Chapter 292. The Dark Mistress (Patreon)

Lol, I was curious how an AI would predict this chapter would start.

Ending of the last chapter:

In the end, there’s really only one choice.

I rotate the button to the left. The icon of the skull glows in my vision. I press the button down and the other options become black and unselectable.

“Selection registered. Preparing Discardia.”

AI prediction:

The voice of the computer is emotionless, but I know it's happy. It's always happy when it's preparing Discardia. It's been preparing Discardia ever since I was born, and it will continue to prepare it long after I'm gone.

I thought it was hilariously edgy.

Anyways, here's the actual chapter.

Suddenly, the synthetic overlay on my vision goes away. The others in the room appear disconcerted by the unpredictability of this challenge. Holiday smiles softly, regarding the room with an air of calm.

“Are we waiting for something?” I ask Red. “What does it mean to prepare Discardia?”

“I’m not sure, but look at this.”

Red shares a memory of a Regret scenario where the classroom opened up like a giant mouth and ate everyone. No one could move, courtesy of Holiday’s chairs. When Red tried to escape, he couldn’t leave his seat, his entire body stuck as though glued. The same was true for everyone else. With more time, people could have escaped, but the classroom devoured everyone in less than a second, turning inside out so the chairs lay within its jagged, sappy maw. The memory ended with Red’s death.

With the experience fresh in my head, I hesitantly try to lift my leg off the seat. It rises without any issues.

“That same scene repeats itself whenever I enter a scenario,” Red says. “Holiday thwarts us. Evidently, he doesn’t want anyone to have a head start.”

“Then we’ll just need to play this out.”

Just as I send that response, the room shudders. Holiday’s voice in my ear returns and says, “Discardia load is complete.”

“We’re stuck, like in the scenario,” Red says, giving me a severe look.

What? I try moving my leg again, but it doesn’t budge. Even using my Death affinity, it remains fixed in place. I try to stand and don’t go anywhere.

In the last second, my lower body has become glued to the seat. What fun.

The other ascendants must have realized the same thing, but nobody says anything. We’re all seasoned professionals here; nobody is pitiful enough to show concern or ask Holiday for an explanation.

“Commencing safety protocol.”

I think this is the work of an End array, Maria says. If you reach under the chair–

Suddenly, not even my arms can move; my whole body goes limp in the seat. I control my lolling head with my practice.

And now there’s a numbing agent, Maria observes. Fast acting and extremely potent. I’m not sure how it entered your body. Perhaps a colorless, scentless gas? But the Cloud practitioners would have noticed–

Holiday’s false voice cuts through Maria’s thoughts. “Entering Discardia now.”

My mind goes foggy. As a Death practitioner, I can counteract the effects of deadly poisons on my body, but this compound is trickier to deal with. I can’t sense its effects in the same way, and whatever it’s doing to my brain is difficult to comprehend, even with the help of Beginning.

Don’t fight it, Maria says. The round is happening in this Discardia world. That’s where you’re supposed to go.

I tamp down on my defensive instincts and let blackness take over my vision. My thoughts empty out.

Suddenly, the ground shakes and a loud roar fills the air. There’s a blindfold over my eyes, but I can sense the vitality around me. Red and I are sitting in chairs on opposite sides of a room bisected by a transparent barrier.

“Welcome to Discardia. You are on level one. Your objective is to make your way through all five levels.

“You have been sent to evaluate the qualifications of a half-step ascendant. You traveled to this half-step ascendant’s world and entered the atmosphere forty-six seconds ago. You obliterated the facility where the half-step ascendant commenced their ascension, but the individual is nowhere to be found. Instead, you find yourself caught in a trap prepared especially for your arrival. As this is your first descent, an ascendant observer has come with you to offer assistance.”

I realize at that moment that this announcement is mostly intended for Red. In the competition, I’m the so-called observer.

“Find the ascendant as quickly as possible, judge them, and return to Eternity. Reward: proceed to round two. Note: if the competitor perishes, the round will restart.”

Red immediately begins to share a memory. In a scenario, he asked for a profile of the half-step ascendant we’ve been tasked with collecting. He received information on the person’s age, fifty-two, and affinity, Dark.

No other details were provided.

Suddenly, a massive door opens up on Red’s side of the room. A gust of wind blows out from the opening, carrying with it the smell of sulfur and death. The stench is so strong that I can smell it even from my side of the transparent barrier.

With thick rock no longer obscuring vital signatures, I sense the forms of four hulking beasts. They’re the work of a Life or Death practitioner–probably a product wrought by two or more practitioners working together.

They pounce into Red’s room, revealing themselves as twisted panthers. The monstrosities rush toward Red, shredding the air with their claws. It seems silly and futile in the face of ascendant might. I’m not permitted to use my ascendant energy for this trial as an observer, but Red has no such restriction.

Ascendants have variable propensities for using their ascendant energy. For instance, Maria’s energy is specialized to reinforce her body, while mine gives attacks using affinity greater lethality, piercing more easily through defenses. That doesn’t mean I can’t use ascendant energy to empower my body, though; it’s just not as effective as when Maria does it.

With a flash of blue energy around his limbs, Red dodges one of the panthers and smashes its head into pulp with his fist, blue ascendant energy more than enough to pulverize flesh. He didn’t appear to reinforce his body. When his fist met panther flesh, energy exploded outward, tearing the panther apart.

In another two seconds, the other three panthers fall.

Red clasps his hands and stretches out his arms behind his back. Then he walks over to the transparent barrier and taps it with his finger. He crouches down and starts etching the outline of a door, leaving a pale white line on the barrier’s surface. When he’s finished, he taps the door and it falls over onto the ground, bouncing like a sturdy plastic. The scent of blood and sulfur wafts out, irritating my nose.

I walk through and join his side.

“Why not destroy the barrier?” I mentally ask, following him toward the door entrance where the panthers emerged. I can’t use Remorse, but I open my nominal mental defenses to Red, allowing him to grab the thoughts without interference.

“If you destroy it, the room collapses,” he replies. “Does Maria sense the End arrays it’s connected to?”

Unlike me, Maria doesn’t appear to be under restrictions, and can use her End affinity freely.

I relay her response: “This entire room is covered in End arrays, so it’s hard to tell,” she says. “I’m amazed we’re going after a Dark practitioner. I’ve seen nothing here that utilizes Dark affinity.”

“The panthers used Dark affinity,” Red says as he leaps up, bounding up a vertical earthen shaft. He uses ascendant energy to help him leap back and forth tirelessly. I have it easy with my Death affinity allowing me to float upward. “Their claws have a disintegration effect and their bodies are selectively incorporeal. They can drop from large heights without taking damage and physical attacks barely work on them. Too bad for them that ascendant energy cuts through their bullshit.”

I blink in surprise. I didn’t realize the panthers were so versatile and deadly. Against a mortal practitioner, they’d be a huge pain.

“What about Remorse? Couldn’t you attack their minds?”

“If they had minds to attack, I might be able to. Didn’t you sense it?”

“Of course not. I can no longer access the affinity,” I remind him.

Red rubs his temple, then sends another Regret memory to me. In it, he tries to grip onto the minds of the panthers but finds nothing to hold onto. It’s like they’re mindless and dead despite the potent vitality that courses through their bodies.

“I think it’s Beginning tech that controls them,” Red adds. “The panthers clearly aren’t conscious.”

Do you think Holiday came up with this stuff on the fly? Maria asks me.

I think this entire scenario is sourced from his own experiences, I reply.

When we reach the end of the vertical chute, rather than proceeding down a dark, gray brick hallway, Red’s hand glows with blue energy. He strikes upward with his palm, shattering the bricks. He leaps up and strikes again, this time piercing through the rock and penetrating dirt. The soft terrain explodes upward like a geyser, showering us with dust. Light shines in from above, barely visible from behind my blindfold.

“Oh, will you take that thing off?” Red grumbles, leaping up and out of sight.

I follow close behind. We’ve arrived on an open, grassy field. “It protected my eyes from all the dust,” I point out. Despite my protest, I pull up the blindfold and survey the terrain. We’re in the middle of nowhere; I can’t see any sign of the half-step ascendant’s compound, confirming that the facility is completely underground.

I do see where Red and I supposedly crash-landed, though. A short distance to the left, the ground is thoroughly shattered, though the radius of destruction is smaller than I’d expected.

“The ascendant knew we were coming,” Red says. “But more importantly, they knew the best way to interfere with the initial descent. An ascendant must balance hitting a wide area and piercing deep. To go deep enough, I sacrificed my strike radius. Seems like our ascendant anticipated that and hollowed out the earth so I’d crash far deeper into the earth than I intended. Then they had an earth elementalist seal us in.”

I look around. “So… where are we supposed to go next?”

He frowns. “I have absolutely no idea. This kind of behavior usually only serves to make ascendants pissy, so my world encouraged half-step ascendants to forgo such evasive tactics.”

Oops, I think to Maria. I’d hid from Ari, forcing the ascendant to track me down.

That doesn’t matter in your case, Maria replies. Ari was already as pissy as possible.

I control the muscles in my face to stifle a laugh and keep my composure. After learning more about Ari and how much she meant to Karanos, I feel a bit bad joking about her, but not that bad. Yes, she definitely was.

—

Ascendant Crimson Teeth

What is an ascendant to do when a half-step ascendant hides from their trial? What if they are the slipperiest, sneakiest, most well-connected bastard?

Over the years, I’ve dealt with numerous half-step ascendants who embraced the hiding strategy. One of the worst was a half-step ascendant who was a prominent leader in her world’s crime circuits. She had connections everywhere and an endless supply of powerful practitioners loyal to her organization and empty of ethical compunctions.

I was alone with my Beginning affinity.

To this day, I wonder what the optimal solution might have been to that challenge. Threatening to destroy cities and cause massive collateral unless the half-step ascendant is delivered on a silver platter or killed is a possibility. It’s essentially the strategy that Ascendant Ari chose when she went to Ian Dunai’s world.

It isn’t particularly effective on a shadowy organization whose members are spread over the entire world and stand to benefit from the chaos caused by destruction of major population centers.

Another strategy is infiltration, though it’s rarely exercised. There technically isn’t a time limit on how long an ascendant can remain on a mortal world, but there’s a natural sense of oppression that mounts the longer one remains on a world that isn’t their own. It’s a phenomenon known as rejection.

I didn’t incorporate it into Discardia, but in real life, it would be a constant source of discomfort and would initially dampen and then slowly leech away at the practitioner’s ascendant energy.

With enough time, the ascendant would only have their practice to rely on.

One of the only times I went with the infiltration strategy was to find the Dark Mistress. It took me three years to find and exact my judgment upon her.

Three years. More than long enough for every ounce of mercy to drain away.

My challenge to the ascendants isn’t intended to be that difficult. I’m not using a proper dilation chamber for Discardia. The simulation moves at faster than real time in their minds, but with only 3x compression. I’m not planning to keep them in round one for days, let alone years.

My intent, after all, isn’t to torture, but to teach. Still, ask any student you know, and they’ll agree that the two naturally overlap.