Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

SARAH AVERY VASILIAS, GREAT HOUSE SCION, REBORN LVL 5

SKYLAND

“Take a good look at it,” Kimi-Lim said, gesturing grandly out at the vista on display beyond the cliff’s edge, “that’s the Valley of Entresis, and it’ll be the last time we see it!”

They were peering down into a beautiful green valley with well-manicured gardens and pristine buildings shining brightly in the sun. The buildings looked sleek and futuristic, like something out of Star Trek, right down to the random flying vehicles that seemed to be busily carrying out something important down there. They couldn’t see any people walking around anywhere, and no matter how long Sarah watched, nobody ever entered or exited the buildings.

“We’re not going down there?” Sarah had her new Vindaari School InfiniBow out with a glowing red arrow on its laser string. “I thought that’s the whole point of what we were doing. That we’re going to the Valley of Entresis to kill the Guardian or whatever. Take his shit, be boss bitches—though not in that order since we’re already boss.” The Vindaari School Archer’s Greatcoat felt incredible on her—not too big not too small, and it never got too hot; all in all, she was enjoying the new gear she and Kimi-Lim had grabbed from the giant slimes.

“I think it’s about time for you to learn a little bit more about how we’re going to go about this whole thing. We’ll walk and talk, so as usual, follow me!” The elf skipped away from the cliff’s edge and back into the jungle that grew all over the skyland.

Sarah followed, shaking her head as she had to—yet again—follow after Kimi-Lim like a puppy. Sunspot followed them both, glowing as brightly as the morning sun. He barked and happily dove into the underbrush nose-first, snuffling into the plants, clearly after one of the countless insects or roots or whatever it was he’d suddenly decided was so important.

Sarah didn’t ask any more questions. She was nervous about any monsters nearby since they’d seen signs of forest giants in the area and Sarah had no desire for a forest giant reunion.

“Do you know how old civilization on Nolm is?” Kimi-Lim asked abruptly. They’d apparently found whatever it was they’d been searching for, so the elf had decided to resume their discussion.

“This is a really weird way of explaining why we’re not going down to the valley. I mean there’s context and then there’s context,” she said drily.

“It’s relevant!” Kimi-Lim reassured her. “The answer—give or take about a million years—is something like 65 million years.”

“Are you kidding?” Sarah said incredulously. “That’s…I mean, the dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago. That’s geological time. Not civilizational. And I’m now hearing myself saying that as we trek through a magical floating skyland in a place that’s generated by an enchanted artificial intelligence to keep us stuck in a time loop so that I’ll exit this place the moment I decide my magical power training is sufficiently advanced. I retract my complaint.

“But, uh. What’s that got to do with the valley?” Sarah chopped at a big leaf in front of her face with her bow irritably.

“What I’ve said was that civilization has been around for around 65 million years. We know that because of what’s referred to in professional circles as the strata. These are layers of civilizations that have come before us and the artifacts, ruins, and remains that they left behind once they disappeared.” Kimi-Lim stopped in front of a particularly large and gnarly tree with trees that stretched several meters further than any of the other jungle trees.

Sarah paused, trying to imagine that. “So, you’re saying that if you dig down, instead of seeing dirt and bedrock, you’ll break into some old wizard’s tower?”

Kimi-Lim shrugged, “It’s entirely possible. You have to dig down a bit further than that. Usually, the strata start at around fifty to a hundred meters underground. That’s the last civilization to have perished in a Cataclysm, but that’s not important in this context—I can tell you have questions! Patience.

“Those strata layer one on top of the other over the eons and attract tensa and draw it down into weird ancient engines or to power rituals that are still ongoing, long after the people who started them were destroyed. And sometimes, the tensa collects and compresses into itself, pouring more and more and more energy into one focused point. Those points turn into Dungeons if they’re given long enough to mature.”

“Point of order,” Sarah said, walking up to Kimi-Lim and poking at the big tree, “a dungeon is a place you put prisoners because of crimes they committed.”

Kimi-Lim nodded, “Oh, that’s originally what they were used for: prisoner disposal. You throw an unarmed person into a Dungeon with all their tensa drained, they’ll get disposed of pretty quickly. Dungeons are unique kinds of creatures that have multi-phased existences: they’re places and creatures and artifacts.” Sunspot trotted over and sniffed at the tree, lifting his leg and lighting a few leaves on fire.

Kimi-Lim stamped out the little blaze and said, “Step back.”

Sarah took a few big steps back as Kimi-Lim pressed a few knots on the twisted trunk of the tree. A few seconds later, the entire tree glided upward smoothly on a meter-wide pillar of shining metal. It stopped after it reached about two and a half meters and an elevator door opened up as soon as it stopped.

Sarah stared at it nonplussed for a long moment after Kimi-Lim entered the elevator. Eventually, she sighed and pressed a button on her bow, and it collapsed with a satisfying, Transformers-like origami kind of folding until it was the size and shape of a pack of playing cards with a button on one end. She kept it ready in her hand but stepped into the little elevator car right next to Kimi-Lim. Sunspot hopped in after her, twisting around both their legs a few times before sitting directly on Sarah’s feet. The elevator doors shut, and the car was illuminated in soft, directionless light.

Kimi-Lim reached out to the blank metal wall and pressed one delicate finger to a spot that was indistinguishable to Sarah from any other spot. A little glowing rune appeared where they pressed the spot on the wall, then faded away and Sarah got the sense that they started to move down.

“Where are we going and how did you know that would happen?” Sarah asked. “I feel like we’re ignoring quite a bit here.”

“Dungeons are incredibly valuable,” Kimi-Lim said, continuing their original point and ignoring Sarah’s question. “They produce unique monsters, infused items, rare materials, and the potential to unlock whatever secrets might be contained within their rooms. But before a Dungeon will do any of that,” Kimi-Lim held up their finger, forestalling Sarah’s interruption, “that Dungeon Core has to be subdued and integrated. That means that the Dungeon Boss has to be defeated and an integration architect has to be brought in to integrate the Core. I’m an integration architect.

“And I knew it would be here because I’ve been searching for this place ever since I got here and now we’re here!"

"So where does it go? And I thought you were a Light Mage,” Sarah pointed out, “that’s what your Class says anyway.”

“A Class is important, but it’s not what I am. I went to the Academy for fifty years to study spellcraft before I was Reborn. I was the very top of the very top of the elite who went to the Academy—you have to be to become an integration architect. They’re some of the most in-demand wizards that exist because, without an integration architect, you can’t bring the Dungeon under your control. Once you have the Dungeon under your control, you can direct the materials that get created, the monsters that protect it—everything. They’re so important in the Empire that subduing and maintaining Dungeon Cores is the primary responsibility of the Reborn.”

Sarah chewed on that for a moment but was interrupted by the elevator stopping and the doors sliding silently open. The room they emerged into was a mostly empty room with pastel-toned, color-shifting walls that looked like they were made of glass. The walls emitted a subtle luminescence making it seem like the light came from everywhere and nowhere in a weird kind of video-gamey way. It felt like a rainbow-hued prison; but Kimi-Lim didn’t seem alarmed, even when the elevator/pillar retracted into the ceiling as silently as it had arrived.

“Uh, what now?” Sarah asked, feeling a bit nervous.

Kimi-Lim knelt and took a small statue of an open door made out of black marble from their BOTI Bag. They touched it briefly and then Sarah felt a weird tightening on her skin, like an electric charge was buzzing in the air. Kimi-Lim placed the gate statue on the ground outside of the elevator door and only then stepped out of the elevator. The whole room lurched a little, even though nothing moved at all. Sarah looked down at the little door statue and saw that the doorway was glowing as if it opened into someplace incredibly bright.

The elf stood back up and smiled, “Now it’s safe to enter! If we’d tried earlier, it would’ve been…bad. Anyway, I became an integration architect, but before I could go back home and get into my career, the Empire happened to my homeland. Integration architects require some heavy-duty computing power and data storage for their spells, never mind the tensa batteries for the heavy disenchant/re-enchantment work. That equipment would have been waiting for me but the Empire prevented that from happening.”

“And we’re going to find that stuff in this empty rainbow room?” Sarah asked, nervously stepping over the threshold of the elevator and into the room.

She paused, flinching a little as she expected something—she didn’t know what—to happen. But nothing happened. She ran her hand along the wall, and it felt exactly like clean, high-quality glass.

“Is the computer in the walls? Or are there batteries hidden somewhere?”

“Not quite,” Kimi-Lim strode to the middle of the room with Sunspot heeling right at their side. They drew a sparkling, glowing circle of light with their silverstaff. “We’re in a very special place, a place that the System would prefer we didn’t know about. It’s just on the edge of this paradigm, kind of like a bubble or a pimple. It was created by the System for these Tutorial zones, and they house the animating spirit running this place: the AI subsystem called Entresis. We’re about to yank Entresis’ brain out so that it can become my new Integration Platform.” They continued drawing with light in the circle they’d already drawn with quick, expert movements.

Sarah watched uneasily as Kimi-Lim’s diagram kept getting more and more complex. The elf was pouring tensa into the diagram, though Sarah couldn’t tell what effect it was having. She looked around the room, but nothing else was happening. Sunspot sniffed around the perimeter of the room, his tail wagging back and forth in a very businesslike manner. He made one complete circuit, then sniffed a particular spot on the floor against the wall exactly like every other spot, circled it twice, then flopped over and yawned hugely before closing his eyes and falling immediately asleep.

“Sometimes, I’m really jealous of that dog,” Sarah said.

“I’m always jealous of Sunspot. His existence is so pure! You might as well get comfortable because this is going to take a while,” Kimi-Lim said. Sunspot’s tail thumped once or twice as he heard his name in his sleep, but he didn’t move otherwise. Kimi-Lim made a pinching gesture at the floating light show and the entire diagram shrank and collapsed into itself into a single, hand-sized rune glowing with white-hot energy. “It’s fiddly work, but it needs an exact hand and tons of tensa.” They pointed their Silverstaff and the rune was sucked into it, making it pulse with silvery light. As it did, the rune appeared on the staff, glowing with argent light.

“What are you doing?” Sarah asked. “It’s not a graft—or not only a graft. What’s the deal with the runes?” She started pacing around the small room, avoiding Sunspot as he napped and tried to ignore the stifling feeling of being closed in.

“This is a spell, sort of. Most spells get constructed and then broken down and stored in my Spellweaver on my wrist,” they held up their left hand, with the silvery bracer on it, “but this is a dynamic spell. I couldn’t load it into the Spellweaver because there were too many variables that had to be accounted for in the construction. Spellweavers are great at storing spells that have general utility or only do the one thing that they do, but if you want to customize anything about it, you need to construct it yourself. The Silverstaff is used for dynamic casting; I made it myself at the Academy. It’s a little beefy for a Silverstaff since it can store up to thirty megasparks of tensa, but I think it’s worth it.”

“Cool cool cool…So why did you need me? We come here, go to a secret elevator and you make a spell out of light runes, and then boom, we’re done?” Sarah shrugged, “I mean, I’m down for that if that’s what’s up, but it’s a bit anticlimactic.”

Kimi-Lim laughed lightly, finishing another rune and positioning it above the first one then continued to the third rune diagram. “This is a multi-phase project. This spell is the first phase: it’s going to extend a bridge of reality into the zone where Entresis’ brain is stored. But I’ll need to get a fix on it first, which means I need to store the spell in these runes for just a little while—it’s why I’m overcharging the damn things so much.

“Once I get the spell mostly done, I’ll open up the gate, but that’ll mean that Entresis’ avatar will get a fix on us and pay us a visit.”

“Entresis’ avatar?” Sarah said, pausing her pacing. She felt a tingling in her palms as almost without thought, she made her anima into her Master Sword weaponform. It was awkward holding the sword with the card-sized collapsed InfiniBow, so she dismissed it, letting it dissolve away. Kimi-Lim was too absorbed in their spellcraft to pay much attention.

“You already know it pretty well. You did spend several years being trained by it, remember?”

“Oh. Right. Gammon.”

Another rune was sent with the other three and Kimi-Lim started on a new rune. “Yeah, Gammon. And it’ll be pissed. As soon as Gammon arrives, you’re going to need to keep it distracted so that I can finish my bridge spell. Then, we’ll both run down the bridge and into the vault where Entresis resides. I’ll rip out its brain and we’ll pop right out of this reality. Then, while the Tutorial Zone collapses, we’ll ride your Quest exit on out of here, and zing, zang, zoom, we’re gone!”

“Zing, zang, zoom?” Sarah winced. As plans went, this was worse than most.