Chapter 129

It wasn’t so much the chanting that set the ominous mood as it was the chanting done just as the sun was setting and the lighting of the fucking wood on fire while he was standing inside the circle. Luke could not possibly stress enough how much he wasn’t a fan of that idea. He’d been hurt pretty regularly since coming to Aros, and to some extent, he’d grown used to that. It still hurt, but thanks to how fast he healed now, it was a lot less scary to know that it’d be over and done with quickly. It was kind of like getting jabbed with a needle. It only hurt for a moment.

However, he had what he felt were some legitimate concerns about the concept of being roasted alive, how long that would hurt, and how long it would last with his regeneration factored in. Zea was not interested in discussing those concerns, and, in her own blunt way, told him to, “Suck it up, you big baby.”

Luke stood there, sweat dripping down his skin and the leaf clutched in his hand, close to his chest to keep the fire from catching it, while Zea paced circles around him, chanting and prodding the wood to help spread the flames with a silver baton she’d purchased. Luke had suspicions that the baton did not need to be silver, that she’d just bought it because she liked it. He was wise enough to avoid voicing those suspicions out loud.

When Zea lit the yellow-banded stick, the temperature spiked inside the circle. Flames flashed across the rest of the wood, and Luke popped the leaf into his mouth as the circle closed completely around him. He got a whiff of something that burned his nostrils for a moment as he shoved it into his mouth, and then he started chewing.

At first, it just tasted like a piece of plant matter, kind of like a crispy piece of lettuce, except that as soon as his teeth mashed into it, it felt like he’d chomped down on a firecracker. Each little fleck that was torn from the whole ignited, searing the insides of his cheeks, his gums, and his tongue. Luke froze midchew and mentally wrestled with himself to keep from spitting it out.

In the end, it wasn’t the seven gold that kept him going. It was that Zea had told him it was crucial to the ritual, and if they fucked that up, they might not live long enough to gather new ingredients to try again. Chewing that burning leaf was a matter of life and death. Though, she hadn’t said anything about how mashed up it had to be. Luke gave it a couple more decisive chews, then swallowed it more or less whole.

[You have been afflicted by the following condition: Poison- Raw Frostbane (8M).]

“Way worse than any Earth peppers,” he said with a wheeze, so bad that the system itself told him he’d been poisoned. He almost expected smoke to be coming out of his mouth, but there was none. Luke wanted to leave his mouth hanging open and fan it, but the heat and the smoke from the burning wood just made it worse somehow.

Then the heat moved down to his chest, like the worst heartburn ever, and then it started in on his stomach. With each breath, new bursts of fire seared his lungs. The heat started spreading to his limbs, far more than just what he could feel on his skin. “Oh God, Zea is trying to kill me,” he moaned. “She’s gone cannibal and is cooking me from the inside out.”

Zea smacked the shard of red gemstone with the baton, and it burst into crimson light. The flames roared up again, then froze in place and crystallized. The heat died down on the outside of his skin, but the leaf kept cooking his insides. Luke clutched at his belly in misery and, not for the first time, cursed the God Machine, the Pantheon, and Aros in general.

The flames started moving again instead their crystalline prison, looking more like fire behind glass now. Melting glass. He watched in mounting horror as little bubbles appeared, and then burst. Each time, a new wave of heat passed over him. Each time, it got a little bit hotter.

He was going to melt long before this ritual was finished! Sweat poured off him liberally, and Luke glanced over at the nearby stream with longing. He could be in that water in less than a second, before Zea could activate the next torturous step of her sadistic and evil ritual.

The chanting rose up to a fever pitch, and she stopped in front of the dead scorpion. Maybe it was the flickering light of the flames dancing across its body, but he could have sworn he saw it move, like it was dancing in demonic glee. A shadow flicked across its tail, giving it the illusion of the stinger moving forward.

Luke knew it hadn’t moved. His perception was too high to be fooled. It was just a trick of the light, one he could easily see through. That was why he was so surprised when he felt a pinprick stab into his shoulder. “Ouch!” he yelped, slapping at his skin with his hand. There was nothing there.

Firelight waved back and forth across the dead scorpion, and a thousand stings hit him at once. They were all over his body, little devil needles of fire. Each one lasted for an instant before the pain disappeared, and his sweat started turning red. It quickly darkened to black and started smoking.

More beads of red sweat rolled down his body, too many coming too fast to all burn away. In a matter of moments, he was stained red. Luke had withstood the leaf, the general heat, and the stings. They sucked, but he could deal with it. This was something else. He was dizzy now, and he didn’t think it was smoke inhalation.

“Too much blood loss,” he said, but so quietly that Zea didn’t hear him over the flames. Stubbornly, he held his balance and stayed on his feet. Maybe it would have been better to sit down, but he hadn’t thought to before they’d started and his little box was small. He didn’t know if he could change position without stepping outside the line, and they’d come too far to screw it all up now.

He could do this. He was superhuman now, capable of bending steel with his bare hands, of leaping thirty feet straight up, and able to run for days without slowing down. A little blood loss wasn’t going to be the thing that finally beat him.

The chanting wasn’t slowing down either. If anything, it was getting more frantic, and the fire was reacting to it. Luke kind of wished he’d thought to ask how long this was going to take. It was different from their first ritual in so many ways that he didn’t even think he could use that as a loose guideline.

At some point, it all stopped mattering. The entire ritual felt like some endless, hazy fever dream that Luke was suffering through, his own personal lake of fire and blood. All of his energies were focused on nothing more than staying upright and inside his designated square. Anything else was asking for too much.

Then, somehow, it was over. The fires had gone out, leaving him surrounded by nothing but ash and cinders.

[You have further purified your bloodline. It has been upgraded to SysAdmin III.]

Luke didn’t remember getting a message like that the first time they’d done the ritual, but then again, the only part he really remembered at the end was being super fucking woozy and damn near passing out. Maybe he’d gotten it and just dismissed it without really reading it.

“Ritual worked,” he slurred out as he dropped down to one knee.

Zea was next to him the instant he went down. Her hands pressed against his chest and his shoulder, helping to support his weight. “You look half-dead,” she told him. “Time to use [Life Surge], then a quick dip in the stream.”

“Right, yeah, sorry. Hard to think. It went better than the first one?”

Zea snorted softly. “Yeah, a little bit. If I had to do the first one on someone else now, it would be a lot easier on them. All those rank 1 skills did not do you any favors. Now, come on, let’s get you back on your feet.”

Luke triggered [Life Surge] and immediately started to feel better. It didn’t bring him back up to a hundred percent, but it was a start. With Zea’s help, he got back upright, took a few deep breaths, then jumped into the stream. It was only about four feet deep, so he crouched down until he was completely underwater and started scrubbing at his bare skin.

The blood-sweat that hadn’t blackened on his skin came off easily enough, but he had to scrape at the rest of it with his nails to make any progress. After a few minutes, he popped his head back above the water and said, “Throw me a bar of soap?”

While Zea was rummaging around, he kept working and said, “Okay, System. Two things. First, the skill that lets me change stats. Tell me about it.”

“It is called [Stat Assignment], and costs 50 AP. This will allow you to alter your point spread, but not change the total amount. For example, you could take 30 points from your perception and add them to your strength. The change occurs as a rate of 5 points per minute, so it would take six minutes for the change to become fully effective.”

“I thought there was a way to remove stats from someone else. Wasn’t it this skill mixed with [Remote Access]?”

“You can change how stats have been allocated, but you cannot gain more without spending AP. I apologize if this wasn’t made clear in my initial explanation.”

“Damn it, that would have been too powerful, I guess. Is there a way to take someone else’s stats away from them?”

“You can unassign the AP used on them, which refunds the AP to their pool for use. Please bear in mind that as your bloodline becomes further purified, new facets of your current skills will open up. Also remember that I am not able to give you detailed information about bloodline skills you don’t have access to yet.”

“Right, speaking of! [XP Mask]. Can I see their XP without letting them see mine?”

“No, I’m afraid not, but you should be able to turn the skill on or off at will now.”

“Small start,” Luke grumbled. It was better than nothing, but not what he wanted. Worse, they’d somehow fucked up on the whole plan of taking an enemy’s stats away. There went his idea for killing that inquisitor easily. He was interrupted by Zea tossing a bar of soap to him, something lavender scented that he hesitated to use. Tracking people by smell alone was something he’d started to consider.

“Got anything without a scent in it?” he asked.

“No.”

“Damn it. Ugh. Fine.” It would probably be alright. If the inquisitor was close enough to smell the soap on him, he’d be close enough to smell them anyway. Luke started scrubbing away at the black gunk flecks all over his body.

“Okay, well, not as good news as I was hoping. Next question, the XP cycling skill. You said it doesn’t exist, but can we create it?”

“It is certainly possible,” System said. “If you’d like, I can guide you through the skill shop’s interface to a section where you can design the skill yourself.”

“Perfect,” Luke said. He paused for a second, then added, “What about the whole stat draining skill idea? Could I make that as well?”

“I believe it should be possible, but we will not be able to say for sure until we try.”

“Well, one way to find out. As soon as I get this crap scrubbed off me, we’re going to make some new skills.”