This Quest is Bullshit - Chapter 173

Chapter 173 - The Eleventh Hour

Eve awoke to cool silence as the guest wing of the palace slumbered around her. If she ran Mana through her ears, she could pick up the ongoing bustle of the distant city streets as Pyrindel hastened to accommodate refugees from the surrounding area and bolster its defenses. She opened her eyes, expecting to see her suite dark and unlit.

The world came alight.

The room around her glowed in every color Eve could imagine and some she previously couldn’t have. A billion hair-thin strands stretched across every surface and through the air itself, weaving an abstract three-dimensional tapestry that seemed to depict Eve’s suite if she squinted at it the right way. Eve blinked, her still-groggy brain struggling to parse the information before her. A quick scan through her character sheet found the obvious culprit.

Aspect Ability - Read the Threads

Similarly to Defy, the aspect ability came with no description, simply a name. Also similarly to Defy, Eve instinctually knew how to activate it. With a mental press of a button, the world returned to normal.

Eve let out a sigh of relief, climbing out of bed and pacing across the room. She pulled a rope hanging on the wall near her door, and moments later an unfamiliar Steward peeked his head in from outside. “How may I help you, your majesty?”

“How long was I asleep?” Eve cut right to the chase. “How long do we have?”

“It’s been two days, your majesty,” the man replied. “Current estimates place the adversary’s arrival at three days from now.”

Eve swallowed. “He’s sped up, then.”

The Steward nodded. “Will there be anything else?”

“Some scones from the kitchen,” Eve said, already moving to where she’d left her armor. “Have them delivered to the training yard. I have work to do.”

With a second, deeper bow, the Steward left. Moments later, Eve followed him out into the hall, turning down a different direction to training yard she’d spent so much time in during the tournament. Three days wasn’t a long time to master three brand new abilities, especially ones without descriptions to aid in the process. Read the Threads on its own seemed complex enough to require years to fully comprehend.

She’d give it a day.

Already, as she stepped onto the practice field and reactivated the ability, the tapestry it weaved seemed clearer, less overwhelmingly busy. Eve realized as she cast her gaze from left to right that the relative simplicity was a result of stepping into clear air and away from the heavily enchanted corridors of the royal palace.

A thousand threads Eve couldn’t understand still swept about every which way, connecting objects, concepts, people from across the world in some way or another. It was all a tangled mess, one Eve could never hope to unwind. Then again, so was reality.

For lack of another spell that didn’t act upon her directly, Eve threw a weak Mana Burst in a narrow cone at a target dummy across the training yard, watching carefully as the Mana left her hand. It appeared, to her vision, as a cluster of dull white threads as it traveled through the air. Even as it moved away from her, a single strand connected the spell to her, seemingly denoting ownership of the attack. Eve wondered if that meant she could manipulate the Mana Burst after she’d cast it.

On the other side, from the moment she’d cast it, the spell had formed a second thread connecting with the target, and a dozen more to the wall behind it. As the spell struck, Eve watched it wreak havoc on the strings that made up the dummy, as the cluster that formed the spell broke open and scattered. A piece of it followed each of the threads connected to the original construct as Mana splashed harmlessly against the wall behind.

Eve’s takeaways were twofold.

First, as far as she could tell, all spells seemed to be constructs of different threads, presumably with different colors representing the various elements. Eve’s Mana Burst, being pure Mana, was white. Second, the spell formed a connection with everything it was going to affect before it even struck. Eve wasn’t quite sure what that meant. Either there was some concept of fate tying events together, or—more likely—in order for the spell to act, it had to somehow interact with the things it intended to affect.

Eve wondered if she could test that.

Selecting a new target, Eve launched another cheap Mana Burst across the training yard, extending her will to the thread connecting it to the target dummy and pulling as hard as she could.

Nothing happened.

She tried again, this time tugging at a random thread within the jumble that made up her spell. It came apart, the Mana within dissipating into the air. “Huh.” Eve let out a breath. Putting spells aside for the moment, she mentally reached for the thread connecting her to the floor—or something beneath the floor, Eve couldn’t tell the difference. She willed it to snap, leveling the full force of over five thousand Willpower against this single thread.

Again, nothing happened.

Eve paused as a Steward arrived to deliver her scones. She sat back for a few minutes, enjoying her breakfast as she thought over the situation. In that time, she tried everything. None of the threads through the air, those along the walls, nor even those connecting Eve to her delicious scones responded to her attempts to influence them. A pair running along the far wall seemed to shift as she tugged, but upon canceling Read the Threads, Eve found they simply corresponded to one of the palace’s many enchantments. She’d already been able to manipulate those.

It seemed, so far as affecting the tapestry of reality as revealed by her new aspect, Eve was limited only to those things she already have some control over: enchantments, and her own spells. She felt certain with enough time to study and practice with the ability, she could find new ways to assert control over the multitude of threads, but time was a luxury Eve couldn’t afford.

Before committing what few days she had to one pursuit or another, Eve elected to investigate her other two aspect abilities.

Mana Prism almost felt designed explicitly for her, or at least for Burendians. She found, upon activating it, that it caused her Mana pool to slowly dwindle, a veritable rainbow of light coalescing within her core. As Eve examined it, she found a countless array of different elements swirling together, elements she couldn’t reabsorb until in a moment, they all snapped back together into pure Mana.

With a few hours of practice, Eve managed to isolate individual elements before they rejoined into pure Mana, expelling blasts of fire or ice directly with Mana Burst. Similarly, she could launch any combination of elements to create unique effects, everything from electrified molten steel to spikes of frozen acid granted her Mana Burst levels of flexibility she wouldn’t have dreamed of a month ago.

The downside of splitting her Mana with Mana Prism was that once she’d used some of the elemental Mana, she couldn’t reabsorb the rest. Forcing her to either come up with a use for the other thousands of elements or simply vent the extra energy in a second blast. The process, in all, seemed rather less efficient than her usual bursts of pure Mana, but Eve would never begrudge flexibility.

She was in the middle of further experiments with tugging on threads to dissemble Mana Bursts mid-flight when Preston and Lumy found her. The former, interestingly enough, had two distinct, blindingly bright threads connecting him to something deep underground. At Eve’s request, he cast a healing spell, the golden light of which didn’t connect with the Paragon at all, but to the same entity deep underground.

Eve mentally noted the color of the thread as belonging to Ayla.

Lumy, in contrast, had no threads. Nothing, as far as Eve could tell, attached the phantasmal harvester to anything at all, save when Eve or Preston reached out to her telepathically. Eve supposed that made sense, what with Lumy’s tenuous connection to reality.

The two where kind enough to while away a few hours helping Eve experiment, a task which, from their viewpoint, consisted exclusively of casting the same spell over and over again so Eve could study the threads that made them work.

It was for her third aspect ability that this research would pay the most dividends.

Free Cast, as the name implied, allowed Eve to control the threads of Mana within her influence directly rather than automatically shaping them into the form of a particular spell. Technically, she’d been using it the moment she first tried to pull on one of the threads within her Mana Burst, but dissipating her own spells only scratched the surface of what it could do.

In theory, between Mana Prism to break her pure Mana down into the various elements, Read the Threads to learn how spells were constructed and see what she was doing, and Free Cast to manipulate them, Eve could cast literally any spell. In practice, even Preston’s most basic heal was beyond her ability to understand, at least for the time being.

That was where the Intelligence stat came in. With roughly two thousand Intelligence after the passive boost from Defiant Mind, Eve’s brain could parse through the remarkably complex patterns far more adeptly than even the average mage. In a matter of hours she managed to isolate the particular threads within her Mana Burst that governed how quickly it flew, how wide of a cone it spread in, and even how far it would travel before dissipating entirely.

But that took hours, and only accounted for the variables she’d already had control over from the ability itself.

In time, Preston and Lumy went on their way to assist in the evacuation of civilians and construction of fortifications, leaving Eve to toil alone on the momentous task before her. She settled in with a vigor.

Eventually, day turned to night and night back to day as labored, filling notebooks with sketches of patterns she’d found and the effects of slight variations. From what she remembered of Preston’s basic heal, Eve managed to deduce the type of connection needed to mark a target as friendly. Using Mana Prism to generate healing Mana—a poor substitute to the divine Mana Preston used, but all Eve could make herself—she even managed to mend a cut on the arm of a page who’d nervously volunteered to be her guinea pig.

Of course, with a health value of 0/0, healing herself would never be a viable strategy, but even a simple flash of healing could mean saving one of her friends’ lives. Eve would devote as many hours as it took to make sure that remained an option.

As their last days of calm before the storm passed, Preston, Lumy, Alex, Emily, and even Reginald came to visit Eve as she worked, each offering their own advice along with the well-needed respite of conversation amidst the furor of her training.

Even Rorick, the berserker who’d first taught her how to fight during the Proving Grounds tournament managed to find her, turning down her offer of a sparring bout for the obvious power level differences. Once they’d exchanged greetings, he’d returned to directing his horde of fangirls in their task of shepherding in refugees.

It was just before sunrise, three days, seven hours, and twenty-two minutes after Eve had first awoken with her new aspect, that Lumy’s mind reached out to Eve’s from somewhere else in the palace. Her tone was strangely calm, detached in a way that didn’t match the phantasm’s usually dry humor, as if no emotion could possibly reach the gravity of the situation, so she hadn’t managed to feel any. The message struck Eve all the same.

He’s here.