Chapter 34: Chapter 34 – Descent

Amber’s hammer rises, Amber’s hammer falls, and the shockwave pulverizes the floor beneath our feet. There’s a Skill in there, and its name is screamed out in the dust and thunder of her strike; [Sunder], it howls, loud enough that it would be fit for capitalization, and we drop straight down into a washed-out, barely-furnished bedroom.

We land… badly, I suppose. We land, that’s the important part, and we pick ourselves up and brush ourselves off, and Amber’s hands and eyes glow as she channels mana through [Healing Touch], which is something I hadn’t noticed before. We breathe, and I tell the pressure in the air that yes, I do have somewhere more important to be, and we’re going there right now, posthaste.

Amber’s hammer rises. Amber’s hammer falls.

We took a break after six floors. The first four were increasingly well-realized rooms appropriate to living spaces, bedrooms and a kitchen; Zidanya narrowly avoids landing on a stove, and I shatter a plate and wind up with a long rent in my pants. The blood gets basically everywhere, but thankfully we have a Druid who can apparently mimic the Cleanse spell, which I’m grateful for. We no longer have the goblin cleanse-charm chains, and while I’m resigned to getting dirty along with the previous battered and bruised, I’d really rather not risk infection and look like a horror in the process.

The fifth is a basement. We hear footsteps outside and a pounding on the door as Amber’s hammer falls once, twice, three times as even my strength enhancements fail to let her simply break the floor. I guess, wildly, and lay Dampen and Suppress across the floor with the usual maximum-return-on-investment three-Mote combo. It’s not what I was calling dungeonstone, back in the corridors; this looks like concrete, and it feels like concrete, and so I guess and call the shot, for better or worse.

Amber’s hammer rises. Amber’s hammer falls, and we fall through the floor, and even as part of me is gibbering in terror as we fall into featureless darkness I’m relieved that we don’t have to go to Plan V For Violence, at least not yet.

Amber and Zidanya don’t waste time gibbering in terror, at least; they move. I don’t see what Zidanya’s doing, but I can feel it when Amber wraps her arm around my waist, pulling me in close enough that it feels like every ring of her mail is digging into my chest through my jacket and shirt. My arms wrap around her torso without my brain getting involved and pull me closer in to her regardless, mostly because I’m absolutely terrified and have no idea what she’s going to do, and then she swings her hammer and lets go.

I can’t quite follow what happens next, but I can mostly reconstruct it. Her hammer strike sends her, us, flying off away from the hammer, spinning gently. She’s got a new weapon in her hand momentarily, something that looks like a flail that was hybridized with a split-ended whip; she spins it around us, tips glowing with heat and extending meters away, gorgeous in motion. It’s a few seconds later that the end-bits hit something solid, and they punch through or dig in, one or the other. The impact is agony, and if it had just been my arms keeping us together, I’m fairly confident I would have slid and fallen, albeit possibly only because my shoulders would have been dislocated; she still has an arm around me, though, and I’m screaming in pain but I’m still there.

The pain doesn’t really fade. Amber’s panting, eyes closed. “I’m tapped,” she says between breaths. “Can you. Hold yourself?”

“Yeah.”

She lets go of me, and my arms scream for a moment. Actually, they scream for more than just a moment, but I manage to get my legs involved, and though I slide a heartstopping inch or two I don’t fall. She shifts her own hands, and the muscles in her arms stand out as she holds us in place. “Plan?”

My mana is ticking back up, not quite enough to summon a Mote. I can feel the Motes I have up, and there’s exactly one Amplify left; everything else was either used in the process of our descent or got disrupted due to gross physical trauma, so to speak. Or not so to speak; I’m pretty sure I’ve got at least some sprains and definitely some bruises.

I’m dithering. I have no idea what the plan is. “I think I know where we are,” I say instead of admitting that. “Administrative building you went into, they’re storing prisoners in a sub-basement, I bet.”

“Holding. Two.” Amber lets go with one hand, the muscles of the other arm bunching and flexing, so she can carefully wiggle her fingers, as if to make the point. She repeats it with the other hand, and I’m staring.

I’m not just staring. Holding two people on just the hands wrapped around what’s basically a pole sticking out of the wall is pretty - wait. “Can you do a shield spike and make foot holds? Once we’re secure, we can regen some mana and go from there.”

“Momentum,” she says, shaking her head. “Have none.”

“Shit. That tough?” I look at the wall we’ve slammed into, and which her weapon has punched through, with new respect, and then I see a shiver go through Amber’s muscles and I remember that we’re hanging, both of us, from her conjured weapon from that wall, and still, I can’t think of anything.

“Plan?”

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“Don’t actually have one yet. I’ve got mana for one Mote in a moment, and I’ve got one Amplify.” I pause, thinking hard, feeling the quiver in her arms. This, I think to myself wryly, may have been really dumb. “I, uh. The wall’s one unit, it feels like, and it’s huge, I can’t, like, Dispel it.”

“Fall?”

“Hungry void, please no.” Gorge rises in my throat. “No, no. Hang on. I can - I can think of something, don’t let go.” The thought has a ripple of weakness run through my arms, and I can imagine all too easily what it would feel like to fall, and - no.

“So. Plan?”

“Yeah, a plan. Uh.” The sudden realization hits me, and I nod. “Okay. I have an idea. Or, uh. Honesty compels me to point out that I have the start of an idea. How long can you hold on for? I need to plan my Motes.”

“Got a plan.” Amber’s breathing deepens, and a tension comes out of her lower body, like suddenly our weight is lessened. “I can hold as long as you need to, if you have a plan. My lord.”

“I,” I say quietly, so quietly I can barely hear myself, “don’t deserve you, Amber.” The mana for [Imbue Mote] flows through me, and an Empower Mote joins my existing Amplify. Her hands clench on the pole, and I’m pretty sure she heard me; my face is flaming red when I realize that, but I don’t let it stop me. Instead, I focus, and [Manipulate Mana] starts to push and tug at the wall.

Here’s the thing about Manipulate, as opposed to basically everything else in my kit: it’s an active-use Skill, but it doesn’t actually cost any mana. Even the Visor takes a pretty decent chunk of mana to spin up for the first time, and the passives are, well, passive; Resistance and Agony Resistance have saved my life more times than I can count, and Learning is what it is, but none of them is going to get me out of this specific mess.

Well, Learning is going to help. It’s going to help a lot, because every little piece of feedback I’m getting from the way the wall’s mana reacts to my touch, metaphysical as it is, is something I need to integrate into my model of how the wall works. I can’t see it, see, so I’m just working on feel here, and hoping it’s not a case of an elephant.

The amount of mana in the wall is enormous and everything it’s doing is interwoven, self-reinforcing, and ridiculously complex. In a way, it’s like the difference between the glyphwork on the Home Key and the glyphwork that Zidanya showed me; there’s an inhuman level of complexity and mechanical perfection in the wall’s enchantments or enhancements or whatever, and there’s no way I could ever replicate it or, if I’m being honest with myself, understand it.

That’s okay, though. It’s so much easier to destroy than it is to build.

I’m not, honestly, depending on my ability to do anything in particular with the mana manipulation. It’s a bonus, and also something to distract myself, and that’s not an irrelevant thing given everything. Seven mana at a time for [Imbue Mote], and Amber’s grip is an unfailing bedrock of our existence; another Mote, and another, and another, and she holds on.

“In just a moment,” I hear myself finally say, “I’m going to make you a better handhold. I think.” If she answers, I don’t hear her; my focus is too busy, too split. I’m shoving all of the mana in a box shape - four lines, forming a rectangle just so - outwards, leaving thick bands of hopefully weaker spellwork.

My orbs trigger. Empower and Amplify boost orbs of Suppress and Dampen, and I imagine with a great deal of hope and not a lot of confidence the spells reinforcing the walls in those weakened bands guttering and dying.

“Thirteen seconds,” I say quickly, and my mouth is open to say more, but Amber is already in motion. She lets go with one hand, and my heart leaps into my throat, but before I can start gibbering she’s punched, punched with nothing but the leverage of her other hand’s grip.

The wall shatters, and she screams, and I don’t know whether I’ve killed us both or saved us from my own idiocy.

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