Vol. 3 Chap. 10 Some Basic Concepts

A few thoughts occurred to Truth at high speeds. The first was that never in his life would he have associated the words “lax security” with anything Starbrite actually cared about. The second was that he had gotten maybe a little cocky. A third thought had started to form but was interrupted.

The glowing, growling, shaking box disintegrated. A sphere of utter blackness emerged, faint blue-green worms of electricity crawling over it. Truth could feel the cosmic rays in the room twisting around it. He could feel it drawing on whatever structures existed in the plates, powering them in ways that Truth didn’t understand.

What he did understand is that he screwed up and needed to run away. Right now. He turned on his heel and slammed into the suddenly warded door.

The black sphere was growing. The growling changed its tone, becoming something deeper, almost below the range of hearing. He felt his chest vibrating. The wards were shrinking, pushing him towards the thing in the middle of the room. Incisive was screaming at him- deadly danger, RUN!

Truth called the Tongue to his hand. He raised it to slash but didn’t know where to cut. The sphere? Seemed unwise. He had no idea what would happen. The chests? Again, didn’t know what would happen. The wards, then. Run first, sort shit out later. He spun and cut. The angelic blade bit into the ward but struggled to get through. Crude, but eye-wateringly strong.

Obliteration!

Truth felt something click. Some oddity in his soul. He didn’t trust this spell a bit. But for the moment- Fuck your ward. He aimed at the weakened point in the ward and let it rip. Obliteration didn’t cause any spectacle. It simply ate at the fabric of the spell. Unwinding it. The instant there was a gap big enough to dive through, he did. Rolled to his feet. And ran like the blazes.

He was down the far end of the hall in an instant. Around the corner and accelerated away as he went. No direction needed, just “away. There was a sudden pressure. A terrible silence.

Truth regained consciousness sitting on the curb of a street sometime later. He was bloody, covered in cement dust. His clothes were torn, shoes were gone. The Tongue was still in his aperture, so that was good. His scarf was lost, but it would return eventually. He didn’t recognize anything around him.

He was having a hard time focusing. Truth desperately wanted a drink of water but somehow couldn’t bring himself to move. He rolled onto the sidewalk, laying on his back. What had happened? He was running?

He could hear sirens racing past and murmured whispers from the people stepping over or around him. Something terrible had happened. There must be some kind of accident. A fire. Do you think… terrorism? Quieter still were those wondering about a rebellion.

He could see high-level police mages flying over on their gilded altars to oversee the site of the incident. But were they really high-level? He was Level Four now. Even lying helpless on the sidewalk, his standards had changed.

His right hand spasmed and shook for thirty seconds. Truth didn’t know why it did that. He just lay there, trying to put himself together.

Hazel Wand.

Truth felt Obliteration shift out, and something new shift in. He could feel how broken the System’s spells were now. The System pruned off big pieces of something much more impressive, leaving a usefully mutilated little stump it could cast for him. The System Astrologica had been doing that, too, just much better. Damn. Damn damn damn. Even Truth wasn’t sure what he was damning. There was so much.

He lay on the sidewalk as the System worked on him. The Hazel Wand was less gentle a thing than he had imagined from the System’s description, at least not when you were paying it your full attention. This wasn’t what the System had run while he was floating in the ocean. This was something altogether more crude.

<<I hacked it down even more than I already had. This should prevent the risk of brain damage, but the trade-off is that it’s now even slower. The good news is that you aren't horribly maimed or anything, so you should be up and moving in a few hours tops.>>

A name popped into Truth’s mind.

Abner’s Amble. The movement spell. Should have cast that while we were running.

<<Probably would have helped, yeah, though I doubt it would have helped enough. You walked a fair distance while you were in shock, so I got a bit of a look around. The Athletic Center is… mostly gone. Not disappeared or anything, just wrecked. The blast radius was significant and, interestingly, not even. It clearly extended a lot further in one direction.>>

You think the wards were designed to trap someone in with the blast? Obliterate the spell plates along with any potential thieves?

<<At this point, I can confidently say I have no goddamn idea anymore. There was no reason, none, to think that shifting one plate, one plate with no apparent alarms or boobytraps or anything, would trigger all that.>>

Other than Incisive telling us to scram. The phrase “Fuck around and find out” seems relevant.

The System made a frustrated noise.

<<Yes. YES. OKAY? Yes! But I can’t work without more information. YOU can’t work without more information. There are going to be times where we need to take risks to achieve our goals. This seemed like a very reasonable, measured, risk.>>

I would pull an answer to that out of my ass, if I could feel my ass.

The System made no reply. What could it even say?

Eventually Truth got a bit bored of just lying around, staring at nothing. Figure out anything about the plates we didn’t already guess?

<<Working on that. The massive explosion is actually a useful datapoint there. Changing topic somewhat, can we talk about this spell?>>

Hazel Wand? What about it?

<<In the process of cutting it into chunks, I found some kind of… artifacts, I guess? Some kind of things that didn’t make sense outside the context of the complete spell. Which made me wonder why they were in the complete spell in the first place.>>

Truth just waited. The System would eventually get to the point.

<<It’s a less… benevolent spell than I gave it credit for. The weird elements were little sets of logical propositions that would unfold as you learned the spell. If-Then, Yes/No, catagorizations… nothing too bizarre, and most of it kind of intuitive. Where it gets a bit spicy is how that interacts with every other part of the spell.>>

Alright?

<<It plugs into everything.>>

The System waited, expecting a reaction. It was disappointed. After a minute longer, it continued. <<Listen, asshole. You wanna tell me why a healing spell, or a demon binding spell, or whatever, needs you to learn about logical reasoning?>>

I have no idea. It was part of the spell description, right? Teaches philosophy and logic?

<<Just philosophy. It didn’t explain why or how the spell does that, though. I think it’s trying to get you to think about how you interact with other people, or yourself, in a particular way.>>

Sure, I guess. Incisive kind of did that too.

Truth could feel the little sprite trying to tear it’s hair out. Which, given that it was a piece of his soul, was a neat trick.

<<I MEAN it works more like how I did when I was brainwashing you!>>

It fucking what?!

<<Beur isn’t quite on Botis’ level, but he’s not far off and has a very sizable following in Hell. Definitionally, he’s not some goody-goody type. So how does he manage it if his spell isn’t really combat-focused? I think it’s because he makes people, and most particularly demons, think the way he does. I don’t really know because we haven’t studied the spell. But that’s my guess.>>

So why does a demon want people to study logic? Is it false logic?

<<I don’t know. It doesn't seem to be. Intuitively obvious stuff, like I said.>>

Truth puzzled over that one until the sun started to set, and his legs started working again.

—————————————————————————————-

Truth made his way back to De’Ponte’s apartment. Right now, the bland emptiness of the place appealed to him. It was restful. He sprawled on the sofa, staring up at the off-white ceiling. Just trying to piece things together.

Starbrite was enslaving the country. But only adding the citizens to the System. Why? Especially since he clearly wanted to scale up, maybe as much as a global scale. Why leave souls on the table in the form of denizens? All he could think of was Starbrite trying to filter out the weaker souls. Level Zero adults were becoming a “thing” now. Presumably, those would be of less use to him. It made sense, but it felt unsatisfying. There was more here, more that he wasn’t seeing.

Then there was the timeline. Put the “end of the world” at a year out. A year for people to be worked over by the System Astrolgica. Was that long enough to make them suicide and send their souls, or parts of their souls, to Starbrite? Unlikely. So he was missing something there too. The bomb didn’t entirely make sense either. Even if you were to suppose that tampering with the plates somehow triggered the ward and the… whatever it was, was wildly disproportionate to the risk of theft or damage. It wasn’t like the plates were going to be any kind of secret in the very near future.

All Truth could think of was some drone trying to balance the need to pre-position the formation components to ensure a smooth rollout, versus the fear of tampering. Because that would be Starbrite’s biggest fear, right? Not that he wouldn’t get some small number of souls, he was playing at a global scale. He would be afraid that the souls he did get would be poisoned. Or, and Truth grinned nastily at the thought, diverted. How dare someone steal what Starbrite had already rightfully stolen!

Then he sighed, his sudden burst of humor fading away into a horrible emptiness. Fair to say the day didn’t go as planned. Some useful things were learned, definitely, some progress was  made, but you couldn’t really say that it went well.

All those dead students, for one thing. He had been trying not to think about it, but the reality was, he just got a hell of a lot of people killed for basically no good reason. Saying he was doing it for a good reason or that their death was accidental really didn’t help.  He had been needling Merkovah about becoming a terrorist. Now that he had done it for real… it didn’t feel good.

Did Vig ever wind up going to university? Sophie definitely did, but she also definitely would have gone to a top school, not a technical school at the edge of the country. Vig, though, he might have wound up in a technical school.

Plenty of people there who were someone else’s sib, of course. And, of course, if they didn’t knock out Starbrite and find the little Shattervoid girl, almost everyone was going to die. These were the fundamental tenants of his current reality. Was this another nudge from Etenesh or the Tongue?

Well, he would press on regardless. Even if all this guilt was one hundred percent justified, he still had people he wanted to protect. His sibs. Etenesh. And yes, Jember, Merkovah, and all the kind people he had met in the Free State and Siphios. So he would plan some more, take more care, and then he would do the same damn thing again. Because it was necessary.

Truth started laughing, almost sobbing. He pressed his arm over his eyes as he laughed and laughed, and the tears slipped out. “That’s not Okay. That’s fucked up! But I’m okay with it. And that’s fucked up!”

Truth drifted off to sleep, seeking temporary oblivion. As this was a daily occurrence, the System paid it no particular mind. This night, however, it noticed the faintest shiver in Truth’s soul, saw the nous, that intersection of soul and mind, ever so faintly come into sharper focus. Then its world became pain.