Raul said something in response to the hue and cry. Sarah didn’t hear it. She was already lining up her sight post with the silhouette of her second target. The weapon slammed into her shoulder. When the shadow continued to flail around, she sent another round after the first. This one definitely hit. The parasite knew because she could see the shade fold over at the waist.
‘Don’t malinger,’ a voice whispered in her ear. ‘Confirm the kill and move on.’
Sarah grunted and fired again at the compact profile. She didn’t wait to see if the bullet would connect. There were too many contacts for that - too many combatants who could get their act together. She needed to lay them all out before they could organize an effective defense.
“After all, an ambush only lasts a moment,” Harlan hissed as he held up the battered infiltrator. “If you hesitate, there’s so many things that could turn your assault against you. Isn’t that right, my hungry little worm?”
The warspawn didn’t answer. In fact, it’d stopped moving entirely about halfway through Harlan’s speech. Their commander didn’t seem to care. He merely let it dangle above the water, suspended between two of his claws.
“What a shame. If you’d been quicker to devour your target, perhaps you wouldn’t be in this position. Alas, every lesson needs its object, and your loss is their gain. 269733c? Eat up. You deserve it.”
The corpse hit the water with a splash. In the half-light of the burning pyres, the displacement looked smaller than it should be. Sarah blamed the opalescent specs clinging to her eyes. The longer she’d stared into the light of the bonfires, the more her photopsia had obscured the fine details.
Sarah still refused to look away. If anything her focus grew more intense as she swept the frantic campground.
Sarah twisted her hips, so she could bring the gun around. By the time she was able to differentiate between the toilet and the gloom a flash of light had blinked into existence, saving her much of the trouble. A baritone snap reached her ears half a second later. It took a couple of retorts for her to realize someone was firing back. Mostly because the shots weren’t coming anywhere close to her. At two hundred paces, the bastard would’ve had to aim up just to ensure his pistol would reach.
Sarah’s rifle didn’t have that problem. Her counterpart learned that the hard way when she put a round straight through the plastic wall.
Raul huffed at the question.
Sarah didn’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with his flippant response.
The rifle echoed her sentiment with a bark of malevolent glee. Once; twice; three times. Somewhere around the eighth shot, she flicked the selector switch to automatic and began to hose down the shore. Ever since she’d started to walk her fire towards the waterline, there’d been a squirrely pool of mud just past a leaking cooler. It looked like someone had remembered they knew magic before breaking out a ‘Mirage’ core. There wasn’t enough wattage in the spell to hide the wizard himself; however, convincing her to jerk her hand aside? That was a lot more feasible.
…Or rather it was. After half a dozen shots finished pulling to the left, the compulsion collapsed in on itself and vanished like its element’s namesake. A few seconds later, the spellcaster’s corpse rolled into view.
‘Fucking Jammer,’ Sarah thought as she scrutinized her mind for any other extant enchantments. ‘The last time I had to deal with this bullshit I was convinced I was a dying cat.’
The nexus’ filament wriggled in her spine like a rod of molten iron. Caught in the grip of the Tellim’s final moments, she couldn’t reconcile the feline’s emotions with the sensation of a knife in her chest. She tried to work up the nerve to scream and gave up before she opened her mouth. There just wasn’t any urgency to the situation. Why cause a ruckus when the blade had barely nicked her heart?
The C7 kicked her in the shoulder. The magazine was out again. When did she…?
Sarah growled and ditched the metal box. It didn’t matter. She could worry about the lost time later; for now, she had a job to do.
Raul shook his head.
Hot brass smoldered against her wrist while she surveyed the rest of the camp. Every time she saw a hint of movement amidst the wreckage, she’d pop a few rounds off and then return to her patient overwatch. After five minutes had passed without anything catching her eye, she let the rifle dip towards the water. She released a manic sigh.
“Well, that was…”
Sarah held her finger up.
Raul lifted his palms in implied surrender.
Pallsburg started to whistle a tune from what seemed to be sheer muscle memory.
Sarah responded by stealing control of their lips. ‘Bitch, what the fuck are you doing?’
There was a faint flash of chagrin as Pallsburg realized she'd broken into song. ‘Sorry,’ she mouthed once Sarah had loosened her grip. ‘That was kind of an Inappropriate in-joke.’
No kidding: dark humor had its place, but it wasn’t while Sarah was still twitching from a couple hundred nanograms of adrenaline. Hell, even afterwards wasn’t the best time; not when they had to hike back to the skein so they could deal with the perforated bodies.
The parasite ran the numbers in her head as they picked up the spent brass. If each person had siphoned an average of thirty mana from the seed, then Sarah would need at least twenty corpses to get the most out of her ritual. It should also employ an icosagon in the design with oscillations along the outer perimeter. If the math worked out, she could segregate the genders between the exterior and anterior points, resulting in a destructive resonance that’d help purify the incoming energy.
Sarah figured she’d need the assistance. Even though they were just a bunch of hedge wizards, each of their ruptured cores would be colored by their essence and identity. That was what it meant to be a sorcerer, after all. If she wasn’t careful, one of those alignments could snowball through its peers and create a facsimile of its owner’s missing soul. At that point, it’d become a question of who could claim Pallsburg first: her or the newly formed ghost.
Personally, Sarah bet on the ghost. Possession was old hat for followers of the Light, and the nobility had a number of horror stories about agents getting swallowed while on assignment. Sure, none of those techniques should’ve been known to the humans on Earth; however, a couple of them were easy to rediscover, even if you lacked formal training. Needless to say, Sarah didn’t want to be the next grizzly splatter shot in a long line of alien OSHA films.
The sports bag released a mellifluous jingle as Sarah finished storing the ejected shells. They’d probably missed a few in the faint moonlight, but the exercise was just a habit to help settle her overwrought nerves. It wasn’t like they’d be able to hide the fact that something had killed all these people.
A shiver crawled down her spine, causing Sarah to correct the thought. ‘Combatants.’ Something had killed all of these ‘combatants.’ People were those luckless assholes stuck working the till at Mcdonalds. When you were squatting in the woods with a gun, you relinquished that particular title.
Sarah should know, her own was uncomfortably similar.
Raul glanced over at the soot-stained metal box by her feet.
It was arguably the only thing she was good at. Really - truly - good at. She could sing alright, and her sculpting was okay; however, nothing measured up to the knowledge that had been granted to her by the Offal Sea. Sometimes, she feared she was addicted to it. To the overwhelming sense of competence. There was certainly a brutal, electric thrill to the ebb and flow of battle.
‘It’s just my nut,’ Sarah reminded herself as Raul passed her back the fully stacked clip. ‘A remnant of the nobles' indoctrination.’
Was it, though? That justification rang a touch hollow when she was confronted by the reality of her handiwork. ‘What do you think?’ Sarah asked after they’d reached the man who'd caked his drawers. ‘How much of this is really me?’
The corpse remained stubbornly silent. The only thing to eventually crawl out of its mouth was a small trickle of discolored fluid, which spread across the roots of an old basswood tree. Sarah nudged the body with her foot. When she brought her toe around for a stronger kick, its posture shifted, revealing a gaping hole in the back of its head. She must have caught it just above the jaw. That was the only way its face would be intact while a third of its skull was missing.
‘What a fucking waste. Why couldn’t you just play nice?’
The thought came and went without comment. So too did Raul after a cursory peek at the carcass. Sarah wasn’t quite that callous. She waited for the sight to elicit more than resigned curiosity before giving it up as a bad job. Sometimes, you didn’t get good answers.
Not in matters of the heart, at least. Magic was more clear-cut.
Raul glanced up from the edge of the firelight, where he’d been eyeing a bikini-clad woman with an uncomfortably speculative gleam.
Sarah forced herself to nod.
The warspawn watched her pick up a few sticks that had been discarded beside a metal spit. Once she had a good dozen piled into her arms, she left the first implanted by the couple and then waded through the bloody muck. Each body got a short ten-second stare and occasionally a bit of repositioning. Any that passed her inspection were also marked with a narrow stake. It took Raul a minute to realize she was selecting everyone who’d been shot in the chest.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Sarah shook her head.
Raul shrugged. His expression said he wanted to agree with her but had learned too much to disdain the extra help.
The light of epiphany suddenly washed over his face. Raul took another look at the weeping lesions and probed the local mana field. Hints of each body’s alignment were seeping through the holes in their flesh. That was why some got the boot and others a bit more respect; the cavities needed to be bigger to allow for proper mana flow.
Sarah was aware. She also didn’t care. She needed the reserves - the power. They were long past the point of living their lives without risk.
Pallsburg seemed to concur. Maybe that was why she’d been so blasé about being an accessory to their crime. ‘Do you need anything from my end?’ the woman mimed.
Sarah shook her head. Unless she fucked something up, she should have enough control to handle this bullshit herself. The hardest part was going to be enduring the throughput. Unlike Pallsburg, Sarah’s skin would burn long before her host felt the heat.
‘What’s a few more blisters, though,’ the parasite conceded grimly. ‘If it works, it’ll be worth it.’
‘If.’ Funny how such a simple word could carry so much weight. It was arguably up there with ‘shame’ or ‘destiny’ for leading men into perdition. For all the former’s push, though - and all the latter’s pull - ‘if’ was still the only one that had her poking corpses in the mud.
Poking them; prodding them; pressing them into position. After she was satisfied with her score of voluntolds, Sarah started to set up the linework that would turn them into proper magic. In this case, that meant digging gaping channels through the far too runny soil. She was going to need a rather large blood trail if she wanted to keep the grooves from collapsing in on themselves.
That would be bad. Sarah was relying upon the sympathetic connections to help catalyze the entire rite. Without them sticking around to provide a degree of autonomous guidance, she’d have to use her own mana to cajole the energy into her feet.
And she didn’t have enough motes to bully the whole formation. In fact, Sarah pulled up her status to double check what she’d be working with.
It felt like sweet fuck all. It wasn’t - she could freeze a fair-sized lake - however, her low compatibility was continuing to highlight the limit of her arcane dexterity. At least, she should have enough finesse to layer her lines with an order from her 'Law' core. If she was careful, she could introduce a rule that encouraged the mana to flow in a single direction. This in turn would lead the motes to her legs, where she could begin the normal cycling process. From there, it was just a matter of keeping up with the rate of diffusion.
…Well, in a nutshell. Using the cross-flows to grind away at the unnecessary elements was a bit more finicky to describe. She’d also need to pencil in some release valves, so she could pre-treat the mana by reintegrating her newly acquired gains. She’d get the energy back again after it passed through the system; however, the additional step would add to the ritual’s length and strain her tendrils in the meantime.
‘There’s no helping it, though. I need some metaphorical grease to ensure everything smoothly slots in.’
The mana-density was going to be intense. If this particular band averaged about a fifth of a mote per minute, then Sarah was going to jack it up to somewhere around nine or ten. She might actually see parts of her formation crystalize by the time they were finished with the rite.
‘I’ll have to remember to check the channels,’ Sarah noted before using her improvised stylus to beat a tattoo against her thigh. ‘There might not be a ryst market on Earth, yet, but it’s surely just a matter of time.’
If nothing else, she could always use the puissant dust herself since it had a lot of applications when it came to fashioning wards. Indeed, it was why the inhabitants of Annol were often so careful with their dead. You see, once the soul faded, and was no longer capable of keeping its mana permeable, most cores turned into a purer form of the crystal. One that could explode under the right conditions. Since this had obvious public safety implications, the local council kept meticulous receipts.
Sarah understood the impetus; she certainly gave her own work a thorough inspection before taking her place at the center.
Sarah made the mistake of glancing over at the concerned warspawn. For the past twenty minutes, Raul had been going from corpse to corpse with a pocketknife clutched in his hand. Every time he’d stumble across a body that she had discarded, he’d calmly reach for their throat and carefully check their pulse. If he could feel them clinging to life, he’d drag the tip beneath their chin and callously send them on their way. Most lost consciousness within a few seconds. The rest passed out a minute later. He called it his 'little act of mercy.’ Sarah suspected the locals thought otherwise, but it was hard to argue when you were wetly gasping for breath.
...That or screaming. Sarah had been working hard to ignore the incessant cries of pain. It was surprisingly easy to drown out the mortally wounded. All she had to do was focus on her work, and it was like she was somewhere else entirely. Joast perhaps. A lot of her artisanal training had come from the tradesmen on Joast.
‘A six-fingered hand reached for the blast-bag and pulled on the wooden lever. When the roar of the furnace had deepened to an appropriate level of fervor, the imago drew the iron billet back before slamming the hammer home again.
Sarah jerked her way free from the memory, lest she get distracted. She didn’t have time to reminisce about a life that wasn’t even her own. Especially when she was about to take a step towards reclaiming who she wanted to be.
‘Deep breaths,’ Sarah reminded herself as her heart began to pound. ‘You’re only going to get one shot at the gold.’
Unwilling to put it off any longer, the parasite cautiously spun up her core. Next, she proceeded to expel a stream of ‘Water’ motes, which spread towards the edge of her formation. Twenty razor-sharp icicles slowly condensed in the brisk air. Poised above the narrow bullet holes that were leaking the Light’s effluvia, the shards hovered beneath the sickle moon and then stabbed downward into the bodies.
Seven of them found their mark immediately. The other thirteen had to tear themselves free, so they could continue their search for the core. It took at least four tries before all of the orbs were fully cracked. Since none of their previous owners were following a standardized blueprint, Sarah considered that a pretty good pace. It was certainly better than she’d expected to achieve when she embarked on this mad endeavor.
‘Enough,’ Sarah thought as she crushed her doubts into a tiny ball. ‘Get ready for the initial swell.’
The mana drifted through her ritual’s guide-lines with gradually burgeoning force. Sliding around each of the circles that encompassed the prone cadavers, the motes soon slipped into the first ring of filters, where they could grind themselves against their neighbor. Bits of ‘You’ and ‘Me’ gave way to the seed’s essential elements. From there, these rarefied creeks were then chivied through a pair of resonating layers until they eventually merged near the center.
It was from this collective well that Sarah finally supped. Rendered down into a granulated slurry by the motes’ own pressure, it was simple, if not easy, to fish out the pieces she desired. The rest she expelled from her body by means of whatever solvent was available. Tears; breath; the oil on her skin. All options were theoretically on the table. Hell, all options were being employed. This wasn’t the sort of situation where she could balk because the end result was ‘icky.’
Sarah still winced a bit when she vomited into the mud. The mana-charged mess had landed dangerously close to her lines. A few feet to the right and it might have biased her spell.
‘I’ll have to keep an eye on that,’ the warspawn thought between heaves. ‘It could become an issue the longer this goes on.’
Fortunately, venting the growing pile of contaminants was a problem with several prescribed solutions. Today, Sarah would be using the one that was commonly referred to as the ‘internal ejection method.’ In layman’s terms, she’d be waiting for the impurities to accumulate before purging them with the mana that she was already planning to refine. Her alignment of choice even had an advantage in this respect. It wouldn’t be enough to destroy the motes in their entirety; however, pushing them away from her formation? That was far more doable. She just had to arrange for the initial down payment. Until it was ready, she was determined to put up with the smell while she breathed her gains back into the rite.
‘Speaking of which, window me,’ Sarah thought, her attention briefly shifting to the Light.
A transparent screen suddenly appeared in a flash of static. ‘[Purity Core]’ the message read. ‘[Output = .000035 mn/min].’
Sarah dragged her eyes to the left, so she could see the rest of the row. It looked like the orb’s total reserves were ticking up in quick, spastic bursts. First to ‘[3.7]’ and then to ‘[4.2].’ ‘[5.3]’ came less than a second later. When the Network was registering her mana pool at a little less than ten full motes, Sarah resolved to keep three of them for emergencies and dumped the rest into her release valves.
There was no need for a mental framework to transform the energy into a spell. At the end of the day, she just wanted some attenuated flows that had been colored by the seed and her soul. This way, when the motes returned to the ritual, there'd be more of her personal alignment to contest the human's own. Oh, she'd lose out again as their aspects abraded one another; however, that was a temporary problem that could be mitigated with sufficient repetition.
The corpses couldn't claim the same. You see, after being separated from their shattered cores, their mana had no way of reinforcing its previous identity. It was rootless - aimless - and in the process of being displaced by the weight of her ‘Law’ core’s compulsion. Soon, even those ravaged dregs would fade away and give rise to the surrounding field. If she could keep this up for another hour or two, the former’s influence might vanish completely.
‘But that’s a bit of an ask,’ Sarah acknowledged as her tendrils peeled along the tip. ‘I’ve probably only got another twenty minutes left in me.’
Well, twenty minutes and two hundred mana. Right now, the motes were beginning to spiral around the kernel that would eventually become her ‘Purity’ core. Meanwhile, her ‘Water’ core wasn’t slacking either, thanks to the element’s prevalence amongst her peers. It was at the point where she might honestly be looking at an eighty-twenty split by the time the ritual was finished.
She hoped so, at any rate. Besides being easier to swallow, her new ‘Water’ motes would correct a lot of the problems with the purity and compatibility of her foundation. Maybe not to the extent that it’d match what Sarah had achieved while protecting Amelia, but it’d definitely be better all the same.
The Light seemed to agree: the little tally on the right side of her screen was creeping up like an analog odometer. It was currently sitting at [.613] and [.051] respectively. Then, ten minutes later, she watched it roll over to [.654] and a touch past six percent. Her output was quick to follow. {.00184 mn / min}. The reading was nearly the inverse of the report coming from her ‘Purity’ core. If this kept up, there should be more than enough motes in her body to handle her outstanding obligations.
For a second, Sarah thought she could almost taste it. The strain of the ritual was even close to what the spell would eventually inflict in Medford. Afterwards, there’d be other scents, made gentle by distance and compassion; however, that first initial treatment? It would feel a lot like this.
And all it cost her were the lives of twenty assholes. Sarah would count the butcher’s bill cheap at twice that gruesome price. Maybe even three times. The pricks really had made it easy for her to write them off as people. Not like Amelia. Not like everything good that Sarah had found for herself here on Earth. Fuck those idiots for throwing away their future, so they could go play wizard in the woods. She refused to regret their deaths and the memories her violence had invoked.
‘Regret’s useless anyway,’ the lessons of her childhood whispered. ‘Murder, though? Murder can change the world.’