Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

Griffin Tucker Vasilias, Great House Scion, Reborn Lvl 2

Mount Discovery, Province of Aragonia

Griffin scrambled back away from the hole in the ceiling the Mother was climbing through. The lens assembly on its head flashed and started glowing as it began to push down into the room. “Please tell me that there are some other exits!” Griffin moaned. “I wasn’t able to test the only weapon I brought!”

Kismet’s face popped up in his HUD, minimizing down into the bottom left of his vision. “There are no other exits—I was able to break through their security using your Great House Seal and find out a few pertinent facts. For instance, there is an air vent up by the ceiling on the other side of the room that you can fit within. It’s your best chance to escape. I’m marking out the route you should follow.” A glowing path was highlighted a few meters ahead of him, indicating which way he should go.

Griffin didn’t question her, he just started moving. He ran as hard as he could, following the glowing path and feeling adrenaline surge inside him. His Speed Attribute combined with the twenty-five percent increase in his top speed from his Survival of the Fastest achievement worked together to increase his running speed by an incredible degree. He felt like Usain Bolt on speed as he dashed through the room, avoiding the big metal storage units with ease. He heard the Mother screech in anger as her prey suddenly darted away.

“Griffin, dive!” Kismet suddenly shouted.

He obeyed immediately, throwing himself to the ground and covering his head with his hands. A beam of plasma as thick as his arm burned the air as it narrowly missed Griffin and sliced right through one of the storage units. The plasma burned a glowing, boiling furrow deep into the ground behind the storage unit. The heat singed his hair, making it hard to breathe until it suddenly stopped and Griffin sprang to his feet and started running again.

He didn’t bother looking behind him—he knew the monster was right there, just seconds away from chomping him down in a single bite—he just kept running, following the path Kismet laid out for him. He wasn’t sure how he was going to handle the fact that the air vent Kismet had mentioned was up near the ceiling, he just wanted to create as much distance between himself and the Mother as he could.

His breath continued to fog up in front of him as he ran, but it was thinner now as the air temperature was noticeably warmer. As Griffin passed one of the storage units, he heard a dull thump come from it and he jumped, nearly tripping. He heard another thump from a storage unit a little further away, then another. Soon, it seemed like every storage unit had something thumping away inside it.

Griffin’s heart was beating so hard, he wondered why it didn’t just burst right out of his chest. He heard someone’s terrified screaming and it took a minute to realize that it was him. He was the one screaming as he ran through the freezing-cold chamber with dozens of tomb-like storage units with unhappy occupants pounding away while a hunger-crazed monster chased him. It was probably the best reaction to the situation.

He managed to navigate through the rows of storage units to the other side of the room where the air vent was, skidding to a stop before he finally looked over his shoulder to see where the Mother was. She was still a few seconds away, so he concentrated, conjuring a ladder with his Adaptive Conjuration graft. He leaned the ladder against the wall and started climbing, desperately hoping that he could just yank the vent out of the wall like the action heroes did in the movies.

Another wild plasma beam scored a glowing mad doodle on the wall next to him and Griffin thanked whatever gods or spirits existed in this world that the Mother’s aim was terrible. He got to the top of the ladder and shouted in frustration. The air vent was secured to the wall with screws of course.

Gritting his teeth, he conjured a claw hammer and jammed it into the top of the air vent with desperate strength, prying at the edge. The vent resisted his attempts for a long, terrible moment, and then it popped open, throwing him completely off balance. He fell, taking the ladder with him as he went. It turned out to be a good thing because another beam of plasma burned right through where his torso had been just a second ago, leaving a smoking hole in the otherwise pristine white wall.

Groaning and winded on the ground, Griffin struggled to get up and get to his feet. His right knee felt bruised and tender, and he could barely take his weight, he had a nasty bump on his head that had immediately bloomed into a banging headache. The ladder clattered as it fell to the floor when Griffin leaned against the wall for support and got to his feet, favoring his hurt knee.

The Mother advanced, its lens assembly glowing as it prepared to fire another beam of plasma at him. Kismet’s holographic form suddenly appeared in front of the monster, flying around its head, trying to distract it. The monster reared back, hissing as it followed her and attempted to bite at her.

“I won’t keep its attention for long!” Kismet said in his HUD. “Get in the vent!”

Griffin pulled the ladder back up and leaned it against the wall, scrambling up it as fast as he could, his right knee throbbing painfully with each step up the rungs. He finally got to the mouth of the vent and squirmed inside as quickly as he could, legs flailing outside as he pulled himself into the narrow metal air duct. It felt like it took forever to get his whole body into the duct and at any moment he expected to either get yanked out by his leg or burned to a crisp by another plasma beam.

“It’s out of tensa for now,” Kismet said in his HUD, not at all sounding like she was out there distracting the giant insect monster by flying around it. “Most monsters will expend their entire tensa pool in an aggressive and desperate urge to devour a Reborn. Keep crawling, I have it distracted for now, but it won’t be much longer.”

Griffin kept going, seeing that the vent opened into a bigger air exchange chamber with large spinning fans. He heard a crash behind him and looked back over his shoulder to see the Mother slamming its head into the vent he’d climbed into, tearing at the wall with its mandibles as it tried to get to him. The lens array on its head began glowing ominously as Griffin watched and he turned back around, worming his way forward with all the speed he could muster.

The maddened monster continued to tear at the wall and vent as Griffin finally made it to the relatively open-air exchange chamber. He stopped the slowly spinning fan with one hand and slipped inside, immediately moving to the side and away from the opening of the vent to avoid any stray plasma beams. The Mother was only ten meters away and the way it was tearing at the wall, Griffin was afraid that ten meters wasn’t nearly far enough.

Kismet appeared at his side as he crouched in the air exchange, the low ceiling just a few centimeters away from his head. He desperately cast about for other vents that he could crawl down, but the only one was a straight vertical that went up beyond his ability to sense. The walls were slick metal and he doubted he’d be able to climb up the whole thing. That meant he’d have to stay here.

He doubted the Mother was going to leave him alone when he was so close, and he didn’t relish the thought of dodging the occasional plasma beam, but the only other option he had was just slightly less terrifying than the monster trying to eat him. Sweat poured down Griffin’s face as he pulled his duffel bag out of his Inventory, setting it on the bottom of the vent and opening it with one swift motion. He dug around until he found the only weapon he’d managed to make that he thought might do anything to something like the Mother.

Griffin had discovered, during the last week he’d been preparing to come here and find the ethershard in the Mother’s corpse, that his Adaptive Conjuration was far more flexible than he’d first thought. He’d made sure to read the graft’s description over carefully as he’d started experimenting with possible weapons.

Adaptive Conjuration [Mind] – Arcana 10

Next Rank: 1 Rare ethershard of Automation, Arcana 13+, 1 Common ethershard of Tensa

Cost: 500 sparks per kg up to 15 kg per item.

Cooldown: None

Description: Spend tensa to conjure non-infused, mundane items. These items are permanent. Their form is limited by your imagination and knowledge. Increasing the complexity of the item will increase the tensa cost.

Note: This is an Heirloom Vasilias graft.

Griffin had come to understand that the complexity of what he could create with his Adaptive Conjuration was subjective. Through practice, he honed the method of visualization required by the graft. He realized that details like the exact chemical composition of an object weren't necessary to the conjuring process — his flares were evidence of this. It dawned on him that the true limit of his graft was the breadth of his creative vision.

Griffin had never studied the exact recipe and mixture of volatile chemicals that the road flares he’d made used; he had simply imagined them as road flares behaving how they ought to behave, and his graft had done the rest. He’d tried it that way after a good fifty failures where he’d tried to remember the exact chemical components that were supposed to go into the road flare and just got a lot of duds. In the end, he’d tried something that seemed completely counter-intuitive: he just imagined a road flare that could do what he expected road flares to do. When he’d tested the flare he’d conjured with that method, he found that it worked exactly like he thought it would, complete with the smell of burnt gunpowder.

That experiment had proven wildly successful, and he’d ended up making far more flares than he needed. Once he’d successfully managed to make a road flare, he’d begun thinking about defense. He tried to think of what kinds of weapons he might create that would deter a monster as strong as a plasma cybercentipede Mother and the only thing he’d come up with was TNT. He’d ended up creating three fat sticks of dynamite, complete with “TNT” printed in big block letters on the side.

He'd included fuses that he’d imagined to be thirty-second fuses. The fuses, at least, he’d managed to test and confirm that they lasted for thirty seconds. Griffin had never worked up the courage or found the opportunity to test the sticks of dynamite he’d created but he felt like the situation was just about as desperate as it got. It might justify doing something potentially stupid.

“So what are the chances that the Mother will get tired of attacking the wall and leave us alone?” Griffin asked Kismet, conjuring a Zippo lighter and holding it nervously next to the fuse. “I’m really not sure how big a blast this is going to be—or if there even is gonna be a blast—so if there’s a chance that this thing is gonna leave us alone after a few minutes, then I’m game to wait it out.”

Kismet looked doubtful. “Monsters, above all, want tensa. You’re a Reborn. Besides your tensa pool, you’ve got all the combined tensa from your ethershards bound up in your etherheart enticing any monster you come across into a feeding frenzy. I believe that the Mother will remain so long as you do.” She paused, considering for a moment. “It may even try to track you down, so if you think your weapon has any chance of damaging the monster, you’d best deploy it now.”

Swallowing nervously, Griffin nodded and set his shoulders. He glanced back down the vent he’d crawled down and had to jerk his head back as a beam of plasma nearly took his face off, making the air in the room as hot as an oven in under a second. The fuse lit on its own from the ambient heat in the air exchange, making Griffin’s heart skip a beat.

He tossed it down the vent as quickly as he could, just catching a quick glimpse of it sparking as it bounced and rebounded off the metal walls. He didn’t see if it made it to the monster. The heat from the plasma beam and its subsequent molten hole in the metal wall of the air exchange was making the small space intolerable. The air hurt to breathe it was so hot.

The Mother kept smashing into the wall, hissing and grinding its mouthparts as it tried to reach him. At least the plasma beam didn’t fire again. Griffin wondered just how long it had been since the fuse lit. It felt like it had already been thirty seconds, at least. He waited, keeping as far away from the cooling molten metal as he could, doing his best not to breathe in any of the acrid smoke. At least the vent fan was blowing it away. The Mother screamed and slammed its face into the opening, spewing oily saliva several meters down the vent, mouthparts ripping into the walls and tearing out chunks of masonry and rock.

Just as he was wondering if he should toss another stick of dynamite, he heard the loudest noise he’d ever heard before. He felt blood trickling down from his ears, and he was pretty sure he was deaf. An instant later, he was violently tossed into the opposite side of the air exchange, his head smashing into the wall.

The last thought he had before he lost consciousness was, Well, I guess that’s a successful test of the dynamite.