Broken System Ch. 82-83 (Patreon)

Almost to the end of book 2! Next week we will wrap it up, and then we can start on book 3! 

Ch. 82 - Shattered

They traveled for only a few minutes. Just long enough to reach the first island of trees in the sea of grass near the city and the river. The elves helped Benjamin from the carriage, and as he walked listlessly wherever it was, they were taking him. As he walked, he noticed that the grass was receding from his path even as it grew up and filled in the track that the coach had taken only minutes ago.

It really is like water, he thought to himself as he tried not to think about what was happening to him and what might be next.

When they reached the tree, the elven woman said, “Before we traverse the wooden way, you’ll need something for the pain.” As she spoke, she produced a large purple blossom. It was tightly closed still and as big as her fist.

“It’s okay,” Benjamin said, waving her away, “This doesn’t hurt so bad. I just feel weak, is all.”

“Not for now,” she said with a smug, superior look. “For when we move across the boundary and get started. Here, your flesh is keeping everything together, more or less. There, well, you’ll be more like a bag of broken glass without the bag. ”

“Okay…” Benjamin said, suddenly less sure. “When you put it that way…”

That sounded awful, and it brought to mind what he’d seen the last time he traveled through the trees with the dryad almost a year ago. The red throbbing crack right down the center of his soul. It was almost certainly worse now.

She didn’t say anything. Instead, the flower magically opened into her hand until it was a blossom the size of his head, and then she blew on it, enveloping his face in a cloud of fuchsia pollen that left him coughing as soon as he inhaled it.

The way his eyes were burning, it briefly crossed his mind that he might be allergic to it. “Jesus, warn a guy,” he gasped. Even as he got control of himself, he felt drunk, and by the time he’d cleared the air, he felt more than a little high, too. It was only after that realization that he noticed that everyone else had backed up quite a bit.

That made him wonder just how potent whatever pixie shit they’d given him, but as he stepped forward, he almost collapsed and held on to the tree instead.

“Take it easy, oddity,” the fae man said. “Nice deep breaths, and then we can take you inside.”

“I really think this is enough. I—” Benjamin said. He was slumped against the tree now, and even sitting was a challenge. He didn’t complete his sentence, though, because a bark-skin woman emerged behind him, and at a nod from Dahlia, she grabbed hold of Benjamin and pulled him into the tree.

The first thing he did was scream, not in fear or even surprise. It was raw pain that ripped its way out of his throat as he transitioned from the realm of skin and bone to something thinner. The narcotic haze that engulfed him did little more than take the edge off of that agony.

One second, he was feverish and high, and the next, he was literally broken. Even though he was half out of his mind, he felt like he was holding himself together solely by force of will at this point. Some distant part of his mind that was still aware of more than being blissed out or being engulfed in anguish noted that it was almost like how you tensed up all your muscles when you throw your back out, only here he wasn’t sure what he was tensing up.

All he knew for sure was that he could see his soul had largely been reduced to gravel, and as soon as he unclenched the pieces were liable to drift away in every direction as he slowly effervesced into nothing.

“Why did you bring me here…” Benjamin asked as he saw the three people he’d left in the real world move to join them in this strange place that was both the true nature of the world they left and somehow beyond it as well.

The landscape had been warped by his journey through the tree as much as his shattered body had been. They were still in the same grove of trees, but now the roots and branches stretched over the horizon, linking with more and more of their kind as they went, forming a network that connected the whole world.

At least, he thought the people who joined him were the same as the three he'd just left behind. Here, Dahlia was mostly the same, though she had a few more dryad features about her, and her soul glowed with a green that was clear and bright. The fae, by contrast, had left their humanity far behind. The man had become a spindly giant cloaked in finery spun from spiderwebs, and the woman was now draped in a gaudy costume that had grown in both size and lavishness even as she’d shrunk. She’d withered away until she was nothing but skin and bone with hollow eye sockets and knife-sharp fingers.

“Where else would we do surgery on your soul, you impudent whelp?” the nearly skeletal woman said as she picked up a tiny crystalline shard of his body and examined it closely before putting it back. “You manthings think it's a good idea to use your soul like a lightning rod or a hammer. Whatever needs you have, you just use it, and you hope it holds. How could you be surprised that something like this has happened to you?”

“What will you do?” Benjamin asked through gritted teeth.

“We will put you back together again,” she said with a shake of her head. “Somehow.”

The man brought a whistle made of bone to his lips just as Dahlia came close to him and said, “What happens next is going to be scary. I know that. But know that it's for your own good.”

Benjamin opened his mouth to ask what she meant by that, but his response was blotted out by the shrill noise from that instrument. It lingered in the air even as he lowered it, and after several seconds, when it finally faded, he could feel the tree that he was still leaning against begin to shake.

“What’s that?” he asked, but he didn’t have time to answer.

Out of every burrow and knothole, a tide of tiny little people started boiling out of the woodwork and coming into view. Most of them were nearly as human as the fae, but some of them looked like the tiny raccoon mice that had spoiled so much of their food this past winter.

“These are brownies. They’re here to…” the female fae started to answer, but Benjamin wasn’t able to hear the rest of her response.

No, hearing was the wrong sense. She was still talking. Words were still coming out of her mouth, but he could no longer understand them because he was coming undone. He would have looked down to see that, but vision was a sense that was failing too.

Each brownie that had crawled out of the openings in the surrounding trees had stolen a shard of him as they walked by, and after a few seconds, there was no longer enough of him left to understand what was happening. A few seconds after that, there was no longer enough of him to exist.

He no longer was. Not in any real sense. There were ten thousand shades of him that were each too small to understand or remember anything.

Benjamin would have thought that he was dead at that moment if he had remembered the concept of what life was. He couldn’t, though. He could gaze blankly at what was being done to him, but he couldn’t really understand it. He could merely watch as the brownies each tried to fit their tiny little shard with another.

Predictably, they almost never did. It was like animals pawing through the garbage more than children trying to put together a jigsaw, but moment after moment, and hour after hour, the pieces slowly began to fall into place, even if it was by random chance more than anything.

And each time those pieces locked into place, Benjamin felt what it was like to exist again, however briefly. For a moment, he could remember the taste of his mother’s marinara sauce or what it had been like to get his heart broken by Emma. He could recall the heat of the day the last time he and Matt had gone rock climbing and the taste of the beer the last time he’d gotten a drink with Ethan.

None of these moments had been important in the grand scheme of things. However, it was millions of little things like that which made up lives like his, and as frantic little workers began to move faster and faster, he started to understand that again.

First, he had fingers and toes, then he had part of a leg. His head, for whatever reason, seemed to come together more slowly than the rest of him, but there was nothing he could do about any of that. The tiny fairies that were slowly rebuilding him could put him together, could run off into the forest and bury him in a thousand different places, and he wouldn’t have been able to do a thing about it.

It would be more peaceful, though, he thought to himself as his mind started to return. He knew that. Benjamin could feel the pain starting to throb again, however distantly, and he could see how the number of pieces of him that were still missing was far greater than the number of pieces that were left to fix him.

He was no longer made of iridescent gravel, though. Everything was where it should be; there just wasn’t enough left to finish the puzzle. Not after all the terrible things he’d done to his body.

In the end, several days after they started, the last piece was placed in his solar plexus, and the brownies retreated as quickly as they came. He was whole now, or at least as whole as he’d ever be. There was a giant hole in his chest where his heart should be. It was where the Prince’s self-destruct command had gone off; there was no other explanation. The bastard had literally blown a part of him to pieces.

“Am I going to die?” he asked when he finally dared to speak.

“Not until you defeat the Rhulvinar,” Dahlia said seriously. “I can’t fix your soul, but… there are ways. First, we will need fertile soil, though, and somewhere safe.”

The giant fae man nodded at that, then carefully picked Benjamin up with stretcher-sized hands and began to walk along the branches like the dryad had done so long ago. Then, just like that, they were speeding up. Soon, Arden was hopelessly far away, and the sea of grass was receding. After that, they reached the woods, and they didn’t stop until they reached a clearing far from anywhere.

Only then, when they were hopelessly far from anywhere Benjamin knew, did they stop. He expected they’d return to the real world, but they didn’t, at least not right away. Instead, Dahlia produced something very familiar that he hadn’t realized he’d lost.

“Do you remember this Benjamin?” she asked, holding up the small amber gem that was The Heart of the Wild.

“Of course I do,” he smiled. “It would be remarkably ungrateful if I forgot your present so soon.”

“I’m glad you liked it,” she answered, not looking particularly glad, “Because today we are going to destroy it, but it’s going to be worth it. It’s going to save your life.”

Benjamin looked at her quizzically. He was going to ask what she meant by that, but before he could, she shoved her hand into the hole in his chest and placed the heart in there. In an instant, the amber heart cracked, and the seed inside began to take root in his soul. It hurt, but not nearly so bad as the jagged pain he’d felt earlier. This was more like… a medical procedure. A very uncomfortable medical procedure as the thing’s roots began to crawl this way and that way inside him.

Then, without a word, she took his hand in one of hers, and touching the nearest tree with the other, she pulled Benjamin into the real world once more.

Ch. 83 - Nature or Nurture

The pain subsided once they were in the real world, but Benjamin was too exhausted to move. He didn’t really need to, though. Dahlia had come through with him even as the strange fae and their army of tiny helpers stayed behind. She helped him to lie down in the soft grass under the sun, where he took a nap almost immediately. He couldn’t help it. He was entirely spent.

For a long time he dwelled in darkness, and the fever dreams that followed were uncomfortable things filled with images of plants infesting his body. More than anything, he dreamed of Lord Jarris’s apprentice and the terrible red blooms that had suffocated that awful young man to death. It was a hard nightmare to avoid, given that he’d watched the fae literally plant something into his very soul.

Some time later, when he woke to the setting sun, he found Dahlia sitting beside him, holding his hand. She smiled at him patiently, and in the golden-hour glow, he couldn’t help but admire just how lovely she was. Of all the fae he’d seen so far, she was the only one who looked almost human, and that magnified her natural beauty.

“What time is it?” he asked groggily, trying and failing to rise. “I feel like I’ve been asleep for hours.”

“Many hours,” she agreed. “But not many days.”

Benjamin did a double-take on that. “Days? More than one?”

“It has been more than a week since we returned to the real world,” she said with a smile, “But I had no doubt that you would wake up again eventually.”

“A week?” he asked, stunned by the news as he tried to force himself into a setting position. “But I haven’t eaten… I’ve had no water or IV. I should be dead, I—”

“Most mortals would certainly be dead,” she nodded, “fortunately, you’ve gotten the Throne’s blessing. As to everything else you mentioned, that’s what the roots are for.”

He realized now that it wasn’t that he was too weak to sit up. It was almost like he was tied down by the grass. Am I her prisoner? Benjamin wondered. It was only as she finished speaking he finally understood. He wasn’t tied down, he was rooted in place, literally.

“Roots?” he asked, completely shocked. “I… am I going to turn into a tree or…”

Benjamin’s mind balked as he realized that whatever it was they’d done with the magic trinket that he’d carried for so long was more literal than he could have possibly assumed. Before he could ask another question, though, Dahlia started to laugh.

“Ben-jamin,” she pronounced with difficulty in a highly amused tone. “If all that was asked of you was to let your corpse nourish the plants, there would be much simpler ways to go about this. We have worked very hard to preserve your life, and the roots will fall away in the next few days when they are no longer needed. You are still a manthing, more or less. We didn’t wish to change more than we had to, to keep you breathing, lest we snuff out whatever clever part of you that makes you so talented at defeating the Rhulvinar.”

“I–” Benjamin struggled at his invisible bonds. He had more questions to ask, but Dahlia soothed him almost immediately.

“Shhhhh,” she whispered, placing her cool hand on his burning forehead, relaxing him almost immediately. “There will be time enough for all that later. For now, you must relax. Many are worried about you. Your friends. Your army. Even the Throne of the sky sea came two nights ago to check on you.”

As she spoke, she pointed to a burned patch of earth not far from him that had only just begun to regrow.

“Only one Goddess?” he laughed. “What about the Arboreal Throne? Doesn’t she care?”

“She is always with you,” Dahlia promised. “And she always will be now. She’s a piece of your soul.”

His caretaker explained a little bit about how it was the Throne had used a bit of her magic to plug the gaps in his broken soul and hold it together the way that climbing ivy might hold together a dilapidated brick facade. It was not a comforting image, but even less comforting was how tired the mere act of laying there asking questions made him.

Benjamin was soon napping again, and when he woke, he was pretty sure more than one day had passed, though he decided he didn’t want to know. Instead, he brought up his system interface to see how bad the damage was.

The results were worse than he would have thought possible, but he took it in stride. While he was marginally concerned about how low his mana pool had gotten, despite all his hard work, he was far more worried about how his class was listed as an error instead of blood mage now. According to the system, he was not unclassifiable in at least one way, and that would take some troubleshooting to figure out.

NAME: Benjamin Newsome

RACE: Human

CLASS: Mage(Error)

LVL: 7

EXP: 15,113/16,000

BPs: 14

Mind

INTELLECT

15

WILL

11

MANIPULATE

6 (5)

Body

AGILITY

6

STRENGTH

11

APPEARANCE

7 (8)

Soul

ANIMA

7

SPIRIT

12

CHARM

8

RESOLVE:  55/55

HEALTH: 55/55

MANA: 10/10

STATUS EFFECTS:

Soul Scar (crippling): -10 to all actions,-75% mana, No natural recovery of health or mana.

Nature’s Gift: +5 to all actions,

SKILLS

Knowledge (academics): 35

Craft (programming): 55

Knowledge (internet): 25

Magic (Runic): 70

Dodge: 25

Team Work: 40

Diplomacy 55

Leadership: 10

Awareness: 35

Resist (Social): 35

Survival: 20

Athletics: 15

Craft (primitive): 10

ABILITIES

Obstinate: +20% resistance to social attacks and charm magics

Blood Mage: Reduce Mana by half. Mana may be freely refilled at the cost of one health per mana. Immunity to life drain effects.

Optimized Mage: All spells cost 1 less mana

Elemental Attunement: +10% effect to all elemental spells

He could just feel the bugs that were crawling around in his system thanks to all of this, and after the briefest of views at his error log, he decided to close it. Even that glimpse was enough to be sure that there were still parts of him that were broken. Honestly, part of him was a little afraid to cast a spell. Benjamin felt like any real surge in mana on his part might blow a hole in himself all over again.

But he refrained from experimenting for now. He didn’t even bother to assign his points or think about where he should. All of that was too much just now. For now, he was content to simply be and spend time with his lovely caretaker. That was enough for him.

So he lay there in the grass and chatted with the beautiful woman who brought him fresh fruit, and when the roots that anchored him to the ground began to wither, glasses of wine and nectar. He didn’t know where exactly she brought them from, but that was what she did. Well, that and look pretty.

Benjamin had a hard time reconciling it in his mind. Six months ago, she’d been a bright and friendly child who had kept her fae guardian from killing them at every faux pas, and now she was a woman. No, she was a beautiful woman. Instead of being half his age, Dahlia was probably five or ten years older than him. It was impossible to say, but that knowledge made it hard to process the way that she subtly flirted with him.

The days each bled into each other as he recovered, and despite the relaxed and friendly atmosphere, he couldn’t help but feel like her outfits were slowly growing more revealing, and her gaze contained more and more smolder as time went on. Benjamin did his best to ignore the signals she was putting out and instead listened to her as she told him all manner of strange stories to pass the time. Until then, she mostly just told him stories, some of which made more sense than others.

A number of things became evident to Benjamin as she explained how Aavernia had never had manthings or even many cities until the Summoner Lords showed up as refugees. “There were only a few hundred at first if the stories can be believed,” she explained to him one day after he got tired of hearing how the king of the mice had outsmarted yet another terrifying beast. “But the Jade Throne took pity on them and gave them a small place on her island to settle, even though we told her not to. They were just supposed to be guests that stayed for a few weeks until they found somewhere more suitable to call home.”

“Only they never left,” he nodded as they walked through the sun-dappled forest paths that were remarkably picturesque and free from the underbrush.

“Only they never left,” she agreed. “Not in all the years since.”

Benjamin got the feeling she meant more like centuries, but he didn’t pry deeper. He could tell the topic pained her; instead, he asked questions about time that had been on his mind a lot more lately. “How old are you anyway, Dahlia,” he asked, finally deciding that was a question worth answering. “Because before you were a kid, and now you’re… well, I think you’re a few years older than me. It's like the clay people that work for the other Throne, but, you know, slower.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” she said, practically purring. “I’m quite a bit older and younger than you think, Ben-jamin. Time isn’t as strict and orderly as you manthings would like to believe.”

“So that means you’re not… 25?” he asked in disappointment.

She laughed at that. “This body hasn’t even existed for a year, my dear oddity, but I have existed for time without measure.”

“Wait, you’re…” he blurted out, unable to finish his sentence as he suddenly put the pieces together.

“I am,” she smiled.

“B-but why would the Throne take an interest in… Wait. Don’t you have more important things to do than nurse me back to health?” he asked in confusion.

“Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve told you?” she smiled. “There’s nothing more important than your survival Ben-jamin. The fate of our whole world depends on it. As to what form I choose to take, well, that changes often. Every year or two I try on a new skin to better understand my domain, that is of no consequence. I’ve been every animal in the forest at least once in order to understand them. When Lord Jarris burned me alive with his green fire and made the sap in my dryad veins boil, that was not the end of me.”

She shrugged as she said this. It was a disarming gesture that almost but not quite enough to make the strap of her flower petal pink sundress she wore slip from her shoulder.

“He-he killed you?” Benjamin asked. She was uncomfortably close now, even though she hadn’t moved. Despite the strange turn in the conversation and the weirdness that pervaded the whole affair right now, he wanted nothing more than to kiss her.

“He has killed me more than once, actually,” she said with a sad smile, “Just as I have killed him on three separate occasions. I have been a Wolven berserker, a dryad archer, a forest titan, a giant spider, and a poisoned hydra, and each one has proven insufficient to end him for good. He is as resourceful as he is wicked. You will find that out when you face him for a second or perhaps even a third time.”

“Then why a human… I mean, manthing?” he asked. “Sure they wouldn’t succeed where so many other exotic forms failed?”

“Haven’t they already, though? I didn’t become a manthing to understand your species, Ben-jamin. I could have done that decades ago. I did it because I wanted to better understand you.” She looked at him coyly, and the hint of a blush appeared on her pale skin. “I only needed time for my form to ripen and flower, so to speak.”

Even before his radical soul surgery, he’d felt her looking at him differently. He’d assumed it was just some alien fae thing, but if she wanted to better understand him by becoming a human, than there was no other possible explanation for the look she was giving him now: she wanted him, and even though part of him knew it was a terrible idea, there was no doubt in his mind that he lusted for her too.

How could he not? If what she was saying was true, then she’d probably grown her body just to appeal to him. He had no idea how that was possible given that she’d only brushed against his mind briefly on a single occasion in her palace, but by now he’d definitely learned that fae magic was even stranger than runic magic, and what he knew about the latter was just the tip of the iceberg.

Right now he didn’t care about learning, though, or about wars or consequences. Right now he was hurting and if this literal goddess wanted to ease his pain, who was he to argue?

Benjamin was certain that there were eyes upon him as he leaned forward. Even the cold sword of the icey fae woman that had guarded her queen wouldn’t have been enough to keep Benjamin from kissing her at that moment, though. He wanted that more than he wanted anything in a long time, protocol be damned.