BTIV - Chapter Twelve

An onkert snarled in front of Micah, beating its chest with gorilla arms as it faced down a human warrior.  Chains forged from fire jumped from the sand, shackling both of the daemon’s arms and setting their thick fur ablaze as the fighter used his blessing.  The man switched to a two handed grip on his sword and stabbed the blade through the bound monster’s chest.

Micah blinked.  His mouth was filled with fuzz and it was like he was watching the world through dirty glass.  Everything was hazy and distant.  Like it was happening to someone other than him.

An arrow sailed past Micah, the shaft of the projectile easily as long as his arm, before burying itself in the side of the daemon’s head.  Leeka followed it, stepping into the open and shouting something unintelligible as she pulled another arrow from her quiver.

A brensen, a skeletal vulture daemon more than twice as strong as an onkert, dove toward them from above.  Leeka unleashed her arrow, striking the monster in a bony wing while Micah stared up at it, his gaze as stunned and vacant as the bodies in his dream.

The arrow deflected off of the monster, cracking one of its many visible bones but failing to do any other damage as it swooped lower.  Just before it reached Leeka and Micah, a man in robes and wielding a staff made entirely from one piece of crystal leapt toward it.  His feet kicked off of the open air like it was solid ground, and he swung his weapon with all his might, meeting the swooping monster mid-flight.

The staff flashed with blue light and the brensen rocketed backward toward the fighter that had just finished off the onkert.  He raised his left hand, closing it into a fist and shackles of flame closed themselves around the daemon’s ankles, binding the monster to the ground.

Leeka was shouting something.  Her hair was undone and flowing everywhere and at some point her armor had been cut, revealing a claw mark on her chest and shoulder that was bleeding freely.

Micah reached out, touching her shoulder and casting Augmented Mending without a word to close the wound.  Leeka turned and looked at him, surprise on her face.  She grabbed him by his shoulder and shook Micah, shouting something the entire time.

He wasn’t sure what she was saying.  His name?  A warning?

Behind her the desert night was filled with moving bodies.  Soldiers wearing uniforms of the Sandrovok Royal Family struggled with daemons.  At the center of the tableau, Trevor and Drekt stood shoulder to shoulder with Gwen and a number of heavily armored elite warriors as they fought a pair of luocas in front of a tear in space.

Micah blinked.

An onkert tumbled out of the rip, and fuzzy memories began to sort themselves out.  Micah ignored the flashes of magic and distant screams as he took a step toward the main battle.  He recognized the dunes surrounding Trevor and Drekt.  This was where the crab daemon had crashed from the sky.

Sound was starting to return.  Leeka was definitely shouting at him, but the words didn’t really mean anything.  It was just a collection of sound washing over him.

What did matter was the portal to Elsewhere.  There wasn’t any mystery or question about how his arcana skill interacted with the gateway.  Micah could feel it, like a raw wound in space, angry and inflamed as it pulsed with unnatural power.

He took a step toward it.  Another onkert charged him only for one of Leeka’s arrows to appear in one of its eye sockets, snapping the daemon’s head backward.  A second later, Leeka ran past him, short sword flashing in the moonlight as she stabbed it three times.

The daemon crumbled to the sand, dissolving into motes of energy that began to float away in the night air.

MIcah didn’t notice, walking at a steady pace past a number of battles between clumps of blessed and the lesser daemons that managed to slip past the main battle line as they struggled with the luocas.  He could hear the portal.  An angry buzzing noise, aggressive and hungry.  It felt like the crab daemon.

Trevor noticed him and yelled something, but it was just noise.  Micah didn’t bother responding as he passed the main fighters from the princess’ detachment.  Now that he was closer he could see the luocas.  They were covered in wounds, none fatal but enough to stain the sand with their dark ichor, but their most striking feature was tethers of crimson energy connecting them to the portal.

Nostalgia washed over Micah.  It was like when he was back in Pereston.  He had substituted the ritual to summon and temporarily bind the daemons with a direct link to himself.  That connection let them live in Karell indefinitely, but it also corrupted Micah, drawing enough of the essence of Elsewhere into himself that he became a poison that risked himself and those around him.

These daemons weren’t summoned.  There was no ritual binding or controlling them.  There wasn’t even a sacrifice determining their energy levels and how long they could remain in the material world.  Somehow, his fight with the greater daemon had opened a pathway into Elsewhere itself.  They were lucky that only smaller entities like the luocas and brensens had passed through.

Admittedly, those daemons were more than a handful for Karell’s denizens, but that wasn’t anything new to Micah.  Compared to the other world, everything here was weak and diluted.  Almost every time he teleported, Micah could feel the attention of beings on par with the crab daemon that had fought him to a stand still and invaded his dreams.

The gods had created the barrier for a good reason, and he’d be damned if his actions were what broke the peace.

Micah reached out with his right hand, touching the border of the portal.  A brensen’s bony claw poked out, but he ignored it.  The new type of energy that he couldn’t quite identify before flowed out of him, but where before it was a trickle, now it was a massive surge.

The portal crumbled like a piece of paper, crushing the claw in front of him before winking out of existence entirely.  Micah’s hand fell to his side and the series of red threads connecting the daemons all over the battlefield to the portal that spawned them began to disappear one by one.

He turned around just in time to see the two luocas collapse.  They began dissolving into brightly colored motes of energy even as the princess and her guards gaped at him incredulously.

Micah opened and closed his hand.  He frowned.  Something was different.  He was more powerful, but more than that something had changed on a basic level.  He could see and interact with both magic and the power of Elsewhere on an almost instinctive level now.  It was as instinctive and natural as breathing or letting his heart continue to beat.

He opened his status.

Age 21 [ERROR] / 35

Class/Level Divine Candidate 57

XP 272,400/1,900,000

HP 10,492/10,492

Class Specialty

Chronomancer, Enchanter

Attributes

Body 61, Agility 61, Mind 123, Spirit 122

Attunement

Moon 110  Sun 70  Night 125

Mana

Moon 10,640/10,651 Sun 10,571/10,571 Night  10,681/10,681

Affinities

Time 10

Tier V - Foresight 19, Time Echos 3, Temporal Transfer 3, Haste 16
Tier VI - Temporal Vortex 14, Temporal Stutter 7, Stasis 6
Tier VII - Time Leash 7, Weave of Fate 5,

Tier VIII - Deja Vu 5

Wood 8

Tier I - Refresh 14, Mending 13, Plant Weave 21

Tier II - Augmented Mending 20, Root Spears 14

Tier III - Heal 13, Paralytic Sting 6, Explosive Thicket 13

Tier IV - Regeneration 12, Healing Wave 6, Poison Fog 15

Tier V - Panacea 7, Coma 6, False Life 3

Tier VI - Binding Vines 12, Infest 4

Air 7

Tier I - Gale 11, Air Knife 24, Air Supply 6
Tier II - Wind Shield 11, Sonic Bolt 18

Tier III - Updraft 5, Pressure Spear 15, Sonic Orb 14

Tier IV - Flight 14, Wind Blade 13

Tier V - Vacuum 6

Blessings

Mythic Blessing of Mursa - Blessed Return, Ageless Folio

Skills

Anatomy  10

Arcana   25

Major Arcana 8

Enchanting  36

Fishing   2
Herbalism  5

Librarian  5

Ritual Magic  39

Spear   41

-Wind Spear 13
-TITS  22

Spellcasting  52

He sucked in a breath, feeling the world snap into focus around him.  A level and a half and a name for the new subskill. There wasn’t a guide or a description for what Major Arcana was, but Micah had a pretty good idea.  Between his dreamlike interaction with the greater daemon and evolution of his perception, there was no doubt in his mind that his ability to perceive and control the energy of Elsewhere had grown exponentially.

“Micah!”

He turned, locking eyes with Trevor as his brother called out to him, waving one arm over his head as he skidded across the dunes.

“We saw you fight that thing,” Trevor continued, “and then both of you just got hazy and collapsed.  Leeka went wild trying to wake you up.  She was basically shaking you and screaming for almost five minutes, and then as the soldiers started to arrive the big daemon’s body dissolved completely and that portal opened up.”

Micah coughed to hide his embarrassment before replying.

“Sorry to worry you.  Things got a little out of hand there.”

“Out of hand?” Gwen asked, marching over to him with a stern look chiseled into her face.  Rather than robes and gems she was wearing heavily enchanted armor, an exquisite broadsword in her right hand.  “My seers detected a major summoning from the capital and we rode as fast as we could only to find the desert half destroyed and a daemon that looked like it had been invented by a drunk bard rampaging across the dunes.  Before I could get any answers to my questions, lesser daemons began to pour out.  For a second there, I thought even the first reaction team was going to be overwhelmed.”

“Somehow,” she said with a sigh, “I am entirely unsurprised to find you in the middle of it.  Both of my encounters with you have ended with daemonic incursions.  Tell me Micah Silver, is that your class?  Are you a daemon hunter?”

Before he could answer, Leeka walked past the princess, punching Micah in the shoulder hard enough that he fell back a step.  The blow didn’t do any damage.  Given that he was wearing the Maarikava armor, Micah suspected it hurt the archer significantly more than the blow shook him.  Still, that wasn’t exactly the point.

“That’s for making me think you were in a coma,” the woman hissed angrily.  “You have no idea how upset I was.  All for nothing.”

He reached up, rubbing his shoulder with his other hand as he looked from Gwen.  All he could really do was smile helplessly.

“I was in a coma though?”  He replied.  “I was trying to cast a spell to limit how many other people would be involved in my fight with the greater daemon, and it didn’t really work.  Both it and I ended up struggling out of body.  I can assure you that I was struggling with it in other ways until the moment I woke up.  Hells, there was something about the creature that stopped or degraded most magic so I shouldn’t have been surprised when my spell didn’t function.”

“But that doesn’t answer my question,” the princess said, crossing her arms in front of her chest.  “What have you been doing that would put you at the epicenter of one of the greatest daemonic outbreaks on record?  I would hate for it to turn out that you are offering yourself as a solution to a problem that you caused.  We’ve had a rash of that lately.  Arsonist fire brigades, miracle doctors spreading diseases.  It’s the kind of fraud that leads to beheadings.”

Micah dug into his satchel for a moment, pulling out the collection of twine bound letters and tossing it to Gwen.

“There you go,” he responded, nodding at the stack of paper in her hands.  “I listened to what you said earlier and decided to investigate Count Arass on my own.  That way it couldn’t be linked to your mother if I got caught, but I could also arrive at court with all the evidence you’d need to weigh my warnings.  I haven’t really gotten a chance to look the correspondence over, but it sure looks like he was talking with someone from Pereston.”

“The daemon?” Gwen asked incredulously, passing the letters off to one of her assistants.  “If you managed to raid the Count’s personal effects, how in the name of the Sixteen did you end up fighting a daemon of that size?”

“I didn’t exactly get away cleanly,” Micah allowed, rubbing the back of his head in embarrassment.  “I was wearing a mask so there wasn’t really any way for him to identify me, but that didn’t stop him from sacrificing the lives of most humans on his property in order to summon the daemon.  After that, I was just trying to stay ahead of it for long enough for it to run out of energy.”

“Didn’t really work though,” Micah finished with a shrug.  “Apparently, the guests at his party were more useful as sacrifices than I expected.”

“Victor,” she said, not taking her eyes off of Micah as an older man in ankle length robes shuffled up to her side.  “What do you think?  I’m inclined to believe Mr. Silver.  He certainly didn’t look like he was in good shape when we arrived, and his friends appeared fairly frantic, but for all I know the four of them are top tier actors in between playing footsie with every daemon these sands have ever seen.”

Micah locked eyes with the older man, flashing him a quick smile.  From his staff to his robes, everything Victor touched was heavily enchanted, and he gave off the aura of someone that had at least four specializations.  In short, one of the few blessed that could possibly consider themselves Micah’s peers.

The old man nodded back before removing a monocle from his robes and peering through it.  Micah could feel the enchantments layered on the item, all of them focused on perception and revealing hidden characteristics.

Victor hummed to himself as he looked Micah over, the magic from his inspection causing Micah’s skin to crawl.  He let out a breath, closing his eyes and doing his best to resist the urge to use the crown to thwart the search.  There wasn’t anything to hide, but an inconclusive search would raise suspicions and slow his plans.

“He’s practically swimming in ritual energy,” the old spellcaster said with a rasp, “but he didn’t summon the daemon.  The mana signatures are too different.  I’d say he’s telling the truth.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Gwen replied.  “It would be a lot simpler if this were all some sort of elaborate con.  Either way, it’s mother’s problem now.  I don’t see another answer but to take you to meet her and let her sort this entire mess out.