Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

Griffin Tucker Vasilias, Great House Scion, Reborn Lvl 2

Mount Discovery, Province of Aragonia

Griffin didn’t know how long it had been when his eyes fluttered open, and he returned to consciousness. The first thing that he noticed was the pain. Everything hurt. His ears rang, and he was vaguely surprised that he could hear anything. The headache he’d had from hitting his head and falling off the ladder trying to get into the vent had gotten even worse. It felt like his skull was split, and Griffin had a sudden cold fear that his skull was cracked open, his brains leaking out onto the floor as he lay there.

“… not dead, but you’ve been unconscious for…nineteen hours, eighteen minutes, and thirty…four seconds now,” Kismet’s voice was saying. It sounded like it wasn’t the first, second, or even the hundredth time she’d said it. “Don’t be alarmed, and don’t try to move. You’ve been badly injured, but your healing factor as a Reborn has vastly increased. It will take another fifteen hours until you can safely move. Please don’t think I’m lying or making it up. Your back was broken, and if you tried to move, you could sever your spinal cord. I don’t believe that your regenerative abilities would be able to regrow your spinal cord.”

He coughed weakly, pain shooting through his whole body at the movement. Kismet stopped talking, and her hologram appeared right in front of him with a concerned look on her face. “Oh good! You’re conscious. I don’t think that will last long based on your injuries, but there is some good news.”

Griffin couldn’t respond beyond a slight widening of his half-closed eyes. Kismet took that as her cue to continue. “The good news is that your explosive killed the Mother. You may have a System achievement for that—Boss monsters generally shouldn’t be able even to be hurt by mundane weapons—so check your System messages when you can.”

Griffin closed his eyes and breathed as shallowly as he could. It felt like everything was badly bruised. He felt both exhausted and afire. An unknown amount of time later, he opened his eyes again, aware that more time had passed than just the blink, but not sure how much more time.

When he woke up this time, the headache had receded somewhat, though he still hurt everywhere. Kismet was there, her small, 15 cm tall hologram form still dressed in the lab coat and glasses as she sat at a holographic desk with a tiny desk lamp, sorting through stacks of colored paper. She looked intensely focused on whatever she was doing, but Griffin couldn’t help but laugh at the incongruous image.

The laugh came out as more weak coughing—which also hurt, but not quite so severely—and he felt how dry his throat and tongue were. It felt like the inside of his mouth was toughened leather. Kismet looked up from her desk and stood up. The desk disappeared, and she hovered over to him, looking him over critically. Griffin followed her with his eyes, unsure if he should try to move again or if he could. Didn’t she say his back had been broken? That can’t be good.

Kismet completed her inspection of him and returned to his face, hovering motionless in the air, her face serious. “I don’t want to alarm you, Griffin, but I’m afraid that your situation has not improved as much as I hoped. The damage your body suffered from the explosion and being cooked by the plasma beam has proven to be too much for your current Reborn healing factor to handle.”

Griffin sucked in a breath, not sure where she was going with this. Kismet noticed the reaction and sighed. “Without additional medical assistance, you will die.” She paused for a long time, and Griffin thought she was done talking. He felt his heart sink as he began processing her words.

So this is how I die, he thought, feeling numb. Crumpled in a heap in a cramped air vent in some forgotten ruin. Fucking great. This is exactly how I wanted my life to go.

Then she started talking again, “But there is a very slight hope for you, so long as the strain doesn’t kill you.”

This sounds promising, he thought. But why is she being so cagey about what it is?

“You need to absorb the ethershard you got out of the corpse of the Mother,” Kismet continued. Griffin wasn’t sure what she meant, his brain moving glacially slowly from the concussion that he was pretty sure he’d suffered.

Kismet, seeing his incomprehension, kept talking, “Your body as a Reborn is incredibly resilient, which is why you’re conscious at all instead of simply dead. However, your strength and resilience are entirely dependent on two factors: your Attributes and your Rank. You’ve only unlocked two Attributes, so while your body has been enhanced, much of your potential remains untapped, including your ability to recover from massive trauma like this. The most important Attribute to help in that endeavor is the Growth Attribute, as it governs—among many other things—your natural regenerative capabilities. You will need to absorb the ethershard and ensure that you bind it to your Growth Attribute or…well…” She trailed off and shrugged.

Griffin closed his eyes and tried to swallow in his dry mouth. I’d love to do precisely what she says, Griffin thought, but I don’t have any idea how to bind an ethershard to a specific Attribute! The last time I did it, I blacked out from the pain, and when I woke up, I had a new power. He grunted, his mouth turning down into a grimace of effort.

He managed to croak out, “…Don’t…know…” He paused, coughing a little, and his head fell back. He tried again a few seconds later. Some saliva had worked its way back into his mouth, making it feel slightly better but bringing an awful taste. “Don’t know…how.” Just saying those few words left him exhausted, and he blinked his eyes slowly up at Kismet, trying to underscore his consternation.

Kismet appeared to understand. She crossed her legs, still floating in midair, and her outfit changed to a set of simple white clothes, just a tunic and a pair of pants with no embroidery. “You’ll need to meditate on this, Griffin, though I know it’s a skill you’ve had some trouble with during training. Try it now; I can tell when you’re in the right mental state.”

Griffin nodded very slightly, doing his best to ignore how the whole world kept moving after he’d finished nodding. He closed his eyes, trying to maintain the focus and concentration he needed to enter into the peculiar kind of meditation Kismet had been teaching him. Griffin had always thought meditation was all about calming your mind and reaching a sort of Zen balance with the world. Still, Kismet’s lessons had always felt very different from what the guided sessions the meditation app he’d tried before on Earth tried to teach.

Kismet’s version of meditation had less to do with Griffin getting in touch with his mental state and more with opening up his senses to the world around him. He had to feel the tensa in the air, which required a certain stillness of mind and openness of senses. According to Kismet, most Reborn relied on meditation to restore their tensa pool. Most Reborn were not fortunate enough to have a gathering technique they could employ through their anima, so they relied on meditation to refill their tensa pool. It was much slower, taking hours instead of minutes or seconds to refill their tensa pool.

Griffin recited the facts about meditation dryly in his mind, trying his best to focus through his many aches and pains. It was so tempting to retreat into his memories; there was solace there, no pain. His headache had returned, and it had a stabbing quality to it that he’d never felt before. Kismet waved her hand in front of his unfocused eyes, and he blinked, bludgeoning his mind into the present.

No! You can’t drift like that, he thought, the sense of his ‘self’ at a strange distance from his body. Sarah’s still out there. And there’s no way I’m gonna go out in a fucking vent. He grimaced and took a deep breath, focusing on the present and trying to push away the constant pain. Despite his efforts, he couldn’t focus on anything for more than a second or two.

Kismet’s face flashed in front of his, her hologram only a few centimeters from his nose and looking at him with grave concern. “Hurry, Griffin,” she said, “your body is beginning to shut down. You will die here if you don’t absorb the shard soon.”

Griffin took a shuddering breath in and closed his eyes. It felt like his body was shutting down. He summoned the ethershard from his Inventory, thankful it materialized in his hand so he wouldn’t have to catch it. As his life force ebbed away, that feeling of distance from himself returned, more vital than ever.

Is this what people meant when they had out-of-body experiences? He wondered. Does that mean that I’m not going to die or that I am? They called them Near-Death Experiences on Earth. Still, slipping into the meditative mindset he needed to attain this odd state of detachment was easy.

As soon as he attained the proper focus, he felt his heartbeat slow down, and his breathing relax as the tension in his body melted away. He felt within himself the molten fire of the tensa within him, still circulating with the same speed as always, even though he was more than half dead. He found that in his meditative state, his tensa sense was far more potent than any of his other senses, and it allowed him to visualize the flow of tensa within him with instinctual precision.

A wave of darkness and nausea swept through him, rocking his focus, but his concentration didn’t break. He felt weaker than ever, but he kept watching his tensa flow within himself, trying to figure out how to find his Growth Attribute.

They cut out my heart and replaced it with a magical artifact to allow me to wield incredible magical powers, and this is how I’m gonna bite the dust, Griffin thought absently. Hang on…they cut out my heart. And replaced it!

He focused his tensa senses on his etherheart, the artifact within him that allowed him to use grafts. As he looked inward, his tensa sense supplied his imagination with an image of a stained glass window set into a stone castle wall. The window showed an incredibly detailed picture of Griffin in multicolored glass with a half circle of lights pointed up at the window, their light illuminating the window.

Two of the lights shone with light in two different hues: a shifting, shimmering sky blue and a bright, nearly blinding white light. Frowning at the odd image, Griffin looked at the other lights in the semicircle, noting that they didn’t have a bulb. In his mental image, Griffin saw that each of the lights had a bit of masking tape stuck to them with a label written in permanent marker in his neat handwriting.

The label on the white light read Speed, while the label on the blue light read Arcana. The unlit lights also had masking tape labels: Dominion, Precision, and Growth. Griffin’s mental eyebrows rose at the rather obvious imagery his brain had chosen to use.

I guess I can’t complain that it’s cryptic, he thought. Now, let’s see if I can put the right bulb in the right light.

His hand tightened around the ethershard as he formed his anima into the absorption configuration that Kismet had taught him. He barely noticed the pain as the ethershard immediately reacted to his anima and sliced into his palm, burrowing into him until it reached his etherheart. In his mind’s eye, Griffin saw a lightbulb hovering in the air above the lights, illuminating his stained glass window.

He reached out and tried to touch the bulb, but his hand was violently repelled by a barely contained ocean of power within it. Griffin gulped and thought about it for a minute. The bulb didn’t react to his mental command, and it lowered slowly but steadily, heading toward the empty light with the Dominion label written on it. With a mental grimace, Griffin tried commanding the lightbulb to stop, willing it to move, and saying half a dozen magic words. Nothing worked. The light slowly lowered to the Dominion light, and frustrated, he lashed out with his fist and anima.

The bulb flashed and flung his arm away again, just like last time, but it stopped moving in response to his anima. Griffin rolled his eyes and thought, Of course, it responds to my anima. It’s kind of obvious now that I think about it. He used his anima to guide the bulb down to his Growth light and smiled when it clicked into place. An odd emptiness emanated from the Growth light, completely invisible and yet adding a strange otherworldly quality to the window. The effect was subtle, but it almost made the image of himself in the window appear to stand out more, like it had gained three dimensions.

Just as he was getting closer to the window to investigate the effect a little closer, his focus was shattered by a wave of pain. The flow of tensa within him expanded, burning through his old tensa pathways and widening them, allowing more and more volatile energy to course through him. He couldn’t scream as the process happened; he was too weak. All he could do was whimper softly as he felt the power burn into him.

Oh yeah, I forgot about this part, he thought as he finally blacked out again.