NOVEL WEB 392. Secret Tunnel
They plunged into the earth. It wasn't his first time, or second, or third, so Ike expected the jolt as Wisp caught them with a spider thread. They still weren't anywhere near the hole's bottom, though, so she released it, then fired another at the opposite fall, slowing their fall by fits and starts, ensuring they never slammed into any side of the tunnel's walls by catching opposite sides of the wall every time. Despite Mag's twittering about wings being superior, he was forced to circle down in a tight spiral, descending at a dizzying spin, until he finally gave up on looking cool and did the pigeon thing where he spread his wings just long enough to slow his drop, tucked them, then dropped again. Occasionally, he drifted too far toward one wall or another, and had to flipturn to face the opposite direction so he could continue dropping again without hitting the wall in an undignified thump.
At last, they reached the bottom. A wide open tunnel opened in both directions, vanishing out from under the city in one direction, and burrowing deeper under it in the other. Bits of rock and crags of earth cut in from the walls, the walls unfinished, and the ground underfoot was cracked and strewn with rocks, save for a path in its center, where four ranks of boots had pounded it flat. The boots were all regular size, and took the same size steps, left behind by a regiment of perfect puppets marching under the region, toward the city. Ike knelt and looked it over, then dusted his hands and stood, shaking his head. "So I guess if marriage and puppetification didn't work, he had the backup of the army?"
"You think he's that rational?" Wisp asked. "He flattened the Prince's region because the people rebelled against their lazy-ass leader. He strikes me as a scorched-earth kind of guy, even when he doesn't have to."
"You're right. He's like a little kid, flipping the board when the game doesn't go his way. Now that I've destroyed his king puppet, what says he doesn't flip the board?" Ike muttered.
"Can't he just build a new one? Honestly, why'd he even have those artisans? Isn't he a puppetmaker?" Wisp pointed out.
"He is a puppetmaker, but he needed to fool an entire city full of mages, and high-tier ones at that, who would be constantly scrutinizing the king to figure out his mood and intentions, let alone checking to see if he's a puppet. I could imagine him needing help to make something that exquisite," Ike pointed out.
"Yeah, but is that Brightbriar?"
Ike frowned. "How do you mean?"
Wisp gestured. "Does he trust anyone to do anything important? And here he is, throwing the king to be made by some random puppet artisans. Does that sound like Brightbriar to you?"
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"Huh," Ike muttered. She had a point. Brightbriar was the kind of guy who felt the need to do everything with his own hands, not the kind of guy who'd just shrug and say, 'oh, I trust you to do that.' Some of the other stuff he'd seen at the artisans' place made sense: the hidden weapons and research things, where Brightbriar surely didn't have enough time or inspiration to come up with those on his own, so had no option but to reach out to someone else. But something like the king's puppet, where all he needed was an exquisite puppet, trusting someone else then? "Maybe the nobles would've realized what he was doing if they sensed his mana on it," he tried, but he knew it was a weak excuse. Brightbriar surely had ways of disguising that. He was at least that paranoid. So why had he farmed out the making of the king?
Unless he had something more important to do, Ike thought, and his stomach twisted. How close was Brightbriar to realizing his goal? Did Ike even factor into that? He didn't know what would happen if the greater being awakened, but he felt like it wasn't anything good.
It's me. I'm a part of it. How bad could it be? he tried to reassure himself, then grimaced, glancing at Wisp and Mag. He ran with a maneating spider and a crazy bird who thought it was fun to build a nest in the middle of skulls, and he was a self-described savage. Most of the other fragments he'd met weren't outright evil, but they weren't good people, either. The King and Accais, the archer, were pompous. Accais blindly believed in Brightbriar's future, and the King was egoistical and borderline narcissistic. Rosamund was self-centered and brash. The Prince was indolent to the point of ruin, where he'd turned a blind eye and done nothing as his country crumbled. The babies had done nothing wrong, but their spirits were so full of resentment that they had clung to this earth and attacked him for bothering them. They hadn't been able to pass on, but had all clung to that hatred past their death.
It's not a great record for the greater being to be a good person, he thought to himself. Then again, maybe it was because the greater being had been fragmented into a thousand pieces that none of the pieces were good people. They were all incomplete, unwhole beings, missing some fundamental piece of themselves. Ike had felt that himself before, that sense of being incomplete. But if he was complete, if all the pieces came together, did they become something better and more whole? Or did they just become… more of what they already were, without anything greater coming together out of the fragments? Just a self-centered, narcissitic, lazy, resentful, savage idiot who had nothing to offer to the world?
Ike chuckled under his breath to himself. Oh boy. I sure hope that's not what the greater being is, or else… or else, I might understand why someone tore that down to create the System and this new world.
"What?" Wisp asked, glancing over.
"Oh, nothing. I was just thinking that I might have figured out why the greater being got killed the first time."
"Is it your sparkling personality?" she snarked.
"I've survived this long."
"By some miracle," she added.
Ike narrowed his eyes at her.
She grinned. "I'm just saying. If you weren't crazy strong, you'd probably be dead." A pause. "I mean, me too, so don't take it too hard."
"Thanks, Wisp," Ike said sarcastically.
"Hey, glad to help."
Shaking his head, he walked on, toward the center of the city.