Mask of Humanity

‘If my memory serves, the tunnel should lead to the prisons. The prisons and the mines,’ said Kleos. ‘I don’t know how it’s all looking now, but that’s where undead who’d lost their purpose or annoyed one of the People were sent, as well as living prisoners with little value.’ It paused to think. ‘It’s probably not as secure as it used to be. With the general collapse of things here and the departure of the masters, the undead seem to have lost a lot of their awareness.’

Kleos seemed to think of the other undead as different and lesser to itself, a fact which Nicolai filed away.

‘Anything of use down there?’ he asked.

‘They dig out Oma crystals in the mines to feed to the Castle Core. There’s always been a big spiritual seam down there.’ Kleos paused, frowning, considering its words. ‘Since everything is still somewhat functioning and the undead regain their spirits each night, I’d say the Core is still online, therefore still being fed, and the seam must still be giving out Oma. You could get all the crystals you’d ever need down there, if you can deal with the Wardens.’

‘What are these Wardens? Are they tough?’

Kleos looked him over. ‘Tougher than you. I’d recommend hiding from them, though they might only capture you, instead of killing you. They wield Imbued chains, and are very effective at fighting or restraining with them.’

Neither capture nor death sounded optimal to Nicolai. The dark tunnel could wait. ‘Tomorrow, I will find a way to catch one of those flying archers. I’ll kill them and take their Imbued. Then I’ll use it to cross the gap and reach the library.’ He felt it was a reasonable plan, but he told Kleos in case the head had anything to add.

‘Good enough,’ said Kleos.

Nicolai nodded mutely and picked up the polearm, part of him wishing to continue practising, but forced himself to stop and let out an irritated breath, reminding himself it was too noisy. He knew he should sleep but during the conversation his grayness of thought had faded and now he was awake and wired.

He put the polearm on the table, well away from him in order to not tempt himself, then he sat beside the fire with his Seed in his hand, and took the time to connect to it, his mind drifting, merging with it, then separating.

Merge, separate, over and over. It wasn’t an easy process, each connection taking quite a bit of time and focus. But he felt sure that it was no different than any other skill he’d learned over his life. Ultimately, they all worked basically the same.

You explored the principles and fundamentals of a thing’s operation. You worked out the movements or acts you needed to perform. You learned which specific elements to focus on in order to do so with maximum efficiency. You practised, and practised, and practised, and took note of where you were improving and where you were not improving, and changed the method, and focused on specific parts, and gradually, you improved.

It was a process Nicolai found deeply satisfying no matter the skill, but especially so if it was one that would improve his combat abilities, fuelling his obsession to become the perfect warrior. Even centuries after the fact, he remembered his times spent training in MMA gyms, gun ranges, practise operations, drills and simulations, with an abiding fondness.

His comrades had thought him strange for the hours he had spent obsessively dry firing guns, drilling and drilling until the weapons had felt like extensions of himself. Their words had never bothered him. He knew he was strange.

Now his Seed found itself the target of his obsessive focus. He connected. He separated. His eyes were closed. The sense of his Seed consumed him. It was a living being, but it was very simple, focused on simple needs. It liked him, in fact more than that, the more they connected the more it felt like a part of him. His mind swam within it and he saw the word through its eyes, a grainy, blurry room lit by flickering firelight, the vague shape of his face above it, pale with dark hair.

‘I have a thought,’ a voice interrupted his silent communion with the Seed.

Nicolai turned his head, his eyes opening and settling onto Kleos. ‘Yes?’

The head twisted its lips thoughtfully. ‘Might be there’s something else you can do with that. There’s an innate ability all those with souls possess. It is called Soul Sense, or Spirit Sense. You have no soul. But your Seed may possess the ability.’

‘Is that so?’ Nicolai skin prickled and he tried in vain to keep the flash of eagerness from his features as excitement boiled in his guts. Something new to practice? ‘What does Soul Sense do, and how do I use it?’

‘For noviciates who possess souls, they simply focus on their soul, then push outwards from their body, try to move beyond the flesh, extending strings of awareness. With these tendrils you can sense the world around you, which can be very useful, if used well. As one grows their Cultivation, so their Soul Sense takes on new forms, gains new abilities.’

‘I will try.’ Nicolai closed his eyes and refocused on the Seed. He connected to it in only a minute, a huge improvement over the almost ten minutes it had taken him the very first time he consciously tried to connect.

From within the Seed, he pushed out, much as he’d pushed into the polearm, but this time into open air. His awareness transformed into something vague, a little worm that pushed out of the Seed and writhed around. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel its position relative to his body and his Seed, much as he would be able to feel the position of his arm were he to hold it outside of his vision. He felt his Mark tingle, and knew he’d completed another challenge.

From the tendril, he could taste the air, smell the air, feel the air. He extended it towards the ceiling, and when the tendril touched he felt the coolness of the stone, the weight and age of it.

Nicolai gradually explored the room with the tendrils. They seemed to work almost entirely on touch, only able to sense that which they came into contact with. But when they did touch on something, he was able to spread them over it and gain a solid understanding of what it was. He couldn’t see them, or see with them, and moving them felt like blindly questing around, but as he was able to sense their relation to his body he could know well-enough where they were.

‘Working?’ asked Kleos after a time.

‘It is.’ Nicolai grinned, opening his eyes.

‘Don’t go too far, the things outside might be able to feel them; if you were to draw too close.’

Nicolai nodded, and restrained himself. He was beginning to grow weary, the strain of connecting to his Seed and manipulating its Soul Sense beginning to show, so he dismissed his connection.

Tapping on his Mark revealed he’d completed the challenge: Use Soul Sense, and he gained another two Oma crystals, another points tag. That took him back up to fourteen crystals, and he now had fifteen points tags. The tags, at least, were stacking up nicely.

After adding these to his store, Nicolai placed Kleos in its jar, and curled up by the fire, closing his eyes, enjoying how its warmth sunk into his flesh. He drifted off, mind at peace.

###

Nicolai awoke hours later, feeling well-rested. The torch on the wall was burning a pale yellow. The fire had burned out in the night.

For a time, he sat there, lost in the vague misty thoughts of one just awoken, the events of the day before re-configuring themselves in his memory. His mind was always clearest in the morning. He thought of the second group of people, those who’d fled, who he hadn’t killed. He told himself it was a victory.

He didn’t want to kill innocent people, right? Wasn’t that the point of this new life? Or at least, one of the points. What was it he’d said to Kleos the other day? Something about new beginnings and doing better. Had he managed to stay on the ground and not go after them because he had been resisting the darkness, or it had it simply been defeated by the weakness of his body? Had he done good? Was he a better person?

Nicolai didn’t feel like a better person, not with the memories of blood and gore and death and the savage, thrilling exhilaration, still swimming just below conscious thought. He forced himself into action. Routine kept the dark at bay.

He rose, counted the skulls on the table, opened the door and thoroughly checked the entirety of the upstairs area then the banquet hall. Once done he returned and pulled Kleos from its jar to place it on the table. The head jerked awake, blinking its dreams away. Nicolai left it to it, moving into his morning routine, mind operating on automatic. Drink of water. Relieving himself in the bucket then putting the foul smelling thing in another room. Warm-up stretch. Cardio and body-weight exercises. Warm-down stretch.

As with the day before, he finished with a lengthy session spent practising with the footman’s mace, dancing with imaginary killers, and followed this by practising with the rapier and longsword he’d claimed, remembering forms he’d learned purely out of interest, long, long ago.

Back on Earth with its guns and bombs, he’d never imagined he might find himself needing to use his mastery of weapons, had always considered it a pointless indulgence, one of very few he’d allowed himself, and only then because he’d been able to sort-of justify it as being useful on the off-chance he ended up in a fight for his life in a museum.

Later on he’d taken a more active interest in these skills, when he took part in the VR battles as GRECKON had occasionally allowed. Now, all of that time, all that pointless indulgence, was paying off. The thought made him excessively happy.

By the end of it all he was relatively calm, as relaxed as he ever was. He held his Seed in his hand and focused. It was harder to connect to it this morning, which confused him because he felt in his calmer state of mind it should be easier, but he managed after a time. It seemed in good health, happy and relaxed. He pressed it gently against the footman’s mace and found the Seed’s stores of energy. Now it was waking up, upset he was using its energy, but it bent to his will and Nicolai injected a small stream of Oma into the wood.

It lit up, lines of pale light crawling over the polearm, and he felt the Oma transform then he made a vague gesture with the weapon as he’d seen the skeleton do. The wind emerged as a scattered burst instead of the sharp, controlled blast he’d imagined.

‘You need to shape it better,’ Kleos chimed in.

Nicolai glanced at the head. ‘I don’t understand what that means.' He raised an eyebrow. ‘Pretend I’m a child, or an animal.’

The head snorted. ‘Ok,’ it said, and from the way it looked at him he had the impression that was roughly what it thought of him anyway. Kleos chewed at its lip, thoughtful, then began to speak. ‘When we inject our Oma into an Imbued item or Symbiote, the tool will take that Oma and transform it into the Art. This is the crucial moment. You must enforce your will, and shape the forming Art as you intend. You can hold it, there, if you have the mental capacity, though the longer you hold it the more the Oma will disperse and the weaker the Art will be when launched.

‘Back in my day, we told novices to hold it as long as they could, as long as they had to to get the feel for it. Once they had a good grasp, they could try and shape it. The shaping is just a matter of will and imagination; think how you wish it to look and feel and act, and make it do so. As you release it, it is helpful to make some kind of gesture which matches or represents your intent.’

Nicolai nodded slowly. He reconnected to his Seed and pushed a little more Oma out of it, into his weapon. He felt it trying to twist into wind and surge out but he clamped down on it tight. It was like using a new muscle, a mental muscle, and the half-transformed Oma struggled powerfully against his inexperienced grip.

His teeth gritted with a faint swell of anger. I am in control, he told both the Oma and the anger. His grip on the energy firmed. A tight, directed burst of wind, straight ahead, he then told the energy, and imagined what that would look like, what that would feel like. Nicolai moved his body, trying to reinforce the shaping with his movement, jabbing the polearm forwards like a spear. It was hard to grip it properly as he had to be careful of where he held his Seed, trapped between his palm and the wood.

It wasn’t tightly controlled, but the gust of shrieking wind that came from his polearm went straight out in front of him as he’d commanded, a sudden wailing gust that stirred the air in the room.

Nicolai injected more Oma, and did the exact same again. The burst of wind came out smoother, stronger.

Again. Again. Each time Nicolai did a little better. The sensation of learning a new skill, of progressing, wrapped around him and he moved into a state of flow, his connection to the Seed, to the polearm, to the Oma, all of it clarifying and settling into his mind.

Time began to drift, and he began to wield the wind like an extension of his weapon, feeling it like an invisible part of the polearm, twisting to send sharp gusts sweeping low, shoving to send a wave of buffeting wind before him, grinning at the realisation he’d managed some of the moves the skeleton had used on him.

Suddenly his calm state was shattered as he felt his Seed’s unhappiness and pain, an awful sensation that dug into his skull with sharp little claws. Stopping and focusing on what he felt of it, he realised it was not only out of balance again, but also strained like an overused muscle. His eyes widened. Had he damaged it?