Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 109 (Patreon)

Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change

Available Power : 0

Authority : 7

Bind Insect (1, Command)

Fortify Space (2, Domain)

Distant Vision (2, Perceive)

Collect Plant (3, Shape)

See Commands (5, Perceive)

Bind Crop (4, Command)

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Nobility : 6

Congeal Glimmer (1, Command)

See Domain (1, Perceive)

Claim Construction (2, Domain)

Stone Pylon (2, Shape)

Drain Health (4, War)

Spawn Golem (5, Command)

Empathy : 5 ><

Shift Water (1, Shape)

Imbue Mending (3, Civic)

Bind Willing Avian (1, Command)

Move Water (4, Shape)

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Spirituality : 6 ><

Shift Wood (1, Shape)

Small Promise (2, Domain)

Make Low Blade (2, War)

Congeal Mantra (1, Command)

Form Party (3, Civic)

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Ingenuity : 5

Know Material (1, Perceive)

Form Wall (2, Shape)

Link Spellwork (3, Arcane)

Sever Command (4, War)

Collect Material (1, Shape)

Tenacity : 6 ><

Nudge Material (1, Shape)

Bolster Nourishment (2, Civic)

Drain Endurance (2, War)

Pressure Trigger (2, War)

Blinding Trap (5, War)

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Animosity : - - ><

Amalgamate Human (3, Command)

Congeal Burn (2, Command)

Trepidation : -

Follow Prey (2, Perceive)

“Monster.”  The magetouched human greets the demon fighter like he’s politely passing someone on a late night stroll, with an inclination of his head.

“Murderers.”  The demon soldier does his best to return the contempt, but I can tell that he’s only barely containing a deep animosity.

All of them are dressed in clothes that we scrounged up for them from the fort.  I healed at least one of them from the brink of death, Seraha and her kitchen helpers have been feeding them for almost a tenday, all our work has going into making them actually safe and moving toward a reconciliation with each other that bypasses species, caste, or any other hangups that get in the way of surviving the ongoing ravaging of the world.

I suppose this is a reconciliation of a sort.

“Do you have it?”  The demon asks, pulling a sack off his gifted belt.

“Yes.  Are you sure you weren’t followed?”  The other human, far less contemptuous than the man that I think is his superior officer, is as much a professional as anyone could be under the circumstances.  His reddish skin looks like it is spotted with whorls under the moonlight, the little resin sentinels I have scattered in the trees around their meeting point giving me a good view of how he keeps casting worried looks into the darkness of the Green.

The demon gives a snort through his wide dark furred muzzle. “It doesn’t think we’re smart enough to conspire with each other.  You heard its puppets talk.”  He sounds dismissive of my abilities. Though he also turns his head to try to check, the nub of a shattered horn showing as a stark white under the pale nighttime light.

“The traitors.”  The magetouched sneers.  “They won’t survive without the thing.”  He claims.

“Don’t care.”  The demon says, passing the sack he has to the other human.  He mutters something that I don’t know if the unaugmented human will pick up.  “Open sky, you can’t even not be a prick now, can you?  Typical human.”

The soldier, the one who was missing half his blood and had a rotten infection practically carving his leg in half when we rescued him from the nightmare the other apparatus put him in, closes the sack.  “This is enough.  We just need to find it now.”  He tells his superior.

“It won’t be a problem.”  The magetouched says.  I wait for him to say more, but he doesn’t, which is actually annoying.  The soldier and singer I used to be are used to people who think they’re secure being a lot looser with information.  Maybe however many hundreds of years have passed have been enough to prompt nations and militaries to develop proper security procedures.

The pair of large bees that have been shadowing Kalip take that moment to send me a nudge through Bind Insect, and draw my attention from the puddle of perception that I have through the glimmerlings to the tiny windows of enhanced night vision that they provide.  The archer has set himself up twenty lengths away in the boughs of a particularly thick tree, his new patches of wolven fur actually providing a strange blended camouflage that will probably go unappreciated in the dark of night.  I know his own magetouched abilities are gone, but I am reasonably sure, even without the connection through Amalgamate Human, that he can hear the same things I can.

He is also in the process of drawing his bow, and sighting through the reaching black shadows of the Green at night.

On the other end of his ire, the human is telling the demon to head back first.  “No.”  The demon soldier shakes his head.  “Time for me to leave.  I want no more part of this.”

“You’ll be dead before dawn.”

“Maybe.  But I won’t be here.”  The demon steps back, and a respectable distance away, I watch as Kalip’s eyes flick to track his motion.  But his bow stays leveled, and I decide he’s sighting on the magetouched.

I have a moment to make a choice.

Do I actually want to intervene here?

These people are trying to kill me.  Not just me.  Whoever is in the way, and by association, everyone who’s been relying on me to stay alive.  There isn’t enough food without Bind Crop.  The storms are coming, foraging and hunting won’t be enough, not for this number of survivors.  My death is an execution for everyone nearby, unless they cut their own numbers down to five or ten.

Maybe they will.  It wouldn’t surprise me.  The demons have a lot of long term animosity toward the humans, but from what I’ve learned through what few conversations about history that I was able to have in the past, the grudge was earned.  Whatever dream of empire that their human neighbors are drunk on, it has led to a number of atrocities and violations that were quite deliberate.  The thought that the rescued humans might drive every other species out of the fort and claim it for themselves, and think that plan is acceptable, is all too possible.

With that in mind, there’s a cost to killing these conspirators.  The merchant had a lot of experience with webs of plot and deception, and there are two points of contention that stand out here.  Beyond just my increasingly impractical desire to see everyone flourish, it is going to cause friction when several people simply vanish, and also there is at least one other that I have not been able to track down yet.  I had hoped to get that information here, but the magetouched center of this plot is annoyingly tight lipped.

I don’t have long to make a choice though, as I can see the black light of the mantra writing glowing under Kalip’s skin, while his eyes narrow in focus.

The underling shifts nervously.  “We should eliminate him, before he tells someone.” He whispers to his officer.

“Why bother?”  The magetouched doesn’t bother to whisper as the demon backs away.  “No one lives long in the Green.  Easier this way for all of us.”

The demon soldier’s face twists in anger, but he stays silent and steps back farther, toward the edge of the little clearing.  “Better odds than you.”  He can’t help but reply.

I do so wish I could sigh.

Was it ever this hard with the others?  I don’t recall having to foil murder plots.  Though Yuea having my side from the start made it easier, certainly.  That, and everyone’s mixed investment in the children.  But while it took them time to learn to trust and respect each other, I don’t think anyone opened with attempted annihilation.

I make a choice.

The rustle of my resin glimmerlings moving causes heads to turn, but it’s no more suspicious than an errant fox on the prowl, and they settle down soon enough.  Just enough space to provide a clear escape for the demon, without being noticeable.

My bees land next to Kalip.  “Oh good.” He grumbles.  But then the bees don’t move to interfere with his attack, just watching.  “What, not going to try to stop me?”  He asks.

One of them gently nudges his arm to the left as the demon stumbles over some roots in the dark, ducking when his horns clip a branch.  But once he’s out of sight, the bee stops pressing on Kalip’s arm, and turns to focus in the same direction.  The other one gives a point with their foreleg, before holding it up in a gesture indicating for Kalip to wait.  He raises an eyebrow, and keeps the string drawn, but doesn’t loose yet.

Twenty lengths away, the magetouched is talking to his minion.  Telling him where to wait with the powder they’ve accumulated, which demon is hunting my hiding spot, which demon to frame for both things, and a few other things as well.  The other things are mostly just casual racism, and not actionable information.  But I still wait.  I want to at least give the solider a chance.

But his response is just as disappointing.  His hate, both of the nonhumans in the fort, and of me in particular, is undisguised and at this point unforgivable.

The bee drops their leg, and Kalip lets out a low “Huh.”  Then he goes completely still.

The Green is not a quiet place at night.  Bushes rustle with moving rats and voles, branches shake in summer winds and under the weight of owls, the wings of bats work to slowly beat away at the persistent buzz of insects.  If you listen closely, even through the muffling wall of trees and undergrowth, you can hear distant moving water, and a hundred different animal cries.

The mantra Kalip applies to his arrow makes no sound.  The arrow in flight is just a whisper.  But the twang of his bowstring may as well be as loud as an overgun to the ears of the distant magetouched.

It’s far, far closer than the magetouched makes it look.  From my perspective, it could be considered a contemptuous maneuver; a simple tilting back of his head to let the arrow brush past him without making contact.

But it’s not.  I can see from my hidden watchers the shock on his eyes, the fear at how narrow the dodge was.

I can also see that while he dodges the shot, the way Kalip lined it up means that the other soldier does not.  The man’s name was Eldrin, and he is halfway through a statement about how they’ll need to make sure the human kids are ‘pure’ enough when the arrow punches through the side of his skull just under one eye, shatters several of his teeth, and bursts out through the cheek on the other side of his face.

He dies instantly.  The magetouched drops into a crouch, grabbing the falling corpse and pulling it around to use as cover against Kalip’s next two arrows.

Arrows Kalip has put no mantra ability on, and which he has fired in a way that makes them louder; practically a gust of sound compared to the thin breeze of his first shot.  They also have much less of a punch, thudding into the corpse as the magetouched holds the body like a shield.

I think Kalip when I met him might have been ruthless enough to pull that maneuver.  Maybe he still is, I’m not sure.  But I don’t know if Kalip when I met him would have been clever enough to set the trap he has.  He certainly wouldn’t have had the mantra for it.

Because mantra develop their ingrained and repeatable magic based on what you do with them.  Of course, a person does a lot of things over the course of a day, and the practice among my survivors has become to only wear mantra when actually training, or in need of them.  No one wants to discover that one of the precious arcane structures has had worn into it a skill for relieving oneself, after all.

Kalip, though, is part mantra now.  It’s in his bones, and it’s something he can’t just put down.  But I think he might be able to guide it a bit.  I have questions for him when we next can talk.  And shortly after that became true of him, there was an action he repeated several times to great effect, that seems to have imprinted itself on the mantra.

Now, when he took that action, the arrows he was firing had my glimmer in them, and me there to overfeed them on magic.  But the mantra’s replication doesn’t seem to care for the missing parts.

The arrow in the corpse’s head, a handspan away from the eyes of the magetouched, explodes.  The nighttime noise of the Green briefly disrupted; squeaks and hoots and rustles either startled or overwhelmed by the blast of noise and fire that erupts outward from Kalip’s first shot.

Engulfed by the fireball, and spiked through with bits of bone and tooth shrapnel from the skull the blast emanates from, the magetouched screams.  Three lengths away, the demon soldier starts to run, stumbling through the Green as he makes his escape.  The glimmerling watching him breaks off.  I never want to see him again.

I never want to see the magetouched again either.  But while he is currently on fire, flesh charred and blackened, he is still screaming and alive.

From the edges of the clearing, my created limbs move in.  The glimmerlings don’t feel indignation or outrage or malice.  They’re not really alive at all; just smooth resin and maybe a little wood or dirt, shaped into four walking legs and something like an eye.  They don’t feel, because they’re really just parts of me, and so I do the feeling for them.

The magetouched’s eyes widen as he sees them coming.  His first strike cracks one before he pulls a hidden knife and plunges it into another.  I direct the glimmerlings to leap, hitting him in the back and sides, aiming for his knees.  His attempts to rise fail, and he staggers.  Another glimmerling is stabbed, this time actually enough to destroy it.  But my force keeps closing in.  I’ve been making a lot of glimmerlings.

The magetouched’s hand tries to swat an arrow out of the air, but his blackened flesh crumbles and ruptures, blood spraying out as he fails to fully stop Kalip’s attack.  I see through my own senses as a spray of sharp magic splatters out into the area as well.  He’s pushed too hard on his enchantment to survive this, and now his magetouched status has fractured.  I collect the magic, and have two glimmerlings tackle him again.

He stumbles, suddenly weaker than he should be.  Weaker than he’s used to being.  He runs for the trees, and trips over nothing, sprawling on the fallen leaves and open dirt, the soil sticking to his bloodied form.

The man tries to scream, but can only choke out a hateful rasp, as he sees the largest glimmerling I have in front of him.  His face looks up, like a fluffmote left too long over a fire, full of pain and impotent fury.  One of its legs, a pillar of solid magical resin, raises, and then slams down.  He was already dead; this is just a mercy.  Though a messy one, as his skull bursts open like a melon on the forest floor, food for the ants and grass.

And that’s it.

His name was Etraru.  I’ll remember both of them.  But I won’t mourn.

“What about the other one?”  Kalip asks me through the bees, slinging his bow across his chest with a practiced motion.  “Not the runner, he’s good as dead.  The other one.”

I don’t know.  The bees help me convey that uncertainty.  I don’t know.  This violence was something abrupt and visceral, and if we’re lucky, this plot stops here.  But no.  No abnegation of responsibility.  We killed these people as enemies, and their deaths aren’t going to convince the other conspirator that I’m not a threat.

The bees take off, and Kalip follows. We have one more conversation to have tonight.