Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

Sarah Avery Vasilias, Great House Scion, Reborn Lvl 5

Skyland

Sarah Avery Vasilias

Race

Human

Rank

Reborn

House

House Vasilias

Racial Gifts

Great House Seal, Enhanced System Access, Unlimited Inventory, Willful, Never Unarmed, Fast Healing

Attributes

Dominion

3 [Dimension] / 20

Speed

6 [Lightning] / 20

Precision

4 [Bow] / 20

Growth

5 [Strength] / 20

Arcana

6 [Cybernetics] / 20

Tensa Pool

10.4 ks

Gear

Training Tunic, Sturdy Pants, Grippy Slippers

Grafts

The Edge That Cuts Anything [Dimension], Electrify [Lightning], Hyper-Zen Archery [Bow], Oni-Blooded [Strength], Power Arm [Cybernetics]

“Alright,” Kimi-Lim said conspiratorially, “I’ll admit it: I’m cheating a tiny bit. I knew about this ruin.” The conspiratorial tone was somewhat ruined by the need to shout over the sound of the waterfall.

They’d broken out of the dense jungle after several hours of hiking and now found themselves in a small clearing, standing at the shore of a beautiful azure pool. A fifty-meter-tall, many-tiered waterfall roared into the pool which churned into white water on slippery rocks at the edge of the pool where it spilled into a swift-moving stream. The waterfall also was pouring onto the roof of a stone building that leaned precariously half into and half out of the pool.

The building was hard to see as a building through all the dense plant life that clung to it. But once Kimi-Lim had pointed out the lines and angles, it had been impossible to un-see. “You think we’re going to find treasure in there?” Sarah asked, unable to keep the skepticism from her voice.

“Of course we will! Dungeons contain infused items; it’s pretty much axiomatic. Now come on!” Kimi-Lim waded into the pool, shouting over their shoulder, “The water is freezing; it feels incredible!” They whistled sharply, and Sarah heard Sunspot’s joyous bark from the dense jungle.

The Sundog came bounding out of the undergrowth, his yellow-orange fur glowing with his inner sun-fire. He had a…thing in his mouth that was small and furry and very likely dead which he dropped as soon as he saw Kimi-Lim in the water. He barked joyfully and jumped into the water after the elf. Kimi-Lim patted his head whenever he happened to make a circuit near them with his happy bounding.

They beckoned to Sarah, saying, “Come on, Sunspot will keep us warm enough not to get any kind of shock from the cold water.”

Sarah shrugged and followed, wading into the pool after Kimi-Lim and catching her breath at the chill. The pool quickly became deep enough that they had to swim. They had to swim in a pool that was highly aerated due to the waterfall and that made it very difficult to stay afloat. Sunspot seemed to have no trouble at all, alternately dog-paddling through the water or climbing up and jumping all around them, paws springing off of thin air.

Sarah and Kimi-Lim struggled on. The cold wasn’t bone-chilling and Sarah supposed she had Sunspot to thank for that. But it was proving to be far more difficult than either of them had anticipated to swim through the aerated water. Sarah’s cybernetic arm was heavy and not designed for swimming and Kimi-Lim was so slight that they were constantly battered backward by the cataract.

They just couldn’t make any progress. They had to expend more energy staying afloat than they could to move ahead. Thinking quickly, Sarah formed her anima into a weaponform she was very familiar with the meteor hammer. She didn’t have a chance to whirl the spiked end of the hammer around to gain momentum, she just had to rely on her newfound Dominion Attribute and her cybernetic Power Arm.

She sank into the aerated water gripping the long chain of the meteor hammer in her right hand. She threw the spiked end as hard as she could into the outer wall of the ruin with her new left arm. The spike thunked into the wall solidly and the chain immediately went taut.

Sarah used the chain to haul herself up and over to Kimi-Lim. Sunspot was doing his best to help the elf stay up, but they weren’t having any more success at making progress than Sarah had. Sarah pulled herself along the chain towards the wall.

“Go back!” Sarah yelled as she pulled herself across the pool. “I’ll toss you the chain when I get across!”

She couldn’t tell if Kimi-Lim heard or not. The roar of the waterfall was too loud for her to hear herself when she spoke, so she doubted Kimi-Lim had heard anything. That just made getting across the pool quickly even more important.

It seemed to take forever to pull herself the last three meters to where her spike had pierced the wall of the ruin. The waterfall was pouring all around her, but a jutting piece of the roof protected her from being deluged. Sarah sputtered and coughed as she clung to the wall, searching for a vantage she could get to so she could toss the chain over to Kimi-Lim.

She squinted around, but the waterfall made it hard to tell where anything was. The water kept spraying into her eyes and face, making her sputter and spit. It was freezing. Sunspot must be too far away for his warming effect to shield her from the cold. Sarah felt fingers of panic start to pluck away at her calm and, as always, that just made her pissed off.

She tried to shield her eyes from the water with one hand, but that made her grip slip and she dunked herself into the water by accident, going a full two meters into the water because she’d neglected to secure herself very well. It was a scary few seconds as she fought to get herself back up and into the air and when she finally did, she was no longer herself. Literally.

Oni-Blooded [Strength] – Growth 5

Next Rank: 1 Uncommon ethershard of Rage; 1 Uncommon ethershard of Spirit

Cost

Passive mode - None. Must have tensa circulating.

Active Mode – Variable 5 ks+

Cooldown: 10 minutes

Duration: 1 minute

Description: (Passive)You gain the strength of the Oni, a rage demon. You also gain its resistance to fire, poison, death effects, and uninfused damage.

(Active) In active form, your strength and durability increase proportionately to your invested tensa pool, and the damage resistances become damage immunities. Gain the Oni form.

Special Activation Condition: To activate the Oni-Blooded graft, you must be enraged.

She burst out of the water, her skin once more crimson and heavily muscled. Her hair writhed and snapped and her face had been transformed into a masklike grimace with large fangs and glowing eyes. Her right hand had long ultramarine claws growing from it and her cybernetic left arm pulsed with angry runes as the grafts synergized unexpectedly into a new convergence:

Artificial Rage – Convergence (Power Arm & Oni-Blooded)

Your cybernetic computer systems have recorded an advantageous configuration for your survival: enraged. You may now induce an artificial rage with your Power Arm so that you may use your Oni-Blooded graft without becoming murderously angry first.

Note: Accepting this convergence will increase the rank-up requirements for both the Power Arm graft and the Oni-Blooded graft.

Accept?

YES / NO

She ignored the message and rammed her left arm through the wall of the ruin. The wall was foot-thick stone and she punched through it with no trouble. She pulled herself up the wall of the ruin by ramming her fists through the walls to create handholds. I’m making “handholes”, she thought giddily as she climbed.

Once she’d gotten far enough up, she braced herself using one of her new “handholes” and rammed her left shoulder into the wall. She heard stone crunch against metal and ceramic and the wall crumbled inward. Instead of falling in with the rest of the wall, she managed to keep her grip on the wall with one hand, legs dangling below her.

Sarah examined her handiwork. The wall was now blasted open in a roughly meter-and-a-half tall oval. The drop onto the floor inside the ruin was a little less than four meters; it seemed the building was deeper than she’d thought. The floor was stone with large puddles of water and the room—whatever it used to be—was now mostly just piles of dirt and puddles of water. Sarah didn’t spare much attention for the inside of the ruin: her Oni-Blooded graft had a timer on it that had nearly run down.

She still had the chain of the meteor hammer she’d created gripped in her right hand, so she mentally extended the chain of the weaponform with her anima and poured tensa into it. Then, just as she felt the strength leaving her, she yanked the spike out of the wall of the ruin and made one last titanic throw, aimed in a forty-five-degree arc away from where Kimi-Lim had been last. The spiked tip whistled through the air and then crunched into a tree trunk or something. Sarah tugged on the chain and felt whatever it was on the other end resist.

Then, the Oni-Blooded graft ended and she shrank back to her normal size, feeling a wave of vertigo come over her. She didn’t let vertigo keep her from refilling her tensa pool, though. That Oni-Blooded graft had cost a whole 5 kilosparks—nearly half her entire tensa pool—and she needed to refill as quickly as she could. She formed the Ten Star Vortex tensa gathering technique and leaned against the wall, taking deep breaths. As she calmed, she also felt the ambient tensa start flowing into her, helping her regain her composure.

By the time she’d recovered a bit from her tensa expenditure, Sunspot was poking his glowing head into the room, casting crazy shadows from his reflections in the puddles on the floor. The roar of the waterfall was muted within the room, even though a curtain of water obscured the new opening.

Sarah pushed herself off the wall and took quick stock of the room, forming her anima into her favorite weaponform: the Master Sword. When the familiar shape crystallized into her hand, she felt a pang of homesickness that nearly took her breath away.

She was holding the sword in her prosthetic hand, so she was properly startled when Sunspot licked her right hand. She took a deep breath again and patted the Sundog’s head, getting another appreciative lick. “Where’s Kimi-Lim?” Sarah asked Sunspot, scratching behind his ear and trying to peer through the sheet of water to see where her friend was. “Did they have more trou—”

The elf skipped into the room casually, twirling a glittering silvery umbrella playfully. Kimi-Lim was completely dry, their orange and yellow robes pristine. Even their braided hair was in perfect shape. Sarah gaped. Kimi-Lim shrugged nonchalantly, “I tried it your way, but…” she looked around, “Your way worked for you, and that’s what’s important! Let’s check this place out. Be on your guard though: likely monsters are lairing here.”

“How did you…?”

“Don’t you remember? My Solar Step graft.” Kimi-Lim hesitated a moment before they sighed and shook their head with a look of—Sarah couldn’t read the look. “This is one of those lessons you’re going to need to learn now. You must learn your teammates’ grafts. You have to be aware of what they can do so that you can take that into account.”

“Right,” Sarah said, remembering when they’d first met and Kimi-Lim had floated them both down a cliff on a platform made of solid light. “I’ll remember that. Hey, before we go any further, can you tell me what a convergence is?”

“Convergences happen when you use your grafts in unexpected or creative ways and they end up synergizing in a new way. You end up modifying how the original graft or grafts work—if you do get convergences, it’s always a good idea to adopt them: they make your grafts operate in unexpected ways.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Sarah protested. “I can’t have it doing some random bullshit every time I need to use it.”

“Not unexpected for you,” Kimi-Lim said ominously. “But it’s part of pretty much any Imperial Reborn’s basic training to know how every Common or Uncommon graft operates. You want every edge you can get against those bastards and since you’ve got enhanced System access, it’d be foolish not to use it. But you’re going to have to play their game better than them and they’ve been doing it for thousands of years.”

“You say that like you don’t use the System,” Sarah said.

“I both use it and don’t,” Kimi-Lim said cryptically. “The important thing is that you use it. And because you made that choice early, you’re stuck with it. Only the orcwallah goes completely without the System.”

Sarah mulled that over, bringing up the message in the System again and accepting the convergence. Her mind was barely even on the message, so the effect caught her by surprise. She felt a fizzing numbness in her head like a limb falling asleep, but in her brain—the odd pins and needles tickly itch was maddening. It quickly escalated until the tingling numbness had spread through her entire body, then ratcheted up in intensity until it felt like there was a hive of wasps just under her skin, stinging her everywhere from the inside. She abruptly lost consciousness.

She came to a moment later, her fainting spell ended almost as soon as it had begun. Sarah had only begun to slump when she regained her senses. She felt like she’d been reset like an old Nintendo or a router, Did you turn the unit on and off? “What was that?” Sarah muttered woozily, blinking and rubbing at her face.

Kimi-Lim turned and was walking through a doorway, getting ready to explore another part of the ruin. Their voice echoed back down the hall, “The System can play rough with your brain—don’t forget that. It’s just one of the many reasons the orcwallah doesn’t trust it. Now come on! Remember that we’re actually on a schedule!”

Sarah looked around for the Master Sword she’d made, then realized two things: when she’d fallen unconscious it had disappeared, and she never needed to look for the damn thing since she could always make a new one. A new Master Sword formed in her hand and she used her Edge That Cuts Anything graft, running her finger along the edge of the sword and leaving behind a silvery, glowing outline. She went out of the room via the only other exit beside her hole in the wall.

Kimi-Lim was only a few meters ahead, Sunspot sniffing around everywhere. The little room—Was it a supply closet? Sarah wondered idly—opened out into a long hallway where the floor was covered in a few centimeters of water. There were a few doorways in the hall that they poked into, but they were all repeats of the first room they’d broken into: variations on small, dank, and slimy.

They combed through more rooms and hallways, but they didn’t find anything interesting. “Seems like a dead end,” Sarah said after the eighteenth empty room. She kicked at the latest pile of wet, dead leaves she’d combed through, scowling at the clumps. “Why are we still here?”

Kimi-Lim was poking at some rotting plaster on the opposite wall, for all the world looked like they were entranced by a large patch of mold growing there. “This isn’t mold,” the elf said, running their finger through it and watching it drip slowly from their fingertip, “It’s slime.” They went very quiet for a while, squinting at the slime. Eventually, they asked, “Do you think this is blue or turquoise?”

“Uh, is that important?” Sarah asked nervously.

“It’s potentially life-altering.”

Sarah peered at the dark patch of slime on the wall. “I have no idea.”