Chapter 44: Chapter 44 – Not Much of a Plan

The stairs are narrow, but it’s dungeonstone; the footing is somehow always perfect, which more than makes up for the awkwardness of not having your whole foot on a step, even after we make a sharp ninety-degree turn to the right on a wildly inadequate amount of landing.

That’s good, because it’s dark; the only light in the place is trickling in from above us, a rapidly diminishing, indirect illumination that barely does more than make the shadows darker by comparison. After a few moments, in an awkward almost-unison, five light sources ripple into existence; Amber starts glowing, Rei’s hands start somehow sourcelessly illuminating the area around him, and each of Zidanya, Tim, and Sara wind up with light-balls. Tim’s are slowly-revolving magma balls, casting a fluctuating red flickering not-exactly-radiance; Sara’s and Zidanya’s are more what I’d expect, a pale off-amber sphere, but Zidanya has five of them orbiting her head in a crown and Sara has one hovering over each shoulder.

Any given one of them, except for maybe Tim’s, would have sufficed. All together, I think a grounder would squint; still, nobody asks anyone to turn it down.

“So,” I say, as we walk down the corridor. “I guess people probably want that I should go over the plan?”

“My lord is gracious,” Amber says dryly.

“Oh right, you don’t know the plan either.”

There’s a minute of silence, as we walk along. I don’t bother trying to hide my smirk; my best poker face is grinning like I’m having the time of my life for a reason. Eventually, I figure, someone is going to crack.

“Adam.” It’s Rei; I preen a little, having guessed right. “Are you… going to tell us the plan?”

“Well, no, not really.” I grin at him. “What I don’t say, the Temple doesn’t hear. Um, I think I can say that I have pretty strong expectations for what we’re going to find, narratively; and I have a wide range of plans, depending on where in the spectrum of those expectations we land. And if we run into something that surprises me, none of you are idiots, it’ll be fine.”

Rei processes that, and I see him digest it in chunks. “What do you want from us, and how will you tell us if we’re in playing-it-by-ear mode instead of letting you take point?”

My face is probably a study in a mixture of fluxing emotions, along the lines of surprise and gratification. I’d expected to have to do a lot of arguing right about now; this is… unexpected. “I’ll start talking the moment anything interesting happens or we get somewhere relevant, if we’re on any of my plans. Which, I want to be clear, I am very confident we will be.” I wave a hand around at the corridor we’re tramping down, with its occasional set of steps downwards. “This scenario has been incredibly straightforward so far, so probably all I’ll want from you is to hang back, let me talk, and then do immediate and overwhelming violence to anything that either attacks us or that I say we’re killing.”

“Immediate and overwhelming violence.” Stella’s voice is somewhere on the gleeful side of amused, with a hint of teasing that comes across mostly because she’s mimicing my phrasing and intonation precisely.

“Yeah, I thought that might be a course that, as charted, you’re happy to follow.”

There’s a moment of silence. We’re making a one-eighty turn in an extremely narrow stairwell now, tracing the north-south path we walked down northwards once more. It’s level now, at least, and instead of featureless dungeonstone on all four sides the walls and ceiling, though not the floor, are lined with glyphwork. It’s all energy-flow and energy-storage stuff, nothing with any real logic in it. A gigantic battery, I think to myself, and then realize belatedly I’ve said it out loud.

“What do you mean?”

I look over at Tim. “Well, these are storage glyphs, right? And glyphs to even out flow, and glyphs that act as, uh, capacitors, I think. This whole… branch, spoke, whatever, that’s what it’s doing; the energy needs to be stored somewhere, and if they’re making all of this corridor space anyway…” I trail off.

Tim is nodding slowly, but I don’t think it’s any particular comprehension. I quirk an eyebrow at him, since that’s moderately safe; if he knows what I’m talking about, he’ll expand on it, probably, and if he doesn’t know… “I don’t know that I follow,” he says quietly, and I shrug.

“Do we break it?” Rei waves a hand at the glyphwork. “The battery, that is.”

“Nah. It’s probably a trap, and besides, it’s inscribed into dungeonstone; I think it’s, well, I think the dungeonstone is formed with the glyph as negative space in the actual shape of the walls.” I see the understanding come across his face with a scowl. “Yeah. And it’s all one seamless, indestructible piece of work.”

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“Didn’t see nearly any of this stuff our other time through.”

“You probably didn’t systematically exploit your way through a couple of floors?” I clear my throat, embarrassed, as he stares at me. “Well, I mean, I was alone. If I could rewrite a glyph before it fired a summoning stage and instead use that to blow a hole through the next half-dozen rooms, or at least make it backfire and burn out the entire sequence, that was a lot less likely to lead to me being dead than trying to win a punching contest with a corrosive slime. And if I did it clean, I could study all the other glyphs in the sequence, and next time I run into a corrosive slime, I can use them instead of having to try to kill it by running around the room and trying to condense Void mana inside of it.”

“That,” Stella says into the horrified silence, “fucks.”

“I have no idea what that means,” I say to her with a respectful nod, “but probably thank you?”

Sara cuts across the laughter. “You successfully condensed Void mana inside a living creature? What Skill were you invoking?”

That’s more words than I’ve heard her string together previously, even including when she was telling me what the solution for a stage of the room’s puzzle was, so I suspect I now know what really makes her tick. “Manipulate Mana,” I say, using the tiniest thread of my will I could manage to give it a touch of realness. “I used Insight to bridge the gap in my understanding, and I don’t think I could replicate it now. Back then, the Temple’s mana responded to me like it wanted nothing more than to be touched and coaxed and to take a desired form. That didn’t last long.”

“I am aware of Manipulate,” Sara says pensively. “Purportedly inferior in every respect to Shape and further inferior in most to Sculpt. I am not, however, familiar with Insight. Elaborate.”

My eyes flicker forwards, and check that there’s no end visibly coming up to the corridor we’re walking through. “It’s a mana hog. Actually, it’s a mana vacuum that’s limitless so far, but the more I have to pump into it, the more it tells me. It’s fast, and it zeroes me out from wherever I am in a few seconds, and it’s loud to anything with mana sight, but it’ll give me understanding on a level I can never manage without it.” I frown. “Afterwards, it’s got an absolutely awful… it’s like a hangover, or I guess it’s like how people describer a really bad hangover.”

“The Temple’s mana changed after this feat?”

“Yeah. It… well.” I smirk. “It changed more than once. First it got thicker, but then I could trigger these elemental cascades that fried stuff, very convenient. Then it got dense enough that I couldn’t do that because I couldn’t take control of the room’s mana, but at that point I think it was boosting my regeneration a lot? And now it’s just really thin and it flows out of my grasp, like it’s dust. Do you know of any other skills like Insight?”

She’s got a look that I think is mostly thoughtful on her face as she answers. “Divine skills, the skills of divination, might provide the effect you describe, but they are a connection with a divine patron, which you lack; and they take a steady stream of mana, one which an individual can sustain for a substantial time. Knowledge skills provide what one might describe as understanding, but are passive. Brilliance and its kindred are passive, and provide us with the ability to bridge the gap ourselves.”

“Which you clearly have,” I say with an attempt at a straight face.

“I do.” She narrows her eyes after a moment. “Inappropriate question, generally.”

“It wasn’t a question,” I say with a shrug. “You switched from what one might and an individual to talking about provide us. And I’m not asking which of its… kindred, that’s a fun word, you have, am I?”

There’s a pause, and a startled laugh from Tim. I look around, and there’s definitely looks of surprise on the faces of the other four of Sara’s party members. Almost all of their faces, at least; Rei’s face looks more like it’s in the throes of some deep calculation, for a moment, like a charming mask slipping off of a mind full of cogs and gears.

We don’t have any time for me to ask about it, though; I’m striding to the front of the group, overtaking Amber and gesturing for her to stay behind me. I’m the first through the doorway, a wide double arch of empty space revealing a room that I deliberately don’t process before opening my mouth and asking a question.

“Excuse me,” I say to the two women in my line of sight, in the moment of silence as the one turns and the other’s screams fade. “Does either of you know where I can find a toilet?”

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