Chapter 10: Chapter 10 – Giving Respect to the Trash

When we cross the next door, we do it like we’re going into a boss room, one of the minis or a full-on Gatekeeper. Those don’t have the runework visible on the safe side of the doorway; just the threshold, the skull glyph, and your would-be killing on the other side.

It’s a combat room, one with a new trick: the mote part of my little orbs, the bit that came from the Skill the System gave me, the bit without which the orbs aren’t anything but some logic without the ability to affect the world, they all wink out when we cross. That’s most of the energy in the orbs by a huge margin, but it’s not all of it, and the rest backlashes into me as I frantically shove as much mana as I can into [Imbue Mote].

It’s not enough, by a smaller margin than I feared. I went through the threshold with five orbs up, and at two points of mana per orb of various logic bits, that still backlashed me for nine points of health.

Four health. I walked through the fucking threshold and wound up at four health. Flare my sensors, I hate this fucking place. This, ultimately was why I kept focusing on what I knew was bullshit; plague, rot, immutability and invulnerability, every exploit in the books. Because this place was an ass, and it was trying to kill me even if it had to bullshit right back at me to do it.

I’m not sure how long it’s been when I lever myself to my feet. Last time I backlashed myself this hard, I’d wound up bleeding out of every orifice in my face and some of my pores, but this time it seems like I’m fine. I’ve got one mote up that doesn’t have any logic, and I’m doing my best to bring up a couple more, and about then I see the mess Amber is making of the place and I can’t help but laugh.

This room is pretty big, especially compared to most of the others, maybe twenty meters long and five wide. There’s a slope that we’re on the bottom of, and a bunch of corpses. These look a kind of warbler, which I’m sure isn’t their ‘real’ name, but I’ve run into them before, albeit in smaller numbers. They’re like birds, and I’ve seen birds before, but they use sonic attacks of some sort to disorient you. Probably to knock you out, but I’ve never let it get that far; what they actually do afterwards, well, their beaks don’t look like they could go for flesh, but maybe they have variable gape or something.

Anyway, I’m not particularly worried as I finish getting myself reoriented. My Paladin’s a juggernaut, and they keep trying to slow her down and keep dying for it. At a guess the slope is meant to slow her down and make her lose her footing, and whatever is hiding up at the top is supposed to do something, so I send my mote zipping out in a pre-set curve and it doesn’t come back.

She sees it and slaps her sword-holding hand, or maybe the hilt itself, into her shield a few times before sprinting the last couple of meters and going into a slide over the top. I’ve got two motes up by the time I drag myself up the slope, and I pop them between my palms at the sight of the two corpses and of Amber victorious. They look vaguely like grallows, which makes sense; grallows are all about putting you back to square one - or they would be, if they actually existed, which I guess they do here - and square one would be back down the hill, having to go up it again, all while getting sonic’d at by the birds.

She puts enough healing into two long kisses to top my health off, snickering when I take a breath for air and then grabbing me by the hair to pull me back in again. It’s not the first time her blood’s up after a fight, and I’m hoping it won’t be the last, but we’re moving again, and this time I only have straight-up Motes manifested when we cross the next threshold.

We don’t take any of them slow. She does most of the killing, if only because she can go zero to blade in hand and being thrust through a bugbear’s knee faster than I can pull one Mote out of my mana. The ambient mana’s slippery somehow, too, so I struggle with attuning it or vortexing it, much less triggering a cascade.

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I still have a couple tricks there, but I figure I’ll save them for when we actually need it. In the remaining rooms, we don’t.

We’d set out to clear the rooms adjacent to the antechamber for practice, and we’d planned on doing most of them slow, figuring out how we mesh and how we gel before we start moving fast. My getting bit changed that plan, and our new plan is to see just how fast fast is, and what kind of challenge the accumulated power gives these rooms. Amber turns out to be just too much for the rooms, which we both think mostly means they were calibrated for me back when I entered the floor, not for the bladed thresher of a woman she is.

I do get a chance to shine on a puzzle room. Whatever malign intelligence is throwing shit at us had mostly stopped giving me any sort of puzzle rooms, or even rooms that involved puzzles by the end of the first floor I cleared. It’s not very good at them, mostly throwing dull twists on old classics at me, though this one was a little better than the usual fare. There’s a logic puzzle of sorts in the form of a grid of numbers, and I do the work out loud, to an audience more appreciative than I’m used to. The fact that the edges don’t have anything more than a six, and the corners don’t have more than a four, is enough of a clue for me to figure out it’s a variant on a fill, and the rest is just pattern recognition and inference.

Honestly, if you can’t solve a logic puzzle whose rules you’ve never seen before with a whole lot less in the way of clueing than that, missing half the contents and not knowing anything about what your answer is going to look like… well, just don’t become a wormhole navigator, alright. Enough information that I only had to go two steps of inference, and an obvious way to extract the answer out of the logic puzzle board into the arrangement of glyph-switches - map the grid onto the glyphs, power up the ones where the fill pattern shifted, get rewarded with loot - just made it almost insultingly easy.

There’s only one close call, and it’s not for me, and it’s not that close. Amber underestimates how fast I can pull the straight-up Motes out in a fight, and I underestimate how fast Amber is going to chew through a pack of tallish green goblinoids she calls Hobs. She takes a pair of Motes in the back, one fire and one ice, that were intended for the asshole doing some kind of chanting, and for a second I’m afraid, but even from the loam of that room’s floor she manages to turn her sword into a javelin and throw it through the chanter’s throat. I’m about three-quarters of the way through throwing two more motes at the chanter, so I divert them to the last hob, and it doesn’t get a chance to scream before the room’s clear and Amber can take her time fixing whatever damage I caused.

She winds up fixing up her armor, too. I get to do the mana vortex with intent, funneling hundreds and hundreds of ambient mana into the intake runes of the glyphs while she concentrates on reforming them. I take extensive recordings on my Visor and try to figure out how it all works, and don’t get much of anywhere, but it gives me a couple of other, more killing-things oriented ideas, so it’s not even a little bit a loss, and her armor is as good as new in less than an hour; fixing one glyph is apparently less of a pain than fixing three, a lot less than one third as much of a pain, and it was only the Weather glyph that broke.

It’s a really good feeling to get to flex my magic like that. The actual underpinnings of the flow of mana might have a lot to do with the kinds of math I had been doing pretty much my whole life, but getting to just impose my will on reality and manifest an instance of those equations into the world is a rush and a half, one of the few things I don’t expect to be able to share with anyone here. In a way, magic is too mundane for them, just like most of the technology I’m mostly not missing was mundane for me, but it’s still a rush, and Amber tolerates the gushing.

Still, we don’t dawdle, and I let Amber drag me away from the runes in the last room without much resistance. We’re giving respect to this place now, and that means crushing it.

The Gatekeeper isn’t going to know what the hell hit it.

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