Chapter 68: Last-Minute Research

Vex was working with an increasing sense of impending doom, not that he knew exactly what was going on. He'd regained access to his system interface a while ago, but that didn't do anything for him — none of his teammates were responding, and there wasn't any way for him to get into contact with them otherwise. He'd tried everything, from using the Communication glyph (which required an anchor, and thus still didn't work) to contacting the Guildmaster directly, but even she didn't have anyone with the ability to look inside dungeons while they were active like this.

That skill was, as far as anyone knew, exclusive to Derivan and the Shift stat. Trait. Whatever.

The only small comfort he had was that he knew they were still alive; none of them had dropped off from the party interface, though Misa's stats seemed dangerously low. If she was low, he didn't want to imagine what state Derivan was in. At least Sev still seemed to be alright...

Though that was strange, now that he thought about it. Was there a reason Sev in particular wasn't being targeted? He was the healer, and normally he would have been the first target. Vex couldn't imagine why Irvis wouldn't try to take him out first.

But he was letting himself get distracted.

He could, in theory, have run down the Ashion tower towards wherever this battle was taking place. If Derivan, Misa, and Sev were all embroiled in the same battle, then more likely than not they had managed to meet up; either they had appeared all at the same starting point, or they were at the central room that would take them to the upper tiers of the dungeon.

But that wasn't a bet he was willing to take. If they were in separate fights — or, worse, if Irvis was the level of threat that Vex thought he was, and even Vex's presence would do nothing to help them except perhaps delay the inevitable — then he needed a different solution, and he needed it fast.

He had the beginnings of an idea percolating in his head.

Irvis was, somehow, a manifestation of a mana aspect into a living, conscious being. Vex wouldn't pretend that he understood how that was possible. What was more important was what the book had told him — the idea that aspects were just reflections of facets of something the book called a conceptual sphere. The full gamut of potential ideas and concepts, filtered through the lens of every living being that existed on the planet.

So — if they were to go to a different world entirely — wouldn't its conceptual sphere be different? Even if Irvis followed them there, he wouldn't be able to stay the same. Hatred was a very specific sort of emotion, but it was directed, and perhaps that direction would be different if they were in a different world.

There were books in the library that had studied the phenomenon of planeshifting. Some of them, Vex suspected, he wouldn't have been able to find if he hadn't already known what he had about Shift and reality and the oddness of Misa's skills with the way they interacted with different timelines.

All of their world was contained within a set of limited set of wavelengths; Shifts. Every potential timeline, every possibility that sprung from their world — all just an infinite set in a larger set of infinite sets. There was a baseline wavelength that all of reality existed upon, and any distance that one took from it was a little bit like stretching a rubber band; other timelines, possibilities, and realities could exist so long as the baseline was stretched over it, but it was otherwise something virtual, rather than real.

Which was all mostly just a very complicated way of saying that their world was real, and all those other timelines that Misa pulled from weren't; they were possibilities that existed in the ether that the system somehow let them pull from and make into reality.

Planeshifting was a step farther than that. Planeshifting was still a Shift, but it was a much larger hop than anywhere Misa could stretch. Even the realm of the gods wasn't as far away as a whole other reality; the phenomenon of planeshifting, therefore, was still far from being understood. The abstract realm of the gods and demons were like an isolated island within their set of infinity, while other realities sat entirely outside that set.

Bonus rooms, too, operated in a similar way. At least, the large ones that contained entire villages or kingdoms or worlds did. The system wrapped a whole localized realm into a smaller set of infinity; the experiments that had been done to confirm this were complicated, and — strangely — seemed to have been done by researchers in Elyra. That point confused Vex. None of their noble houses had done research that extensive on planeshifting, as far as he knew, and the book itself seemed to be older than the history of their kingdom suggested.

Not that he was surprised that their history was a little bit chronologically broken, at this point. The actual experiments were interesting, and Vex would have loved to spend some time delving into it. They had asked cleric to reach out to the gods outside a dungeon, inside the dungeon, and inside a bonus room; they'd measured the amount of subjective time it had taken for a response, and the amount of energy that had been spent on that connection—

It was around here that Vex shook his head, and pulled the tendrils of his Sign back, letting the Research magic fade away. He'd learned what he needed to. He knew his bonus room was the type that they needed; if the name of the dungeon wasn't enough, they'd seen proof of that back in Fendal and Teque.

It was convenient that Research magic let him read books much, much faster than he would usually have been able to. It was like having a virtual version of himself write down all the pertinent notes after going through the book thoroughly.

The next question was how to activate the bonus room — and how to get it to drag Derivan, Sev, and Misa in as well.

If nothing else, he was relatively sure he knew where it was.

In the time he'd spent looking for the relevant books in the library, Irvis had melted a little more; the aspect was able to move his head around slightly, and if glares could kill, Vex was pretty sure he'd already be dead. More importantly, though, that little bit of melting had introduced a lot of mana-rich water to the floor, and that water had soaked into the carpet. Vex almost hadn't noticed how the water soaked into the floor in a very specific pattern, but he'd recognized one spike that was particularly familiar to him as the outer edge of a runic circle.

There was a circle cut into the ground beneath the carpet.

It took more work than he would have liked; if Irvis hadn't been frozen next to the circle, Vex would have made use of a controlled burn to get rid of the carpet and preserve the books. Instead, he was forced to use a variety of cutting spells to rip up sections of the carpet, distantly aware that Irvis was watching him the whole time.

Uncomfortable. Vex was a little worried he'd be able to do something with the circle as well. Irvis was a living aspect — Vex had no doubt that he knew more about magic than he did, both the true, glyph-based magic and the system-enforced mockery of it that was runes.

After a moment of consideration, he grabbed some of the pieces of carpet he'd already cut up and placed them over Irvis' head as a makeshift blindfold.

Then he finished what he was doing, and took a second to survey his work.

There was a door built into the ground — one that wasn't dissimilar to the one in the dungeon all the way back in Fendal, albeit much larger, and also on the floor. At the center of the circle was something that Vex now recognized as a reality shard. Had that always been there? Or had the system adjusted now that it knew about reality shards?

He recognized some of the other components of the circle from the research he'd already done on spells, and from the work he did on runic circles in general; he understood them well enough to know how to modify a lot of them. This circle was, strangely, not unlike the runic circle that represented a [Fireball].

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Funny how so many spells came back to that. Vex supposed there was a lot of use in the idea of packing mana into a ball and launching it, whatever aspect that mana happened to be. [Fireball] was just a common one.

The launching aspect of the circle was different, though. It was similar enough that Vex could recognize the pieces that represented position and momentum, but there was an extra variable baked into the vector that described direction. That was probably for the Shift element of it all.

The door was set to pull mana from the user as soon as it was opened. With a normal individual's supply of mana, there would only have been enough to transport one person. Vex's supply was enough to take their whole party, if only that party was here...

Vex tried to quell his rising panic, and thought.

The amount of mana he had was enough, essentially, to cover the room. If he wanted to get greater coverage — something entirely unintended by the system, as far as he knew — he needed a bigger supply of mana. Misa's reality anchor would have been a source, but she wasn't here; he couldn't rely on that.

The only other source of mana he had here was...

Vex glanced at Irvis, then looked at the runic circle again.

As far as he could tell, this circle didn't do anything to the mana going through it except use it to power the spell; the aspect he used wouldn't change the nature of the spell in any way. The possibility that Irvis' hatred-aspect would corrupt the spell was no more likely than fire-aspect mana would end up creating a version of Teque that was literally on fire — there wasn't a way for that to happen within the circle.

But Vex had to be cautious, because Irvis was the hatred aspect. Even if the spell as-is wasn't affected by the type of mana used to power it, there was every chance that Irvis would be able to change the nature of the spell somehow, either in the process of being used to fuel the circle of afterwards, when the spell was actually being cast.

Cautious or not, though, there was a more pertinent question.

Did he really have a choice?

He could have run back to try to fight with his friends; [Manaburn] could do damage to Irvis, he knew that much. But his father had died just to stop — stop, not kill — this version of Irvis. If the list of attacks he'd received from Derivan spell was any indication, then the version his friends were fighting was much, much stronger.

...There was a risk no matter what direction he took here. Derivan had given him information, which meant he trusted him to make the right decision, and to Vex, the answer was plain.

As they were right now, they couldn't beat Irvis. They had all the tools, but they hadn't spent enough time exploring the full potential of that set of tools. They had plenty of reason for that; they'd been tossed into one situation after another, and had simply responded the best they could, but...

They needed time. The bonus room was their best bet at that. Vex had the ability to give them that time, and more importantly, he had a powerful version of [Mana Manipulation] that he could use to stop Irvis from doing anything strange. Besides, the danger that Irvis potentially posed here was just a potential danger.

The danger his friends were in was very, very real.

Vex didn't waste any more time. It took a small spell to buff his strength, but he dragged Irvis' body over to the door, making sure the carpet was secure around his head; he didn't want to give him any more of a glimpse at the circle, in case that helped him compromise it.

For a small moment, Vex hesitated. "...Sorry about this," he said, though he wasn't sure why.

Then — albeit awkwardly — he pushed the frozen statue of Irvis forward so that one hand was wedged into the door handle, and pulled.

Part of him was worried Irvis' arm would simply snap off.

But no. The circle flared to life and began to work almost immediately; the small bit of mana that touched the handle activated the siphon, and Vex could almost feel the flare of hatred from Irvis. It pulled more and more mana, unpacking the sheer density that was packed into just this iteration of Irvis.

It was here that Vex knew he'd made the right choice. There wasn't a chance in any of the realms that he or his team would have been able to beat Irvis as they were. The amount of mana packed into him was beyond even that reality anchor they'd stolen.

It was too much mana, even. This wasn't just enough to grab his party — this would grab hold of the entire dungeon and snap it into the realm of his bonus room. Elyra would be missing its Prime Dungeon for the entire time that Vex and his team were gone, and all the infrastructure that relied on it would collapse, for as long as they took to complete the objective in the bonus room.

...Hopefully the time dilation was significant.

Vex kept an eye on the spell as it was cast, but Irvis didn't seem to be able to do anything to change it. He was, in this case, as helpless against the system as all the rest of them had been. A surge of mana followed, and the door began to open, all on its own. Vex saw a pulse reach out, grabbing on to as much in this reality as it could, packing it into a dense bubble of information and possibility —

— and then he saw nothing, as the whole world Shifted.

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