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Arcanist - Chapter 15
🕑 Added 2025-03-09 11:35:13 +0000 UTCThe cave seemed to hum with crushing echoes around them. Rocks rolled and crashed down the ground, walls shaking as if they were about to come off. They weaved through the throng while Nomad refused to utter a word and kept sneaking glances from the ceiling.
Valens let Nomad drag him onward. The air had a different quality about it here. The sort that didn’t feel quite right. Above, through the jumble of tangled frequencies, he could hear hundreds of different tunes all carrying a hint of consciousness.
A nervous sensation crept around his chest.
They were getting closer to the exit. He felt the wind now more than ever. The draft almost pushed him further, beckoned him slowly toward the world above. Still, Nomad’s sudden change and the green fog weighed on his mind. It was still rolling off Nomad’s shoulders like a cape.
“Can you at least tell me what’s going on?” he said as Light Feet allowed him to keep pace with Nomad. “You look surprised just then. Disturbed. Why?”
“They must’ve found the Necromancer.” Nomad glanced at him, voice unnaturally stiff, emerald eyes carrying the remnants of the greenish fog. “It's the Everfog of Lord Zahul. He wouldn’t have crossed over the Pact without a good reason.”
“Everfog?” Valens asked. It looked like the same kind of fog that strangled a dozen Skeletons down below. The kind that seemed hostile against the bodies roused by the Necromancer.
Nomad did not answer. He was keeping to himself instead of paying Valens any heed, jaw moving soundlessly under the helmet.
They rounded a corner and came to a stop when the cavern forked into three different paths up ahead.
“Time to choose, Valens,” he said, giving him a look over the shoulder. He pointed a finger at the left-most entrance. “That’ll get you into another cave. You’ll see a bunch of Skeletons, but nothing more. Once you deal with them, you can then wait until the Quest is completed. The Keystone will get everyone of you back to Haven’s Reach once it's done.”
Valens moved over to the side and regarded the paths with his sound vision. He caught a set of frequencies thrumming under the mossy ground, most of them coming from the middle path. Steps and thumps of strong beats. The left-most path was steeper with a stronger draft through the incline. The right-most path, instead, sloped downward.
“You’re thinking of picking that one,” Valens said with a nudge of his head toward the middle path. “It’s crowded there. Chaotic, too.”
“Uh,” Nomad grunted. “I must answer the Call. Already made a mistake leaving the boys.”
“You’ve said you’ve got lost.” Valens arched an eyebrow at him. Nomad had been strangely tight-lipped about his own tale, other than stating outright he was simply lost.
Everybody lies.
“Pick a path,” Nomad urged him, a tone of mild fury in his voice. “Make it quick.” He stepped closer to the middle path and trailed a finger through his sword, waiting.
“Been through a lot, haven’t we? Through the bones and flames, eh? I say you’re being rather rude going back on your word now.” Valens shrugged and brushed past Nomad, peering back to his face. “Let’s go.”
Nomad’s shoulders hunched down. Emerald eyes squinted in hesitation. A glimmer of light shone round the ethereal fog coating over him, burning bright under the chestpiece. The thrum of his Heartstone had never been this clear, but its beats were a mess that lacked any sort of rhythm.
In the end, Nomad bent forward and pulled his sword up. Gazed at it for a long second before giving an uncertain nod. “Memories,” he said, and clicked his jaw. “Can’t get away with them, can you?”
“You can’t.”
“Then we move.”
They started up the middle path, walls widening around them. Tip and tap, water spilled down through the cracks along the ceiling. Everything was cold and dead, and yet Valens’s back prickled with invisible fear. His sound-vision sent tremors of unknown origins down his chest.
He hated the feeling. Knowing something was out there, but lacking the ability to see what it really was. Felt like solving one of the Master’s puzzles. You’d think you have a pretty good idea about the path you’d need to choose, only to realize you’ve been led blindly to a dead-end.
That sense of aimless wandering and nervous expectation multiplied here down in the cave, but Nomad’s sudden silence was worse. Valens then thought, much to his surprise, of yanking Nomad by the armor and asking him to spill everything out of his chest. Poke him with a Gale or two in case he’d resist.
Eats away the mind.
This couldn’t possibly be a side effect of Warmagic. A quick Lifeward told him that nothing in his body frequencies suggested that a change had happened in his nerve lines. Thoughts, though restless, still carried the same tone of cold separation about them. A Resonant Healer’s mind wasn’t different from a castle nailed at the edge of the long acres of the Northern Lands, hardened by the bone-chilling winds and ever-furious blizzards.
But then, warmth and questions, the stubborn pursuit of knowledge sat across the side of this harsh apathy. It was during those times, when he’d pour himself over the rocking chair and sip from Master Eldras’s home brewed root beer, or when they argued vehemently about a certain topic they just couldn’t meet each other halfway, that the apathy with which he shaded his mind faltered.
When he trailed that line of thought and was reminded of times he’d found himself at loss for words, when anger prevailed over his tight control round his emotions, when it became too much that he couldn’t stop the shaking of his fingers, he came to a fascinating discovery.
He was in a different world, trapped in an underground maze of caves, probably looking at facing a Necromancer and hundreds of corpses animated by his foul magic, hadn’t eaten a single bite of food for the last two days, but he was more bothered by the fact that Nomad refused to share what was clearly an important matter for him.
Nonsense.
Valens’s immediate reaction to the idea was to reject it. Young he might be, but he still carried the weight of an Archmagus’s mantle over his back. He couldn’t have been moved by the companionship they shared with this unnatural being for just over a day.
He was shaking his head when he finally witnessed a solitary streak of light break into the dark of the cave. It glistened silver, carrying the gentle touch of the moon's unmistakable grace.
More awaited them further along. Cracks widened and hinted at a promise of the world beyond. Still, Valens squashed his expectations and kept his heart in check. The streaks likely have found their way here after bouncing through a web of cracks in the stone, considering he could only see the hard walls beyond those cracks.
But there was one thing clear. They were nearing the chaos.
……
The road ahead was littered with pieces of bones, some splintered and ground into dust, some others riddled with cracks. The growling beat of Nomad’s Heartstone thumped in Valens’s mind when they came across an armored body, one that’d been nailed by a rusted spear to a side wall. Under its legs, green bits of stone glimmered ominously.
“I see you, brother,” Nomad muttered as he gave a long glance at the undead’s corpse, sword clenched tight in his hand and the other hand clasped in a fist over his chest. “Your stone now belongs to the Ninth Legion.”
Nomad repeated the same salute to the dozens of similar corpses along the way, mixed with an ungodly number of Skeletons and Skeleton Soldiers. Valens saw different shaped beasts between them. Hulking, dangerous-looking bone frames of creatures that spoke of unimaginable sizes.
One such corpse that had four strong bony limbs dripping with rotten flesh, one that could easily rival a two-story house in size, seemed to have crushed a group of undead under its weight. Nomad lingered a bit longer at the sight.
This scene reminded Valens of a border skirmish that happened three years ago. Ten thousand men had been butchered during a long winter. Bodies succumbed to the frostbite even before the men could carry them into the Healer’s Tent. Blood had pooled and smeared every bit of the military camp. Death had become a daily occurrence.
But nothing had been worse than the chaotic desperation of the frequencies. When a man died, he lost his Resonance, the song that accompanied and grew with him throughout his life. A bullet to his heart, then it was gone. Back to nothing.
Here, the same tune of empty agony hung thick in the air. Of remorse and rejection. Of pain and the nothingness of what had once been alive. Most of them belonged to the undead. Their Heartstones still bled even after they lost their glints.
Over that mournful hum, a clear cry dinned in Valens’s mind. Painful. Diminishing. He rushed past Nomad who was saluting the dead of his legion, through the giant bones and heap of bodies, until he stopped before a mountain of a carcass that blocked nearly half of the passage. There were other corpses strewn about here, bodies belonging to humans that died horrible deaths.
The clear sound came from just under those giant bones. A pained cry of a Resonance that burned stark amidst others. Valens grabbed at the ribcage of the already dead creature, straining against the weight. That didn’t work, so he decided to cast a Gale when a strong, armored hand reached from behind him and clenched the rib cage tight.
Nomad hauled the set of bones with a grunt, lifted it high and sent it crashing back the way they came, revealing a woman who lay senseless round a set of bones.
[Warrior - ???]
She was buried half-way into the ground, streaks of fractured earth sprawling about from the point of impact as if she was crushed by a great force. Her armor glistened golden, the chestpiece dented hideously into the ribcage, bits of shining metal tangled in the bloody flesh of her chest. Blood had dried round her lips, two blue eyes wide open and staring at nothing. She must’ve been blonde once, but now the hair had streaks of crimson smearing it.
Valens managed a Lifeward with immediate focus, instinct taking over his mind. The frequencies that dinned within the woman’s Resonance painted a grave picture in his sound vision.
Her ribcage was gone, heart punctured by the broken bones in more than five different points. Barely any blood flowed through her veins. Tunes of foreign substances rumbled in the Resonance, likely some sort of poison, perhaps similar to viper’s tongue — a most vile and unforgiving toxin that could paralyze an adult’s body in a few seconds.
Such a terrible case.
It was more the reason why he had trouble believing the frequencies inside his mind still carried a hint of life.
The woman was alive. Somehow, something was keeping her heart beating even as blood spurted out through the holes around her chest. Her breaths came out in a soundless, faint wheeze that Valens was sure nobody would’ve heard under that giant pile of bones.
“Still alive,” he muttered, reaching out to her face. “Still breathing.”
Nomad muttered something behind his back. Valens didn’t hear most of it. He was too busy keeping the Lifeward active, already mapping out a general direction for what seemed like an impossible operation.
But then, through the waves of feedback coming from the Lifeward, the picture detailing the woman’s condition grew clearer in his mind. He caught the coronary arteries feeding the heart, throbbing in a silent, almost pained cadence.
One of the floating ribs, the eleventh rib bone from the sound of it, was the main culprit of the hampered blood flow. It was thick, thrumming with such force that made him doubt whether it belonged to that beast Nomad hauled from over her than to the woman. It's point had drilled into the heart from the back and nearly ripped it wide open.
Even though its shape and size seemed normal at the first glance, Valens was sure even the rootmetal bullets couldn't ever hope to puncture through such density. Endurance had changed this woman into something more than a mere human, a feat of unimaginable proportions that left him scowling at her face.
That density now had become a major obstacle.
“Leave her,” Nomad said with a gravelly voice, grabbing Valens’s shoulder with crushing force. When Valens gave him a questioning glance, Nomad shook his head. “She’s dead. We need to move.”
“No, she’s not,” Valens said solemnly, planting his feet near the woman and leaning over her. “I can’t leave a patient who has a chance at making it. Go on your own, if you must.”
“You boneless fool! Move!” Nomad grumbled and cursed as he placed one armored foot near the woman’s face. His hand clasped the sword in a ready-grip, as if he was preparing to make sure the woman was dead.
“Stop it,” Valens said to his face with cold determination. “And be quiet. I need to work.”
He ignored the undead’s curses as he focused back on the patient. He first studied the subtle movement of the woman’s coronary arteries and the way how the shattered rib cage stirred around her chest. The broken bones seemed guided by an unseen force, just like that large mole with a big wound on its head, trying to find their way back, but failing miserably as there was hardly anything left in the woman’s body to feed their motions.
So Valens had to take the reins with a pair of Lifesurges, both of which he sent down to the woman’s chest and wrapped around the bone tips biting into the heart, Lifeward constantly letting him know of the Resonance of the broken area.
Another Lifesurge slithered slowly down and came to a rest beside the largest fracture, waiting to stitch the arteries back when Valens would pull the stubborn bone out of the way.
A gentle tug at the surge threads sent a wave of crashing frequencies belonging to that of spilling blood into his mind. The woman wheezed out a pained breath as her heart tightened. Valens wasted no time moving onto the artery while guiding the rib bone away to its home, releasing the surge threads once he was done and letting them wash over the damaged area with life mana.
He repeated the same process with the other fractures, sweat dripping down his chin. The fact that he didn’t have to rely on external tools made the operation a manageable challenge. Without the skills and his inner mana pool supplying them, the patient would’ve been dead the moment he took that bone out of the heart.
The woman’s natural constitution certainly helped. Like a cracked bare patch of earth, once the surges dissolved into waves of life mana, her body absorbed it greedily and accelerated the healing process.
Her skin slowly reknitted itself around where the bones poked out of her chest. Valens had already cleared the large pieces of her splintered armor, but for good measure he had to remove the chestpiece and the cloth under it as well, sending another Lifesurge to make sure the bits wouldn’t get mixed into her flesh.
*Ding! [Lifesurge(Master) : 2 > 3]
*Ding! [Lifeward(Master) : 2 > 3]
“You’re wasting our time,” Nomad grunted from behind. “Even if you can pull her back, we can’t carry her through the caves. There’s a damned Necromancer—“
“She won’t be a burden,” Valens cut him off, giving him a weighing look. “Once I’m done here she’ll be breathing and walking just fine.”
The undead didn’t seem to be convinced, but Valens ignored him. The result would speak for itself. It took him the greater half of his mana pool to make sure everything was back in place. Fatigue weighed hard on his shoulders.
The woman choked. A rattling, rasping breath rocked her chest. Blood dripped slowly down her chin as some warmth returned to her bare skin. She shook madly, bubbles frothing round her pale lips, eyelids fluttering and fingers grasping at the empty air. Valens had to keep her nailed on the ground lest she’d harm herself.
Nomad leaned in and peered curiously from beside Valens’s face. His emerald eyes widened. “That can’t be true,” he let out an awed breath. “Her eyes… She’s coming to herself. How?”
“Through experience and a mad effort at studying the nature’s miracle that is the human body,” Valens answered with a hint of shaded pride in his voice, both hands pressed hard onto the woman’s chest.
The poison is still there, I’m afraid.
“Nine Hells! If she’s coming to herself…” Nomad seemed restless for a reason as his eyes snapped at the woman. “This ain’t going to be pretty.”
“What?” Valens said.
“Uh—“
A hand lashed up and caught Valens by the throat, fingers curling painfully tight around his skin. Breath wheezed out weakly through his lips. He flailed. Tried to shake himself off the woman’s hold, but the fingers kept his throat sealed. Kept him there on the spot, and choked him hard.
…..
