Chapter 51.5: Success?

How Penny could think Jinkke didn’t grasp the situation as well as she did, Jinkke had no idea. None of this was transdimensional matter distribution.

She knew the truth of it, though. It wasn’t about the complexity; there was a Minkus-like concern in Penny’s tone, something Jinkke hadn’t often heard there before. At the same time it warmed her, it also grieved her—angered her a little, actually. She opted not to think about it.

What she needed to do was get herself, her human friend, and her brother’s dead body out of this obscene conflict in any way necessary. That could very well mean devastating the minds of the two factions at war before her. She didn’t quite comprehend the part these humans played in Kikka’s schemes, but that spellcaster raising the very construct that had set Minkus on his course was enough to tell her they too were on the wrong side of things. She wanted to put this all behind them, and the strategy she’d seen Penny silently draw up was, in all probability, the most effective and succinct they’d find.

All her thoughts and feelings on the subject snapped through her in the second it took Penny to blink and nod, agreeing to return to the attacking golem. The human’s eyes opened, frustrated, taxed, and worried. But she spun back to the encroaching golem as it slammed two clenched fists of stone and steel through what remained of the wagon bed. The blow missed both her and Jindel, and Penny rushed around the construct’s flank, yelling something about hating golems. It followed her with its photoreceptors.

Jinkke returned her attention to her own task, hefting the energy rifle and looking up at the distance between her and the spellcrafting human. The calculations ran as quickly as ever. She’d proven that day that she wasn’t a shooter, however much she understood the simple physics of it, so minimizing the distance to her target was necessary. The magic inside the reservoir, she knew, was in a gaseous state, but its expansion rate didn’t seem particularly rapid, even when compressed. If she took the shot at a distance of… yes, 16.4 yards, she would have at least a few seconds to outrun it back to the others. That left one remaining variable: the female bandit still positioned between her and her target.

Even as Jinkke processed the options, something flew out of her periphery, hitting the woman in the leg. Another something flew, knocking her shoulder back. Jinkke glanced aside to find Yissa, still awkwardly in nothing but undergarments yet toting an armful of disassembled golemite parts that she hurled at the human as she strafed eastward.

“I don’t comprehend your strategy,” the scholar panted, tossing parts. Two missed entirely, but they distracted the human long enough for a third to strike her in the face, dropping her to the earth. “but go implement it!”

Jinkke took off. She only needed to cross half the distance between the wagons to get in range.

Five yards. Three yards. One yard. 

She stopped several feet shy of the fallen bandit woman, at precisely 16.4 remaining yards, and transferred her accumulated momentum into the rifle. It flew, a little lower than she’d have liked, but the added thrust from her run made up for it. The weapon hit ground butt-first, bounded once, and then slid through the dirt to a stop, right beside the magic reservoir.

There was no time for Jinkke to feel her pride. She unslung the Vigil rifle from her back, already making the subsequent calculations. Her hand trembled as she raised the rifle to her cheek. Why in the Alchemy had she volunteered for this?

Stilling herself, she thought of her big brother, aimed, and— yelped as a hand gripped her ankle and tugged! Jinkke fell, the shot went skyward, and the fallen bandit woman dragged her forward by the leg, raising a mace overhead.

***

A short distance away, Penny breathed heavily, dancing in weary circles around a golem and cursing every decision that had gotten her here. She tried taking a shot at the thing’s eyes, but on the move, they were just too small a target, and wasting more shots on that stonework exterior would get her nothing but empty chambers. She had three shots remaining, and she knew she’d need them. Another few Inquest asura had exited the doorways of the western complex, and the bandits still hadn’t dispatched the ones that had come with Wepp.

Penny’s focus returned as the golem hefted one of the wagon’s axles out of the rubble and swung it to take her head off her shoulders. She yelped embarrassingly and ducked the swing at the same time she hopped over a pile of wooden rubble. The confused movement threw her off balance, and she tumbled into the golem’s legs.

Before it could notice, though, Jindel clubbed it over its fat head with a broken board. Penny scrambled aside, catching a breath as the crusader took the golem’s focus for a moment.

Amid the noise of grinding golem joints, splintering wood, and instructions called between the other members of their party, Penny heard a gunshot and a scream.

Her eyes shot to Jinkke, midway across the gap between the two devastated wagons. She clawed violently at the ground in a futile effort to escape the grip of a bandit dragging her in for a blow. Beyond their tussle, the big, steel cylinder still lay in one piece, now nuzzled almost peacefully beside the asuran rifle that should have blown to pieces. Beyond that, a broad, crystalline chest had formed from the pile of jade and lifted the six-eyed head well above its previous height. One huge shoulder was now rebuilt, drawing pieces into a growing arm, and while the scar-faced, mumbling man at its side hunched in visible pain, he looked no worse for wear than he had a minute before.

What in Torment had happened?

“Where are you going?” Jindel yelled, exhausted desperation in her voice.

Penny only half turned her head, already on the move. “You’ve got this, Vigil Girl. You don’t need me.”

“Like hell I…” Whatever the rest of her rebuttal was, Penny didn’t hear it. She ducked to grab whatever handful of ammunition she could from the bag by the crates.

Planting a hand on one of the few intact crates, she vaulted the pile of wooden slag, careful to slip between the remaining flows of magic still coursing through the air. She had just enough mind to recognize that they were fewer now. The man must have exhausted the first of   their minimal payloads.

The bandit swung a mace at Jinkke’s face, and Penny cast a prayer to whoever might be listening, cracking off the remaining shots in her pistol. Grenth himself stand in her way, she wasn’t losing another of these siblings.

One round hit, causing the bandit to recoil. She dropped the mace, and it fell wild, hitting dirt just beside Jinkke’s head. The asura gawked, scrambling away on hands and knees, the standard rifle still half strapped around her with its tip digging a rut in the earth.

Penny leapt past Jinkke, grabbed the mace from the ground—gods, the thing was heavy—and put her weight into a toss, hurling it far enough to keep out of the other woman’s reach. For good measure, she rebalanced and put a boot in the bandit’s mouth, knocking her to the ground and hopefully gaining them enough time.

She spun back to grip Jinkke by a shoulder and drag her to her feet. “Get going,” she instructed, pointing back southward. There wasn’t much of a barricade there anymore, but Penny was more concerned with distance than shelter at this point. “I’ve got this.”

Raising her pistol to sight, Penny pulled the trigger. The hammer cracked down, and nothing else happened. Her gun was dry. “Shit!” she yelled, flipping open the loader to confirm— no, nothing there. “Shit, shit, shit!”

Despite her anger, Penny’s mind slowed. It was all too much. Purple magic still flowed by from a few of those golemite crates, and shots from an energy rifle blazed into the fray from the other direction, but Penny’s mind could track none of it. She realized she was panting; gods, this whole thing had been exhausting.

A tug at the end of her chestguard drew her out of her daze, and Penny looked down to find Jinkke still beside her, holding out the rifle. “You’re a notably better marksman,” she said, looking almost embarrassed.

Penny took the rifle, her thoughts snapping back into place as she hefted it. “Get back,” she spat, and this time Jinkke obeyed, heading toward the others still engaged with the golem.

Penny raised the rifle to her eye, aligning the sights, and shot.

A dozen-plus yards away, the energy rifle exploded, a firework of concussive colors that blew the struggling bandit woman into a roll across the earth. Even her mace shot off into the air. Penny too was knocked off her feet, thrown to the ground despite her distance. Where her skin was exposed, it felt instantly hot, like she’d been in the sun for hours. She got hands under her and turned.

Before Penny could get her eyes on the cylinder, there was a secondary explosion, not nearly as concussive but twice as loud. She was deafened at the same moment something struck her in the side, hot pain piercing her leather armor as shrapnel buried itself in the dirt around her.

Bells rang vibrantly in Penny’s ears, drowning out all other noise as she clutched at the foreign object in her side. Nonetheless, she looked up and grinned through the pain. She’d done it.

An utterly opaque cloud of violet fury rose and stormed from where the magical reservoir had lay a moment before. It threatened to spread across them all, blocking the whole world from sight and promising they’d never see it again in their madness. Penny needed to move before that happened.

Only, it didn’t. It never would. One end of the thick miasma swirled into a violent funnel, and faster than the rest of the cloud could dissipate into the air, its energy was sucked away… straight into the man seated beyond it.

***

Christoff Veritas screamed.

The torrent of raw power that slammed into him was unlike anything he’d ever felt. At once damning and exhilarating, it was the full, unmitigated might of the Unseen Ones. It had to be. Just a moment before he’d extended himself to what he thought was the edge of madness, just to draw on a few more streams of agony magic. This, by comparison, was the wall of seawater that had drowned Lion’s Arch. Where had it come from?

He fought it, pushing back at first. He wasn’t about to release the magic outright, but he had to gate its pressure, or he was sure it would kill him: scour away his flesh, his bone, his very soul as it pumped through him and into the construct he still had to complete. It was not just power now, not just burning, roiling, drowning energy; it was voices, souls, individuals and whole communities of disparate thoughts that rushed upon his mind a hundred times more vehemently than anything he’d handled so far. By the dozen they came, not just at him but through him, into in. Some of the voices he recognized: his father, his mother, the demagogue—were those made of his own mind and memory? Others were entirely foreign, some not even human. The cacophonous voices chattered and raged, argued and mocked, laughed and cried, over each other, to each other, against each other as they pressed to gain passage.

Its reverberating echo throbbed at the inside of his skull, and Christoff wanted to scream. Was he already screaming?

One of the voices came to the forefront, dulling the rest into submission for just a second. It was humble at first, this voice, different than any of the others: somehow more solid, more real. It sighed piteously art him. Hunger, master. Hunger. Starve.

He felt a gentle, pleading tug at the opposite end of his soul-wrenching work, and the voice came again. Feed, master. Feed.

Seconds became minutes, became days, became years. Time passed at a rate Christoff had never seen, never heard of, and yet nothing seemed to happen at all. He was outside time, holding up the barricade in his mind that limited what of the torrent could pass. The voices magnified, reproduced, whispering promises and threats, weeping and laughing as madmen—mad men, mad women, mad children, mad charr. And then they began to sing.

It was the worst, most beautiful sound he’d ever heard: a choral cacophony serenading horrors of his life, his lineage, his endless futures, his death. He wanted to claw his own flesh away, release the swelling power, surrender to it, if only to quiet the maelstrom. But how could he survive that?

The storm of sound battering at his head retreated, and that small voice returned with lowly encouragement. Serve, it said. Protect master. Only feed.

Christoff rent his eyes open, spinning to the construct that rose from the pile of jade behind him. It was still only half a creature, one of its arms still coalescing. It looked dead, like a corpse reassembling. And yet, he knew there was something alive in it, something that— the head rotated, and six glowing eyes met his.

Feed, came the sad, encouraging voice in his head again. Hunger. Protect.

No one had ever told Christoff of this. The Unseen One’s creatures had thoughts? Voices? Oh, what he could do with such a creation at his side.

The wails and babble and song continued in his mind, enough to drive an ordinary man mad. But Christoff was no ordinary man. He would never be ordinary. Closing his eyes to regain his concentration, Christoff opened the floodgates.

Now he did scream; he knew he screamed. The wash of psychic chaos that raged into him didn’t just fill, didn’t just overwhelm; it threatened to wipe away the very world in which he sat, removing him from it so fully that creation itself would cease to be, not only him. The voices that had risen into a disharmonious crescendo suddenly multiplied by the hundreds, the thousands, becoming an inseparable wall of maddening sound that wracked the man from inside. And yet, Christoff loved it. It was pure strength burning beneath his skin. It was the nectar of life and authority, scouring at Christoff’s mind to burn away what he had been to that point, burying his weak, human soul and rebuilding him into a god, into one of the Unseen Ones themselves! He soared at the thought as the magic continued to fill him, flood him, consume him. He was power.

As he took it in, Christoff set almost at once to feeding the power on to his budding creation, not all at once, but as quickly as he dared. 

The voice moaned lustily at the sudden influx. Food, it crooned, gaining in volume and depth. Sweet food and pain.

The potent rush continued, and Christoff rode it out, cursing the same torrent of lacerating voices that he simultaneously worshiped. He loved them—unable to stop himself—loved what they made of him as their hideous song continued.

But as the seemingly endless moments passed, he noticed the grotesque members of that chorus departing. First one, and then a few. Then entire sections were gone, faster and faster, leaving him void of their oily company as new ones took their places. And their power—his power—Christoff felt its loss acutely. The fiendishly intoxicating energy was still coming into him through his outstretched right hand, but it left him through his other arm just as quickly, flushing faster and faster into the thing that he’d created.

Feeling a new type of panic, Christoff tried to slow the flow of that ancient force, but he gained no ground. The psychotic, beautiful voices screamed through him, from source to outlet, disappearing as quickly as they were added, and over them all, a single voice remained. More, master. Feed more! Christoff knew it was the same voice, though its pitiable humility had turned grating, cold, and arrogant.

That phrase repeated several more times in an increasingly granite voice. The other voices dwindled away more rapidly, increasingly replaced by a cold, dead silence: the home of only one voice, ravenous and frigid, drawing every ounce of the Unseen Ones’ power from his very marrow.

Feed, it insisted. Master, hunger.

It paused. Christoff’s eyes were closed, but he could feel the eyes turn on him again through the dark of his own mind. Master? It inspected, a wolf sniffing at possible prey.

Not master! it suddenly cried.

All the other voices, their entities, seemed to return, silent now, creeping in and watching feverishly from somewhere out of sight and sound, somewhere behind the monster that Christoff had created. The thing’s eyes blazed again, and Christoff felt a sort of tug somewhere new inside him, a probing. Food, the construct declared, and that tug roared into a vaccuum.

The voices behind the jade beast erupted to life as well, only now there was no power for him in any of what they screamed and sang. They mocked him for the fool he’d been and painted visions of the hell that would be his eternal legacy. How, they laughed, had he ever thought himself enough to compete with the construct? To manipulate it? Control it? He’d not been enough to impress his pathetic human father, and he thought he’d be equal to the task of controlling the greatest weapon of the Unseen Ones? The cruel entourage gave up using any words at all and simply laughed, an endless resonance of unabashed ridicule.

Each peal pulled at him, sluicing off a layer of who and what he was. He wasn’t just losing what power the magic had given him; he was now losing his own power, his soul, whatever tiny spark he’d carried simply by being a living, breathing thing. Christoff felt it pulled away, bit by bit and added to his treasonous creation.

It should have been his slave, his tool of ascension and authority and power. The defiant thing had been built by his own will, and now it had the gall to not only make a play for independence, but to feed off him to do it?

Christoff regained his mind long enough to wrench his eyes open again, not simply looking at the jade construct’s reflection in his mind, but once again at the real, physical thing glaring down at him.

It was huge, and it was complete, but it continued pulling all the magic, all the life it could. He felt himself weakening, not just losing the Unseen Ones’ energy, but his own life force, in streams. It was consuming him, using him.

That, as he found his coherence again, enraged him.

***

Penny scrambled several paces on hands and knees before she could get to her feet, still gawking back at the scene she’d put into motion. The plume of crazy-making magic was almost gone, sucked right into the bandit lord like he’d been waiting for it. He certainly looked worse for wear: back arched, clawing violently at the air, and howling fury as if pressed against the very gates of the underworld. But still the magic pumped out of him, and the jade construct grew at a terrifying rate, less than ten percent of its mass still in a shattered pile beneath its hovering, crystalline form. Penny’s plan hadn’t killed the man and stopped the construct. Gods alive, she’d sped up the process.

Penny looked around dully, having no more idea what to do. It didn’t look like anyone else around her knew either. Though she could hear the golem still ravaging through the remains of their shelter on its programmed course, its asura masters had fallen still, gawking at the scene. Some seemed amazed, like Yissa, and at least two began shooting at the giant, crystal monster, but most were just terrified, staring for a moment before turning to flee. The bandit woman who’d been blown clear of the jade pile rose unsteadily from the earth, just to lay herself back down, prostrating before the thing—that was about as cracked a response as Penny could imagine. The other bandit, the skinny one, stopped and stared in disbelief, at both the risen construct and the norn now running at it.

Penny felt her eyes pop. Fjornsson, that mind-warped idiot, was running at the ancient jade construct towering over them all.

“What in Torment are you doing?” she screamed, darting to intercept him. The metal scrap embedded in her side shot ice-hot pangs through her, bringing Penny to her knees after only a few steps. She rose, trying more slowly and gripping the leather around the shrapnel to hold it steady. “Gods,” she barked at him, “leave it alone, and let’s just get out of here!” At this point, what else were they going to do? They were out of options.

She may as well have said nothing, because that was exactly what it affected. Crusader Yult rushed past her, eyes rabid and inextricably transfixed on the magical creature. The shards of jade in his leg and arm only bobbed along with his movement, little bristles of purple rage that seemed to echo the illuminating pulse of the construct itself.

Complete uncertainty flushed through Penny again. She’d thought— well, she’d genuinely thought she’d found the answer to their problem, and all it had done was instantly exacerbate things. Breath quickening and stomach tight, she looked back at Jinkke. The asura frantically waved her back toward the others, where Jindel still hacked meaninglessly at the golem and Yissa fought to drag Ventyr clear, despite his frail efforts to re-engage.

That, she realized, might actually be their chance. if the sylvari was finally too weary to put up a fight, even against his own people, they might still be able to back out of this before it really went south. With the bandits and Inquest squared off against the jade thing, they could just slip away. No, the norn sure as Torment wasn’t going to listen to her—assuming he was still sane enough to listen to anyone—but he could find his own way out; he was more than capable, normally.

It was then that Penny’s eyes found Minkus’ body, flung several yards from the wagon by the golem’s attack. Guilt followed. Biggie, she thought, we tried. I tried. Gods, I swear, I really did, but he just isn’t going to listen, and if we wait for him—

Right on cue, Yult’s bloodthirsty bellow broke her internal conflict. “Alayna! Pypp!”

Penny spun to see him nearly upon the jade creature.

“Dulf, Keaste, Vulmos!” Fjornsson screamed, as clearly as if he still had his wits. He gripped the huge hammer tightly in both hands, stretching it laterally across his body as he darted past the still wailing bandit lord.

The jade monster’s head turned, six eyes blinking in recognition of the odd and sudden attacker. Penny had no experience with ancient constructs of course, but something in the tilt of its many eyes gave her a sense of mockery. It dropped the man it had been holding and transfixed its gaze on the norn, hunching toward him and swinging out the arm that now drew the dwindling stream of agony magic out of the human on the ground before it. The violet flow whipped out at Fjornsson violently, passing right into him.

As much to the construct’s surprise as Penny’s, nothing happened. A series of iridescent flashes cascaded up the shards protruding from the norn’s body, as he launched himself into the air and brought the arcing swing of a hammer right though the extended arm, shattering the still forming limb into a thousand shimmering fragments and severing the magical tether that had held it to the bandit.

It was the construct’s turn to wail.

Following his blow, Fjornsson slammed into the monster. Still bellowing rage and pain, the huge thing stumbled back, grasping the norn in its remaining arm and crushing him to its pulsing, crystalline chest. Yult dropped the hammer, and the construct extended its stump of a shoulder back toward the bandit chie. A thread of magic began to tug out of him again, not out of his hands this time, but out of his face, nearly his whole head.

The man bent back and screamed as magic was ripped forcefully out of him—it was the best description Penny could find for the insanity she was witnessing. This time, though, the man’s hoarse wail morphed from simple pain into something more like defiance, and a second flow of gaseous, glowing magic was yanked out into the air between them. Not from the man this time, but from the monster hovering over him. Penny got the distinct feeling some secondary battle had just begun between the man and his creation. Each pulled at the other, those broad tethers of magic actually moving the two physically now, all while the mad norn ripped and tore at the construct’s side with bloody hands. What in Torment was happening?

In a flash of impatience, Penny decided she didn’t care: what the Inquest did, what these bandit jerks were doing here, or what happened to this suddenly resurrected ancient monster—she did not care. As long as Minkus lay there behind her, she had no damn choice but to go after the big, literally insane, norn oaf.

How, she had no idea. So she did the only thing that made any sense: she scooped up a few of the pistol rounds she’d dropped, jammed them into her gun’s loader, and took every shot at the construct she could find.