EmEs_etherious
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Chapter 98- Mageburn
🕑 Added 2023-09-23 23:15:00 +0000 UTCArthur woke up feeling like a black hole had decided to take up residence in his stomach. He was starving, and the fact that he could smell the tantalising aroma of grilled meat didn’t help matters at all. Not when his perception stat dialled up his senses to eleven.
He could hear the pop and sizzle as fat melted into oil and dripped into an open flame, and the slightly charred exterior of Alyssia’s cooking was so crisp he could somehow pre-emptively hear the crunch it would make when consumed. As if it was some sort of premonition and he was becoming a food God.
He sure wished the meal was being made as an offering to him.
Arthur opened his eyes slowly and immediately wished he hadn’t. No one should ever have to look up a horse's nostrils with 92 perception, and the sight he’d just seen was one that would stay with him for life. The damn Stormwalker had an entire ecosystem going on in there.
Arthur didn’t question why he hadn’t been able to sense the green beast, or what it was even doing here in the first place. He’d long since learned that the creatures were nigh undetectable to all means, magical and mundane when they wanted to be, and the animals did whatever they pleased be that sleeping for two days straight, or nibbling on his hair like it was a strange shade of grass, which this particular Stormwalker was currently doing.
Arthur gently pushed it away with his hand and sat up, wincing as his back clicked and realigned itself into place. Just how long had he been sleeping?
“So, you finally decided to wake up. I was starting to think I might’ve hit you too hard.” Alyssia spoke in jest and tried to make light of the situation, but Arthur could hear the worry in her voice. And the alverin woman, Arthur had learned, was not a person who worried easily, which in turn meant that whatever happened to him must have been pretty damn bad.
Arthur almost groaned when he felt a headache building behind his eyes, it was as if the insidious thing had been waiting for him to regain consciousness before it started to form. He’d been perfectly fine when he’d woken up, at least that was how he’d felt and now the little bastard was striking like a bitch when he could experience it in its full glory.
“How long was I out for?” Arthur asked.
Alyssia didn’t answer immediately, instead observing him with eyes filled with concern over the open fire she was using to cook. The attention made Arthur feel uncomfortable, and the fact that Alyssia chose to drag out the silence for an awkwardly long amount of time didn’t help matters at all.
“Twelve glasses or eighteen hours as you humans like to call it. I was a little scared at first when you continued to release ether like a leaking cauldron, but it only lasted for a short while. You slept like a baby the rest of the way. All of last night and half of today.”
Arthur shook his head, half surprised and half relieved. Surprised at the fact that he’d been out for so long, and relieved that his stupidity didn’t have any other far-reaching consequences.
Yet.
Just what exactly had he done?
His memories were a little foggy at the moment, but everything was slowly coming back to him and with it, his headache was steadily intensifying.
“So, care to explain what the hell it was you were doing? I nearly had a heart attack when I saw you BURNING your ether. Were you trying to kill yourself?”
“Because I know a few better ways to go about it than mageburn.”
Her last few words had started off as a question and ended up as a half-yell, half-exasperated outburst that contained far more emotion than he’d have expected. Arthur could hear the frustration in her voice as genome distress and so he withheld from making the retort that was at the tip of his tongue. He’d be a real dick if he responded to someone's care by snapping back at them, even if their raised voice caused waves of annoying pain to ricochet through his head.
He instead graced Alyssia with a tired smile, or at least as close to one as he would manage in his current state. The near instantaneous change of expression from worry to rage on Alyssia’s face told him that perhaps that hadn’t been his brightest idea in recent times and his latest ones had caused him no small amount of pain. This one quickly proved itself to follow the same strain.
Arthur didn’t see the slap coming. He didn’t even feel it. Well, not at first anyway. One moment he was looking at Alyssia, and the next, the scenery in front of him had completely changed. Instead of a beautiful woman, his vision was filled with an uncensored image of a horses butthole, enhanced by his perception to an other-worldly sense of detail, as if a master artist had spent an entire lifetime sculpting the thing that would haunt Arthur when he closed his eyes at night for the rest of his life.
That was when he heard the deafening boom of the sound barrier being broken, with his right ear, of course. His left one was currently dripping blood, something that Arthur still hadn’t realised yet. It was actually a testament to his insane constitution that a slap delivered at nearly twice the speed of sound did nothing more than make him bleed a little.
It still hurt like a bitch, which Arthur finally realised when his motor neurones managed to catch up with reality and send some electrical impulses to his brain. For the second time in less than a minute, Arthur winced in pain. It felt like his face had been scalded with boiling water, or at least what it should’ve felt like if Arthur wasn’t so obsessed with becoming unkillable. Something he was currently very glad for.
He was sure his neck would’ve broken, or at least fractured if he had anything less than 500 points in constitution.
“What the fuck was that for!” He yelled at Alyssia, who was now standing so close to him he could feel the heat radiating her body.
She didn’t answer, instead positioning her arm once again to deliver another devastating blow. If she wasn’t projecting her movement so much, Arthur was under no illusions that he could have dodged it. The woman must have invested nearly everything into Agility. As it was, it was very easy to stop the alien woman, Arthur kicked at her ankle. Not with any amount of force, it was practically impossible to generate any from his seated position, and it wasn’t his intent to harm her in the first place.
What it did manage to do, however, was shift her already terrible stance into an impossible one. Physics did the rest of the work for Arthur and the Alverin woman fell to her side like a sack of bricks when gravity told her that you couldn’t generate any force by attacking one of your legs with the other, no matter how much you might want to make the stupid motion.
It was at this moment that Arthur would have normally got her into some sort of lock or hold to immobilise her. It wasn't something he'd trained too much in, but he knew the basics. With his raging headache, however, as well as his general sense of weakness currently, such complex movements were far beyond him. He did the next best thing he could think of.
“Stop that. Calm the fuck down!” He shouted. "I know you're incredibly angry right now for one reason or the other, but it gives you no right to strike me. The only reason I'm not hitting you right now is because it'll hurt me more than you right now."
In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the best thing to say to a raging woman who had physically assaulted him at the speed of a bullet, not when she'd already held back so much. If she wanted to actually hurt him, well, there were better places to strike a man. Nope, she'd just hit him out of rage, with no thought of truly inflicting harm.
It had been an impulsive decision, not that Arthur would take that as an excuse. Still, if anger was so easy to control, no one would ever lose themselves to fury in the first place and Arthur didn’t even know why Alyssia had reacted so explosively in the first place.
Surprisingly enough, or perhaps not, she actually listened to him. He should have learned by now that Alyssia was not normal by any measure, be it human or alverin. Arthur was pretty sure by now that she wasn’t normal according to her own people's standards. The words had a very literal effect on Alyssia and the woman froze in place as if circuits had been cut.
Arthur, who had been bracing himself for another tussle with Alyssia was relieved but also… disappointed. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but he had wanted to know just how strong the dimensional traveller was since he’d first laid eyes on her. Arthur tried to say something but his jaw seemed to be locked in place, too stiff to move with the usual ease he spoke with. Arthur opened and closed his mouth a few times until he heard the audible click of his jaw reasserting itself into its proper place.
Okay. She's pretty damn fucking strong. Of that Arthur was certain. Alyssia had almost dislocated his jaw with a single slap. Arthur tried to calculate how much force she must have generated with it to cause so much damage but gave up halfway when a spike of pain reminded him that now probably wasn’t the best time to strain his head.
It took a grand total of ten seconds for him to regain his hearing and another twenty for all remnants of Alyssia’s rage to disappear from his face as his prodigious health regeneration made itself known. It was only then that he decided to talk to Alyssia. The woman hadn’t moved from where she’d fallen into the ground, only turning to face away from Arthur.
He didn’t know if it was because of his strange Bhai Giya relationship with the woman, or his perception attribute, but he could read her emotions like an open book. It didn’t matter if it was in a language he couldn’t understand, it was a far cry better than the near non-existent EQ he’d passed when he was younger. Alyssia was angry, frustrated and even afraid for some reason. But mostly, she was just sad.
Arthur tried to take into account all of her emotions when he chose his next words, even if they didn’t make much sense to him. That was the least he could do for the woman who had probably once again, just saved his ass.
“Okay, Alyssia, maybe I’m just being ignorant here, or something, but can you tell me what all that was about? Please."
“I won't know what I did wrong if you don’t tell me.”
Alyssia didn’t answer for a long time but Arthur didn’t say anything else. Not because he couldn’t, or didn’t know what to say, because he knew that sometimes less was more. Alyssia could answer his question sooner or later, she just needed some time.
“You were suffering from mageburn.”
“I wasn’t sure at first, but I became certain when I saw the miasma leaking out of you when you were unconscious.”
“Yes, I do remember the system warning me about that, but I didn’t think it was that serious.”
Arthur saw Alyssia’s shoulders tense.
“But one of my title effects was clouding my judgement at the time,” he hastily added. He only calmed down when he saw the alverin’s muscles relax and he almost breathed out a sigh of relief.
“So, what is mageburn, anyway? And what's the big deal if I was suffering from it.”
He didn’t mean to sound so callous and uncaring, but he couldn’t help it when the thing had only caused him a slight headache. He did remember a pebble striking him, Alyssia’s interference no doubt, and the distraction it caused stopping things from progressing further, but he didn’t think this so-called mageburn would have done much to his 15,000 points of health.
Alyssia finally turned around to look at him, and Arthur was startled to see that the woman’s eyes were wet.
She was crying!
“I sometimes forget that your planet only evolved a month ago. It’s easy to when the human I’ve talked to the most is as absurd as you.”
She chuckled mirthlessly.
“As for mageburn…”
She trailed off, looking into the distance as if recalling some particularly vivid memories of her past. Arthur didn’t say anything to hasten her or interrupt. Her reminiscing, gave her time to collect her thoughts. It looked like she needed it. She finally looked back at Arthur, focusing on the half of his face that was supposed to be bruised up. She didn’t even look surprised at the absence of any injury.
“I’m sorry for hitting you, even if you deserved it.”
Arthur ignored her half-assed apology.
“I just have some particularly bad experiences with mageburn.”
She didn’t elaborate, and Arthur didn’t ask for an explanation.
“As for what exactly it is, well…, it’s not my field of expertise, but it’s basically when you start burning your ether. It can happen for multiple reasons, but mainly when you try your hand at magic- at magic that’s beyond your level.”
Her voice cracked a little but she continued on anyway.
“I don’t know how or why your world adapted to ether and magic so easily during its first evolution. It’s a good thing I guess, but it also means you humans are treating ether too lightly.”
Her voice hardened.
“Magic is not a joke and that's something you need to learn quickly.”
“Before it kills you.”
“Is it really that bad,” Arthur asked. He couldn’t help but sound sceptical.
Alyssia laughed, and it contained so much more spite and bitterness than he would have expected from the usually joyful woman.
“No, no, it’s not bad at all. What’s the worst that could happen?”
Arthur was a little unnerved to see this side of Alyssia. It didn’t feel like she was addressing these words to Arthur, but rather, to herself. She took a deep breath and looked at him, with those same yellow eyes that had fascinated and scared him so much, except now they contained so much grief and sadness.
“I’m sorry Arthur. I’m really not myself right now.”
She took another deep breath.
“Mageburn in itself…it-it isn’t so bad. It’s what it leads to. Misusing your ether, burning it…that's a one-track path to soul burn,”
“And that is so, so, so much worse.”
She looked up at the sky and Arthur could see that the tears had returned to her eyes.
“You could have died,” she whispered. “Burnt out to a husk and I could’ve done nothing but watch as you withered away. Your soul's already severely damaged. If I'd stopped you a few seconds later, it would've been too late.”
She looked back at him, her gaze piercing.
“Or you could have gone supernova. And if that happened, I…this entire locus…, the forest it’s in and even the city we came from would have been destroyed.”
“A soul's explosion, especially one as strange and powerful as yours has devastating effects.” she paused, the few seconds of silence only magnifying Arthur's dread. "It's like one of those pre-system weapons your world is so proud of. What do you call it? A nuke, yes. Your soul's detonation would've been a magic nuke.
“And yours… yours would have killed us all.”
