Chapter Three Hundred And Eighty – 380
The frozen waves of Evie's core were like mountains, grown somehow in the few minutes he'd been gone, and Felix's every step scaled them. Leaping from the crest of one, he soared through the air on the Strength of his legs alone, while the only thing preventing him from shattering the glacier beneath him was a hastily summoned Cloudstep. The platform exploded beneath his tread but it served its purpose.
Evie's core stretched into the sky before him, as huge and as choked with frost as before. Essencestolen from the now obliterated giantsfilled him to bursting as he hurtled horizontally toward the massive chain. He reached for its winter-locked shape with Will and Skill.
Adamant Discord!
A dim connection turned to solid-steel bar in his grip, filling Felix with a bone deep chill even as he directed the stolen potency within him into the link. It warmed immediately, turning intensely hot as he hauled on it. Lightning sparked, generated by the sheer friction of his motion, and he found himself practically teleported to its side so fast was his movement. Felix barely had time to flex his Will in the reverse, landing with entirely too much force on the craggy chain.
The entire thing shook, and broken ice rained down from above.
Felix grimaced, but couldn't afford the time to care. Gentle meant failure, and failure...Evie wouldn't be able to hold on for long. He grabbed at the Essence in his core, held separate from his Divine Tree and other gnashing bits of his core space, and focused. With a great heave, he shoved the lot of it out of his Mana Gates and into the chain core at his feet. Power, white-bright and thick, blasted forth from his palms and feet and mouth.
Ice turned to water and then vapor almost instantly. Essence Draught and System energy thundered from Felix, so bright he couldn't even look at it all, so loud he had to squeeze shut his Affinity to keep out the Spirit-splitting pain. Everything around him bucked, once, twice, before even the metal started to sag and warp.
Ice exploded above and below as the entire skyscraper-sized chain began to move. A huge detonation shook the core space, quaking everything, and Felix could barely sense the frozen waves all collapsing on themselves as they melted. An ocean of power heaved beneath him as the chain morphed, twisting on itself as ice was drawn upward from the surface and clouds were pulled down from the sky. Purple-white and silvery-blue, the Mana burned as bright as the System energy, hotter than a sun and twice as brilliant.
"Evie!" he shouted, putting everything into his voice. "Now!"
Evie's eyes snapped open at the same time the world fell apart.
Water surged and her nearby Skills screamed in protest, metal and ice shearing against one another in a high pitched cacophony. Magda, committed to her attack, was hauled off her feet by a sudden inexorable suction. Her sister's icy double was wrenched backward toward Evie's core, flipping over itself until it planted its jagged shields in the water and floor beneath it.
Evie felt the tug, but it was somehow far less disastrous for her. Water streamed past her body, swirling toward the center, but left her relatively untouched. She stood, still shaking. Her eyes were filled with her sister's Golem, its inanimate eyes seeming terrified and utterly unconcerned at the same time.
"II didn't," she whispered. Evie took several steps, not even feeling the frigid water on her feet. Memories still swam in her head, visions that refused to leave her. She didn't want them to. "Mags, youI didn't kill you."
YOU LEFT
"I DIDN'T KILL YOU!"
Evie screamed as she tackled the creature that wore her sister's face, knocking its shields loose and sending the both of them crashing into the water. Currents swept them away, pulling first Magda and then Evie under, tumbling them at increasing speeds toward her core. The creature's thick limbs pushed at Evie's smaller frame, but she had little leverage so close, and the younger woman clung like a barnacle on a sinking ship. They bobbed back up to the surface, both of them gasping for breath.
"I'm not to blame!" Evie shouted. A dagger appeared in her free hand and was brought down, again and again. Ice chipped and flew in all directions. The creature twisted, kicking its legs and flexing its beefy arms.
THE GIANTS FOUND ME! YOU WERE NOT THERE!
"I saved them! I saved the people we were sent to save!" Evie rolled as the creature bucked beneath her, until they both flailed in the deepening water. Waves hurled them up and down, barely missing the broken ice flotillas all around them. "You fought them"
I FOUGHT THEM ALONE!
A shield at least ten feet tall sped through the water, narrowly missing Evie's skull as it sheared through three burgeoning ice floes behind her. The force of its passage, however, sent Evie splashing in the depths, sunk below before bobbing up like a cork.
"You...did," Evie choked out as she climbed atop an ice platform about ten strides across. The creature that wasand wasn'ther sister did the same, at the opposite end. The water around them was racing now, the currents too strong for her Strength to overcome. "You saved everyone...Felix, me, Cal...everyone."
Evie looked down at her hands which were raw and shaking from the cold. The bladed chain she held tumbled uselessly from her fingers. Her voice was a low sob that hurt her chest and throat.
"No one is to blame. You...you chose."
Magda regarded her, and for a moment the violence paused. A shield half formed from ice and metal chains, stuttered to an unnatural stop. Evie's breath caught as something manifested within the construct, something she could hear, even over her own ragged breaths. It was gentle and sudden, yet viciously guarded. Tears leaked from Evie's eyes at that sound, which felt so much like her sister that she had once known.
"Magda...?"
Magda reached out a hand of faceted ice layered with links of steel upon her shoulder, one and then the other. Beneath that touch, Evie's own form flickered, her visualized flesh giving way to ice and water and metal chains. For an instant, as they embraced, they were the same. Evie shuddered, her throat scraped raw, and collapsed into her sister's arms.
She imagined that the constructs arms tightened just a little more. Evie gasped, and looked up...but its arms loosened without warning.
Core Space Authority Recognized.
Direct As Needed.
The creature's face was empty, and its song was gone, turning once more to ice and steel. Evie blinked back tears and pulled herself away.
"Y-yeah. Let's go back to my core."
Confirmed.
Evie pushed down her pain. She couldn't afford it. Not then. The currents carried them into her core faster than ever before, floating atop their frozen platform. The currents grew stronger and stronger, until everywhere there was a frenetic inward movement. She feared, for a moment, that they were headed for a waterfall. Yet she wasn't ready for the true devastation at her center.
She gasped as it came into view.
Chains and ice pulled inward, buckling huge sheets of thick hoarfrost before they were rendered into a thousand tiny pieces. The water below it all was sucked in as well, hissing as it hit her core and producing a cloak of choking steam. Her impossible chain, once frozen in place, now moved, spinning slowly as three distinct Mana types flowed into and around it all. Water, ice, and metal. They called to her in a cacophony of drums and crashing cymbals, a symphony of building rhythm...but empty just the same.
AFI +15!
Evie blinked in surprise as the sound deepened and expanded. The drums divided into sharp reports and low, sonorous booms, while metal crashed and vibrated in equal measure. It was the sound of her core as it spun, but it was incomplete. That emptiness was all the more obvious for its increased volume, a gaping hole where the rhythm died.
She saw Felix, hovering in mid-air in the blazing light of her molten core. His arms were outstretched and red-gold flames licked along their length as he enacted some sort of Skill.
"Evie!" he shouted, not seeming surprised by her arrival, only relieved. "You need to spin your core! The power must be spooled together! Condensed!"
"How?" she asked, shouting with everything she had. She could barely hear him over the hollow music in her ears. "I don't know how!"
"Your Willpower! Focus on what you need to happen! Visualize it!"
Visualize. Just like Harn said, she realized. The warrior had beat the concept into her over the course of months until she'd formed this space, but even then Evie still questioned how it all worked. The why of it. Don't think. Just do.
The core he was stabilizing with Fiendforge shifted, its lazy rotations picking up by the barest of margins.
You got this, Evie. C'mon.
Fiendforge is level 10!
His Skill was working hard, filling Felix's channels with its strange, complex song. The pattern of the Unique Skill was all that was holding Evie's volatile core space together as the System tried to advance herand he spotted more power incoming. From the distance, waves of shimmering water Mana flooded, rising so high that they threatened to crash into the floating chain-bundles of her Skills. By the time the waves reached them, they had partially frozen into ice and slush, hitting Evie's core with a stentorian hiss and release of carbon-charred steam. Each wave hurt him more, wasting a ton of his Essence and Mana in the process, not to mention the shreds of significance that fed into his Fiendforge. It was far less than what Unite the Lost utilized, but Felix wasn't sure it was working.
Evie's core remained in its strange transitional state, even as her Willpower caught enough momentum to maintain a steady rotation. The core space was drawing in Mana from all around, not even counting the occasional System wave, and like debris in a river, Felix could feel that it would eventually dam itself up.
What's missing?
"Evie!" he shouted, forcing his voice with all of his chest. It was crazy loud so close to her core. "Evie! It's not catching! We're missing something!"
He had no clue what, or else he would have pointed it out. Frankly, thinking was getting harder the longer he maintained his grip on her core space. His Mind and Spirit were straining while he felt his Body distantly spasming back in the real world. Fiendforge was not a Skill lightly used, he was realizing, but it was too late for that. It was all that kept Evie from breaking apart completely, and he'd hold it until he collapsed if it meant a chance for her success.
"I don't want to rush you, but this hurts. Like, a lot!" Felix grunted.
In response, he heard a high, blood-curdling scream. It was laced with frustration and...and grief and loneliness. The core before him began to hum as if in sympathy, and to Felix's amazement, it spun. Faster. And faster.
"You're doing it! I don't know what, but you're doing it!" Felix shouted in joy. He risked a look back at his friend, only to see her on her knees. "Evie?"
Her face was stricken, and her hand was outstretched but limp against the ice floe she was on. Felix focused, only just barely making out the shape of her Golem, the false Magda, as it raced toward her core.
"She's the missing piece," Evie said, her voice strained.
The creature, made of ice and metal, hit the spinning core in a single colossal leap. It turned to liquid before ever touching it, the compression and friction of its spin too much for its form, and even the liquid burst into steam that was pulled whole-cloth into the roiling morass beneath Felix.
Evie screamed wordlessly and her core pulsed.
A melody joined the insistent rhythm, a song that wove deftly within the empty spaces between beats. The whole of Evie's core surged, bucking in Felix's grip as Evie's fledgling Intent finally became realized. Molten metal stretched and twisted, spinning in greater velocities with every passing second, and ice from below was pulled into the weave, spiraling around the molten core of it like a strand of DNA. The ice melted, turning to water and then to steam as it rose to the topmost portions of the complex ring, where it once more condensed into iceall to repeat the pattern over and over again. Deep blue and purple-white Mana spun endlessly in looping whorls around the molten silver core. A chain of power, endlessly wrapped within itself.
Evie's ring core was complete.
Three chains shot outward, glowing links of blazing silver and deepest blue that stabbed out into her core space. Each chain sunk into a Skill, and power thrummed along their lengths. Ice shattered as the Skills cracked and twisted, the chains within them whirling to a life Felix had never seen them display. The thick ice that had choked them broke off in great sheets while in their center orbs of wobbling water formed, each of them illuminated by swirling motes.
Light inundated the core space, the same process as Atar's own, and all Felix could do was hunch and weather the onslaught of power. It washed over him, burning at his skin and hair and face, but leaving him largely unharmed. Below, Evie shouted as the power altered her in a fundamental way, and she blossomed with a sympathetic radiance.
Felix closed his eyes, and held on.
Fiendforge is level 11!
Above it all, hovering in a darkness beyond the sky, Zara watched. Water and ice and metal had swirled triumphantly into a thin ring of power, a core worthy of a nascent Adept, and the whole of Evie's core space shone with the baptism of resonant energy it had just undergone.
Zara was shaken.
The cracks that had crazed the girl's foundations were gone, healed just as completely as if they had never happened. The immense, vice-like grip of Felix's strange Skill had held it through the worst of her crisis, and the System's rush of energy had done the rest. It was not an impossible feat, achievable by many that called themselves true experts in the advancement of core spaces. And yet...Felix had also reforged the girl's core in a way she have never seen before. He'd balanced the spin and twist of her attuned elements, giving a priority to metal as was proper to Evie's selected build, while also creating a cyclical representation of her ice and water attunements. His grasp of the intrinsic nature of Harmony, of the music behind the world, was growing at an alarming rate.
Zara felt hope swell within her breast at the sight. Perhaps doom wasn't certain, were Felix to join their side in the coming battles.
Perhaps...
For now, she would wait and watch. And pray.
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