for an alchemist.

Personally, I had no idea what they were going to do next. Whether to return to their interrupted ritual or to atomize the corpse of the old man they had killed twice into atoms, but I didn't wait for the first or the second. Nor did I disguise myself. If the defense didn't pay any attention to us, it meant that the blockade of unknown nature was good enough, and I didn't have to hold back.

The puppet was on the cold floor for less than a tenth of a second. The malleable flesh and energy swelled and boiled, oozing a blue mist, and the wounds began to heal rapidly. The torn pieces of energy blinked with no less rapidity, taking their original form, and all the essences that had entered the body simply evaporated like a pencil from one smiling magician. The reflection of the state of the energy a second before the blow and her actual injuries simply switched places. It's a complicated trick that is ten times harder to perform on a living person than on a puppet. But there is no nit to spare this piece of meat so I can restore it for a long time. I think the deceased would appreciate the opportunity to avenge his killers... although I'd be the first person he'd want to kill, no question about it.

The body morphed, rapidly losing its human form. Obeying an instinctive impulse, directed simultaneously by the Soul of the Mocker and the title of the Giver of Fear, the flesh melted, transforming the doll into a ghastly mixture of a human and a skinned bird, the bird clearly having tentacle monsters as relatives, because instead of wings, two flexible tentacles sprang from the shoulder blades, in which it was easy to see mesmerizingly shimmering mirrors. And the whole body is also covered with these mirrors and not only the body! A halo seems to sprout around the shape-shifting skull and face of the head when several dozens of mirrored grains make their way straight from under the frontal bone. And having broken through this way, they begin to slowly circle the head, creating a perfectly shaped circle, still shining and at the same time serving as a focusing antenna for better control of the doll and the mirror amulets enclosed in it. The same "halos" begin to circle each of the two-and-a-half arms and all four dorsal tentacles. And a little above, over the distorted body unfolded another, the largest of all, halo, in which are no longer pathetic grains but large mirrors the size of a child's fist.

One might ask, why did I, so good, get time to melt the puppet down instead of destroying it as quickly and inevitably as in the beginning? My answer would be pretty obvious. It took much longer to describe the process than it did to happen. Much, much longer. Oh, this couple would have made it. But now, there was no barrier to protect them from the mental scream that would awaken their worst nightmares or at least just press down on their minds with a steel press. They overcame the scream without difficulty, but it didn't buy them any time - the puppet had time to change, get used to it, and attack.

I wasn't kidding when I asserted the collaboration of my two not-so-favorite titles. The smirkiest of my opponents seemed as unlikely to be confused as he was to be frightened. I couldn't sense his true fears, at least not right away. They were there. I knew I could reach them, gnaw them out from under the armor of self-control, indifference, and un-existence. Whatever this creature (creature, it was a creature, not a human being!) was, it had fears. But I didn't have time to dig through that shell in the middle of a battle!

But Shmielae was much livelier, and my present appearance, which the flesh that had submitted to my will had taken on in its eagerness to give her all the horror of human and nonhuman sacrifices, touched something in her, reminded her of something, awakened some long-forgotten sorrow and the bitter pain of losing something pricelessly important. Our gazes met in that brief moment when they had already disdained the nightmarish scream but had not yet struck with all their might at its source. I saw her fear. I saw the anger with which she clutched her whip. I saw how she hated and despised me, so she dared not fear, dared not disgrace the power she served.

I didn't have time for anything. No one would let me finish or even start a pathos one-liner. But the past of not the last troll on 4chan didn't allow me to miss the opportunity to tease my opponent in any way. With a birdlike tilt of my doll's head, I squeezed out of myself, letting the distant chime of the mirror mazes ring out in my voice:

"Curly?" (pigeon sounds)

For one infinitesimally brief moment, a hidden horror burst from the prison of Shmielae's eyes, streaking across her beautiful face, but only for a moment, after which the horror was replaced by such burning hatred that if I were here in a real body, I might have flinched.

The creature emerged from the blink again, again hiding under un-existence, but now the halos are acting as multiple scanners and locators. I can pick up the smallest imperfections in its concealment in time to take the blow in both hands again. The halfling's light body shakes from the power of the blow, and the energy-breaking attack is absorbed into his body. But now I don't fly away from the kick into the far distance, but only bend my knees backward, cushioning the physical impact. The energy attack is absorbed by the mirrors, causing some of them to turn black, losing their charge, falling out of the "halo" chorus, or crumbling to crumbs, but fulfilling their role - lost in the labyrinth of mirrors constantly being set up in its path, the attack is reflected several dozen times inside the puppet's body until I use all four tentacles, striking in such a way that the creature that dodged them fell under the lightest touch of my fully grown third arm.

The creature gave a very puzzled "Uhoo!" as if it too wanted to imitate a night bird and then flew backward, smashing into the surface of the barrier with a crunch of its vertebrae. I heard the crunch of those vertebrae, already bringing all my limbs in a guaranteed deadly combination of blows, wanting to tear one cute little cat into a bunch of little kittens. She can't dodge, as her mind is desperately trying to shake off the paralysis, regain control of her body, and extinguish the dozens of conflicting emotions I'm broadcasting through the halos directly into her mind and partially even her soul. By the way, I'd expected her to be a vegetable by the time I hit her physically, but there was something in her mind and essence that rejected my attacks, something indistinguishable, perfectly hidden, but honeyed sweetness and nauseating rot at the same time.

I've met something like this before...

I almost made it, but when in our world "almost" was enough? I was already one step away from my opponent, and I was suddenly bound in some kind of sugar syrup or gelatinous gel. The ritualist, distracted again, rearranged some of the bone figures and created a selective barrier right under my feet. It didn't hurt the cat and even blocked the mental pressure on her, but it squeezed and twisted me so hard that I felt like a kitten who'd accidentally gotten into the washing machine while it was spinning. The world flashed before my eyes, the top confused with the bottom, but the doll didn't care about physical states.

The mirrors flashed with captured images, the halos glowed purple and unreal, and another manifestation of Dream took a piece of reality away from the barrier that was spinning me. I lost a couple of seconds, no more than that. The creature only had time to patch up its crippled body, for some reason not showing its face, and Shmielae hadn't quite gotten rid of the effects I'd induced.

I change reality in such a way that the acceleration barrier does not exist in it, simply by replacing this reality with another reflection, after which I reflect my weight and mass, first making them zero and then returning them to their place and reflecting the gravity vector in the opposite direction.

I fell upward toward the rapidly approaching and very high ceiling, and the place where I had been bound earlier became absolutely one thousand out of a hundred times real. I don't even want to think about what would have happened to the Dream-soaked puppet. I wonder if this grandfather was not in the same college with Ferrer Rocher studied? I remember he almost killed me with something very similar. Only it wasn't conceptual neutralization of distortions, but...

I grabbed the air with my tentacles, changed my vector, and reactivated the mirrors in my body, burning out the next batch of mirrors and covering myself with a cocoon of pure Dream power. No structuring, no attempts to create an attack, just a siphon that flows through me and releases a small lake of raw power into the world around me. Still, there's no Dream here, and its only source is the puppet, and as the pilot of this Little Hobbit-like Battle Robot, I have to rely on the durability of the rapidly deteriorating Misty.

At the moment when another rearrangement of bone figures forced all planar and magical energy in a certain area to disappear. I only grimaced. The flow of raw power was too fast for the pumping to start pulling power from the halos, the mirrors embedded in the body and flesh increasingly decomposing into a lilac mist. But while I was leaving the next dead zone, my opponents had time to come to their senses again, the bastards.

This collection of statuettes is no longer a legend, but at least a myth, designed for high-class ritualists. He manages to keep up that weird defense that negates the entire room and prevents me from raising the alarm, keeps up a damn powerful barrier, and attacks me with blows that make me uncomfortable at the same time. If I don't think of something clever, the puppet will be quietly beaten until the connection is turned off, after which they'll finish their business and think about how to shit on me. So why did I even bother? To get my ass kicked? I could have gotten it at home, even before I was Summoned.

Okay, it's not over yet.

Two of the seven tails of the whip hit the puppet body, but the halos rearrange their configuration into a smooth mirror surface, which the immateriality of the pyramids doesn't work on, causing them to bounce off the improvised shield with a ringing sound. Some of the essences fell into the looking glass, and there wasn't much left in the whip after all our dances. It seems that her artifact can gradually accumulate and renew the essence if there is even a little bit left in the pyramid, but it is a matter of long days, not short moments of battle.

The disguised creature's hand crashed into the mirror that had not had time to dissolve back, and at least a third of the mirror mass, starting from the center of the shield, turned black, crumbling to the ground. The bastard quickly picked up the "frequency" of the vile molasses that flowed from his palms, which caused the maximum possible damage to my puppet.

The lion's share of the mirrors have already been used up on shields or attacks. The untouched reserve was waiting for the moment to strike a decisive blow. During the entire battle, which took a minute, maybe a minute and a half, nothing was said, not a single sound was uttered. Only the rumble of our blows, the roar of the magic used by the ritualist, the hiss of the whip cutting through the air, and the heavy breathing of the catgirl. Neither I nor the creature seemed to need to breathe.

The palms of his hands slammed into the creature, causing it to twist unnaturally, letting the mirrored claws of his third hand slip past her and then, with a light touch, causing it to shatter into a purple mist. The same fate had already befallen three of the seven (though he had never had time to grow more than five) arms and all four tentacles growing from his back. The halos had already faded, causing the connection to the puppet to falter and make new mistakes.

I don't have enough mirrors to fight and attack on equal terms with my opponents. And the Mist's resource is enough for a couple more minutes of this dance, assuming I don't get any new wounds, which seems a bit unrealistic. My opponents recovered from the surprise, calmed down, gathered their strength, and now slowly and methodically pressed me at the expense of experience, superiority in equipment, and much greater stamina. If I hadn't decided to go for trumps from the beginning, I might have managed better, but my cards were beaten, and I didn't have any new ones.

At least they think so.

And they are even largely right.

My initial superiority in speed had already waned. The cat is equal to me in combat potential, and the creature fights lazily, still not showing its true face or other, more dangerous techniques. Not that the creature needs them, as its touch, blink, and un-existing make a very powerful and dangerous bundle. The body of the deceased halfling has almost ceased to exist, as the constant strain and regeneration have made most of the real mass an unreal broth of Dream mist and mirror anchors with small flecks of rapidly dissolving matter. Well, the design created for infiltration is not intended for long and hard battles. The fact that I've managed to last this long is solely due to my talents in clairvoyance, which allow me to somehow stand against this couple.

But.

The dodge, the twist of the torso, in which every single bone disappeared at once, allows you to skip another blow from the blink while taking a sliding step forward, poking almost blindly (fewer and fewer mirror sensors remain), forcing the smilingly polite one to take a soft and careful step back, and then another when the cat barely has time to redirect the blow of the whip that almost hit an ally...

But.

The sharp shriek, not even a scream, but a squeal, short and pitiful compared to the song the puppet could make at the beginning of the battle, still forced Shmielae to distract, to miss the moment when I, who had barely blocked the creature's next blow, could be crushed and smeared on the marble floor. The bones in the puppet's body are almost gone. They've all been used as material for the Misty, for patches, which I used to frantically try to bind the construction that had already passed the point of no return. The bones are replaced by pure Dream, an embodied mirage that has taken on a form mirroring that of the real bones. But this matter too easily turns into the mirage from which it was created.....

But.

Another missed blow rips too much from the tiny torso of the lump of limbs and lilac mist that had long since lost all form, and the last of the halos, already sparse and slowing, crumbles to the floor with a ringing sound inaudible at our speed and over the noise of our battle. Shmielae's whip turns into a hangman's noose, wrapping all seven tails around the puppet, and then slices it into many slices, almost immediately beginning to spread purple puddles and mist.

But.

Nothing could last forever. It wasn't in my power to win this battle with the set parameters and the opponents that got in my way. It didn't matter who they thought I was. It didn't matter what they thought of me. It didn't even matter if these guys believed that this was Pypysh Popyatchev's last desperate fight and not the puppet that had taken over the body of the hobbit who had died from the very first blow. There are sometimes moments when you just can't win. Moments in which you have to see, to look through the sprawling eyes of the destroyed puppet, how the desperate and barely had time to settle in the eyes of the man prepared for sacrifice hope, turn to ashes along with the disappeared puppet.

But.

A puppet in which, by the time it disintegrated, not a single piece of mirror remained, not the tiniest grain of sand of a materialized dream.

"He gave everything." Softly and affectionately said what he pretends to be an ordinary man so skillfully that even the Library's defense believed it, and his words sound like what a sommelier says about the rarest kind of wine. "Gave it away, sold himself to the end, and failed. Right in front of the eyes of those he wished to save from their fate. It's so, uh. Perfect."

Not a sign of fatigue on the smiling face, not a trace of anxiety in his voice, not even a hitch in his breathing. Somehow, this welcome and cheerfulness is more creepy than the hoarse threats and frantic growls of a raging beast.

"Ha... Myah... I'm glad you appreciated it, hon." The cat, not unlike her interlocutor, had clearly worked her ass off, only now beginning to realize how close their entire plan was to collapse, and their lives to something next to which a simple ending would be the greatest of blessings. "Mya!!!? Wait, what do you mean he wanted to save? I checked everything, I even scanned with the Experience Flower! Pypysh was the kind of old man who didn't give a shit about anything but his favorite books and stacks of papers!"

The male figure distracted from his pensive scrutiny of the place from which all traces of the energy-dissolved halfling had long since evaporated, giving that unreadable gaze and the same good-natured smile that had previously been bestowed upon a defeated foe gazing at his killer.

"He was looking at her, my dear." Without turning around, pointing a finger behind his back, not a man unmistakably pointing in the direction of Justine Reneal, who was almost reached by the hands of the continuing ritualist calmly and deliberately doing his thing. "And, it seemed to me, was ready to throw all his efforts into an escape attempt or perhaps an equally desperate attempt to reach through the Veil? But he threw himself into the fight, immediately offering himself to the mirrors. All of him."

As if she'd received a New Year's gift a couple of months before the new year, the beast girl looked into the captive's eyes clouded with neutralizing charms and clapped her hands together in joy. She was now genuinely, like a small child, glad those associated with the Library should stop breathing and be the last. It gave her a chance to enjoy the spectacle a little longer. Justine herself, having been questioned three times about everything of interest (and having told everything voluntarily for the right to kiss Shmiellae's bright scarlet lips once more), had no idea of the old marmot's attitude toward her, but there was a beauty in that, too. To receive such a sacrifice, to witness it, and to realize that even that sacrifice wasn't enough... It is truly marvelous, and the half-breed passionately regretted that she had no time to describe and convey to the witness of the sad story the whole gamut of the agony of dissolving into the mirrors.

By the way...

"Bane, I mean... well, Bane?" She suddenly abruptly forgot her question, asking a completely different one, instantly understood by her attentive interlocutor. "Or not?"

"Alas." Now the smile took on light apologetic tones. "That blow was a reflection of mine, and thus the damage came entirely at the base of your comrade. In a way, since we'll have to weave the details of what happened into a wreath of doubt for a few days, I'll have to play his part since I couldn't take the person who gave me such a rare sight. I hereby affirm that I am Bane."

If the cat's soul flashed any regrets about the fate of a dead comrade, and was it a comrade? It was impossible to notice this sadness with an unarmed eye, and probably not with an armed one either. She bowed briefly to another doll, but now no longer a hobbit, and asked the question that the realization of her ally's death had prevented her from asking.

"By the way, Honorable Buubga, am I distracting you?" She'd probably planned to ask Bane first, but she didn't risk it now, even if the creature was being sympathetic and kind, because she'd have to know what that sympathy was really worth.

At first, it might have seemed that the ritualist, who right now was arranging the floating entrails of a still-alive slave, one of the last remaining ones in the right places in the ritual pattern, had simply not heard the question. The sacrifices were very special, and their souls, bodies, magic, blood, inner essences, or even personalities had a whole list of very unusual traits. Not powerful, though the average level of sacrifice was between the twentieth and twenty-fifth, but rare and unusual.

Some had multicolored eyes, some were in love with their sister and brother at the same time and carried their feelings through their lives, some had a useless anomaly in their aura that gave them no advantages, some had birthmarks on their bodies that formed mystical patterns due to a ritual performed by their great-grandmother, some had been blessed in the cradle by priests of three gods at once, light and dark, and some could breathe river water, having accidentally received a rare title as a child. Just as alchemists could manipulate essences, accessing concepts through them, so the basis of a ritualist's work was the manipulation of concepts with the ability to trigger work through essences. A great, perhaps even legendary master was at work here and now, using a powerful artifact complex.

And his skill was enough to answer the questions asked without interrupting his work.

"No, you're not a distraction, Shmielae." That characteristic of the whole trio, dissonant with the surrounding reality, calmness, and goodwill, seemed to have taken root in them, and it probably did. "I can't let you in yet. There's a stage to complete, and I'll rearrange the pieces."

The desire to be under the barrier was understandable. The battle was hot, and even if the stone of the hall was not even scratched or distorted by the streams of dream energy, who knows what the limit of the mighty Veil's patience is in keeping something very bad from happening? Even here, at the altar itself, where danger is almost material, this creation, born from the right combination of set figures, could grant a few seconds for a last prayer. Or an escape.

The barrier took the positions of nearly a fifth of the figures, with another three-quarters left for the construction of the ritual and the maintenance of Veil, so the master could do little to help his companions except the simplest of effects (for a mythical artifact in the hands of an affinity for it). And even this barrier, the provisions for which had been calculated in advance in case of trouble, would have to be removed towards the end when the ritual drawing was complete. The full power of the carved figures will be revealed only if you give them all to one single purpose, the creation of the right landscape, the right completion for their, no joke, great mission.

"That's not what I mean. I don't mind standing here." The tailed saboteur shook her head negatively, having already completely calmed down and regained her clarity of speech. "That's not what I meant. In this place, I mean, in any of the lacunas, not just at the altar, there is no connection with most of the planes. Not even a flap, but a complete non-existence of the third type. There are labs where a certain type of planar energy has been channeled through, but they're not in the central building or the altar room!"

"Of course it is." The Master agreed, stepping up to the first of the captured Library workers. "Exactly non-existence. Exactly the third type."

All the victims die silently, but not all of them are stupefied and senseless. Some of them are only paralyzed but fully aware of what is happening, some of them even intensified their feelings, making every scratch unbearably painful, and the agony made them go beyond the limits of imagination, others were drugged with such potions that turned any agony into pure ecstasy. The latter, in orgasmic convulsions giving their essence to the ritual, were perhaps the most numerous.

"Strange indeed." The old man continued meanwhile, even taking his eyes off his work for a moment. "At first, I was sure it was some kind of artifact reservoir, then I thought it was like he was using some kind of artifact container with a mighty nightmare stuffed in it. But now... yeah, now all the background's almost gone. Truly, it's a nice mystery that I'll think about at my leisure. He couldn't have broken through the concept of non-existence for Dream, could he? And a type three, at that."

Redeeming a second's delay, the master sped up the cutting tools, finishing off another employee in a few seconds, incidentally his official archivist colleague. Then he bent over the very lady who had caused the battle. Well, or rather, the reason that this battle had proved so easy for those who had invaded the altar room. It is truly a great pity that such lovely heartache and despair cannot be stretched out over a longer time.

"That's right!" The master, whose skill had grown over long decades, managed to grasp some absurdity in the situation, habitually switching to a boring lecturing tone. "After the destruction of her entire body and soul, Dream, having no way to escape the closed cauldron of cut-off reality, had to spill over the walls and rise upwards under the ceiling due to the etheric current created by the barrier... But... Bane, I can't feel Dream!"

Highlight

Rustle.

Moove.

His perception, pumped up by his efforts and powerful gifts, inexplicably missed the moment when the drops of blood that had spilled from the extracted innards and had not yet had time to swallow the lines of the drawing made an absurd puddle, impossible for a master with his pedantry and accuracy. But this perception was enough to catch the moment when this bloody puddle reflected not the infinitely distant snow-white ceiling of the altar hall or even the calm face of the master, who had hardly soiled himself, but the face of Pypysh Popyatchev of the House of Pryhodonotchev, of the clan of the Trydygorodskys, distorted by frenzied tension and the same frenzied mirth, rejuvenated and smeared by contact with the energy of Dream.

The hobbit, though it was neither a hobbit nor a living creature nor anything comprehensible at all, jumped out of the puddle frozen with red glass like a puppet goblin from a snuffbox, still in flight mirroring himself behind the back of the ritualist who was frankly confused by such a performance and yelling loudly:

"Buubga, it's not here!"

T.N. It's a reference to this.

And, as if confirming his words, he stuck his only hand, and the limb in general, consisting almost entirely of mirror shards frozen on the very edge of overload and blackening, straight into the living, warm and so vulnerable flesh of the only non-combatant of the three saboteurs. The hobbit's body had no legs, and he was not a giant even by hobbit standards. Let the hand mirror have time to distort the metrics of space and the image of reality, becoming once a little longer (or is it the surrounding matter of the world became shorter?), but even this could not change some of the constants of the universe.

The hand of the one pretending to be a hobbit unwilling to disappear for some reason pierced the heart of the one who had been pretending to be a good archivist for seventeen springs, unleashing all the power accumulated in the remnants of the mirrors.

Except that hand went straight up to the heart through the ass.

"Nyat!" Shocked, Shmielae cried out, once again breaking into the "animal" accent she hated in her normal speech and freezing from the impossibility, the unreality of the picture.

"Amazing." For the first time in a very, very long, unimaginably long time, the creature disguised as a human uttered with lost self-control.

"I'll have to wash my hands." The creature murmured without opening its mouth, trading what the previous two thought was humanity for a chance to save its love and carry its killers to the other world, and then slumped soundly against the cold stone next to the ritualist, who hadn't even had time to be surprised, gently clutching the torn heart in its only grasp.

The heart was beating in the doll's palm, literally oozing something, even through all the transponders (the number of which was rapidly shifting toward zero) beckoning to me with the promise of all the pleasures of the world, all the possible pleasures and caresses, the fulfillment of every fantasy. For the first time during our entire battle, I could do it after all! I was able to identify the bullshit I had foolishly and ass-playing idiocy messed with in this story. I should not stand up after the very first hit. If I had known where to fall, I would have taken a parachute or a protection amulet of the highest order.

I ignored the vaporous fleur of Vice coming from the soaring heart, for I could barely distinguish it through the maddening rustle of the maddening Dream, which was not even in my ears but in my head. The degree of tension I had experienced in preparing for this attack could only be compared to the memorable storming of Stone, the only difference being that this time only Dream was used in the battle.

When I realized that there was no chance of victory unless a good wizard riding a blued piano appeared before me right now, that is, almost immediately, I immediately began to look for workarounds. I didn't need to kill the scumbags, but at least raise the alarm, and they would be killed by the defense of the altar hall. It would be enough for me just to fall out of the focus of attention to self-destruct Misty and hide the traces of my presence, and all the bumps would be collected by the most important intruders, not poor Kostik.

The main problem was the barrier raised by the ugly figures that were blocking the alarm itself. And the barrier was so infinitely cool. Even at my full strength, I'd have trouble breaking through it. Even if I hit it not with a Dream that could do little direct damage, but with the corrosive power of Shadow, like my sense of humor!

This thing a priori won't let anything in its threat database under its aegis, and that database is so complete that I might as well say that this barrier won't let anything in at all. Do you see the irony? Nothing exists! And if there is a plan in this world more suitable for playing with the real-unreal than my "beloved" Dream, I somehow don't know it.

At the moment when the puppet's body received the fatal two blows, I had already reflected all the remaining flesh and mirrors (of which there was only a handful left) in the version of the mirror where they no longer existed, and on top of that, I covered it all with un-existence, trying to make full use of the effects of the title of the one who doesn't exist. After all, what could be more clever and ingenious than to conceal a construction whose reality is so low that it is largely subjective in the negation of any existence that has become reality?

Trust me, I'm an engineer (no).

For anyone wishing to try something like this in the future, let me try to explain... The title I received was, pardon the tautology, received in conjunction with the highest techniques of shadow magic, stealth, and immersion in the deep layers of the plane, whose nature is largely on sharpened stealth, and even such a thing worked for a few moments. So. To use such a technique when working with such a light, fragile, and malleable thing as Dream, not having a strong enough grip on the plane, being under the gaze of carefully killing you tough guys, and even not for a couple of seconds, but for a much longer time...

Bad idea, Kostik, very bad idea.

I'd be gone if I tried to do that not through a puppet, working through a powerful mirror amplifier. No way. That is, without any options at all, without any options, and even without my favorite pulling the situation on bare pathos and inadequacy. Konstantin Yurievich would have ended. Start another story, not so crazy.

Even the mere presence of my mind, my will, which had been gone for some time, was almost fatal. If I had overexerted my un-existence for a fraction, a thousandth of a heartbeat, if I had slackened my concentration, I'd turn into a zucchini. I'd have about the same amount of thinking ability. Ygra would be happy that she's finally smarter than me! And that's assuming that my body could be pulled out of Dream because, of course, I left fuses in my vessel, which should throw the whole warehouse and the vessel out into reality, but fuck knows how it would have turned out.

While I, squeezing my imaginary buns to the appearance of a gravitational singularity in my anus, was watching what was happening in the hall. It was as if I was watching from the outside, as if from the third person, not realizing myself, the very fact of my presence here. Feel yourself as a narrator in a thrashy fantasy with a lot of blood and trampling of traditional values! It's not painful, but it's very scary once you realize what's already happened. I ran into and almost died, while not appearing on the battlefield in person and doing everything possible so the fight did not happen, and if it did happen, I was able to immediately escape! That's a good plan, Kostik, a fucking great plan! Reliable, like a dwarf mechanical watch!

At that moment, when I was, forgive me common sense, punishing the ritualist anally (not in that sense, Anons), I was so full of terror and anger that I seriously feared I would burst. And the puppet probably would have burst from overexertion, and I would have lost control due to the same anger, if it hadn't been for the radiating heart in my hand.

I had already met with the inhabitants of Hells, even if our communication was only in the form of correspondence boxing. The difference is that I've managed to hit my interlocutor with enough blows to make him feel bad, sad, and dead. I even have a special title, two to be exact. In general, my relationship with this plane did not work out, and it continues to not work out further and further.

What the heck!

What the fuck are the local intelligence services doing? Fucking each other in the eyes, that's what they do! Then an elven avenger kills the Second Prince, slashing one of the Heroes and blowing a couple of neighborhoods in the process, then some murky types slaughter a Summoned of the allied-vassal state, kicking a famous media magnate in the ass, then two squads of intruders break into the holy of holies, where no outsider can penetrate, and have a fight!

The puppet is no longer on the verge of disintegration but far beyond it, so far away that it only remains to weep bitterly with bloody tears. Now my mech can be kicked by the forces of one brave enough kid who drops his pot on this miracle of magical thought. There are a couple of grains of mirrors left, because of which the signal reaches the puppet with wild interruptions, and the control is duller than I was at the math analysis exam. If it weren't for the heart in my hand, still trying to control the missing body and mind of the puppet, it would be a mess. As it was, I could use that very power of Vice as a battery just by filtering it through the rest of the mirrors.

Yes, harmful, and yes, dangerous even through all the proxies, but there were no other options. But everything passes, and so does the weakness after the Final Ass-breaking Blow of the Midnight Dragon's Inevitable Vengeance. The overloaded mirror grains partially recovered, and I was about to throw out the shit when suddenly a thought came into my head, more like a Thought. And I'm sure it wasn't a thought, but my own, from the repertoire that almost killed me against the wall just a couple of seconds ago.

Putting the heart aside, I approached the corpse of the master of sacrifice and, not listening to the couple who couldn't get in here - the catgirl was trying to use some hypnotic bullshit, too, tied to her voice - began tearing off pieces of flesh and attaching them to me. The pressure of the fleur became really (un)pleasant, so I had to stop. I was too tired mentally, I might not be able to keep my concentration under such pressure, and these guys just gave me an excuse. One lash taken from the undead, which almost brainwashed me, was enough for me to properly assess the threat of the devil's tricks. I don't need a repeat.

I didn't abuse the corpse out of anger or stupidity, though Tia would have something to say about that, mostly in elegant elven curses. I needed the connection that the master had with his creation, with all this ritual construction. My clairvoyance was failing, as if I were a vagrant fresh out of the woods, unable to control or direct my visions. The swirl of images is so murky it makes me sick, and there's plenty of Vice mixed in, voluptuous visions sent straight from Hell.

You know, I liked the Agony aspect much better than the current one. The tricks were simpler there. The impact was more direct, and, most importantly, the devils of that particular domain were much weaker. And even through the barrier, the cloaked creature increases my euphoria and excitement, hoping to crush, as he thinks, an almost fallen soul. Still, Misty's disguise was his strongest feature - until the very last moment, my enemy didn't realize he was facing a puppet and not a real Pypysh. Now, when all the time is spent on trying not to disintegrate completely, he would have understood this nature at once, but now he is hindered by a barrier.

I find the right image among the lewd pictures that are squeezing my brain harder and harder and pulling a fancy-shaped vial out of the pocket. It's not an antidote, but if you don't have bread, you can snack on pastries, right? The ultimate renewal potion, capable of bringing a fresh corpse back to its feet, as long as the soul isn't devoured and the shells aren't too damaged. I can make them myself, and no worse, but I don't have my potions with me for good reason. I clench the vial in my fist, willfully banish the image of twelve elven mothers breastfeeding one elven teenager, and then I begin to crawl zombie-style to the still-paralyzed Justine. On one fucking arm! Like a caterpillar, damn.

The shrieks and moans, hitting my brains even through the transmitters, of which there are about three dozen out of almost two hundred left, are really deafening, and if they came directly to me, there would be problems. Not too serious, but against the background of the general pile of shit that has a chance to become the straw that will break the camel's backbone. I cast aside another portion of images filled with tenderness and care (almost not fake!), so tempting to do something with the rescued girl. I pour the alchemical concoction into the lady's mouth with a gymnastic trick that surprised even me, and then I say:

Are you adequate?" Dream's voice might sound intimidating, but she's been in fights in the past, and I'm less intimidating to her now.

"Y-yes." And a little while later, more firmly. "Yes, quite."

"Then grab me by the scruff of the neck and lift me." I spent some of my strength to make her words normal, not as usual, and then when she started to stand up slowly on her legs, shaking from the horror and shock of the experience, I slowed down. "Wait a minute, that's not good. We have to get rid of it."

With these words, I started to reduce the flesh of the killed cultist because this flesh was not only soaked in Hell, but also the creature was doing some shit based on the principle of similarity through it, and it was doing it more and more every second. But when I was done, having thrown away everything unnecessary and reduced the inflow of Vice through the Pypysh-Brains connection, I was reminded that not everyone here has such great resistance to mental effects.

The smiling Shmielae was making some strange movements. And Justine, smiling quite happily and almost cumming with joy, trying to favor the one who, it seems, had managed to dig into her brain during her captivity, mirrored all her movements. And these movements were about to cause her to rearrange the pieces, getting something bad from the artifact and, with some probability nullifying the barrier.

With a mental, so as not to strain my throat, swear, I took control of myself, and in my one hand, I took the hand that had been torn off from the master, which just happened to come to hand, and threw it under Justine's feet so that she tripped over it and fell on her ass coming out of the trance. Then, taking advantage of the fact that she was carrying Misty, I concentrated some of the available Dream on her, weakening the effects of the bookmarks and reducing the pressure of the Vice with what was left of my programming.

Removing lust and submission with the Mist? What's next? Bees versus honey? Sex versus virginity? Or, to make my life even more fun, politicians vs. corruption?

The woman bounced away from the edge of the barrier, covered her ears with her palms, and staggered toward me, carrying the projectile I had fired for some reason. And all of this while swearing in such a high-pitched manner that I've only ever heard such language from Cassie Friendmage. She takes me by the scruff of the neck, still swearing, obviously not letting herself listen to the charming voice of an angry, tired, and desperately kicking the impenetrable wall of the barrier.

The mnemonic technique of mind defense witch based on profanity - it sounds strange, but the method is more than effective and often used. Anger and combat excitement are some of the best shields against mental influences of a hard or even subtle type, and there are never too many masters who can suppress or deceive such defenses quickly. The beast girl was certainly among that small number and not even at the bottom of the hierarchy, but his isekai dodginess had made her work almost to the bottom, and now her strength was not enough to overcome even such a shaken will, only slightly covered by my influence.

"Well, well, well, then, from right here, three steps forward and half a step to the left." In such a state of mind, it is harder to maintain the manner of speech favored by Pypysh than to fight a battle with a vice that has only slightly receded. "And, besides, don't throw your hand away, I suppose."

I did take the severed limb from the breathing and barely controlling captive, then connected it to the only working limb I had. Not only did it lengthen the hobbit's short organ (it sounded dirty again, damn it!), but it was also able, in theory, to work with the late master's artifact figurines.

It wasn't that hard to merge my signature with the remnants of the one I'd killed, and it was possible to try to move some of the figures with my hand, too, if it weren't for my shitty condition and the pressure on my brain. The creature had stopped pounding me directly through the connection with the cultist's flesh, which had become part of the puppet, and had begun to make some manipulations with the barrier. Could it have known some tricky key to level this masterpiece of fortification in case the enemy got hold of it? I'd be surprised if they didn't have such a key. Even if not all artifacts have built-in vulnerabilities, and even more so mythical ones, this particular collection of figures just begs for a bunch of secrets hidden in it.

Collection ...

Over a hundred and fifteen hundred bone toys, in which the essence of those who were used to make the figures is cunningly sealed. Each figurine is unique in its own way, possessing a whole list of properties and effects, each worthy to be considered not the weakest epic. However, the full potential given by assembling the entire collection in skillful hands is already truly frightening.

The figure of a teenage boy of unknown gender curled up in a cradle, silently weeping for his fate. His entire family had been tortured for years by a multitude of illnesses and failures right in front of his eyes, slowly driving the boy born with the rarest of titles to insanity, the type of insanity that the mad Carver needed. Particles of the souls of not only the teenager but his entire family as well are placed inside the piece of bone, silently humming a lullaby to him and just as silently blaming him for all his torment. This figurine can give protection to the hearth from evil spirits, become an anchor for a powerful curse, transmitted by blood to the entire family of the cursed, help in healing physical wounds, bringing mental anguish, stop the action of the attacking magic based on sound vibrations and dozens of different things that are not too strong on their own. And the number of effects in different combinations and positions in these combinations could not be counted, probably not even by the wielder himself.

A mighty warrior with a naked torso and a long spear, kneeling and pressing his hand to his bloody side, created from the vertebrae of a coward who had fought to the very end, whose fear had been killed, replaced with determination and reshaped into a warrior desperate to slay his enemy. The Carver needed a coward turned brave and a scoundrel who found honor, so he brought up the right victim. The figure could cast a mental buff to take away fear or give that fear to the enemy, make old wounds open, or summon the shadow of a fallen comrade to say goodbye. Once again, the exact number of effects of even one figure by itself is lost in the chorus of images.

A kneeling priest clutches the wavy blade of a ceremonial blade behind his back. He was the purest in his faith, a righteous man who honored his god and lived by conscience, not self-interest. His faith had been tested time and again by the Carver's will until it was broken, showing him the true face of a cleric who had long ago sold out all humans. And the righteous man fell, first turning to evil for revenge, and then, horrified at what he had done, sacrificing himself to the summoned forces, saving the souls of those who had been promised under the treaty in his place. The faith and contempt for that faith still in the figure allowed a user to remove or even steal the priests' blessings, to distort and weaken the Miracles, sometimes even turning them against the clerics themselves, to cause suicidal thoughts and an unaccountable sense of guilt for what he had done.

Mages, warriors, artisans, common passersby... Those who created themselves and those who were broken by long and thoughtful labor. Those who were born with the right gifts, and those who received them by their efforts... They all remained forever in this monstrous chess, some incomprehensible game with incomprehensible rules. This thing was not created directly by the Вумшды, but they obviously put more than one century of their labor into inspiration and then took the result of inspiration into their greedy hands. These figures embodied other people's stories, whose endings were caught in a cage, forever imprisoned in it, and left in a bone prison.

They objectified everything - all the things I could only hate.

Destroying them is not in my power... not now, anyway. Bone is only material, like all enchantments and rituals. The essence of the figures lives as long as one of them is intact. If the extremely stable artifacts are broken somehow, their souls and fragments will be attracted to some immaterial egregore, which exists as long as at least one of the figurines is intact, and even after destroying all of them, this creation can be restored. Because there, in the depths of nothingness, in the domain that exists only for the prisoners of this artifact, is hidden the brightly shining soul of the Carver, who settled in his creation forever.

He settled and charged a user fee.

Each new owner, each master of rituals who can control the artifact, must create a new figure for the collection. The necessary inspiration will be provided by the Carver, who has nothing to do but invent new figures in his domain. And again, they search all over the world for the most bizarre reagents, the most different and the most unique people, or even monsters, beasts, or even creatures. And they cut, cut with a sharp knife through the bones that were separated from the flesh, if there was any at all. Even the absence of bones did not prevent them from carving the desired figure out of pure essence just to finish the job. Something tells me this set may well outgrow the Mythic Grade, reaching something higher. And the Carver himself has every chance to become a newborn deity with a very interesting specialization.

Fuck! Come on, Alurei! Why the fuck is it that every time I think I've seen enough, you give me another impossibly disgusting abomination?

The words pour out of my strained, wheezing throat, and then Justine and I are racing against a creature that rearranges the hexagons of the barrier, which now resembles some kind of puzzle master or a fan of isometric cell phone games. You know, those time killers where you have to put together three pieces of one-colored circles?

My thoughts, clairvoyant clues, and the sweet molasses of infernal promises obscure my eyes, so I can't fully distinguish between reality and my glitches. But it's being done, even if every second I'm here I risk more and more and lose more transponders.

I could just turn off all the defenses and let the altar and whatever was in it do its thing, but then we'd all be killed at the same time, and I'm not a Japanese master of artistic suicide! And no, in my current state, I'm not sure I can even survive the attack of a deceived guardian coming through my glove, let alone deceive him and escape without leaving any trace of my existence. So I'd have to be imaginative without dying in the process.

Man, it's like I've described my whole life.

An old and hunched lizardman with a shopping bag and a traveling staff in his hands changes position, standing next to a dwarf dressed only in shackles, a jester in a silly cap, shrieking funny, and a knight missing an arm and a head, almost falling off his horse. Right after that, when the barrier, under the actions of the creature, began to vibrate badly, I changed the positions of a couple more figures. At this moment, I was dropped by Justine, causing me to bump my face right into someone's spleen, and by some miracle, I didn't knock over any pieces.

Justine, with desperation in her eyes, stabs herself in the ears with a needle created from her magic (some kind of combat technique from a branch of the lurkers) but withstands a desperate attempt to take control of her. Too bad, too bad, that the one who forged her mind is standing in the same hall, making the barrier unable to stop the missing attack. And it didn't cut off words and sounds, which gave the cat that was hitting triggers and behavioral bombs time after time some room to maneuver.

I don't really care anymore, though.

I sent to my "colleague" almost all of the mirrored matter and fragments, literally a couple of percent of the initial amount of Mist to protect her brain from Shmielae, and then pushed the woman with all my strength, causing the puppet disintegration in the next minute. With barely enough time to orient herself, the captive landed on her feet at the very edge of the barrier, which, after only a moment, shifted. Now it had been covering me and the ritual figure for the last few seconds, and its hexagons went out one by one, unable to duplicate themselves twice. But the new, newly created dome covered Justine, giving her a direct path straight to the exit of the ritual hall. The kind of path that she, the last surviving prisoner (I couldn't prepare my attack any faster, and she was cut at the very end!), could easily leave the place and raise the alarm.

And even if I broke the construction made of figures and ritual lines, causing the wrath of the keeper, it wouldn't change anything. Ten seconds would be enough for the pumped-up lady. I pour more strength into the already crumbling body, without economy and thrift, growing misty legs and a second arm, and then I make a graceful bow and tip an unexisting hat.

And the puppet dies completely, exhaling the last specks of rapidly blackening mirror dust.

Through this dust, I can still distinguish how a couple of the remaining cultists silently and without even showing any irritation from failure or panic of imminent death pass through the crumbled dome, pass over the place where the puppet disintegrated with some kind of combat ability, and start... Either I'm glitching because I'm looking through such a shitty filter, or one of the two, but right before my eyes, the creature opened like a bloody flower, and right in the center of this opening formed a breach or something else incomprehensible. The dust was rapidly blackening out, but I could still see a fuzzy vision of Shmiele gathering her figures, grabbing her spatial bags, and leaping into the flower,

I'd like to believe that it was just a glitch and that they'd all be wiped out by the guards or even by someone on the altar waking up from his slumber. The latter, I'm sure, would be guaranteed to put an end to the Cutter's story, but it seems that story isn't over yet.

And the connection to the puppet is now truly and forever extinguished.

* * *

I still managed to fall back into reality on my own, uninjured by the blackened glass that outnumbered the working mirrors. I was dragged out of the warehouse by Losius, covered from top to toe by Heaven, along with Tia, who was wrapped in ritual tablecloths painted with ritual signs and stinking of chthonic Stars. Taria and Hans could have entered the hall, but they were kicked, and it was Tia who kicked them.

Then some potions were poured down my throat, and I even recognized them and helped with essentialism in my nearly unconscious state. Then I used Purification, throwing up some black stuff that made a big, big hole in the floor. Then I was given potions again since all intoxication was gone, and I was choking on them like an alcoholic with vodka.

The potions helped, and the maddening headache subsided a little, letting me slip into a semi-delirious state that couldn't even be called sleep. It was more like a deep faint, dangerously close to a coma, but still a bit of a relief from the miserable state of the mission. I don't even remember feeling worse... more than five times.

All the things had long since been collected, traces erased, images and prints replaced, and Hans had not even been too lazy to throw back the dust that had been swept away earlier. I wish he'd hung the cobwebs, but that would take some special magic. As soon as I stopped agonizingly dying from the consequences of my idiocy, I was softly and gently, by my hands and feet, thrown into a cart with some goods and then slowly moved to the point of new dislocation. There was no need to talk about disguise, conspiracy, and not attracting attention, as you could not argue with the elven dictator who temporarily took command.

Judging by the fact that while we were, so to speak, on the march, and the main unit of chaos and world entropy in my person was incapacitated, no one attacked us, my precautions were sufficient to avoid instant disclosure and retribution. I'm not so sure about not instantaneous, so it's a bit early to relax.

Surprisingly, I made it.

The new base was in the same, previously rejected cabin near the harbor. Even a goblin would have been smart enough to set up the defenses before the operation, so we just went in, settled into our beds, and kept quiet, watching the evening harbor through the slits of the boarded-up windows. The place has a surprisingly good view from the window, even if the scenery is bleak to the extreme. It also smells quite noticeably of shit and fish entrails, a stench reminiscent of fish markets. The latter, however, was dealt with by a couple of simple ritual circles drawn by the elf in five minutes.

I woke up, that is, woke up in an adequate state, not in a feverish delirium, about the third day after that ill-fated night. And immediately, the kind and affectionate eyes of the whole company stared at me as if wanting to know about the results of what had happened and the reasons why I had sent first alarm signals, then signals of great alarm, then signals of fucking great alarm, and at the end of the whole thing SNAFUBAR

"We need to get out of the Eternal," I muttered quietly after finishing the invigorating herbal infusion Taria held out. "Right now."

And before they decided to tie me up tighter, as if I were delirious, I began to tell about my adventures. There were many exciting moments in the story. Starting with the moment when Pypysh was killed, but at the description of how I decided to "fighto" with every opportunity to get away unnoticed, Tia politely asked me to stop. Then she left the room quietly, and from the next room, there came the sound of a fist smashing through the wood paneling on the walls.

When she returned, as if nothing had happened, she asked to continue.

At the moment when I almost killed myself with a combination of extreme unexistence and a mind vulnerable while controlling the puppet, both Tia and Hestia came out at once, and the rumbling was a little longer and more audible. By the end of the story, the only one who never made a facepalm was Tia, who after the first two breakdowns acted like Zen incarnate. She was also the first one to smash my proposal to smithereens.

"You need to get back on your feet and recover from the battle." She reasoned, clearly in her thoughts. "Having servants of the Vicious Principalities and not lacking in power or equipment is no doubt an excellent reason to leave this city behind. And if we happen to linger within its walls, I will be the first to ask for a retreat. But you are weak now, and an attack on the march could prove fatal. I am not strong enough to cover our entire force as securely from the gaze of the Seers as you do. And there are enough bases already set up in the city to feel free to act."

He seemed to be saying all the right things, but somehow I felt uncomfortable, not because of temporary powerlessness, but because of the same premonition of trouble. It doesn't get stronger. It doesn't feel like some shit demon is standing right behind me. But it's there. It doesn't go away, and three days ago, I had a great theory about where this premonition came from.

Tia named the main problem at once: searching. In my normal state, with any mirror or even a reflective surface smelted by essentialism from the nearest stone, I could divert any search impulses to the side at a level that suited me. I mean, it would be possible to upgrade, but even without it, I am objectively not bad.

Tia is also good, very good, and her ritual figures are a good substitute for my mirrors, her experience is such that it's hard to surprise her. And she can even cover all of us, if necessary. But it's simple logic - if they haven't found her yet, then trying to escape right now with me in bad condition is really too dangerous. We all realize that we have to run, but the elf wants to go as she is used to, in a smart way and with minimal risk. I'll have to be carried through the gate, through all the scanners, because I won't be able to step through the Shadow in this condition!

How am I supposed to get through? Hide me in ritual figures or, for that matter, in the Mist of Hestia? It would be easier and safer to wait at least a week to get over the city walls. But if I don't want to get sick again right after crossing them, it's more practical to just listen to Tia and wait for a full recovery. With my parameters and class bonuses, it would take surprisingly little time.

Bu-u-u-t...

"Somehow, I'm feeling kind of mopey..." That's all I could say, not knowing what else to say. "And knowing my luck, you can expect, uh. for all sorts of things."

"I'm not going to insult you and myself by underestimating your intuition, truth be told!" The druidess remarks conciliatingly. "But even when you feel the shadow of danger, you should not give in to your instincts and run headlong. Often, such actions of the victim are the goal of the hunter, in a hurry to lure the prey out of the den, or to wear it down without giving it time to rest."

Instead of me, Losius answers, saying exactly what I wanted to say, but I haven't yet managed to wrap my thoughts into a verbal form straight enough.

"I'm sure Tin wasn't so much talking about premonitions here as his luck." He stretched, his thoughts returning to our past adventures, especially the very first days of our acquaintance.

In response, Tia allowed herself a polite and correct chuckle, but in a way that made it immediately clear that on two of us were laughing, and very loudly and with sobs.

"By the stars, this is ridiculous!" She had that look on her face you get when you're talking to Taria, as if you're trying to prove that the planet is flat and you're trying to prove the opposite, somehow feeling like an idiot to yourself, not to the person you're talking to. "We are, may I remind you, in the capital of one of the most powerful nations in the world! If even the agents of Hell were not sent to steal something important or create dangerous sabotage by a single group. If even the existing cult in the city is capable of conducting a ritual breakthrough. If even after the alarm raised by an irresponsible act, your act, Tin, is not enough to either cut the cult out or make it discard all unnecessary things, like snakeskin, and merge with the muddy bottom of the deepest pool. Still, the main problem of the cult will not be us but the authorities of the Empire. They are hardly a problem for us. What we should be wary of is the Eyes because even if they don't find a hot target, they can still come at us in some unknown way. An artifact, a unique ritual dependent on timing or special conditions, just the blind smile of fickle Fortune - that's the danger."

My head ached again, the strength spent on the story needed a quick rest, and the elf spoke, in general, strictly to the point, while my desire to run away quickly looked really simple whim. Dangerous whim. Well, what could happen in the dozen days I'd have to regain my form? I'd already done enough damage and idiocy by embarking on unnecessary adventures.

"I accept, I understand, I acknowledge." I agree, but I'm already shutting down, deciding to have the last word. "But, if anything, I warned you! And anyway, my kind supposed to find all sorts of things in the middle of nowhere."

"Except you shouldn't exaggerate." Tia smiled softly to the chuckles of the rest of the team, who had already dispersed to their corners. "I have, no doubt about it, made a habit of underestimating the possibility of the unlikely around you, but not to this extent. When I spoke of the Eternal Falling to the Devils, I was overplaying it a bit to create a dramatic moment. And even if this hail should fall swiftly and inexorably, it will not fall in the two weeks you need to recover."

I chuckled, remembering that not-so-old but seemingly long-forgotten ancient conversation. Then we talked, told stories, ate sweets bought in a good shop, discussed some stupid questions, and in general, almost relaxed. Yes, I still felt bad. Yes, we were all still on guard because of the possible attack on the insolent bastards-terrorists in our faces, but the main task had already been accomplished.

In a far corner of yet another temporary home lie several beautiful pocket mirrors, my replacement for the image-collecting crystals. There, tightly and securely packed and quite paranoid-securely isolated from any scanning, are stored the images stolen through the altar. So far, I hadn't deciphered it or even looked through it, but even the little things I'd managed to realize were enough to understand I hadn't gone for anything. Even though the danger hadn't gone away, and I was still feeling only slightly above freezing, I was in a relatively positive mood.

There would be days of recovery, of lying in bed, perhaps in the arms of Taria, who wouldn't get off me and would bring Hestia along with her. In the future, I'll be trying to make sense of the knowledge I've gained and figure out how to use it to my advantage. In the same place, in the future, awaited careful attempts to find out how many traces I had left, as well as who and by what means looking for me. But all that was not now, for now there was only the pleasant taste of the herbal drink, and the softness of a surprisingly good pillow. The clairvoyance said that Hans had gotten very expensive, comfortable and soft bedclothes, but he didn't want to show how and where. But I didn't care much about all that when I fell asleep.

As they say in the clichéd phrase, which they stick wherever they can, tacked on to any situation, as if they could not come up with anything of their own: nothing foreshadowed trouble.

So.

I didn't say that phrase or even think it.

Because it was foreshadowing.

Only I didn't listen.

* * *

Author's Note:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r0jlv2EjP3tjlU9__WbuT9ceXdbXVXGu/view?usp=sharing - Carduelis

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eWPHpnivQSrv87yQkTrJ3OKE4K5_Ykyp/view?usp=sharing - Mighty magick

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f3rNq9eKRJ7FKV9NM_y0zAqB6wdQROZa/view?usp=sharing - Pypysh attack.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r0zslgkazpWZ_8BKbM6bmWplMV7qoKjo/view?usp=sharing - Engineer Kostick's ultra-reliable design.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oFLH2_zNtlS_ZIHX_nbWlRv4YqnyqMCb/view?usp=sharing - Schmiele.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1muvdk729KJ8t0PwRecNrj27SJQ29zAUo/view?usp=sharing - Or this.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11MqmUXIpHetDtm89pfLwPous1d_8LWmR/view?usp=sharing - Buubga.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t1Y7SutNfRFMQQ3oJ0YVSFDcJYjwm1UA/view?usp=sharing - Again

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cwi2FrXbtUZan5MmNem2J9sMe6sGPZOw/view?usp=sharing - Approximate scale of the altar hall, only it is larger and without columns, just a huge empty hall and an altar in the center.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EunDBUbF-aIIadLxO-1gF_ZhfqUCxYjD/view?usp=sharing - One of the concepts of either Ancient Shadow or the Spawn of Madness, i.e., Darkness. I haven't decided yet.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/101HDU10VHknHJBR_p_vSZciaIVfkvrzc/view?usp=sharing - One of the creatures sealed in the dungeon.

The dice are even more than a lot and bounced a lot. I will post in the comments if I find the strength to describe these dice.

Kindness, caring, cuteness, and all that for everyone

* * *

The high ground is taken, and the firs comment is gained!

Soooo.

Completed, forgive me healthy sleep. That was probably the last time I agreed to just roll the dice. Now, no matter what I think to myself, I'm not even going to open the working files until the due date for the chapter. 44 pages, and I've been proofreading them until three in the morning! You can't just go to bed with an unproofread text.

There were so many dice that I won't even try to write them all. I will limit myself only to the crits and the most interesting moments, for general understanding, and even then not all of them.

Crits were a lot, a shitload to be honest. There and the volume of the chapter, which, by good should have been divided into four or three, but then the working plan for the entire arc goes astray, and a lot of bonuses or disadvantages played to one side or another.

Let's start.

100 with bonuses: the hero has finally noticed the danger in the city. Thanks to the pumped clairvoyance in bullshit conditions, standard Shroud tools like layers of thawed snow falling on his head can't bring him down, nor can other such trivialities. So he sensed it, but...

47 without bonuses (because it is the second roll, and all bonuses are offset by anti-bonuses): he found anything but a sense of unease.

79 with bonuses and minuses for searching for reasons and building versions. He approximately guessed about the possible presence of creatures and on bare paranoia and the fact that the hero is lucky for shit. So, sabotage or even a full-fledged attack (Hans is not the only one who has cool artifacts-guide to bring the army under the walls) Alishan much more reasonable assumption.

A bunch of revenge rolls for Losius, during which MC still managed to roll on the morality, even if a small edge and the morality is not too moral. He's walking on the edge as it is, so it's good that he did roll it. A small bonus to the preservation of humanity, very small.

A lot of bonuses to rolls here and there given by Tia and her working methodology. It's not as if the MC is completely slack, but the elf knows exactly how to and can utilize the potential of the entire group to its fullest potential. Perhaps it's easy to miss it behind the scenes, but there were a couple of hints - she even got Taria, who was not very useful in other work, to draw maps and routes. She now had apprentice-level cartography skills and almost journeyman-level tactical planning. That's right!

The creation of vessel (there reached a hundred, but with such bonuses that only if not a 1 to roll, and so it will still be a hundred) added bonuses simply by the packs (stealth and camouflage), so that hundreds and almost hundreds were quite a lot.

100 - Communication set-up.

93 - digging through Popyatchev's memory. Tin spent more time than desired, but due to his unhealthy perfectionism, he would have only invested in those "two hours" if he had a clean crit.

4 (FOUR!!!) hundredths almost in a row to fool the scanners on the way to the altar room.

Hundred, only here at the expense of MC-independent disadvantages, on a successful hidden under the Gaze. He already had chances, but thanks to the already working ritualist, it was almost impossible not to pass the crit.

92 clean, without any bonuses or minuses: searching in the altar because nothing was in the way.

97 at Pypysh's attentiveness is like the Bastian Roche Award: if he hadn't noticed anything wrong, the hero would have quietly left, decomposed Misty and the little guy would still be alive, though he would have been dragged through interrogations and scans after discovering traces of interference with his mind's defenses. Or not, if our Hero had fixed the defenses back up.

A blow to the soul: the hundredth automatic, for it was almost the same as with Sigmund - the blow was prepared for a particular person. The creature sitting in Bane was to take the place, at the right opportunity of the poor old jew.... hobbit.

And then the Hero's spirit of the Hero was aroused, and I don't even know if it was crit fail or crit success, and it went on.

MC had a couple of crits at the very beginning due to the maximum charges in the mirrors. But, since the moment the barrier was set, those crit on the defense is permanent and double. It's mythic. It was still possible to push through the first crit if no one interfered, but no.

A separate song with the equipment of the trio, whose mission was comparable in importance to the elimination and substitution of Sigmund. Well, maybe a little less important. So they were outfitted to the top.

One high-grade mythic, almost comparable, in fact, to the Ring in terms of the power of this mythic. True this effect is taken at the expense of the "assemblage" of the mythic, but the very fact, the very fact. There's all the prospect of going to a divine artifact grade or something comparable.

3 legendary Bags of Saboteurs in which the victims were delivered and these bags were made literally under the protection of the altar hall. True, not by Devils, but by humans long before the current date. To be even more precise, by the masters of Neitmak, who cool not only in alchemy but in artifacting too. Their sabotage never happened, and during the next war the bags were somehow lost, and in time the cult found them and took them, killing the losers who had pocketed them.

1 combat legendary lash Alchemist's Hug. Yes, the creator had a peculiar sense of humor. This is a weapon of monstrous power and a repository for essence, capable of copying the essence by pulling supplies out of the air and the surrounding world. A combat screwdriver so to speak, very combat, but also archipotent outside of combat.

A huge pile of epic, legendary, and even mythic ritual reagents and just a brain-deadening amount of "bonus", that is bonus-giving sacrifices.

That's it.

Kostic only broke the barrier when he nearly suicide himself against. Honestly, if he had killed himself, I would have continued the story without him because fuck that! The Roland Award at Dolmen!

Pure crit saves bonuses and neutralizes the first defense crit. The bonuses were enough for the second crit, and the pure 88 was still allowed to survive. Although, MC stays outside existence for a very long time. Roll less than 85, and there would be a new MC. The two MCs are Ygra and Taria. Tia would probably just leave and either commit suicide or live out her eternity away from everyone and all alone.

Critical Ass Kick - with bonuses, but there's a high roll of its own.

A hundred to create a plan for "how to get everyone in the way with the least amount of available force." And then also never rolled below 60. To be fair, no disadvantages from the two opponents other than the effects of fleur could be - they locked themselves in, but who knew? Fleur rolls, by the way, accumulated, and each next one was 1-3 stronger, but just the brain defense was the only thing that did not depend on the state of the puppets' body.

1 on recognizing the nature of the puppet - Misty's bonuses, plus the failure of opponents who didn't care about hidden meanings.

1 on Shmielae's morale after trolling (pure 97, 83, and 90 due to Soul of Mockery and Giver of Fear) from the owl. And yes, you don't mess with owls in this world.

1 on trying to subdue the hero with a purr - catgirls will not pass!

1 on Justine's resistance to mental attacks - if it wasn't for MC boosting her mentality and the barrier preventing her from doing anything but using triggers, it would have been sad. But as it happens, it was the cat that took the poor thing to "play during breaks", so it was a straight path to her brain.

MC had a couple 1 when fighting, but he was pulling out at the expense of being able to almost completely regenerate the puppet and developing into a double Crit faills these two never managed.

There were a whole bunch of rolls, even crits, and anti-crits, but it's spoilers for now.

One thing I will say is that Tia was right, in every sense, when she demanded to wait at least a week, or better two. From the point of view of logic and common sense, the chances of dying or being framed in case of an unsuccessful escape are just too much. To try and scatter and the option of immediate (after a couple of days, when MC at least in consciousness will be able to stay) escape, and let there did without corpses, but got into trouble and leave traces. Tia didn't clean up all the clues, which would have led to guaranteed trouble in the future. In many ways, because Tia's saving everyone like Bruce Willis, Tia herself has made a mess of things, and they're looking for her very diligently.

They stayed, and now the whole question is whether they'll be able to get away before the hour H.

Back in the interlude, it was said that the Cult had almost reached its goals and was ready to move into the active phase.

Even on the mission with the altar, they sent emissaries because the failure of this mission would not be critical at all, and the probability of failure is so high that it is easier to put this operation almost before so the failure no one has time to take advantage of.

MC can still escape in time if he rolls (with health and disadvantages) his intuition. But he may not.

That's it.

If MC's operation had been successful, or if he hadn't gotten involved in a stupid and fucking unnecessary fight, they would have been at a picnic with Ygra by now, and MC himself would have been dealing with the stolen information. The chapter grew because MC chose combat over intelligence.

That's it.

Good for everyone. Wash your feet, eat your hands, wear underpants, and keep your masks on.

Covid is not fiction, the Earth is not flat, anime is not porn cartoons, and RWBY is not anime.