Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

SARAH AVERY VASILIAS, GREAT HOUSE SCION, REBORN LVL 5

CATACLYSM MOUNTAINS, KILDARI FEDERATION

Sarah stumbled as she materialized into reality. She was blinded by the suddenly bright sun. Overwhelming, oven-like heat nearly took her breath away (it was hotter than when she and Kimi-Lim had faced the manticore) but Sarah managed to keep her balance enough not to fall off the ledge.

She saw a strange disturbance in the air almost exactly where she had materialized and then Kimi-Lim was there, stumbling a little as they adjusted to the terrain. Sarah focused on the elf for a moment, testing something. Sure enough, a System popup appeared now that they were out of the Tutorial Realm.

Kimi-Lim Uilui, Integration Architect

Party Profile

Rank/Level: Stone 7

Class: Light Mage

Tensa Pool: 22 ks

Known Grafts: Sun Dog [Sun], Solar Step [Dance], Night Needles [Dark], Laser [Focus], Spirit Friends [Mystic], Spectrum Spray [Rainbow], Love of the Light [Renewal]

Wow, Sarah thought, Kimi-Lim is just level 7 but they’re so much more at home in their power than I am. They make seven grafts look like seventy with how they use them in so many different ways. Is there that much of a difference?

They had just managed to escape the Tutorial Realm where Kimi-Lim had been trying to rip out the AI’s brain that was keeping the whole place together. Sarah was supposed to be distracting Gammon while Kimi-Lim took the AI’s brain for some arcane purpose. But instead of a climactic battle to the end, she had the conversation she’d always wished she’d had with him while the world fell apart. With it, not him. Gammon hadn’t been a human, but a projection from an artificial intelligence called Entresis that was running the Tutorial Realm. It looked like they’d escaped, but where…?

Before she could do more than wonder for a moment, she was beset with System messages that popped up and demanded her attention. Right as she was shifting her focus to them, the tensa within her began heating and speeding up until it was going so fast and so hot it felt like she was going to light on fire from the inside. All of a sudden she was lit from within by what felt like nuclear fire. It was terrible and wonderful in equal measure and she knew she was probably screaming as it happened.

The pain and ecstasy semeed to go on forever for Sarah. A wild image of Christopher Lambert with lightning striking his katana as he knelt in the rain with sparks raining down all around him, then the image was obliterated by another wave of ecstatic pain shot through her.

She finally managed to come to her senses as she mastered the new sensation surging within her. She felt…stronger. Far stronger than she ever had before. Not only that, but everything around her seemed sharper and clearer. It was incredible. The System messages demanded her attention, wiggling in her vision insistently.

Finally able to focus on them, she read them, if only to get them out of her view.

Tutorial Completion: Deferred Attribute Increase

Through diligent training and System Achievements, your Attributes have increased! You were in a Tutorial Realm for… 8 years, 2 months, 19 days.

Your Attribute increases are as follows: Dominion +15; Speed +8; Precision +8; Growth +10; Arcana +12

Congratulations! Your tensa pool is now 39.7 kilosparks.

Your Attribute Increase breakdown is as follows:

+1 Attribute for all Attributes per year spent in Tutorial Realm (total +8)

+3 Dominion for training with master trainer [Gammon] on graft The Edge that Cuts Anything

+1 Dominion for Achievement: First Monster Kill

+1 Dominion for Achievement: Climb the Vine

+1 Dominion for Achievement: Bisected a Manticore

+2 Growth for Achievement: Graft Convergence Before Stone Rank

+2 Arcana for Achievement: Ethershard Absorption During a Boss Fight

+2 Arcana for Achievement: Graft Convergence Before Stone Rank

She didn’t bother reading through the Achievements, only acknowledging them to get them out of her way. The new power coursing through her felt incredible, but she wondered at what cost it had truly come. She had been gone for eight years now. Even if she didn’t look any older, she certainly felt older, even with the incredible energy burning within. And now…now she was in the ‘real’ world. Sarah stared around her, feeling her stomach sink as she recognized the bleak surroundings.

The landscape was utterly arid and barren with what few plants there were growing tenaciously out of cracks in the red and grey rocks. Her System maps identified them as being somewhere in the middle of a place called the Cataclysm Mountains. The ledge they’d appeared on was eerily familiar to Sarah. It was three meters long and two meters wide on the side of a gut-churningly tall sheer sandstone cliff. With a start, she realized that they’d appeared exactly where she had first appeared in Nolm, on the clifftop with the angry bird set to attack her.

The footing was slick with dust and grit and the ground was strewn with a scattering of small rocks. The nest that Sarah remembered as being there was gone, and she felt a stab of disappointment. She’d wanted to get back at the Starlight Crane that had cut her arm up so badly when she’d originally appeared in Nolm eight years ago. Or was it only a few months ago? Sarah felt a little dizzy as she thought about the time dilation in the Tutorial Realm, so she pushed the thought away; it was a terrible idea to be dizzy right now.

Kimi-Lim looked around, their face a little paler than usual, “We did it!” They said, voice choked with emotion. They looked up at Sarah, their big golden eyes wet with unshed tears, “We’re out of the Tutorial Realm! This is the real world!” They sat down with their back to the cliff wall and closed their eyes, tears leaking out the corners. “Thank you,” they said, too quietly for Sarah to hear.

“So, did you get it? Entresis’ brain?” She asked, sitting down next to Kimi-Lim.

Kimi-Lim had never put it away once they’d pulled it out of its housing. They held it up to Sarah, inviting her to take a look, but not for even a moment relinquishing it. The “brain” was about the size of a brick and was made of a metal that swirled with constantly moving rainbow light. It was covered in intricate geometric designs and there were several different ports arranged on one of the narrow ends.

“This is it?” Sarah asked skeptically. “It looks like a big rainbow brick. I mean, I could see it in a head shop somewhere, but is this really an AI’s… brain?”

Kimi-Lim laughed, their eyes tracing the designs on the brain intently. “This really is an AI’s mind. It’s the core of the thing that ran the Tutorial Realm and I’m going to repurpose it for something that will be a benefit to the world—no offense,” Kimi-Lim said. “This is what’s going to enable me to become powerful enough to save my home.” Kimi-Lim looked at it for a little while longer before putting it away, tucking it into their limited Inventory space for safekeeping.

“We can’t stay here on this cliff, I’m getting sick just looking out over this drop and I’m not usually affected by heights,” Sarah said uncomfortably, “we’ll have to either climb up or down.” She looked over the edge of their little ledge, judging the distance to non-vertical ground.

It looked like the cliff turned into a steep mountainside maybe two or three hundred meters down with a lot of scree and loose rock. Above her, the climb seemed maybe a little easier; it was shorter anyway. The clifftop was maybe a hundred meters above them, but the rock was just as sheer going up as it was going down and Sarah was no rock climber. She was sure if she tried, she’d likely fall to her death.

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Kimi-Lim said. “Remember when we first met?” Sarah blushed at the memory.

She’d only been on the Skyland for a few minutes before she disturbed a forest giant. The monster had been far too much for her at the time, so she’d run from it, heedless of her surroundings until she ended up falling off a cliff in a style reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote. Kimi-Lim’s grafts had prevented her from making a Sarah-shaped hole in the ground.

“It feels so good to feel Vil’s real, actual, unsynthesized sunlight on my skin!” Kimi-Lim sighed, spreading their arms wide, bathing in the light.

Sarah felt Kimi-Lim’s anima brush hers as a kind of ephemeral spiderweb—subtle but unmistakable. Sarah’s tensa pool was full, so she’d configured hers in a perceptive bubble, but it was so barren here that all she’d sensed were rocks and dirt. It wasn’t long before Kimi-Lim’s anima retracted somewhat, and Sarah could no longer feel its ephemeral touch on her psyche. “Feel better?” Sarah asked drily.

Kimi-Lim smiled sunnily and nodded. They produced their Silverstaff with a flourish and held out their hand for Sarah to take.

“I miss Sunspot,” Sarah said wistfully, “though I guess he wouldn’t have a great time climbing.”

“Oh, Sunspot would be just fine out here,” Kimi-Lim touched two spots in the air with their staff and two discs of yellow-orange light appeared. The elf stepped up onto one and gestured at the other for Sarah, “But you’re right, there’s not enough room to summon him. Let’s get up there and see if we have a bit more space to stretch out.”

Sarah stepped onto the light disc, still marveling that what amounted to an insubstantial movie special effect could hold her weight. With a sweep of their hand, Kimi-Lim began levitating them directly up the cliff. Sarah as a rule wasn’t afraid of heights, but Kimi-Lim’s enthusiasm for feeling the sun had them going way too fast for Sarah’s comfort.

There aren’t any handholds! She thought, doing her best not to fall off the disk. Her suddenly-increased Attributes made this a far easier task than she’d been anticipating and she almost overcorrected for her lack of overcorrection. That would have been a really embarassing way to go, she thought as they reached the top. Kimi-Lim lightly skipped off their light disk, looking around curiously.

Sarah wasn’t so graceful. The trip had made her knees a little wobbly, so she stumbled a bit as the light disk deposited her at the top of the cliff. When she regained her balance and took a look around, she discovered that it wasn’t exactly an inspiring view. Her heart fell as she saw that they’d climbed up into a tiny valley of dirt, rock, and gravel with the occasional large boulder. The only plants that grew here were small, twisted, and brown with long thorns. Even though they had climbed up a cliff to get here, they were surrounded by enormous mountains of barren red rock.

“Welcome to the Cataclysm Mountains,” Kimi-Lim said brightly.

“With a name like that, I really don’t know what I was expecting,” she remarked, gesturing at the hostile, broken landscape. “They weren’t going for subtlety when they named the place.”

Sarah joined Kimi-Lim, still a little unsteady on her feet when an unexpectedly strong gust of wind came howling up out of the valley blowing dust and rock in a huge plume. The wind was so strong it made her stumble back a few steps until she was nearly teetering on the cliff’s edge again. Kimi-Lim caught Sarah’s greatcoat lapel in one tiny fist and hauled her back before she could be blown off the edge.

“Holy shit!” Sarah gasped once her adrenaline allowed her to speak past the lump in her throat. “What the fuck?! What is with this wind?!” Sarah shouted as she scooted away from the cliff’s edge.

The wind was not only strong, it was also frigid. She shivered violently as another blast of wind cut right through her enchanted leather greatcoat like it wasn’t there, this time coming from behind as if the valley were breathing them in. The next moment, the wind died down and the sun beat down on them, once more unbearably hot. “Let’s get out of here before we get blown off the edge!”

“Good idea,” Kimi-Lim agreed, suiting actions to words. They started to make their way away from the cliff’s edge and down into the valley, “One of the many side effects of the ‘Cataclysm’ that happened here were these unnatural weather patterns. It’s one of the reasons the plants here,” they gestured with their Silverstaff at a particularly gnarled-looking plant with blood-red thorns hiding amidst stringy, dried-out brown leaves, “are so tough and thorny. But it’s not the plants we need to watch out for.”

“Who do we need to watch out for? And if we need to watch out for anyone, shouldn’t we be going stealthily? I know the Blanket of Shadows anima configuration and I think I could probably extend it to you if I needed to.” Sarah looked nervously around, but the landscape was relentlessly the same: barren and rock-strewn.

“No point in being stealthy,” Kimi-Lim replied. “I’m pretty sure they already know we’re here. We’re not too far from one of their utun grazing areas.” They pointed at the miserable plants dotting the otherwise barren landscape, “This place is practically a garden, relatively speaking, and it’s certain to have a toh-yeh patrolling nearby. If we try stealth, it won’t work, and we’ll almost certainly be killed before they ask questions.”

“And they won’t kill us if we’re not hiding?”

“That’s what I’m hoping,” Kimi-Lim said. “But just in case, it might be a good idea to let me do any talking. Any member of the orcwallah is going to probably want to kill you on sight.”

Sarah stopped walking for a second, but Kimi-Lim kept going. “Wait, why do they want to kill--?” She stopped, remembering how the Empire that turned Kimi-Lim’s home into undead monsters had decided to destroy their identity with a magical bomb to label them as monsters and then invade and destroy their homeland. “Shit,” she said bitterly. She couldn’t even blame them: if it’d been her in their shoes, she was pretty sure she’d feel the same way.

Despite her sympathy for their plight, the potential for hostile eyes to be on them made Sarah’s skin crawl. She felt like she had to hunch down or find somewhere to hide. She hated the feeling. “So, what’s the plan? We just keep walking until we run into someone who may or may not try to kill me. I think you can see why I might have some concerns.”

Kimi-Lim laughed and nodded, “Oh it’s not the best plan I’ve ever come up with, but it’s the only one I have right now. It’d be easier if you weren’t human, but at least you’re not ginpaari; the orcwallah won’t wait for a ginpaari to speak. They’re kill-on-sight.”

Sarah shook her head, worriedly scanning the barren landscape. “They sound terrible!” she exclaimed. “Why are we wandering around like this?”

Kimi-Lim sighed and rolled their eyes, “Because, we’ll die out here if we don’t get picked up by a toh-yeh—that’s an orcwallah team of Reborn—and that’s a certainty.” They gestured at the dead land everywhere, “This place is cursed. Like seriously bad. If you stay here too long without knowing how to avoid the bad places, then the fallout of the Cataclysm will seep into your bones and you’ll die just like the rest of their people did: in screaming agony as their tensa turned against them, hollowing them out to nothing. Or you could die in another of a million other ways, each as terrible as the last. That’s just one of the terrible things about this place.”

Sarah remembered Griffin’s mom, shriveled and dead on the floor of her cabin on the fateful night she and Griffin had met August Vasilias. Is that what happened to her? She wondered, Did August Vasilias curse Griffin’s mom like that? She shuddered, remembering the empty pits where her eyes had been. And what about your own Mom and Dad? But she wasn’t ready for that. She shied away from the pain like she’d touched a hot burner and focused on the barren landscape.

“And these people live here? Why would anyone want to do that?” Sarah asked.

Kimi-Lim shrugged, “What choice do they have? Who would take them in? The Painted Desert has been turned into an undead wasteland by Imperials and House Vasilias claims the lands to the south of these mountains while Bardoul claims the lands to the north. Where would they go?” She gestured to the dead land around them, “To us, this place looks lifeless and blasted. To the orcwallah… well, they’ve adapted to their home over the past two hundred years. They would see opportunity here.”

Sarah looked around at the brown and grey rock. She shivered and spat out fine dust as she was blasted with another frigid column of wind. The mountains loomed above them like sentinels, their bare peaks harsh and rigid against the glare of the hot sun. She had no idea what opportunity could be found here. Sarah and Kimi-Lim lapsed into a natural silence, conserving their breath for their trek. Save for a brief time when they stopped to let Kimi-Lim summon Sunspot again, they pressed on for, Sarah’s System clock reported, almost five hours.

Her mind inevitably turned to memories of home. Her friends. Griffin. Her family… Mom and Dad had been so supportive! They’d been expecting her to stop by the day after she’d left Earth forever. It was easy to find herself getting into a spiral out here where she was alternately freezing one minute and frying the next. Kimi-Lim’s family is gone too, Sarah thought grimly, this Empire has a lot to answer for. Including Earth. Her mouth hardened into a line as she unconsciously gritted her teeth. Especially this House Vasilias.