Sacrifice Mage

Chapter 246 (B3: 73): Beyond Beginning

When I could see again, I wasn’t where I felt like I should have been. I didn’t like who I should have been.Instead, I was… well, I was me in a fashion, but so much more than me.

Both my mana cores were whizzing so fast, I was sure they’d be tearing their ways out of my chest and head respectively. My body seemed to be pulsing. Strange waves of energy seemed to be emanating from me at regular intervals.

All of it combined to make me feel like I was about to blow any second. Like I was going to self-destruct into smithereens if I didn’t focus on keeping myself together.

Slowly, I got to my feet, taking note of my surroundings while trying to ignore the weirdness with my own body and sense of self. It was like that strange feeling I got when channelling excess energy, like I energy myself, my body and soul and consciousness all turning into some form of mana that vaguely resembled everything that made me .

For the moment, my vision was obscured by the Weave desperately claiming my attention.

I blinked at the new Augmentation. Was that it? Had the fight against the Vaunted finally pushed my Power enough to get me the new Augmentation I had been training for?

Not that I could test it now. My Path of Starforged Firmament was now evolving too, and that added another layer of warping, twisting sensation of that compounded my already terrible feelings. Forget the euphoria at ranking up, I was feeling way too unmoored.

It was easy to push aside my slight trepidation at the wrongness I was feeling when I saw my location.

My first impression was that I was back in the Nether Vein. The same storm-grey metal with the interlocking patterns, the same sensation of writhing darkness just waiting for me to take my first step before eradicating me with a hurricane of Netherthreads.

But that wasn’t true. As I got over my shock, I found that it was the Nether Vein that was trying to come the mountain.

The mountainside was plated with the strange metal, which was taking on a pyramidic appearance with the way it was creating concentric steps and levels. All the magma in the vent that I had plunged into was now ensconced within the walls, running through tiny veins beside the metal.

Above me, a strange scar of writhing energy pulsed against the darkness birthed by the Nether Vein. I recognized it after a few blinks. That was where Starburst had struck the Vaunted’s attack.

The collision of our ultimate powers, now immortalized in that rupture in space-time within this facsimile of the Nether Vein.

Speaking of the Vaunted, I found no sign of her. Where had she gone? Why hadn’t she killed me yet? Because I was really, really sure that she was well and alive and continuing with her machinations. Ones that I needed to stop. Fast. Before her plan, whatever it was, reached its culmination.

I hurried away. The farther I went, the more I grew alarmed. I was familiar with in my quarter of Zairgon had changed because of the strange Nether Vein incursion ritual that the Vaunted had performed. Hardly anything was recognizable…

With no other option, I flew straight up. Gravity and Flare combined to send me climbing straight upwards.

I gasped as I rose. Not at the sight that was unfolding before me, which just confirmed my fears of how much was changing—and had already changed. But at the with which I was able to execute my Aspects. They flowed like butter. I wasn’t even sure if I had actually channelled any mana or not.

Just thinking about my Aspects brought them into being. Or rather, their came into being. I wished to rise high, and lo and behold, I did.

Did the crazy way my mana cores were spinning have something to do with that?

Focus. I had to focus on what was important, not on the myriad weirdness resulting from the ritual.

Much of Ring Four was still identifiable in the distance. Streets were changing, buildings were being swamped by the rapidly spreading Nether Vein, whole neighbourhoods shifting and altering as they were stormed by the grey metal. Strangely, I didn’t see any of the Netherthreads. There was no vicious storm of darkness ripping into everyone and everything it could see.

That comforted me just a tiny bit.

What didn’t, though, was the way the temple of the Sun Cult glowed bright hot.

I blinked at the glare. Calling it intense was a massive understatement. The light was bright enough to force me to look away. Which was bad because my temple supposed to be glowing like that.

“Cultist Ross!” Lujean said when I shot over to where he and a few other cultists had gathered together. “What in the world is going on? Are you… are you alright?”

“I’m fine.” There was no point in focusing on the weirdness about me. More important business was afoot. They all looked scared, but honestly, I was just glad they were all safe. “Tell me what happened.”

I realized what a stupid demand that was after what Lujean had just asked me.

“I mean,” I said. “Tell me what exactly went down. I want to know the details. .”

Lujean and the other cultists were quick about it, especially after seeing my urgency. I learned that a sudden blast had shaken the entirety of Zairgon, so much so that people had quickly evacuated their homes in fear of an earthquake. That was good. It meant that everything changing due to the Nether Vein wasn’t affecting people directly as badly as I had feared.

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The temple had started glowing moments after the shaking had started. Everyone had already evacuated, and now, no one dared go in. Even from this distance, I could feel it radiating energy that was so potent, going even one foot closer meant stepping nearer to obliteration.

“We saw her!” Lujean said loudly when I asked about the Vaunted specifically. “I had no idea who it was, but Thefris came down with a warning about it all, Cultist. So we’ve been preparing in case things turned awful. Which I guess they have.”

I wasn’t listening to the last bit. My eyes were focused on the insanity at the centre of the temple. I had just turned on Highlight again, and what I saw made my skin crawl.

At the centre of the temple, right over the broken roof near where I liked to hang, an eye was birthing to life. Clearly, no one else saw it because no one else was reacting at all. In fact, when I stopped channelling Highlight, I lost sight of it too, only able to see a blistering brightness like a miniature sun had come to life.

But I decided I wasn’t going to stop channelling Highlight any time soon. That eye at the centre of the temple wasn’t all that was wrong with the world.

Strange energies were flowing everywhere. A lot of them were directed straight at the eye, but several were heading to the little mana cores forming everywhere the Nether Vein’s metal was arising. Right. I remembered well how mana cores were embedded into the very structure of the Nether Vein. It seemed they were here too, forming along with the walls and floors.

“Lujean,” I said. “I need you to take everyone and protect them.”

“Where are you going, Cultist Ross?” he asked. “Are you… going to try and stop this? you stop it?”

“I will.” I took a deep breath, then stopped and tried for a smile. “I won’t lie, I can’t guarantee I will. Guess I lied to you there. But I get to the bottom of what’s going on.”

That seemed to be enough to comfort Lujean and the rest of the cultists with him. I was once again thankful there didn’t seem to be that many of them there. Thefris had been good with her warning.

I was about to go in, but first, I rose high up again. Something told me that entering the temple now would have me committing myself to seeing through whatever was going on there.

So, first, I was determined to see if I could do something about the entirety of Ring Four.

A curious figure made me pause whatever I was thinking just then. A familiar figure, one I flew towards with zero hesitation.

“Ah, Cultist Moreland,” Councillor Wargrog said. “I arrived as quickly as I could after I heard there were disturbances in Ring Four…”

He was looking around, his aged grey eyes taking it all in with growing alarm and foreboding. Right. The Nether Vein was everywhere now, and people were huddling together in fear.

“I tried to stop it,” I said. “But…”

In the end, I hadn’t done enough. My knowledge of rituals, or at least, the of ritualistic process that the Vaunted from Claderov had followed, was limited. And that had led me to get cornered by my enemy’s plan.

“This is Claderov’s doing, I gather,” Wargrog said.

“I’m sorry, Councillor, but there’s no time to talk. This god-awakening process they’re attempting to perform isn’t done yet. And I intend to stop it before any further disasters materialize.”

Wargrog’s sense of alarm had clearly grown the more I had spoken, but his voice was admirably composed. “I fear it might be too late, Cultist Moreland.”

“I refuse to believe that. I don’t care how well they executed their stupid plan or what they’ve got in mind. I getting to the bottom of this, and I will let them harm Ring Four.”

“No, I don’t mean their ritual or whatever strange ceremony they are following. I mean what you said about no further disasters befalling us in Zairgon. In Ring Four, specifically. The gates for that have already been flung wide open, and now, we have no choice but to contend with them.”

I swallowed. “What do you mean?” I started looking around just as the Councillor was doing. “I haven’t seen any…”

My voice faded when I start to see things that made my heart clench. The streams of energy were taking a certain strange shape. They were beginning to look like spirits. Like ghosts, wraiths shooting through the streets and scouring across the walls of the Nether Vein, screeching out with haunting, cries.

At first, they didn’t look particularly harmful, other than clearly scaring anyone who was too close. I wondered how much regular people were aware of them. When I stopped using Highlight, I definitely didn’t see much of the spirits besides vague impressions of .

But the more alarming changes were starting to occur already. Several of the spirits, who for now had retained some sort of humanlike—or in certain rare cases, Rakshasa-, or Scalekin-, or even Plumefolk-like appearance—had started changing. Their bodies were contorting, deforming, turning monstrous.

“Have you ever wondered where the creatures you fought within the Nether Vein came from, Cultist Moreland?” Wargrog asked.

I swallowed. “I thought… they were native to the Nether Vein.”

“Not quite. They are native to the power trapped within the Nether Vein.”

“You mean ”

“Exactly.”

It was surreal to have conversations of that nature while there were literal monsters taking shape in front of our very eyes. My body twitched to move, to get in front of and deal with the creatures before they attacked the innocent Ring Four citizens huddling together in the street.

But there were already people working on it. I had just failed to notice them till now.

Led by Guard Commander Trikurag, the guards of Zairgon who hadn’t accompanied the trip to Claderov were now here in full force. Several were pulling away the citizens to safer ground, while the rest tackled the newborn monsters in groups. Through it all, Trikurag’s calls rang out loud and clear.

I took a calming breath. “The energy that these creatures are birthing themselves from,” I said. “They’re all coming from the Sun Cult temple. I intend to go and there and stop whatever madness the Vaunted from Claderov is trying to accomplish. That should hopefully stop the horrific monsters too.”

“Then I will leave you to it,” Wargrog said. “My expertise may yet be needed here.” He looked at me shrewdly. “Se-Vigilance said you had a certain path ahead of you. A path that no one can walk besides yourself. I believe that this moment is a part of that path…”

Paths. I was once again reminded of my Path of the Auric Hierophant trying to evolve. That was what kept causing the weirdness with my body exuding magical energy the way it did.

Satisfied that there were indeed others willing to keep an eye out and protect Ring Four besides myself, I hurried back to the temple. Lujean and the others were drawing a large group of Ring Four inhabitants towards safer ground. The strange wraiths might have been turning into monsters, but the people of Ring Four weren’t defenceless.

We had fought off the Blight Swarm, after all.

From a certain perspective, it was odd to think I might be the only one to fix this mess. That I could pervade into whatever gleaming, golden miasma that the Vaunted had created with her ritual and correct the wrongness she had inflicted on Zairgon. On Ring Four, specifically.

There were others who were stronger than me. At least one of them was already present in Ring Four too. Surely, the Councillor was the powerful of the two of us. I wasn’t even fully Opal-ranked, yet.

But I had to remind myself that most powerful wasn’t the same as best equipped to handle every scenario.

From the very moment it had all started, I was the one who was most integral to everything that had gone on with the Nether Vein. I was the one who had opened it. I was the one who had been unduly targeted by the Netherthreads, whose core had been infiltrated by the strands of darkness. I was the one who had gone deep within the Nether Vein and interacted with the Beyond in such a way that my mana core had taken up its property.

There was no one else in Zairgon who could claim to have the same kind of connection to the Nether Vein, to the supposed divine power locked within it, as I did.

So I strode straight to the temple. The area was devoid of people. There was nothing in the neighbourhood except more of those wraiths swirling around, looking for targets as they slowly transformed and turned into monstrous beings.

I ignored them all. Field Manipulation with Infusion worked well enough to keep them trapped. It seemed Massless Interaction worked on massless ghosts as well.

The energy coming off my body was essentially turning spastic. It stiffened and spiked with no rhyme or reason, coming off my body more and more riotously the closer I got to the temple. Both my mana cores felt like they were bombs seconds away from exploding. The weirdest thing was that they seemed to be spinning in directions, for whatever reason.

Almost like there’d be sparks flying if they got close enough to brush against each other. I wasn’t sure what was up with that, but there was no time to ponder it.

The temple was right in front of me.

And I couldn’t go in.

There was some kind of barrier working against me. I thought it felt like condensed energy at first, but no, this was something else. It was that same wrongness I had felt earlier. Like there was something in front of me that should never have even existed in this place. Even Highlight was struggling to identify it.

I stepped back for a bit, trying not to let my frustrations win. The mana cores were spinning ever faster, distracting me and not letting me focus.

With a curse, I sent out Sacrifice. Surely, with Overclaim, I could bully my way through whatever this was. It didn’t work, which wasn’t helping my annoyance levels. The white threads of Sacrifice mana just disappeared as soon as they connected with the strangeness.

I couldn’t even what it was. Just a blanket of bright seeming-energy that was probably something else entirely. This made me afraid of whether someone was stuck inside or not. And then there were the wraiths getting bigger and more demonic. Slowly pushing themselves up and out of the field of artificial gravity.

Using Granular Control to break down the temple walls didn’t work because space itself within the—

.

The wrongness I kept feeling was a different entirely.

As if that was some sort of breakthrough or realization, my twin mana cores went on overdrive. Somehow, they really did connect. Disregarding the laws of spacetime, the two oppositely-revolving cores of compressed magical energy spun against each other, making the aura around them spike with nuclear power.

I didn’t even get the chance to curse as I felt like I was being consumed from within.