Broken System Ch. 80-81 (Patreon)

Ch. 80 - Aftermath

Only a few of the assembled mages had succumbed to the poison that the four of them had poured so freely during Prince Agardian’s posturing, but all of them reacted slowly to the shock of being set free in a way they’d never expected. Benjamin didn’t blame them. It was an impossible situation.

One minute, the Prince had been uprooting another plot for their amusement, and the next, he was dead, and the slaves around them that they’d taken for granted for so long were revolting. Many of them reacted too slowly to protect themselves from the violent onslaught that was spearheaded by his friends in the moments that followed.

After that, all of the survivors summoned their own protectors and monstrosities, and the polished white ballroom very quickly became a complete madhouse. Beautiful kimono-clad ghost girls, giant electric green frogs, hunting cats the size of ponies made of molten lava, and sinuous serpents made of rippling vines and thorns all sprang into existence at almost the same moment. However, the mages were far too close to each other, so some of them blinked out of existence almost immediately, as one hellish creature killed one or more mages as soon as it sprang into existence by reflex or mistake.

Dozens of powerful casters were fighting for their lives at the same time, and death became an almost casual presence in that room. Flashes of magical death in the form of spells lit up the bright room in every color of the rainbow, and its thoughtful acoustics echoed every scream and battle cry perfectly.

In a way, it was just another dance, Benjamin decided as they watched the show. However, in this dance, one of the partners always died before the song was over.

Lava cat ripped apart the stone turtle only to disappear into a puff of smoke as one of the now free guards struck the cat’s summoner’s head from his shoulders. He was, in turn, devoured by the giant frog that stayed alive longer than most as it radiated arc lightning that kept everyone but its master well clear of it. That lightning did nothing to stop the shot that Raja fired across the room. His arcane shot was highlighted like a neon sign by the electricity, but that didn’t stop it from detonating its target’s head and sending gray matter in all directions even as the frog faded out of existence.

It was a terrifying spectacle. From his point of view, the entire room, and probably the city, had gone insane. It was difficult to tell from where he lay covered in blood, though. He was sure this scene was being played out in even uglier ways all across Adren.

Benjamin wasn’t so delusional as to assume they’d managed to wrangle all of the mages into a single room. They’d accidentally managed to bring most of them together, but instead of the death sentence he’d assumed it would be, it actually hampered the summoners more than anything. They were used to acting with complete freedom and impunity, and they weren’t even trying to work together.

Right now, people were dying in every part of the city. Rhulvinarian masters were being brutally killed in their sleep at the same time others were waking up just in time to boil the slaves that dared to raise a hand against them alive in their own skins. Hundreds would die tonight. Thousands were a possibility, but despite the cost, it would almost certainly be worth it. He didn’t really see a way they could lose at this point. Now, it was just a matter of paying the butcher’s bill.

Benjamin didn’t rise to his feet during the whole of the battle. He helped where he could by launching a few vampiric bolt spells where he could at the mages that seemed to be the largest threats to his friends, but that was about it. Even that became distasteful as he was forced to endure the brief, angry, and fear-filled memories that washed over him as he stole pieces of their lives to refuel his own.

He’d never cared for the blood mage choice that had saved his life, but it wasn’t until he’d built his botnet and felt the little pieces of so many strangers that he really understood what his magic was doing, and it made him feel unclean.

Clean wasn’t exactly something he could really complain about as he lay amidst corpses, drenched in blood. Not only was it much safer to stay where he was among the bodies of the Prince and his victims, but even with his hit points topped off again, he lacked the strength to do much else.

No matter what his character sheet said, he felt weak and depleted. The corpse slowly cooling beside him had set off a bomb in his already battered soul. Now everything but thinking hurt, and even that seemed to be going a little slower than usual as well.

He could see in the looks that some of the surviving mages cast this way that they suspected the murder of their ruler was still alive, and yet no one struck him down. It took him longer than it should have to realize that the only reason they hadn’t blown him apart with tectonic magics that could blow a hole in the floor and turn his bones into dust was because of the amulet around the corpse's neck.

That made Benjamin smile as he grasped the thing and pocketed it. Even in death, the Prince was his hostage. If they survived, they might be able to do something with that, but he wasn’t sure what. Something like this was like finding a five-and-a-half-inch floppy disk and school: it might have a purpose, it might even be interesting, but no one had the equipment to read it anymore.

The battle raged around him for almost half an hour before the last mage left standing was brought down with a combination of Emma’s speed and his haste spell. Once most of the Summon Lords had died, the combat had become much more fierce, and the bodies of dead slaves that lay strewn across the floor served as mute testament to the ferocity of the fighting.

Fortunately, his friends were among them. In the end, it had become a battle of attrition, and thanks to mana burn, none of them had ever run out of mana completely. Benjamin couldn’t let that happen. Not again. He still remembered Nicole’s fate too well.

In fact, he’d spent half the fight sure that Emma would meet the same fate as the dead girl, but somehow, his friend had managed to stay a step ahead of the worst of the hazards, using one enemy as a human shield against another on a constant and dizzying basis. She was grace incarnate, and oftentimes, the only reason Benjamin knew for sure that the man she’d just killed had died was because she’d moved on to her next target.

Matt, on the other hand, was implacable brutality. He tore his opponents apart. He took mortal wounds and healed them almost immediately as he continued to march forward. They couldn’t have possibly been more opposite in their approaches, but both of them got results.

When it was done, and the last mage had fallen, only a dozen people left in the room were still alive, and all of them were wounded and exhausted. From the fires in the streets and the sounds of distant battle, though, it was clear that the job wasn’t done.

“We should get out there,” Matt said, helping Benjamin rise to his feet. “Can you walk?”

“I can, and we should,” Benjamin agreed, “But I think that we need to rewire the city’s beacon before we kill anyone else.”

“Why,” Emma asked as she and Raja joined them.

“Reinforcements,” Benjamin said with a shrug. “There are still makes out there. Some have almost certainly gotten away by now, but Prince Agardian mentioned whole armies coming here soon. All it would take is one runner to bring hundreds more men to kill. We have to stop that at all costs.”

No one argued with that, and after they asked a few of the freed guardsmen, they were quickly led to the rear plaza where he saw the familiar mosaic runic structure he’d been looking for.

“Keep on your guard,” he cautioned his friends as he had other people in the area help him dig up the stones and start putting them down in a new order that would keep any rifts from opening up anywhere near here.

Even though other people were doing most of the heavy lifting, he still felt weak. He only needed to look at his character sheet to see why.

Soul Bleed (Terminal): -20 health/hour,  -50exp/hr.

Even though he’d just gotten level 7 in that fight, he could already see that his experience points had retreated slightly from their all-time high. This time, he wasn’t even moving skills around. He was just… bleeding out.

“Uh, Matt, I don’t feel so good,” he said, looking up at his friend. His hit points were still near the halfway mark, but his last thought before he fainted was that he should probably drain a little of his friend’s life.

He didn’t, though. Instead, he slumped bonelessly onto the stones of his almost complete creation, only to be revived a few seconds later by Matt.

“What’s going on, man?” he said, slapping Benjamin awake, “Talk to me. You’re not poisoned or hurt, as far as I can tell. What’s wrong?”

“You remember that thing I told you about before?” Benjamin asked. “How I fucked up my soul the way I used the system?”

“Yeah…” Matt said uncertainly.

“Well, that asshole of a Prince… I guess you could say he opened up some old wounds.” Benjamin said with a voice heavy with exhaustion. “I think I might be just about out of time. So we need to finish this before—”

“Fuck that,” Matt shot back, “We need to figure out how to fix you. Everything else can wait.”

“It really can’t, Matt,” Benjamin said, looking at the work. “Thirty more stones. Then I can rest easy, one way or the other. Let me do that much, at least.”

His friend looked hard at him at that moment but didn’t refuse him. Instead, Benjamin spent the next few minutes telling other people where to place each of the remaining dark and light stones to inverse the beacon’s polarity. He couldn’t say exactly how the whole portal thing worked, but it was pretty easy to invert the polarity of the circuit so it repulsed every rift that someone tried to create instead of attracting it, and for now, it was all he could do.

Benjamin tried to work on his botnet again. If he was going to bite it here and now, then he wanted to make sure that he finished what he started with Raja, but Matt’s patience had run out by then, and instead, his friend escorted him to the nearest summoner residence that looked defensible and forced Benjamin to rest.

This wasn’t a hard thing to enforce. All Matt had to do was not heal him for a few minutes, and suddenly, the world began to fade from view. That didn’t bother Benjamin too much, though; it was better than looking at all of his friends and seeing so much worry on their faces.

He hated how much that hurt, but aside from the whole dying thing, Benjamin honestly didn’t think that their conquest of Arden could have gone much better. Sure, it didn’t go according to any of their plans, but they’d defied the odds and won, and if that wasn’t worth throwing your life away for, then what was?

Ch. 81 - Solstice

The next couple of days were hit-and-miss for Benjamin. He remembered the smell of smoke and the sound of battle on and off. He was told that there was an army approaching the gates at one point, and a metal horn was shoved into his hand to enchant.

“I want to be there,” he told Raja, “I want to fight.”

His silent friend just took the completed horn and left him in the care of his healer, an older man with little hair left and deep stains on his fingers from whatever manual labor they’d had him doing when he wasn’t required to mend the wounds of warriors. In his heart, Benjamin knew that fighting like this was impossible. It was a fight to keep his eyes open or even sit up. His condition had definitely been growing worse, but at this point, he didn’t even want to know what his character sheet said. Terminal was bad enough for him.

At this point, Benjamin just wanted to do whatever he could for his friends. So, in his lucid moments, he tried to create an item that would let them create and command the network he’d created for his friend.

He couldn’t, though. There were just too many variables and missing functions for him to put together when he felt this way.

He tried to see if there was anything that could be done to improve his condition with some coding. He even considered another rest but decided against it because he was fairly certain that had made the damage the Prince had done to him that much worse.

There were no answers to be found inside his system, though, in the end. There was just one terrible little box that said everything that needed to be said.

Soul Shattered: -10 to all actions, -100 health/hour, -50exp/hr.

He was well and truly broken, and day by day, the damage only got worse. He was told they’d won the battle, but by the time Matt had said anything about it, Benjamin had almost entirely forgotten about making the horn in the first place.

They told him how far the mages stood back from the front line for fear of what was going to happen next. They also told him how the defenders turned what should have been an insurmountable attack into a sudden wave of reinforcements with a horn blow and that the mages were forced to run for their lives until they got far enough away to flee through one of those portals.

The second half of the story was made funnier by the first, and Benjamin actually laughed for the first time in days. All that accomplished, though, was a bloody coughing fit.

Part of him knew that it was terrible news that survivors had seen what his magic could accomplish and that their escape might jeopardize everything going forward, but he couldn’t make himself get too worked up about it. All they could do was all they could do, and the fact that his friends had managed to increase the size of their forces by hundreds of men in a single stroke was something to celebrate.

Over that visit and the next one, he urged Matt to move while there was still time and strike while the iron was hot, but his friend wouldn’t hear of it. “We’re moving out when you’re ready to come with us, Benji, not before.”

“And what if that’s never,” he asked weakly.

“It sounds to me like someone needs to look on the bright side,” Matt said.

That made Benjamin smile. It had taken almost a year, but he could see traces of the old Matt more and more often within the scarred body of the new one. Slowly but surely, he was healing. They all were, at least mentally. Obviously, he was still dying spiritually, but he wasn’t about to let that bring him down.

All Benjamin could say in response to that was, “Well, at least the soul bleed and the soul scar are gone.”

Even Raja didn’t laugh at that. No one laughed anymore. In fact, no one had any idea how to make this better. This wasn’t anything that anyone could fix. All they could do was pray for a miracle and hope that time helped, even though it seemed to be doing just the opposite.

In the end, he lay there on his deathbed for at least three days, and it took the combined magic of several other people to keep him alive. There was always a healer by his side, and every few hours, when one was depleted, the next one would come in. In the mornings, it was a grey-haired crone, then it was a lovely dark-skinned woman. The afternoons seemed almost random, but the nights were almost always Matt. He said that if someone fell asleep, Benjamin might die before they woke up from their nap, so he was there to make sure that never happened.

Benjamin was touched by that, but all in all, the whole thing felt pretty bad on more than just the physical level. He was literally on life support, only instead of being covered in wires and tubes, he had people laying their hands on him and whispering a few words. In that respect, at least, it was more dignified.

On the day of the solstice, the city of Arden received an unexpected visitor. Matt came to inform of it, even though he had to wake Benjamin up to do it. “A Carriage arrived at the gate, Benji, and you’re never going to guess who was in it.”

“Lord Jarris,” Benjamin said, smiling weakly. “He felt bad about bringing us here, so he came back from the dead to take us all home.”

“Eh, pretty close,” Matt said with a shrug and a smile. “I don’t think that his carriage would have been flanked by centaurs, though.”

That left Benjamin to wonder until Matt opened the door and brought in three fae.

No, he realized, looking at them again. Not three fae. Two fae and another emissary. Or, is it the same… no, it couldn’t be.

Benjamin studied the guests. The two fae were an imperious man and woman who were each finally dressed in resplendent garments of green and brown, and the woman that stood between them looked familiar. It took him only another moment to put the pieces together. The kind expression on her face. The vines in her hair.

If not for the large magenta lotus blossom in her hair and the fact that she was at least twice the other girl's age, he’d definitely say she was Dahlia. As it was, he couldn’t say. A sister? A mother? Perhaps all of the emissaries looked similar in the way the fae and the clay people did.

Or maybe I’m just terrible at telling them apart, he thought grudgingly.

“So this is the oddity then,” the man said, looking down his nose at Simon both literally and metaphorically. The man raised a monocle to his eye and then looked Simon over, from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. “He doesn’t seem like he’ll last much longer, does he?”

“Certainly not,” the woman said with a shake of her head. She was looking at him through a pair of burnished opera glasses. “It’s a wonder he’s lived this long. He has what? Hours? Days? Even with all this polluted magic of theirs, I can't expect that he will last the week.”

“He had better,” the almost human-looking woman between them said. “He is important to the Throne and her plans, and he cannot fulfill those if he is dead.”

“Well then, we’d best get started here, hadn’t we,” the man said flippantly.

“No one is getting started on anything until they tell me what’s happening,” Matt said. Until that point, he’d stood quietly against the wall, but

“Isn’t it obvious?” The fae woman said, gesturing to Benjamin, “Your… comrade is falling to pieces here. No matter how many times you heal him, he’s just breaking apart into smaller and smaller parts. If you don’t let us try to fix that, then I expect he’ll be a puddle inside of a week.”

It was a disconcerting image, but Benjamin said nothing. He had a vague memory from Earth that fae could do amazing things but at terrible costs. He wasn’t sure what they wanted to charge for this service, but whatever it was, it would probably be worth it.

“I don’t even know how you knew about any of this,” Matt said, “but I doubt you’re doing this out of the kindness of your heart. If there are any strings attached, I want to hear about them. Now.”

The not-Dahlia Emissary smiled mildly and said, “The costs have already been paid by the Throne in this matter. There will be damage we can’t mend and conditions that our patient might have to abide by, but this is not about stealing your friend or any part of him, sir. You must understand the oddity is the first real weapon we’ve had against the slow creep of the Rhulvinar in an age. For year after relentless year, they advance, and if there is to be any hope, all of you must keep fighting.”

“I see,” Matt said, relaxing slightly. “We’ll call it services rendered then. You good with this, Benji?”

Benjamin nodded weakly. He thought about responding but decided against it. His thoughts were still too sluggish. Instead, he lay there while they discussed it more, and after he tried and failed to stand, Matt carried him outside as the fae insisted on somewhere with healthy soil and natural light for what came next.

They took him to the garden at the center of the citadel, but the fae refused it. “There’s too much poison and death here,” the woman said.

“This is the largest green space in this place, I’m afraid,” Matt shot back. “So it’s either this or—”

“Then we will take him outside these tainted walls,” the elven man countered.

They argued how much danger that would or wouldn’t put Benjamin in, but he had trouble following it. He understood. Arden had both defenses and defenders, but none of them were going to do him any good.

In the end, all he really understood as they moved his feverish form to the luxurious carriage was that no one would ever find them in the sea of grass unless they wished it.

“When will he be back?” Matt asked as Benjamin was bundled into the carriage.

“A day, a week, or not at all,” the elven woman said as the door slammed shut and they began to move.

Benjamin found himself lying across one of the benches with his head in the lap of the Emissary while the two elves that were with her sat on the other side.

“He may very well not survive this, you know,” the male elf said, talking about him like he wasn’t even here. “There’s no prophecy to promise an outcome. That’s generally a bad sign.”

“You know perfectly well that prophecies can’t take into account the strange magic of the humans,” the Emissary said as she stroked Benjamin’s hair. “If they could have, then we would have known what a pestilence the Rhulvinarians would eventually become. He will survive because he needs to survive. That is all that needs to be said of it.”

“You seem so like Dahlia,” Benjamin finally said, looking up at the woman who was being so kind to him for no reason he could immediately discern.

“Of course,” she smiled. “Because I am Dahlia.”