The Soul Engine Ch. 5 (Original Fantasy) (Patreon)

A/N: Mikael finally gets some answers and so do all of you!

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Slowly turning towards the only other person left alive in the basement, Mikael lets out a lengthy exhale and almost reflexively fights down the urge to commit more violence. He knows that’s not him by this point. And while there’s still some adrenaline pumping through his veins, the fight is over now. Speaking of which…

Mikael looks down at himself, past the device embedded in his chest, to where the dagger he’s now holding had been stabbed into his gut. He hadn’t even realized it, but the pain had completely gone away. That made sense, given the wound had completely gone away as well. Mikael runs his fingers across his now blemish-free abdomen, a little shocked at how… total the healing seems to be. Then again, the nightlight in his chest is still glowing brightly and he still feels like he has the strength of ten men coursing through his body. So maybe it shouldn’t be surprising at all.

Either way, he’s feeling like a million bucks at the moment and that SEEMS to be thanks to the woman standing in front of him. Makes it easier to ignore the murderous urges that want him to stab the dagger into her eye.

Instead, he lifts his empty hand and jabs a finger at her.

“Avina.”

She jolts, only to slowly nod in response.

“Y-Yes… that’s my name…”

Pointing back at himself, Mikael makes sure to enunciate.

“Mikael.”

This causes a smile to spread across her face, one that Mikael can admit only accentuates her beauty… so long as one is willing to ignore the bloodstained apron and gloves from when she’d clearly been working on him VERY recently. Then again, some of his fissured mind was into that. Ugh.

“Hello, Mikael. It’s a pleasure to properly meet you.”

Mikael frowns at that and shakes his head.

“Pleasure’s all yours. I’d really like an explanation now, Avina. I’d really like to know what the fuck is going on.”

He feels pretty good about the fact that he’s not raising his voice at the moment. Though Avina still flinches at the gruff, angry undercurrent to his tone. He can’t help that though, and he thinks she should be able to forgive him a little anger, all things considered.

“R-Right. That’s… entirely fair. You’ve been through a lot. You definitely deserve an explanation. What… what do you want to know?”

He wants to know more things than he can count right now. But there are less things he NEEDS to know. It takes him a moment to order them in terms of priority in his own head, but honestly? The very first item on the list isn’t going to change, no matter how long he spends wracking his brain trying to think of anything more important.

Bringing the dagger he’d used to kill two men up; he taps the edge against the outer casing of the device embedded in his chest.

Tink. Tink.

As it makes a metallic sound from the impacts, Avina winces but doesn’t try to tell him off. Though the look she gives the device is… well, it’s almost reverent. And proud.

“What is this thing? I’m not a complete idiot. I recognize that it’s replaced my heart entirely. But… what the fuck is it?”

Avina lights up at that, or as much as anyone who dresses in all black and is covered in his blood CAN light up. Mikael gets the impression that outside of her ‘project’, she’s a bit more standoffish and introverted. But get her talking about her work and she starts to come to life.

“That… thing as you put it, is my magnum opus! My life’s work! That, my dear Mikael… is the Soul Engine!”

Mikael’s eyes bulge at that and he immediately looks to the corpses of the rat and the three men he’d killed. All four bodies, both animal and human, are shriveled up into little more than husks. While he… he feels energized and powerful. Like he could take on any challenge and overcome any obstacle. But… Soul Engine?

Staring down at the device in his chest, he tries to wrap his head around it. A… Soul Engine. It makes a sickening sort of sense, he supposes. The humming is louder now, though still relatively unobtrusive. Still, many would liken your average engine to that of a heart. They were what made powered machines work. Just like the heart made blood flow through a body.

Of course, the exact details of how Avina’s Soul Engine was managing to make HIS blood flow through his veins and keep him ticking were… definitely escaping him in this moment. But then, what did Mikael know about Soul Engines or magic or… or anything, really? Not much, as it turned out. Not even the foreign entities in his mind knew much about magic except how dangerous it was. They all believed magic existed, and some had seen it as well, but none of them were men who could cast it themselves. They were all mundane soldiers. Or warriors. Or just plain killers and worse.

Either way though, Mikael can’t help but blanch at the other word in ‘Soul Engine’. The S word. He looks at Avina askance, unable to help the slightly accusatory tone his next words take.

“You told me that I was just… taking energy. But in actuality, you were having me… eat souls?”

Looking rather confused, Avina tilts her head to the side and shrugs.

“Well… yes.”

He can’t help but look down at the corpses again. The rat was one thing, but he’d truly consumed these men’s souls? The demeanor of all three men strikes him then. How nasty and monstrous Tak and his two goons were. Was he going to… get any of that from him? By eating their souls, had he infected himself with their vicious, thuggish, murderous personalities?

Sure, maybe that was a silly thing to worry about when he was still dealing with the other foreign memories of killing and bloodshed stuffed into his head, but that was just it! Mikael had enough to deal with just trying to handle the worst of that lot! And now he had to worry about three more ‘voices’ added to the mix? Though admittedly… he wasn’t ‘hearing’ anything that particularly reminded him of that bastard Tak. But what if it was only a matter of time?

“Ugh, you’re one of those spiritual types, aren’t you?”

Pulled from his thoughts, Mikael looks over just in time to see Avina scoffing. Spiritual types? He actually didn’t consider himself very spiritual, no. But he didn’t have to be to start believing in the existence of souls when she quite literally shoved proof in his face in the form of that teal energy he’d sucked out of his kills. Combine that with the name of the device in his chest literally being ‘Soul Engine’ and it painted a pretty clear picture.

“Look, listen closely please. Souls are just energy at the end of the day. Everyone likes to think that their soul has some sort of imprint of themselves in it, but that’s ridiculous. Souls are basically just transfer nodes in the great tapestry of life. Ultimately, people are the sum of their experiences, of their memories. NOT their souls. A soul doesn’t hold any of the actual person it’s connected to in it.”

She certainly sounds knowledgeable, which given this is apparently an area of expertise for her… makes sense. But at the same time…

“Then what is the point of a soul, if not to contain the person it’s connected to?”

Crossing her arms over her chest, Avina answers clearly and concisely.

“Power. At the end of the day, souls are power. They latch onto people and they suck in energy throughout their lives, growing stronger and stronger. Then, when the person dies, the soul dissipates back into the weave of life, feeding the next generation of souls coming along.”

That was… sort of nice if you tilted your head and squinted really hard. It sort of reminded Mikael of the concept of reincarnation, but not quite. Or at least, not the sort of reincarnation that was popular in all of the fiction he’d liked to read back on Earth. In those stories, reincarnation was more of a direct one to one transfer, allowing for the reincarnators in question to ‘awaken’ their past lives more often than not.

But if Avina was to be believed, then here that wasn’t possible. Because no soul managed to stay intact after the person it was connected to died. Each soul ultimately dissolved and gave up its energy to the next souls about to be born.

That all said, if he trusted her to be telling the truth… what did that mean for him and what HE was doing?

“You eat souls now to survive, in case it wasn’t clear.”

Looking at Avina again, it’s to find that she hasn’t uncrossed her arms. She has a slightly mulish expression on her face and Mikael is reminded of what she’d said to Tak earlier. Apparently, she’s also thinking about her words back then.

“I wasn’t entirely lying when I told Tak that you wouldn’t last the night. I was just… obfuscating the truth a little bit. Lying by omission, I think it’s called. Put bluntly, you wouldn’t have lasted the night… without more meals. A single rat like the one I fed you was good for a few hours, but not even a full day. However, with three humans… well. I’m sure you felt it, didn’t you?”

He did. And even now, Mikael had to admit that he still felt amazing. And a glance down at the Soul Engine showed that it was still glowing brightly as well.

“In the end, it doesn’t matter whether you get the energy from animals or humans. If you refrain entirely, the Soul Engine will run out of energy. And if it does, you’ll die. Again.”

A sobering thought to be sure, but Avina wasn’t done.

“You CAN survive on just rats and other animals if you really want to, but as you learned just now, the bigger the soul is, the more energy you’ll get from it. And also… you’ll get stronger the more powerful the souls you consume.”

Mikael frowns and shakes his head.

“But wait… if I’m sucking up all these souls that are supposed to be dissipating back into… into the weave of life as you called it, doesn’t that mean I’m damaging the weave? Unraveling it, or something?”

Avina rolls her eyes again and shakes her head.

“You’re just clever enough to ask dumb questions, aren’t you? No. The weave of life is literally all-encompassing. It’s everywhere all around us and is said to connect all living things. I made the Soul Engine with it in mind, of course. As you expend the energy within it, either through fighting or through simply living your life, the energy goes back into the weave, just as it would have without your interference.”

Oh… that made sense. If he was slowly draining the Soul Engine of power just by existing, that power WOULD have to go somewhere, wouldn’t it?

Admittedly, part of him liked the idea that she’d put forward before. Getting stronger on the back of more and more soul consumption. But was that really him who liked it, or was it the foreign thoughts shoved into his head by that evil bastard of a wizard? That said, one thing was for sure… the foreign side of his brain was labeling Avina something that the native side of his brain vaguely recognized from those aforementioned fictional stories he’d liked to read so much.

… Maybe it was signing his own death warrant to even bring it up, but he had to ask.

“You… Avina, are you a necromancer?”

He suspected that she wouldn’t be happy with that question and braced himself accordingly, but he’s still not truly prepared for just how… huffy she gets.

“Urgh! No! Where did you even hear that term?! I am NOT a necromancer! If there’s one thing you get through that thick skull of yours, let it be this. I did not bring you back halfway. I don’t DO half-measures, alright? You aren’t undead. You’re a living, breathing person again. Just… with my Soul Engine in your chest to replace your heart. In fact, if you have to describe me in any sort of way, I MUCH prefer that you call me a Soul Mechanic.”

She looks particularly proud and happy with that title as her lips curl up into a small self-satisfied smile. Mikael, meanwhile, just raises a brow.

“A… Soul Mechanic?”

Harumphing, Avina gives him an evil eye at his disbelieving tone.

“Your Soul Mechanic, to be exact. Just as you are MY successful project. You know that you’ll need me if you’re going to survive whatever comes next. The Soul Engine in your chest is the first of its kind. I don’t do shoddy work I’ll have you know, but I honestly have no clue how long the thing will last before you need a… tune-up or something. So, with that said… we need each other.”

Once again, Mikael finds himself glancing around at the bodies. Her words, as smug as her tone is, do ring true in his ears. They do need each other. And not just because she’s apparently his ‘Soul Mechanic’ now… but also because Mikael knows fuck all about his surroundings, even with the memories shoved into his head. He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know where he can go from here. He doesn’t know enough about anything, really.

That said, he has two questions left at the moment. One to end this first part of their conversation, and another to begin the next part.

“Alright Soul Mechanic. How long would you say I have now that I’ve… consumed the energy from three human beings on top of the rat?”

Avina considers that for a second, muttering under her breath momentarily and peering at the glowing Soul Engine embedded in his chest for a few moments. Finally, she nods decisively to herself.

“You’re good for at least a week now. Easily. Plenty of time to pad that expiration date.”

Well, that certainly wasn’t depressing. To know that if he did nothing, he would only have a week left to live. And that in order to survive, he would HAVE to kill more living creatures. Animals, Mikael swore to himself. He would only hunt animals… hopefully, there would be enough in this forsaken fucking place to satisfy his needs.

Regardless, that brought him to his second question. He already had a niggling suspicion in the back of his mind, but he needed confirmation. And so he locks eyes with Avina once more, pinning his Soul Mechanic with his gaze.

“Avina… please answer me honestly. Who the FUCK is Lord Zadicus?”

Avina grimaces but seems perfectly willing to tell him, even opening her mouth to give an answer. However, before she can get a word out, there’s the sound of clanking coming down the hall towards the basement room they’re in. Mikael immediately whips around, his foreign memories telling him that that’s the sound of someone in full armor stomping towards them at a clipped pace.

In an instant, he steps forward and grabs the sword off of Tak’s corpse, holding it in one hand with the dagger still in his other. And he prepares for another fight.

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A/N: I swear I didn't intentionally intend to leave the story on a weekend cliffhanger. It just happened naturally! Anyways, we'll reconvene on Monday for Chapter 6, not to worry!

Anyways... what do you guys think? More information is coming to light now. Mikael knows more about the device in his chest, The Soul Engine. Poor guy doesn't get any fancy System or Cheat. He just gets a bunch of traumatic memories forced into his head and a soul-sucking device shoved into his chest.

This is fine, right?