Beacon from Beyond

Oura was single handedly the most powerful Shaman in the [Gem Dweller] community. On the Council, his vote was the tie breaker, and when they needed the force of an army in a single location quickly, he was there.

He was also incredibly bored. Nobody ever called on him. The other Councilors were always enough to handle the situation, so when some runner had come to the main city talking about a Shaman and a villager nearly leveling the whole cave because of an argument over whether the villagers son was a mockery-type monster, Oura decided a quick trip was in order. The group of people who reported the situation to the city were tired, and begged for a break. They had been running almost non-stop for a month straight, and needed at least a few days to rest.

Naturally, Oura said they could rest in their homes, as he had been to every single village in the cave systems, and the Spatial affinity on his staff would absolutely trivialize the trip back. The other Councilors asked him not to go, in case they needed to teleport anywhere else while he was gone, but he waved them off and said they could just contact him, and he’d be back just as fast if they really needed him.

He enjoyed seeing the shocked faces of the little outskirt villagers when they blinked and were right back home, but he only indulged himself for a moment before getting to work. This was, after all, an official mission to keep peace.

Looking around, he saw that there were no screams or fire, so that was a good sign. Looking at the roof of the cave that had supposedly collapsed before the messengers left, he saw it in good shape, another good sign.

A bad sign was the floating Shaman, far above in the air. ‘Iora was her name, yes? Of course she would get the mockery-type monster, she has history with them, does she not?’

His face softened when he remembered her story, a tragic one it was. Both her parents had been replaced when she was very young by mockeries, but she managed to figure it out and escape before they ate her too. Then the same happened to her best friend a few years later. A year after that, her pet had been replaced. She once tried to take on a disciple, it was replaced by a mockery-type monster within two months.

There had been an investigation launched to see if an intelligent mockery-type monster was targeting her, but it ended up revealing she just had rotten luck. Mockery-type monsters were incredibly rare for sapient races, yet Iora had suffered so much by their hands.

He shook off the thoughts and flew up to meet her. From a distance, he saw an absolutely furious look on her face, like she was staring at the worst bag of shit the world had ever known, but he couldn’t spot what she was looking at. To him, she was staring at nothing.

When he got even closer, he noticed two things. First was an overwhelming aura of Sloth, which tipped him off to what was actually happening. Second was a whisper of Soul magic buzzing around in his ear.

He activated a spell on his staff to give him a soul sense, and a much more professional looking vision of Iora appeared before him, standing straight and presenting herself well while she was in some sort of soul form.

“Sir! Thank you for coming. I will report the situation to you as soon as I can, but as you can see, my body has been imprisoned.” the Avatar of Iora said to him.

He didn’t respond, instead going to investigate her body that was still stuck in the air. Initially he thought it was some constant channeled effect on her body, perpetually locking her down, but he saw now that the concentration of Sloth in the mana was simply incredible.

It was hard to measure Skill rarities, as it depended on their “Conceptual Depth” as it was called. Things that were called “Epic” rarity when measured by certain tools, were really just deep concepts within the affinities, but it wasn’t a surefire way to gauge strength.

He could tell that the Skill that created this would have an Epic rarity if measured, as the quality of the mana filling Iora wasn’t conceptually strong enough to go further. He felt it wouldn’t do it justice though, this Skill had some nuance to it, and it was one of many where the grading system for Skills failed.

It was an Epic grade skill, bordering on Legendary. It didn’t have the Oomph to be Legendary, but given the chance, the Skill would output power far above Epic grade. Not Legendary, but close.

It seemed that Iora had inadvertently given it the chance. He chuckled at her predicament, and Iora’s avatar turned a bit red when she heard him.

No matter though, he activated the Time affinity in his staff, targeting the Sloth mana in Iora and speeding up its relative time, watching as it decayed. He was impressed to find out that the mana would have genuinely locked her down for another month if he had not come along. ‘I will need to meet the man who made this.’

With that, Iora was free, and she led him to her house to give a full review on everything that had happened. She quickly had to put everything back in place, as it was supposedly blown up in the fight between her and this “Gor” she said she was fighting, but that didn’t take very long.

When she was going to start telling him everything though, he stopped her. “Instead of going on some lengthy explanation, I would like to simply review a memory packet from you, if you could make one and send it to me.”

She looked a bit nervous at the proposition, but knew she couldn’t deny him the request. He was given an in-depth review of everything that had happened since the start, but before he could begin, she warned him that there was a portion of it marked as “Hazardous” by her former self.

She said that there was a memory she had locked away, as it was supposedly damaging her soul to even know about it. She would send a copy of that to him too, but still warned him to be careful.

With that out of the way, it began. Initially, it was reasonable, as the child in question was acting like a mockery-type monster, but then he got to the interrogation part of the memory.

She went too far. Way, way too far. The fear spell, the agony she inflicted, the soul-destruction she went through to dig through his secrets. If that was how the rest of this was going to go, he would have to execute her by the end of the day, as even in her own memories, she realized that this boy was genuinely just a very smart human kid. She had gone back even to when his mother was pregnant with him, and still kept going.

Oura realized the lengths were caused by Iora’s own trauma. She couldn’t accept that it was a normal kid, as the situations with suspected mockeries had never been normal in the past. ‘Holy hell. I really might need to kill her.’ He thought with a sinking feeling. A Shaman could not lose themselves like this. It was weird though, in the memory he felt the emotions that she felt, and he knew that she was positive there was something else.

He wasn’t the one digging through the boys head, but clearly she sensed something that Oura couldn’t see. When the memory slammed into a wall marked as “Hazardous,” he realized what had happened, and why she was so sure there was something else. Because she was right.

Iora didn’t know what was behind the sealed off wall, but Oura was in a better position to find out. Carefully, he opened the informational packet, and saw the memory of Iora’s soul beginning to come apart at what she found, a glimpse of void.

This was not normal. This boy had memories of before his birth, of time spent in the void. There were many theories about what happened when someone died, but none could be confirmed. Oura had heard many stories though, and killed many creatures.

One such creature, centuries ago, when he was just a Shaman’s disciple, was a very special mockery-type monster. The story of its creation was a mystery, as they don't know where it came from, only that it did.

There was a Soul mage that was positive he had found the trick to being able to re-attune yourself into a different affinity. It was common knowledge that attunement stuck to you the rest of your life, even if you were someone like a Soul mage who could change your body, the attunement of your soul stayed the same through body swaps. If he had succeeded, he would be able to use his Epic-rarity Soul attunement to get an even better contract than the one he had gotten the first time.

He said that he only needed to exit this reality, for a single moment, and the contract would break. Nobody knew why he was so sure, just that he was. Hundreds of scholars had come to watch as he cast the Spell.

And he had succeeded. His Soul attunement was undone, and he was given the option to do it again for better benefits. There was a celebration, people partied for weeks, and many more quickly tried it out to great success.

There was an issue though. Those who had tried it soon began forgetting their lives, despite their high mentalities, and becoming more animalistic as time went on.

They became more aggressive, their eyes bloodshot, their skin taking on a sickly pale hue.

The first mage was the first one to transform. After six years of suffering, a beast burst from him. No identify worked on the beast, the magic being absorbed into it, but the System had given everyone within a hundred miles the most chilling of warnings. He pulled it up frequently, to never forget how such a legendary Soul mage was brought so low. He pulled it up again now.

[WARNING: A Void Beast has pierced the veil, entering your material plane of existence through an unwitting avatar. Slay it quickly, or its power shall grow until it has consumed your reality. All who are close enough to reasonably stop it before it becomes a universal-ending entity class have been pinged, and will innately know its location.

May the Gods save you]

And the Gods took the warning seriously. Every faithful within the area received a holy quest with incredible rewards to kill the void beast, all of them also being boosted supernaturally by holy energy.

The beast was a horrible thing that hurt the eyes to look at, most people unable to process it, including Oura. What Oura saw was a discordant mix of memories, moments, and shapes connecting to one another in ways he couldn't process. His teacher was a Soul Shaman, and told Oura later that it reminded him of what a soul looked like, except for the fact that it was violently wrong. The experiences and memories that composed it were organized in a pattern he couldn’t discern.

Normally, ones experiences in the soul were organized chronologically, from the first to the last experience. The void beast was like a thin window into a reality that followed different physics than the material plane. Oura’s teacher said that he tried looking a bit too close, and was blinded almost immediately by things he couldn’t process.

The creature began sucking in everything around him, adding to the experiences and shapes into its own body, becoming more tangible with every speck of dirt or blade of grass.

It was difficult to hurt it, but people figured out that it was the intent to hurt it that did so. People who dropped rocks on it added to its power, but those that shot rocks at it infused with the intent to kill it were able to knock some of the matter out of it.

Thousands of attacks later, the creature fell and dissipated into nothingness. Holy quests went out across the land though, that anyone who had undergone the process of re-attunement had to be killed. The Gods placed bounties upon every last one of them, and asked their faithful who had undergone the process to kill themselves, stating that it would be their greatest achievement if they did. It was a crusade, Oura never heard of another void beast successfully coming into existence.

It was dubbed “The day that never happened” by those who knew what was going on, as the Gods demanded silence from anyone who had received the original notification about the void beast. Nobody was allowed to talk about it, for reasons they didn’t know. The information of course still spread among the strongest, but the general population was none the wiser to the fact that a void beast had appeared at all.

Oura had actually received the information packed for how to cast the re-attunement Spell, as they intended for it to become standard practice before the side effects began to show. In the information packet, he received a glimpse into the plane of existence his soul was going to need to visit, and it felt exactly like what he was seeing from the packet Iora had given him.

Void was not an unknown element, but it was treated differently than other elements. It was the element of between if it had to be described. It was the time between moments, the space between points. There was a common phenomena called a Convergence, where a Conceptual Plane of existence would overlap with the material plane, yet there had never been a Void Convergence. There were records of all the different affinities manifesting during convergences, but not Void.

Because of this, people theorized that it didn’t have its own plane of existence like other affinities. Instead, it was the place between all the planes.

It was this in-between place that the re-attunement spell took advantage of, and what Oura was seeing a glimpse of.

He had a sinking feeling that this child was perhaps the reborn soul of a mage who had cast some version of the re-attunement spell, and might soon ‘hatch’ into a full-fledged void beast. Iora’s torturing of a child was completely forgotten, instead filled with dread that another might be born. The Gods would probably send out quests to kill this one too, but that was not a plan they should rely on. They needed to find and kill this child as soon as possible.

After watching Iora annihilate the boy's mind, he finished reading the packet, all the way up to the point where Iora was frozen by the Sloth manifestation, and looked back at her. She was nervously wringing her hands, ashamed of her actions that she clearly thought were going to get her punished. “The contents of the marked packet will be lethal to a weaker soul, I suggest you annihilate it.” he told her, and she looked surprised at both his declaration and that his first words were not chastisement.

Once he saw she had completed what he told her to, he told her “The packet also confirmed that this child is a rare mockery monster, one that could cause significant devastation. He must be found and extinguished. Now. I see in your memory packet that you placed a tracking spell on the mother, we will now activate it and find her.”‘Of course it's the one time I try to have a bit of fun outside the city that I get caught up in some void beast hunt.’

Her eyes widened even more when he told her she was right about Dei, and she quickly got on it. Pouring mana into her tracking spell, she furrowed her brows when it didn’t immediately work. “This might take a week or two. It seems Fou is suppressing the spell on her somehow.”

Oura didn’t have patience for that. Reaching over, he took control of the tracking spell, getting a surprised look from Iora, and poured all the Tracking and Mind mana he could into the spell.

The connection to it thrummed, yet still it was suppressed. Not for long though, as Oura could sense that the mother was spending a significant quantity of mana to sever the signal the spell was trying to send.

‘Only a matter of time now. Three days at most, rather than two weeks.’

He would wait, and he would prepare himself for a task he drew no enjoyment from.

‘I wish I had let someone else do this job.’ He thought with a frown.

***

Fou shot to her feet when she felt Iora’s mark become active again, her soul guardian drawing harshly from her mana to suppress it. ‘What is happening? Why is she allowed to continue with her antics?!’ She thought furiously. A moment later, the cost to suppress it increased tenfold, and she paled as she realized the Council members were helping her power it.

‘Oh.’

The verdict was in. Dei would die… but she wouldn’t allow it to happen.

She knew that it was stupid. That the Shamanic Council had the best intentions in mind, that they would do what was better for the community. But she was a mother.

She didn’t care what was better for the community, she would do what was best for her baby. If hundreds had to die for her son to live, they would.

She turned towards Dei. He was smart, unnaturally so. She would have to trust that he would find a way to survive on his own. “Dei, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I-”

She paused, unable to finish her sentence in one go. She knew that this was probably the last time she would ever see him. If the Council wanted him dead, she would never be let out of their sight, just in case she led them back to Dei. She was going to leave him, for good.

“I need to leave. I need to leave, and I’m not going to be able to come back. I’m sorry.” She said to him, She wanted to tell him that she loved him, but it would ring hollow from her. What mother would claim to love her child, then leave him behind? Even if it was unreasonable, she didn’t think she deserved to love him. He deserved better than what she could give.

She turned to leave quickly. She didn’t have as much time as she did on the way down, but she would use her limited timeframe to get far, far away from Dei. She would lead them on a wild chase to find her, leaving no trail back to him.

Right before she made it through the exit, she heard from behind her “Mama!” and paused. What mother wouldn’t?

“I love you” she heard from behind her, Dei’s voice cracking.

‘Why? What did I do to deserve it?’ she thought as her tears continued to fall. But she knew he was smarter than a normal child. It might be wishful thinking, but she hoped he genuinely understood that she was doing this because she cared for him.

And if he did love her, if he loved her despite her failing as a mother, how could she reject him? How could she not tell him the same?

“I love you too, baby” was all she could choke out before she finally pressed on into the darkness.

Her Love affinity roared to life, producing more mana in response to her emotions. ‘I will give them NOTHING to use against Dei.’

She thought defiantly, and took off deeper down the caves. She used [Point Flash] every step, barely touching the ground each time. She activated every stealth Skill she had, focused every point of Mentality and Physicality she had into carefully leaving as little physical traces behind as she could. Her guardian from [Love is Blind] responded in kind, removing all magical traces of her passing that would normally have been left behind by her soul.

Her affinity was producing mana as quickly as she was using it, as she was acting in a way to protect her son. She was acting in love, so Love was compensating her the cost of every move. She would still run out of mana in three days, but she would be so much further away than she could have been previously. In those three days, she would not sleep or stop. She had left her rations with Dei in the hopes that he would be able to stay safe longer. In the time her and Dei had been in the cave she was foraging from the area outside to keep from using their dried rations in case of an emergency, such as being trapped by a larger beast.

The cave also had some sort of natural concealment effect, which would stop them from just scanning for and finding him. They wouldn’t find him. So she continued running at the top speed she could go while still leaving no trace behind.

***

Three days later, she was heaving. Running on fumes that she didn’t have. She had taken no drink from any rivers, had eaten only things she could pick as she passed, and hadn’t stopped for a moment. She felt multiple Skills level up but ignored them.

While her Love affinity was compensating her the cost of all the spells she was actively using, it wasn’t compensating the cost draining from the tracking mark, and soon she would be bottomed out of mana completely.

She deactivated the suppression, wanting to keep at least enough mana in her body to keep casting the spells that allowed her to run quickly. The Shamans would take weeks to catch up to-

She was pressed into the wall by a force she couldn't see, but she could see the caster. A Shaman. Not just any Shaman, it was Oura, the Shaman.

Her former master's master.

“Fuck, Fou. it’s you?” he cursed “you look to be in a sorry state.”

She growled at him, not having the mental capacity to argue right now. She was no doubt emaciated and pale with bloodshot eyes. She’d been burning through everything trying to run not just as far from Dei, but also in unexpected directions.

“Tell me where it is and I’ll end things here. I don’t have to go to the next step, taking the information straight from your mind will hurt. A lot.” he said, and that sobered her up a bit more.

If it had been any other Councilor, Fou would be confident in protecting the one vital piece of information, where Dei was, from them using her [Love is Blind] guardian, but not Oura. That wouldn’t stop her from trying though.

She spit in his face, but it stopped in the air between them and went flying off to the side.

‘Very well’ she heard in her mind, and felt as he began gently disassembling the defenses her guardian had put up. Her mind was on fire, she couldn’t think clearly or stop him in any meaningful way, but she was desperately trying to think of anything but Dei.

It was all for naught though, as Oura shattered any barrier she put up and shifted around any memory she tried trapping him in. She felt as he carefully moved his way through her soul, dodging what he could and being as mindful to not hurt her when he could, but her entire mind was collapsing in on him, trying to do anything to stop him. It barely slowed him down. In seconds, he would find where Dei was hidden. But her guardian had other plans.

It couldn’t stop Oura from moving forward, but that was never the goal. It only needed to stop him from finding Dei.

Fou let out a blood curdling scream as her guardian tore into her own soul. It was meant to be a protector, so it struggled to deal damage, yet it did not stop. With its jagged, clumsy control, the guardian tore out any trace in Fou’s mind of where she had taken Dei.

Fou felt as multiple completely unrelated memories broke as well, but such collateral was inevitable in what the guardian was doing.

“No!” Oura shouted as Fou continued screaming. All pretense of carefulness gone, he quickly pushed through everything to reach the memory faster. Too late, he happened upon the disconnected and destroyed remains of a memory, the very last memory the guardian destroyed. It was the general direction Fou had taken Dei, and it would do very little good.

Before he could even divine the memory though, the guardian destroyed the remnants too, and with it the last scrap of evidence to Dei’s location. Fou slumped down against the force that held her to the wall, unconscious.