Chapter 296. Uprising (Patreon)

[ note – I retconned the name of ian’s special dagger in book 5, since I never actually gave it a proper name and always just referred to it as the blade / dagger / knife. oops. it's called “the blade of revelation” – which happens to be the title of book 5, which is already complete. book 5 ends with ancient ash taking ian away to train. chapt 261 is the first chap of book 6, our current installment. i'm mentioning this now because ian is going to privately call the dagger by this proper name. ]

I hold the full glass of pale blue, bubbling beverage in my left hand. I control my face and posture, forcing constant stoicism. I’m not oblivious to the fact that it makes me resemble Karanos, my mentor usually wearing a similarly dry expression.

Holiday makes idle conversation with several other competitors and their observers who wait to commence the second round, Red, and a few others from the Hall of Ascension. People initially tried to talk to me, though quickly found me unapproachable and turned to my supposed protégé. As the current frontrunner, Red’s received quite a bit of attention.

While they socialize, concerns churn in my mind, frothing like my effervescent drink. I share them with Maria. What will happen when we win and it eventually comes out that this was all a farce, that me and Red are part of the white faction?

I don’t think you ever technically joined the white faction, Maria remarks. You’re Karanos’s protégé, but there’s no formalized tie. He decided to make you his protégé without asking for your consent so you could participate in the faction’s competition. Your bond is predicated on an agreement–that you would help him in exchange for a return beacon. Once this business is done, you’ll have no concrete reason to remain with him.

That… is technically true.

The real problem is Red, since he’s formally affiliated with the white faction. He won’t be able to hide that forever. But you… you’re free to be whoever and whatever you want. This persona you’ve made doesn’t have to be fake. You aren’t lying about being an ancient. You’ll grow into your power soon enough.

But… Ancient Black… that isn’t me.

Neither is the Skai’aren, Maria states. That name is behind you, and when we survive this Infinity Loop business, that world will be, as well. You need to start thinking about who you want to be when this is all over.

You and Karanos act like I need to prepare for the future now, but I’m eternal, Maria. I have time. I pause. We have time.

We’ll have time when you find a way to maintain consciousness without your special dagger, she says.

I can’t argue with that. My eyes fall on Holiday, my Beginning affinity bringing an idea to the forefront. Of all the people in Eternity, Holiday is the only one outside of the white faction and Achemiss who already knows about my dagger. He’s also an unparalleled Beginning practitioner who’s likely made countless artifacts, though I’ve only seen a fraction of them.

He also owes me a favor.

Maybe he can fix my vulnerability, though informing him about it would be critically revealing. Without the Blade of Revelation’s transformative effects, he would easily recognize me as Ian Dunai, even with the ring of flesh shift sharpening the contours of my face.

Perhaps when this is all over… I’ll think about it.

Most of the teams we entered round two with complete their challenges within two hours of our time. Only one pairing seems to be stuck. One team from the second group of round two entrants finishes first, taking the spot of the slow pair.

With that, we finally have enough to start round three.

—

Round three is different from the previous two as Holiday hinted, though it still follows Kyla Bresnir.

The Dark practitioner has taken over multiple major population centers on the large, central continent of her world with End arrays, employing a tactic similar to the one Maria used when she invaded the SPU. An army of chimeras with practitioner abilities stalk the conquered cities, promising violence to any who question the takeover.

It’s the kind of strategy that would never work long term. Before I ascended, I might have been able to conquer a country, but I wouldn’t have been able to hold it. But Bresnir doesn’t need to hold it.

She’s leaving. And as she goes out, she’s going to empower and enrich her organization in any way she can. The chimeras are expendable, sourced from rifts and plentiful human stock, and created by Dark, Life, and Death practitioners working in tandem in decentralized centers of operation around the world.

Bresnir and her chimeras, along with the assistance of a few key practitioners from Bresnir’s organization, are enough to seize the cities. The problem for us is that not only is Bresnir constantly moving around, making extravagant use of hijacked transport arrays to relocate both herself and her agents, but that she’s tied her fate to the lives of over 250 million people.

If we kill Bresnir, those people will die, too. If we ascend with her, the people will survive, of course… but the round three description, given to us when Discardia loaded for the third time, made clear what we were to do: “Kill the ascendant and return to Eternity.”

The previous times, we were to judge the ascendant. Both times we killed Kyla, though I suppose we could have knocked her out and chosen to bring her to Eternity. This time, the order is explicitly to kill.

It’s intentionally keeping us from picking the easy path.

Red, Maria, and I argued about what we were supposed to do in this scenario. Were we supposed to simply solve the situation, intervening on the behalf of the common people? That felt wrong. We all agreed that the role of an ascendant was to judge half-step ascendants and ideally bring them to Eternity, less ideally kill them. We weren’t supposed to interfere in the events of a world, even if people tried to weaponize our arrival for their own purposes.

In the beginning, we decided that the round was almost a trick question. We would wait and let peak practitioners and relevant governmental bodies address the situation. We waited for four hours before Red started getting exasperated.

“They’re not doing anything,” he protested. “The governments are holding their practitioners in reserve and telling their citizens to shelter in place, even as Bresnir’s agents and chimeras destroy millions in property, steal wantonly, and murder indiscriminately.”

“You’re just parroting the news.” I gesture to the newscast displayed on the screen in the upscale hotel lobby we’ve been occupying. “Obviously Bresnir’s organization has a goal, we just don’t know what it is. What we do know, though, is that this world’s affected governments are waiting for us to act.”

Red gives me a serious look. “Should we? If we wait long enough, they’ll be forced to take matters into their own hands, as they should.” He sighs. “If they weren’t waiting for us, they would have dealt with the situation much more aggressively. Many people would still be alive.”

“The same could also be said if we had intervened immediately,” I say. “If this were real, we could have located her, then ascended, breaking the fate that binds her to millions of civilian hostages.”

The exact wording of our challenge was to kill her, then return to Eternity, Maria thinks. Where does the Hall of Ascension lie?

Red cocks his head as he reads her thoughts. “In Eternity?”

“No,” I say, realizing what Maria is getting at. “To enter Eternity, you must walk through the hall and into the amber. The hall itself is in the–well, it’s not correct to call it the ‘real world,’ but it’s a place where ascendants are not immortal.”

“How do you know this?” Red asks.

“We saw it,” I reply simply. “Most ascendants are brought into the Hall of Ascension unconscious, then thrown into the amber,” I explain. “I was fully conscious, so I saw what it looked like.”

It is a place separated from mortal worlds, and yet situated beyond Eternity, Maria adds. I propose that we ascend with Bresnir, then kill her before she can enter Eternity. In the worst case, we fail our challenge, and the round will reset.

Red’s eyes darken. “Do you think we’ll be able to see the Hall of Ascension?”

“I think so,” I reply slowly, mulling it over. “Holiday made this simulation, and he knows the hall inside and out.”

Do you have a return beacon? Maria suddenly asks.

Red pats his jacket. “The sim placed it in the interior pocket.”

With that, our path forward was settled. We exit the hotel lobby, a medium-sized establishment on a heavily wooded mountain. I reconstruct my bone wyrm from its shallow grave. Red and I climb into its ribcage and fly toward the city where Bresnir was last spotted on the news.

I keep the wyrm low to the ground to evade detection, while Red runs Regret scenarios to ensure we don’t run into potentially hostile practitioners or authorities. He uses his Remorse to read the thoughts of people we fly by, verifying that we’re on course for Bresnir. We need to catch Bresnir by surprise so she can’t stall things indefinitely. If her organization is enriching itself off the chaos, then her prerogative will be to stick around as long as possible.

“Red,” I say.

His gaze wanders from the rapidly passing terrain below, mostly green mountains and rocky valleys. “Yes?”

“You don’t often ask me questions in scenarios, do you?”

“Not if I can just do it in real life. I’ll experience asking the question either way; technically, it’s only your time I’m wasting.”

I nod. “Euryphel… he usually asks questions in scenarios. He’ll run the same scenes over and over again before playing them out for real.”

“Well, things are different when you’re an immortal,” Red says. “When life is short, bounded, Regret lets you extend out every moment. Asking questions in scenarios is a way to save yourself time, and that builds up in the long run.” He rubs his hand over one of the long rib bones. “Using Regret like your friend is tedious. It wears on the mind like a grindstone. I had to break myself of a similar habit when I ascended.”

When we’re less than twenty minutes away from Bresnir’s supposed location, Red curses. “She’s moved cities.”

“Where is she now?”

“Half a continent away,” he says. “I’d say that we should keep on our current route and use the same transport array to pursue her, but Bresnir’s underlings would be more likely to destroy the array than let us use it. At least, if they’re competent.

I grimace. “Maybe we should draw Bresnir out, rather than trying to ambush her.”

“How do you propose?”

I grab the ribcage with both arms, pressing my head up into a gap. “Killing her organization's underlings.”

Maria protests. What if their lives are also tied to those of the civilians?

“Then we have you,” I reply. “You’re a peak End practitioner; surely it’s within your limits.”

We’ll see. The bindings must be powerful, otherwise other End practitioners would have broken them by now.

The city is aflame as we approach, great plumes of dark smoke threatening to blot out the sun. The part of the city with the tallest buildings is most obviously ruined. A large section–perhaps a stretch of fifteen skyscrapers–have toppled, their tops sliced off in a clean line, as though bisected by a massive sword.

We saw the footage on the news. Bresnir did that blow herself, manifesting a cord of disintegrating shadow that she dragged across the skyline at rapid clip while riding in a slick, black shuttle. Its afterburners bled powerful flames that a fire elementalist within her shuttle controlled to fend off attackers.

The shuttle moved fast enough that Bresnir could use it to travel the continent, but it wasn’t invulnerable. Bresnir had been forced to abandon it when far-off fire elementalists and Light practitioners wielded a specialized focus to laser her craft down, forcing her to abandon it.

My wyrm flies over the wreckage of the shuttle now. It flew straight through an apartment building, setting it on fire, before plummeting into and demolishing an office building. It was severely scorched, but someone appeared to have put that fire out.

It seems so senseless on the surface, but the more I see, the more certain I am that there’s a larger agenda at work. Perhaps a much larger one. I know just enough about the geopolitics of this world to be dangerous.

The continent that Bresnir has usurped is a single country–Unified Monta–composed of different autonomous states. Over the past decades, it’s grown in power and influence, rising from a second-tier power to one of the most powerful countries in the world, its population burgeoning to fill its large, underpopulated wilds.

As a stateless outlaw, Bresnir shouldn’t personally care about that, and soon she’ll be either dead or gone. But if Bresnir’s organization received a lucrative offer from a nation threatened by Unified Monta’s ascendance… they might be compelled to act.

Meanwhile, said threatened nation could undertake their own agenda, their movements masked by the utter chaos of Bresnir’s endeavors and the inclement destruction wrought by the anticipated descendant.

I consider the tangled war between the SPU and its neighbors. This sim scenario reminds me of what happened to Maria, half her government leading an insurrection as me and Eury entered the country and Ari plummeted toward Pardin.

My hands tighten on the wyrm bones, knuckles turning white.

Opportunists and vultures. The same people who block me and Eury now, determined to develop Infinity Loop tech without concern for the dangers.

And behind all of them, the great, bloody wheel of politics.