Chapter 273. More Important Things (Patreon)

[ thanks for reading! :3 ]

Isid’ra Druni was holed up in a dim cave. Moonlight reflected off the wall and onto the small puddles by the entrance.

She waved her hand and the water slid upwards off the ground. It froze into a mirror angled across the wall, magnifying the moonlight. Druni no longer wore the standard of a guardian. Instead she was dressed in the mottled black and gray of her stealth fatigues. The colors shifted as she moved liquid between layers of fabric. By deploying small ice mirrors around the vicinity, she could view herself from multiple angles and change the pattern to mimic the environment.

“What are you doing?” a voice whispered in accented Swellish.

Druni turned to the woman reposing at the other end of the cave. Guardian Urstes and the Crowned Executor paired her with Kaiwen Chowicz for this operation.

While the SPU and Selejo were now unified under the banner of one nation, enmities hadn’t evaporated overnight. After Maria’s disappearance and Selejo’s capitulation, Chowicz refused to cooperate until the Selejan elites threatened to expunge her from Zilverna’s retinue. She’d calmed down after that, at least on the surface, but Druni had always been good at reading people. She recognized when someone was beaten and hunkering down, waiting for an opportunity to strike back.

But that changed right around the time that Euryphel organized the formation of the Darkseers. Chowicz had shown up unannounced to their third gathering. Euryphel hadn’t been at that meeting, but his second in command, Guardian Urstes, had accepted her presence without complaint, keeping his composure. He acted as though Chowicz was invited.

But Druni had been one of the few trusted with compiling the list of invitations–she knew that Chowicz’s appearance was unplanned.

Euryphel and Urstes evidently had information on Chowicz that Druni didn’t. That was okay–Druni recognized that she didn’t have a need to know. If the heads of her nation–and the Darkseers–agreed that Chowicz was an asset they could trust and use to save their world from the Infinity Loop, she wasn’t going to argue.

That didn’t mean that she felt comfortable being paired with the mysterious woman, especially when her Moon affinity was stronger. If Chowicz decided to go against orders, Druni wouldn’t be able to stop her.

Druni sighed and dispelled the mirror, the cave descending back into relative darkness. “I’m not doing anything. Just thought it might be pleasant to have a bit more light.”

“You didn’t have to dispel the ice just because I asked a question,” Chowicz said. Her black hair was tied up in a tight bun rather than draping over her shoulders, revealing the sharpness of her jaw. Her eyes were lined by dark lashes distinctive even in the low light. “A bit of light can be nice, especially when we’re waiting for who knows how long.”

Oh. She turned to Chowicz. “I’ve been wondering–”

“Why I joined the Darkseers?”

Druni blinked. “If I was supposed to know, I already would. I was going to ask why you still serve Zilverna even when the Eldemari is gone.”

“Because he’s her son?” Chowicz replied, clearly confused. “She entrusted him to me.”

“You lost your nation,” Druni continued. “Maria’s faction fell apart after her death. Zilverna is a puppet. He doesn’t have enough power to say no to anyone.”

Chowicz laughed. “If you think he’s a puppet, then you’ve been fooled just as well as the rest of them. I know we seek to eliminate the Infinity Loop, but it’s a powerful tool, and until the moment is right to strike, Selejo will continue to utilize its Infinity Loop. To do anything less would attract suspicion.” She looked at her hands. “Zilverna was despondent for two months, I’ll admit. But he isn’t the boy you remember at the executor’s coronation.”

“Zilverna used the loop again?” Druni remembered that Zilverna used it once before to prepare for the Fassari Summit.

“This isn’t news to Selejan elites–the energy expenditure is too large to happen in secret. But when they see Zilverna, they see a foppish boy who wastes Selejo’s capital on fruitless attempts to get stronger.”

“He’s a good actor,” Druni muttered.

Chowicz sighed. “Yes, he is. Better at acting than his mother, even if he’s less naturally talented in other areas.”

“Does he know about–”

“The Darkseers?” Chowicz nodded.

“Druni, Chowicz,” a voice said next to their ears, carried on the wind. “Go, now.”

“Copy,” Druni replied. She and Chowicz sprinted out of the cavern. Chowicz hadn’t been using her Regret affinity nonstop, so she didn’t predict the message to move out, but Druni had no doubts that Chowicz would be running non-stop scenarios from this point on. After all, Chowicz’s official role in this operation wasn’t tied to her Moon affinity or water elementalism, but her Regret affinity.

They ran through the forests of Flatochre, Druni following Chowicz’s lead. Their shared affinity allowed them to sense the liquid in living organisms, and the recent rain helped with detecting inanimate objects like boulders that might block their path.

The northwest edge of Flatochre was dominated by Lake Adrian. It was named after the last Emperor of the Adrillon Empire, the power that dominated the subcontinent for two-thousand years before collapsing five hundred years ago. Emperor Adrian commenced his ascension at the heart of his capital city. A descendant trial later, the empire’s capital was sunk into a vast, watery crater.

Almost like what happened to Selejo, Druni thought with a shudder. Most trials weren’t so destructive–legends said that Adrillon was a land of tyrants, chains, and bloodshed. The calamity that destroyed the empire was framed as justice from above.

The two water elementalists reached the lake and dove like dolphins into its frigid depths, their fatigues constricting around them to become insulated wetsuits. They swam east along the coast until they encountered a small necromantic fish construct. They followed it downward through groves of seaweed and staggered rocks.

The women surfaced in a cavern. Druni could go for over thirty minutes without taking a breath relying on her elementalism alone, but it was uncomfortable. She breathed contentedly as she collected the water from her hair and suit, funneling it back to the lake.

Druni inclined her head respectfully toward the other figure in the room–their resident necromancer, Soolemar.

“You found where they’re housing the facility?” Druni asked.

“I did,” Soolemar confirmed. “It’s well hidden–I had over fifty constructs trawling the water for the past eight hours. If there’s no barrier near the facility that detects necromancy, I’ll be able to accompany you.”

The only way to be sure was for Soolemar to go himself and approach the facility in a Regret loop. Druni gave Chowicz a nod. “Let’s go.”

The necromancer didn’t need to breathe and was unaffected by the cold water, so he wore a low-tech black wetsuit without insulation. Even though Soolemar knew the way, the party followed Chowicz, relying on her Regret affinity to find the best path. Lake Adrillon couldn’t be considered hostile waters, but they wanted to avoid detection at all costs.

The Darkseers strategy relied on moving in the shadows, attracting no notice while surveilling and planning a decisive day of action. They could only truly destroy the Infinity Loop technology by removing all traces of it from the world simultaneously, and to do that, they needed absolute secrecy.

Ahead, Chowicz signed. She nodded at Soolemar encouragingly, indicating that the necromancer could safely proceed closer to the facility.

Chowicz suddenly stopped using her affinity to propel herself and Soolemar along. Druni followed the woman’s lead and the three of them swam slowly into the darkness with sure strokes. As Chowicz took them around an outcrop, Druni was momentarily blinded. She blinked rapidly at the bright beacons that were about two city-blocks away.

And city block was the right term for what she saw. A ruined city stretched as far as Druni could see. Without the beacons providing light, Druni might not have realized. Natural processes had greatly eroded what remained of the city’s buildings, though most were almost completely destroyed at the base, only building foundations remaining.

The city had been leveled, then sunk into the water. So this really was the fate of the Adrillon Empire, Druni thought, awestruck.

But her eyes ignored the vestiges of history to focus on the mission. The beacons marked the location of a windowless metal bunker surrounded by large metal columns. The brief described them as generators that could harvest the motion of the lake water to partially offset the absurd energy requirements of the Infinity Loop.

An added, obvious bonus of being in the middle of the lake was that the site would avoid attention. States in the East tiptoed around one another as they constructed Infinity Loops, as a loop was an instant force-multiplier when it came to training up powerful combatants–at least if the highly-visible example of the Skai’aren was anything to go by.

They swam carefully toward the compound, Chowicz taking a circuitous path with more than a few zigzags. Druni’s heart quickened with apprehension, but she forced herself to trust Chowicz to get them into place safely.

“Here,” Chowicz signed. The trio ducked behind one of the hydro-generator columns.

Druni watched as an all-terrain hovergloss pod sank toward their location. While hoverglosses could skim across the surface of water without augmentations, she recognized that this submersible version must be a custom job.

The first pod was only the first of many. Over twenty hovergloss pods dropped into the depths and delivered their payloads to the compound, entering via one of six circular uptake tubes.

None of the pods returned.

Darkseers intelligence indicated that the pods carried materials and experts needed to build and operate an Infinity Loop. Druni’s team was tasked with finding exactly where the loop was being built and planting a necromantic construct as close as possible to the loop’s physical location within the facility.

How hard could it be?

—

Euryphel rubbed at the space between his eyebrows as he paced his office. First on his mind should be the clusterfuck that was the Selejo Imperial Federation. The fledgling nation’s troubles dominated his waking life. He was the nation’s outward face and the one ultimately responsible for navigating new political waters associated with the West’s ascendance on the world stage.

He read the news articles that came out about him. They were generally quite favorable, calling his leadership style decisive and no-nonsense.

Ironically, Euryphel attributed his “leadership style” to the fact that he didn’t allot nearly enough focus to his official duties. He couldn’t be bothered to patiently read through a five-hundred page report on a weekday morning and deliberate painstakingly over possible options.

All in the Federation were invested in its collective prosperity, but individual nation blocks competed for increased influence. As the head of the Federation, the SPU block had the most power. Euryphel’s political enemies–essentially everyone who wasn’t in the former SPU–wouldn’t outwardly fight him, but they would benefit from him failing in his duties.

He knew that giving him stupidly long, verbose reports–often in Luxish rather than his native Swellish–was a ploy to get under his skin.

Perhaps if Euryphel’s only concern was guiding the Federation into the future, the not-so-subtle attacks would have had a greater effect. Instead, Euryphel passed the briefs off to whatever top Beginning practitioner was available, then had them condense the information into a few bullet points. He didn’t have the mental energy to deal with political bullshit when more important things were on his mind.

The Darkseers had three operations tonight across the globe. The spread of the Infinity Loop technology was accelerating. The technology was still only in prototypical stages, and required massive investment to build and operate. This greatly limited who could acquire the technology at this point.

But that wouldn’t be the case forever.

Euryphel knew that they needed to act as soon as they were confident that they had tracked down all existing Infinity Loops, related research and data storage centers, and scientists. They’d come a long way in a few months. Beginning estimates said that the Darkseers would likely have a 95% chance of success by mid-year.

“95% chance of success” was misleading in this context. It meant that if the Darkseers could successfully pull off their operation and destroy every single identified trace of the Infinity Loop, there was a 95% chance that they would permanently remove the technology from circulation.

But if they failed to destroy a facility on their hit list, or a lead scientist escaped assassination…

These were the concerns that really kept Euryphel up at night–not passive-aggressive politicking.

He groaned into his hands. Ian, I don’t know if we can afford to wait for you to return. He knew that Ian had subjected himself to brutal training in spaces with dilated time to accelerate the timeline for his return. If they had Ian assisting them, Euryphel had much greater confidence in their success–especially if something went wrong, and they needed someone to rectify the situation with overwhelming force. An alternative was recruiting a returned ascendant to their cause, but they hadn’t yet had luck.

One thing was certain: The longer they waited, the more the loop technology would develop and disseminate. Wait too long, and even the combined might of the Darkseers’ peak practitioners would falter.