Mage Tank

Chapter 205: Soundtrack

“Grotto, got any idea what this weave does?”

[It… appears to be nonsense.]

Hysteria began muttering arcane phrases, their voice low and sonorous. Each syllable hammered against the air like the head of a drum, the avatar chanting in a droning monotone. Their fingers twisted into complex formations, gliding through anatomically impossible shapes.

Something began thudding beneath the floorboards.

“Arlo,” said Xim. “You haven’t been hoarding corpses in the basement, have you?” The cleric was stripping as she asked this, which I realized was an excellent idea once she started pulling chainmail from her inventory.

“There’s six feet of solid stone beneath these hardwoods,” I said. “You can see the damn blocks where Varrin tore the floor up.”

Nuralie and Etja followed Xim’s lead, although with less shameless nudity. Nuralie had been wearing her leathers under her suit this entire time. That was kind of paranoid but justified given our lifestyle. The only piece she hadn’t been wearing was her Cloak of the Descent. Etja got out her staff and wand. A quick glance at the mana in her dress told me she’d had it enchanted to a much greater extent than her old robes. Her skin hardened into a combination of dark chitin and crystal.

The dripping moisture gathered before the Zenithar as a haunting wail echoed around us. It was a cry of profound pain and misery. At first, unintelligible, but slowly, the cries transformed into words.

“Yooooouuuuu biiiiitchhh! Yoooouuuu kiiiiiilllled meeeeee!”

The floorboards splintered as something crashed into them from below. Another thud and one of the boards broke in half. A tormented scream rattled cookware and sent foodstuffs tumbling from shelves.

Zura unleashed a concentrated jet of water, which arced across the kitchen, cutting through the walls as easily as the air. It swept over Hysteria, and the avatar interrupted their chanting with a cackle as their robes and flesh were carved away.

Something began to crawl out from beneath the broken floorboards, a corrupted mockery of what it had been in life.

It was Cloaky.

Hysteria’s recently murdered article of clothing squeezed through the cracks in the floor and hovered next to the avatar. Its edges were tattered and worn, a thousand scraps of cloth stitched together with rough thread. It shook itself free of wood chips.

“You asshole!” Cloaky shouted, floating within an inch of the avatar. “You couldn’t let me rest in fucking pieces?! You just had to drag me back up here. Why?! To torment me even more?!”

Hysteria reached up and wiped a stream of water from their eyes.

“One sec,” said the avatar. Zura’s jet cut across their face, ruining it until only the colorful skull remained. All the while, orbs of water formed around the Zenithar, trembling to contain Zura’s wrath. The woman’s eyes were glowing.

“The king is gone, so I’m only left with one choice,” said Hysteria. Water cut away their lips and tongue, but it had no impact on their speech. “I’m curious to see how much your god’s protection is worth, Zenithar.”

Hysteria’s body erupted with power, their skeleton glowing bright enough to penetrate the remains of their flesh. Zura stumbled back as a swell of mana rose from Hysteria and battered against the Geulon.

You have observed the Passion Imperium spell!

Passion Imperium

Deific

Cost: Give us a sec to analyze this shit.

Requirements: Probably real high.

Effects:

Obtain dominion over the target’s soul.

Zura spasmed, her spirit flaring out with all the strength I’d seen on the day she’d destroyed the Littan fleet. Hysteria smiled in ecstasy as their magic flowed through the Zenithar, tendrils of power invading and corrupting the Geulon.

Arrows began shattering against Hysteria as Nuralie tried in vain to interrupt their spell. A pillar of crimson light came down, igniting the avatar with holy fire. Varrin moved to stand in front of Riona, who’d resisted Grotto’s attempt to teleport her away.

“I wanted to give you a chance,” Hysteria shouted to Cloaky, “to pursue your true calling from beyond the grave! The universe should not be denied your gifts, merely because I lost my temper!”

“M-my passion?” said Cloaky, deflating. “You mean that…”

“Yes, Cloaky,” said Hysteria. They reached into the shredded remains of their robes and produced a violin and bow, handing it to the cloak. They gripped it in their fabric hands with reverence.

“What should I play?” Cloaky asked.

“Whatever moves you,” said Hysteria.

The cloak nodded (I think) and then held the bow up to the violin’s strings. It hesitated, then turned to me.

“When you teleported in,” Cloaky said, “there was about a half a second before you ate whatever it was that kept this douche out of your brain.”

“Hurtful!” said Hysteria.

“We got a good peek at what was going on inside that skull of yours,” said Cloaky. “So I hope you can appreciate this one.”

Cloaky drew the bow along the violin, eliciting a single, mournful note. Then it began to play a familiar melody, albeit much slower than the original. I was momentarily dumbstruck by what I heard.

“Oh, I’m loving this one,” said Hysteria, swaying their hips and walking forward. The avatar looked Zenithar Zura in the eye as she struggled to resist.

The avatar stopped to poke at the trembling orbs of water with fascination. They jerked their hand back and blew on the tip of their finger.

Even though Hysteria’s spell had been Deific, Geul’s protection was a bulwark against the avatar’s power. Even so, it was rapidly crumbling.

There was a solution here, and a rush of connections slid into place.

I returned to my theory on Hysteria’s nature. If the avatar was entirely focused on Spiritual Magic, they were limited to a narrow range of abilities. Extremely potent abilities, but they could be countered.

Spiritual Magic centered around manipulating the soul and mind, either of the self or of others. This even allowed the wielder to extend their own spiritual essence into the world around them, with very few limits on what kinds of physical phenomena could be imbued.

Spiritual Magic had little in the way of traditional defenses. Hysteria partially dealt with that by manifesting in soul form and exploiting its inviolability, but that primarily mitigated physical forces. They were obviously spiritually robust, but that left three schools we hadn’t properly tested against the avatar: Divine, Mystical, and Dimensional.

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We had evidence that Divine forces could impact Hysteria. Mana flowed through the soul, so their abilities could likely be interfered with via Mystical, although none of us had a skill that could deal with a Deific spell. Dimensional Magic was resisted by Fortitude, and I was willing to bet an avatar had a lot of that, or whatever the godly equivalent was.

Damage-dealing effects and anything that activated after dealing damage were right out. We didn’t have the raw power to be a threat. However, some things didn’t rely on damage, and some effects were… weird, for lack of a better word.

So, we needed a Divine skill with a weird effect. That gave us Xim and Etja. Xim’s offensive abilities mostly relied on traditional effects, like damage and stun.

Etja was a lot weirder.

Her abilities were Charisma-based, even when they should have been Intelligence-based. Charisma-based skills were often resisted by Wisdom. Hysteria didn’t seem like a paragon of Wisdom.

Etja’s abilities were filled with references to her relation to divine beings. She was the incarnation of a divine being, a descendant of divinity. Her soul was literally forged as a shell to contain the overwhelming might of a godly avatar’s soul fragment, and she could still contain another entity’s spirit within her own.

She also had a skill that might be able take advantage of that.

Incorporate

Divine

Cost: Variable mana

You can draw in the form and essence of other things and make them part of yourself. The effects of this ability vary. Incorporating objects may give you material properties of those objects, whereas incorporating a spirit may even give you memories of that spirit. Greater levels of Divine Magic increase the potency of what you can incorporate.

Be careful you don’t lose yourself in the process.

Etja’s Divine Magic skill wasn’t incredibly high, but I didn’t think it mattered. All of her Divine evolutions were directly related to her avatar heritage. I was willing to bet her capacity to interact with avatars through her Divine Magic was substantially more powerful per Level than literally any other non-godly being in the world.

Etja could currently have a stable maximum of 30 Blessed stacks. There’s no reason she wouldn’t have maxed those out during her downtime since they didn’t expire. Blessed improved an attack by 8 per stack spent. Incorporate wasn’t directly listed as an attack, but using any skill offensively typically counted. That was a bonus of 240 if she dumped all her stacks at once.

Her Finishing Move passive tripled the effectiveness of one spell, so long as it was cast at the end of a four-spell combo.

Now that got her bonus from Blessed up to 720.

Etja had a Charisma of 58 and a Divine skill somewhere in the mid or upper 20’s. Based on what I’d learned about attack values from Grotto, that made her base attack somewhere around 100, also tripled by Finishing Move.

Now we were up to an attack value of 1020. She also had whatever buffs her new gear might give her on top.

Beyond that, Incorporate was a variable mana skill, which meant it could draw as much power as it needed to succeed. Etja had a significant mana pool by any measure, and half her damn build was focused on improving her mana efficiency. How much more that might add, I had no idea. Probably a whole fucking lot.

But what would Incorporate actually do?

I was hoping it would let Etja eat part of Hysteria’s soul.

How would that affect Etja? Good fucking question, but if she received a “beneficial effect” from it, she could double its potency with her Luck 40 evolution, Double Down. Having a massive Luck score also wouldn’t hurt her chances of success, now that I thought about it.

I relayed that plan through Grotto, but we’d need to buy ourselves a few seconds while Etja put her combo together.

Hysteria wanted Zura, so we needed to get the Zenithar out of there.

How fast was Hysteria? They’d made it from the impact crater a few miles away to my Closet portal in a handful of seconds, but how? Spiritual Magic wasn’t big on the movement skills. Maybe they… bounced?

It didn’t really matter. One mile per second was 3,600 miles per hour. Nuralie had recently gotten a massive buff to her Speed, and after double-checking the numbers, spitting out my drink, triple-checking the numbers, and spitting another completely different drink, I realized she could theoretically move around two-thirds that fast. That was with full buffs and ideal circumstances, which included moving through darkness.

Fortunately, I had complete control over the illumination situation.

“Grotto, kill all the lights in the Closet.”

I sent Nuralie the plan at the speed of thought. The loson had more Speed and more Intelligence than me, so she followed my manic pace without trouble.

Hopefully, she could get tricky with Stealth and her near-invisibility.

The lights went out, Nuralie and the Zenithar disappeared, Etja hit Riona with Nullify to see if it purged Hysteria’s mental influence, and Varrin moved in a blur to get his sister somewhere safer.

“Wait, what?” said Hysteria.

Cloaky continued to play, but their violin had grown longer and gained more strings. They dropped their bow and swapped to strumming.

“Uh, is that a fucking nine-string?” I asked.

Etja had already been casting Siphon before things went to shit, gearing up to fly if she needed to. Nullify had been her second spell in sequence, and she hit the wall to our east with Disintegrate, revealing the wastelanders moving in on our position.

With both Reconnaissance and a massive Wisdom score, Etja was technically our best lookout. Strange, but true.

The wastelanders were moving cautiously, looking between everyone in the kitchen. Their eyes halted on Cloaky as heavy metal distortion kicked in, the music’s tempo accelerating.

I tried to ignore it.

“Grotto, let’s burn our System Rep to make a long-distance call.”

[You are getting in the habit of solving your problems by throwing outrageously powerful entities at them.]

“Our recent problems have been outrageous, which justifies the use of outrageous force. I have no regrets.”

“This is exciting!” said Hysteria. They mimed walking down a flight of stairs behind the kitchen counter. I dashed around to keep eyes on the avatar, Etja and Xim close behind, but Hysteria was gone.

You have observed the Dramatic Exit spell!

Dramatic Exit

Deific

Cost: After analysis, these appear to use some kind of godly favor.

Requirements: You don’t meet them, nor will you ever meet them.

Disappear with a flourish and reappear wherever the narrative tension will be highest.

Listen, we’re doing our best with this shit. Avatars are hard to quantify.

“Grotto–”

[Already on it.]

Etja, Xim, and I teleported right behind Hysteria, finding the avatar standing over Nuralie and Zura, who were both on the ground, bleeding.

“This is why it isn’t safe to run in the house, kids!” said Hysteria. They were wearing a dirty floral dress, house shoes, and a hair net. “You might run into somebody!”

The avatar’s tendrils were once more invading the Zenithar’s soul. The moment before Etja cast Incorporate, Hysteria frowned and turned to look at her.

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and I felt like a predator was stalking me, just out of sight. I couldn’t help but take my eyes off the avatar for a second to glance back at Etja.

The mage was surrounded by a swell of Divine light, wrapped in the blessings of the only god she acknowledged. Herself.

She hungered, and the world yearned to feed itself to her.

Etja reached out toward Hysteria, a hole opening on her palm, ravenous and relentless. The avatar’s clothing was torn to shreds, flying into Etja’s hand and disappearing. Next came the avatar’s mimic flesh, and Etja’s body rippled, changing itself on instinct to accommodate her newfound power.

The air was thick with Etja’s potent need to fill herself, and the mage’s eyes rolled back into her head. Her entire palm had become a cavernous mouth filled with dark swirling threads of hypnotic energy, spiraling towards an endless stomach, beckoning us to throw ourselves in.

Hidden beneath it all was fear, the fear that she was being erased by a creature that had been buried deep within. One that we’d released.

Hysteria’s soul fluttered.

“Now, hold on a minute,” said the avatar. Their colorful bones swirled, and a viscous blob of essence dripped from their sternum. Etja consumed it and became a raging storm.

“That looks like a problem!” shouted Xim over Cloaky’s swelling riffs.

A full ensemble had joined the guitar. We were on the other side of the mansion, but the music was everywhere. Etja’s eyes became dark pits.

“Probably!” I shouted back. We’d have to swap to psychic comms soon, the music was so loud.

“What the fuck is this, anyway?” shouted Xim, throwing a hand out toward the rattling walls.

The backing cut out and the guitar kicked out a two-measure solo. Then, an entire orchestra joined in.

I knew exactly what it was since the song had been ripped out of my own head.

“It’s mother lovin’ Nightwish.”