Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

Griffin Tucker Vasilias, Great House Scion, Reborn Lvl 2

Mount Discovery, Province of Aragonia

Griffin decided to use the new sphere configuration Kismet had been teaching him, doing his best to push his anima out evenly. Surprisingly, the effort had become much easier. He was able to respond more quickly to areas of weakness in his construction and react much more quickly to any interruption in the sphere.

Is this another feature of unlocking my Speed Attribute? He wondered, finding the sphere configuration no longer the challenge it had been to set up and maintain just a few days ago.

As soon as his anima sphere configuration was up and stable, Griffin noticed an immediate improvement in his Sensor Suite senses. All of his senses were suddenly tuned to the highest degree, his sensitivity spiking as the sphere configuration boosted his perceptions. The difference was staggering. Griffin had only thought he’d been using his Sensor Suite before, now it was like realizing he’d been stumbling around in the dark when someone suddenly switches on the lights. It was disorienting at first, but he quickly became accustomed to the increased sensitivity.

He looked around his new surroundings with his newly enhanced super-senses. Even though there was no light in the massive chamber, he could see everything within as clearly as if the room was bathed in strong sunlight. His SONAR told him that what he’d thought were desks or counters turned out to be large insulated containers made of an odd combination of ceramics and strange metal alloys.

The containers had a brushed stainless steel chassis and reminded Griffin of industrial freezer lockers. In each container was a small viewport near one end. Griffin ran his hand along one of the containers as he inspected it, fascinated by the thing. The viewport was completely frosted over, so he couldn’t see what was inside. His SONAR couldn’t penetrate whatever the viewport was made of, and his infrared senses showed it as utterly black, completely devoid of heat, even compared to the freezing surroundings.

His tensa sense, however, showed a dense lattice of woven runes all glowing with pale blue tensa. This was the first time he’d noticed that the tensa had a different color other than the opalescent whitish-silvery glowing mist. As he probed the runes with his tensa sense, he felt a deep pang of cold come from them, an echo through his anima that he could feel all the way through to his bones. He withdrew from the runes, blinking and rubbing at his temples.

“Whatever’s powering this is still going strong,” Griffin said, tapping lightly on the container. “I thought everything in this facility was a run-down ruin, but these things look like they’re brand new. Look, there’s not even any dust on them,” he wiped his finger on the exterior and held it up: not a speck of dust.

Kismet hovered over across the room, on the far end from the remains of the Mother where there was a doorway with a heavy security door set into it. She pointed at the door, “I traced the tensa conduits from each of these units and I’m sure that what is powering them is a tensa battery or a whole rack of them.”

Griffin looked up and asked, “You can put tensa in batteries? Like how much tensa are we talking? If there’s a graft or magical effect that’s making this place clean and cold, then it must be pretty strong. It’s fucking frigid in here.” Even his parka was only barely keeping the cold at bay.

“It is likely that there are teraspark batteries in this room.” When Griffin failed to look properly impressed, she said, “You only just barely crossed into the kilospark range. A single teraspark contains a billion kilosparks.” Griffin blinked, eyebrows shooting up. Kismet continued, “The conduits feeding these storage units are rated for ten teraspark surges each and there’s no reason for that unless the batteries themselves are teraspark-capacity batteries.”

Griffin looked around, trying to find the conduits Kismet had described. The tensa

In Griffin’s HUD, the conduits Kismet had just described flashed briefly. “Even with batteries of such incredibly high capacity, we must assume that their charge is nearly depleted after powering such potent enchantments. Let’s move as quickly as we can. Whatever is in these containers could defrost at any moment.”

Griffin gulped and nodded, “Right, definitely don’t want that. Let’s see if the ethershard is still in that Mother’s corpse and then get the hell out of here.” He glanced back over his shoulder to confirm that his rope was still dangling from the twisted metal rod he’d tied it to, then continued further into the large room.

The Mother’s frost-bitten corpse was near the center of the room and Griffin moved quickly, his breath coming in smokestacks of steam in the frigid air. It was hard to tell just which part of the Mother remained, it had been so thoroughly chewed on. The carapace was crushed and there were undigested bits of cybernetics littering the otherwise pristine floor. A pale brownish-yellow goo stained the containers and floor it was draped over with viscous puddles of the stuff giving off a vile rotten odor even though they were frozen over.

Griffin, prepared once more for just such an occasion, paused for a moment to rummage around in his duffel bag. He’d managed to conjure the gas mask, complete with personal air supply the first time he’d tried. His experience using Adaptive Conjuration to create the hazmat suit had freshened his memory of just how those systems were meant to be used. He slipped the mask over his head and turned on the air supply, hooking the little 2-hour bottle of air to his belt to keep his hands free.

Feeling that sense of triumph return as the disgusting smell was banished, Griffin began investigating the disgusting remains. It was more than half eaten and spread out across eight of the frozen storage containers. He walked around it, trying to catch a glimpse of the ethershard he’d spotted in the video recording. The frozen corpse was enormous; far bigger in person than the recording had made it seem. It took a long few minutes of looking to conclude that it wasn’t going to be easy to find if the shard was even still in the dead monster.

As he walked, he heard a muffled beeping noise and craned his neck, trying to locate the source of the sound. “Hey Kismet, do you hear that beeping?” He asked.

“I do,” she replied. “I don’t know what’s making the noise though. It may be a good idea to find the source, but not at the expense of finding the ethershard. Keep looking.”

“Right, right, I never stopped!” He replied. “What if it’s not here?”

“Why are you asking me?”

Griffin paused and shrugged, “You seem to know what’s going on. You’ve got the training plan and the System expertise. I assumed you had a plan of what to do if we don’t find the ethershard here.”

Kismet said, “You already have the answer to that question, Griffin.”

Griffin sighed and laughed softly to himself. “Yeah yeah. Keep looking, keep training, keep exploring. As my favorite forgetful fish used to sing, ‘Just keep swimming, just keep swimming!’”

“Earth fish are capable of coordinated musical performances?” Kismet asked. “That is the first interesting thing about your planet that you’ve mentioned. It almost makes up for Monopoly. Almost.” Griffin decided not to correct her since he thought it was pretty hilarious to have Kismet believe that a barracuda might have conceivably sung Barracuda.

He kept scanning the frozen corpse, trying to look more closely for the ethershard, but the soft beeping was distracting. He thought it sounded like it was coming from somewhere underneath the body—maybe from one of the storage units—so he kept circling it, this time ducking his head to try to pinpoint the source of the noise. It seemed to get louder as he got lower, so he got down on his hands and knees listening intently.

He’d just gotten as close to the beeping as he was able to get and was trying to peer around the huge corpse to figure out what was doing the beeping when he nearly speared his cheek with the razor-sharp tip of one of the dead centipede’s legs. Griffin dodged out of the way right before he hurt himself, but the effort made him overcorrect and almost fall over. He caught himself on another of the Mother’s legs and steadied himself when his eye caught on an odd swirl of tensa he sensed in the broken chitin. The tensa didn’t just swirl, it seemed to be a slow-moving vortex of energy sparkling deep in the frozen flesh.

“Hey, look at this!” He pointed at the odd swirl and looked for Kismet.

Her face appeared in his HUD again, a comically irritated expression on her adorable features. “What is it?” She asked. “I’m trying to figure out what these containers hold. There’s an isolated system here that’s still got power and I’m working on cracking it.”

He pointed at the swirl and said, “There’s this…I don’t know what to call it. Like, this swirly thing of tensa in the, uh, corpse of the monster.”

“A ‘swirly thing’?” Kismet asked. Her animated eyes closed and she took a deep breath. “Word choice aside, what you’re describing could be caused by an ethershard that’s been set in one place for long enough. It sounds promising. Try to see if you can find out what it is, I’ll keep working on this security system.”

“Uh, right. Great. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to cut into this thing—especially not frozen—but I guess I gotta play the hand I’m dealt. That beeping is really driving me nuts, though.”

He tried to see what was causing it, but it was buried in there through more than a meter of half-rotten monster and thick chitin. He grimaced and dug around in his duffel bag. He’d packed a pair of thick, elbow-length Kevlar gloves and a set of butcher’s knives and cleavers with this task in mind. Grimly, he pulled the gloves on and selected the biggest cleaver he’d created, a meter-long cleaver with a long handle and a blade as sharp as he could imagine. It was not going to be much fun to get to whatever was causing the tensa vortex.

Griffin took an experimental swing, using both hands to chop into the frost-bitten monster flesh. Unsurprisingly, despite the razor edge of the cleaver, he couldn’t get a clean cut through the meat. He had to hack at it over and over to make a dent, the flesh only reluctantly coming apart under the blade. A bead of sweat dripped down his forehead and he wiped it with the back of his glove, being very careful not to smear any of the Mother’s foul-smelling ichor on his face.

It took fifteen tense minutes of chopping through tough frozen meat for Griffin to get to the spot where the tensa vortex was. He was glad he’d spent the time to do it, though. The last few chops had shown that the swirl of tensa was concentrated on the tip of an exceedingly sharp crystalline spike. He tried to grip it with his Kevlar gloves, but the sliver was too slick with the monster’s frozen, icy blood for him to grab onto it.

He had to use a different angle to get to it, using a smaller butcher knife for more maneuverability. It took him another few minutes of careful work with the knife to cut away enough frozen cybercentipede Mother for him to pull out the shard. The shard was so dark it looked like a sliver of night, like it sucked in light, making Griffin wonder what kind of shard this one was going to be. He put the butcher’s knife down and then grabbed the shard and pulled it out of the cold flesh of the monster, marveling that the delicate-looking shard seemed to be unharmed.

He slung his duffel bag back over his shoulder and backed away from the monster’s corpse going all the way back across the room, keeping as far away from the storage containers as he could. Once he got back to where he’d left his rope, he set his bag down and took off his protective gear, including the gas mask. He was still freezing cold despite the parka he’d made, and he was now covered in slowly defrosting monster blood.

He took a bottle of isopropyl alcohol—at least, he assumed it was isopropyl alcohol because of the smell but he had no idea if its chemical makeup would match ‘real’ isopropyl—and dumped it all over the shard, washing away all the frozen monster blood. He used two more bottles of the stuff to make sure it was clean, then unbuttoned his parka. The cold hit him immediately and he started shivering right away.

“I still don’t see why you feel the need to do this here,” Kismet’s chibi animation popped up and said in his HUD before he could absorb the shard. “I thought you were going to find the shard and then bring it back to the room and absorb it in safety.”

Griffin paused, thinking. “Uh, that’s a really good point. I was just gonna do it as soon as I got it—I didn’t really think about bringing it back to the room.” He grinned sheepishly. “I was just gonna do what I did last time but yeah, that sounds like a much better idea.”

He peered around, but he didn’t see any hidden plasma cybercentipede Mothers creeping around. Just the mostly eaten remains of the one that he’d spent the last half hour hacking into with his collection of butcher's knives. Kismet flew over to him, finished with her inspection of the enchantments and runes. She alighted on the newly cleaned ethershard and her eyes grew wide.

“It’s another Legendary ethershard, complete with the golden Vasilias tag. Clearly it's one of the shards August Vasilias sent with you,” she said, her voice sounding subdued. “But its aspect is troubling. Examine it, Griffin. It’s an ethershard of the Void!”

Griffin stared at the shard in his hand, not sure what made it so special. It was a black so deep that it didn’t reflect any light, despite seeming to be made of the same crystalline substance the other ethershard he’d handled was made of. He used the System to inspect it and see if he could glean any more details.

Enhanced System Access: Item Identification Query

Item: Legendary ethershard of Void

Value: 1,000,000 Imperial calyxes

Description: This is a [Legendary] ethershard of the Void. As a [Legendary] ethershard, it contains 10 gigasparks of tensa and can be used as a single-use tensa battery. Other uses for Reborn include unlocking or upgrading grafts, increasing Attributes, and to empower grafts, spells, or other effects requiring tensa.

“Wow, I had no idea you could use ethershards for so many things,” Griffin commented. “This thing is a tensa battery, too, but I don’t think you can recharge it.”

Kismet nodded, “Ethershards of such rarity and potency as a Legendary shard are rarely used as tensa batteries. However, Common and Uncommon ethershards—especially those with an Arcane or Wealth aspect—are commonly used to empower high-tensa spells or devices. Those aspects have more tensa or purer tensa, which can be desirable for certain effects. The strange thing about this ethershard is that Void-aspected shards or any rarity are extremely rare. A Legendary one is almost unheard-of. I cannot imagine why an Imperial noble House would have it.”

"Rich people having super-rare and expensive things isn't exactly a red flag to me. Besides, look at this place! It's a ruined research lab or something and it's crawling with cybernetic monstrosities. These Vasilias people must've had something to do with it. After all, you don't get cybernetics from nothing, right? They had to be designed by someone at some point." He thought a little more about what Kismet said and something occurred to him. “Hang on a sec, you said 'Wealth-aspect', right? So there’s Wealth grafts? Like what would that entail? Doubling the interest rate for your IRA?” He grinned, “Or maybe you could transpose bank accounts with anyone you see, set interest rates to whatever you want, or just give yourself infinite money!” He was joking but Kismet didn’t laugh or even crack a smile.

“You begin to see the possibilities of Wealth-aspected grafts,” Kismet said, not discouraging Griffin’s wild imaginings. “Banks in Nolm must have high-rank fiscal protection spells and security systems to prevent thieves and bad actors from using magic to rob them.”

“Huh, that’s pretty crazy man, I’m not sure I was actually prepared for you to talk about fiscal protection spells or whatever.” He paused a second and then realized something, “You called it magic just then! I heard you!”

Kismet rolled her eyes and said, “I’m using your vocabulary so that you can better relate to me; do not mistake it for acquiescence.” She pinched the bridge of her nose in a very human way. “Just…don’t call it ‘magic’ to an Imperial citizen. Or really to anyone. You would not be taken seriously.”

Griffin shrugged, “I’m not really concerned with people taking me seriously or not. I’m not a deeply serious person, so that doesn’t exactly bother me. Also, if people can underestimate me because of a single word I use?” He laughed and shook his head, “Well, that’s on them. I’m who I am and if even you can call it ‘magic’ without your head blowing up, then I think other people will get what I’m talking about.”

“Griffin, I understand your position,” Kismet said. “But calling the etheric arts ‘magic’ is like calling electricity ‘spark spirits’. People would mostly understand you, but you sound like an idiot.”

Griffin blinked and laughed again, “Duly noted. At least I’ll know exactly how they’ll underestimate me. Okay, let’s get the hell out of here before something really terrible happens.”

Kismet nodded, “Good idea. Oh, you remember the beeping you noticed? It’s stopped.”

Griffin frowned. He hadn’t noticed it stop, but then he’d just assumed that he couldn’t hear it from across the room. He breathed out, his breath fogging in front of him. “Is it…” He paused as his infrared sense tickled all along his skin, warming up by entire tenths of a degree in just moments. “Holy shit. It’s getting warmer in here. That can’t be good.”

“Put the shard away and get climbing,” Kismet suggested.

Griffin nodded, putting the shard into his Inventory, marveling once more at its endless capacity. As he did that, he suddenly realized why Kismet had been giving him such weird looks for making his big duffel bag and stuffing it full of supplies. It wasn’t because he was prepared, it was because he hadn’t been using his limitless Inventory that allowed him to store whatever he wanted in an extra-dimensional pocket space. He decided the weird looks were fair.

He felt himself blush as he grabbed the rope, putting his duffel bag into his Inventory, deciding not to comment on it. It had been a pain to climb down the rope with the heavy awkward thing dangling from his shoulder. He rolled his eyes and looked up, getting ready to start his climb up when he froze, eyes wide.

Staring back at him with predatory calm, the plasma cybercentipede Mother’s semi-mechanical mouthparts began churning and chittering. A drop of hot saliva mixed with oil leaking from a grinder that had been grafted to the monster’s throat dripped onto Griffin’s upturned face.

Griffin wiped his face and stepped back from the rope quickly. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit,” he chanted softly under his breath.