12 Miles Below

Hexis wanted the Winterblossom technique.

I almost told him to eat ice. But I'm more polite than that. He’s my occult master after all, I have to pay respects and all that.

“Go gargle snow.” I said. "Respectfully."

He kept his hands folded inside his robe, glancing me over with a raised eyebrow. "You certainly have a peculiar bravado for someone seeking secrets from me."

I think that’s his way of calling me a cheeky brat. Just with far more words than needed. Cathida was a breath of fresh air in comparison, she’d drop any pretense of making the insult subtle.

“Master, with all due respects, what you’re asking for would need to have Lord Atius looped in. It’s not on me to tell clan secrets. And he’s in the freeze leading knights to terrorize innocent slavers right now.”

Personally, I think he was doing this as a vacation from his regular paperwork duty as a Clan Lord. Now that his bodyguards were all fighting at or even past his weight class, there wasn’t a huge point to having him out on the field.

“Besides, what are you going to use that kind of knowledge for anyhow?” I asked, waving at his general Hexis-ness. The man likely never held a sword for any other reason than to inspect it. He was a bureaucrat who wanted to stay at his desk and amass minions to go out and do his work for him.

With a disdainful frown, he waved a hand. "Oh, fine, you have a point, albeit a minor one. Naturally, a person of my importance wouldn't sully his hands with such mundane conflicts—I have underlings for that. No, I ask out of mild curiosity.”

“You’re willing to trade occult fractals for mild curiosity?”

“I’ve always had a penchant for knowledge, especially when it pertains to the intricate arts of the occult. Though, at my rank, there is scarcely anything left unknown to me. Your knights moving as fast as imperators is fascinating in a way. I suspect you’ve discovered the imperial techniques, and then applied the occult to shortcut the years of work required.”

“Oh, and how do you know it’s me?”

He gave me the ‘are you really asking?’ look. “With names, apprentice. And common sense. Your clan does not rename imperial armors by tradition. And while occasionally insufferable, you do not strike me as egotistical enough to cross a dead imperial’s heritage. The only other imperial armor I’ve heard mentioned in your clan was recovered generations ago by another of your Houses. Did you think I hadn’t searched for basic information given my hunches? I haven’t been sitting at my desk waiting for you to return each day. Life is to be savored, even in the bleakest of locations.”

He got me there. Journey was a rather different name entirely compared to the traditional compound names used by surface clans. The armor might only look imperial, but the name certainly gave it all away.

I had to haggle with him for another hour before we got a deal going for his fractals. The whole negotiation did get me a good view of just how much Hexis suspected about what we had going and what we didn’t, and what other Warlocks would likely guess when they ran into us.

Other than immediately placing the Imperials and their imperators into the mix, there was another side topic to it all: Tomb-bound souls. Which is warlock jargon for someone sitting in the soul fractal, and no true body to return to.

Warlocks had the soul fractal. They knew how it worked. But using it meant they’d go fully into the soul fractal, partial joining was pointless since the body was near frozen anyhow. Even I needed to see-saw my soul weight around between the fractal and my body when I wanted to just talk.

So using the soul fractal while in armor was a waste to their eyes. Can’t move the body, can’t move the armor. When he spotted two soul fractals active in my armor, one for Journey and one for myself, he made the wrong assumption - that it was someone else inhabiting that fractal.

That was what they called a tomb bound soul. Move the soul too far away from the body and it simply has a heart attack. Breathing stops, heart stops, everything. Which made me glad I never tested moving a human soul away from their body.

It was rare for a reason - warlocks sufficiently powerful and knowledgeable to use the occult in any capacity for war were the high rank versions who, by dint of their status, lived a pampered life at the top of the social hierarchy.

To go from a life like that, into a trapped disembodied soul unable to eat, sleep, or find any pleasure of life ever again - it was a kind of shock that didn’t go over well for anyone involved. Usually done under cases of dire need, such as a machine attack wiping out the city.

Was rather interesting to see the difference in how that was approached. The knights within Sagrius’s armor all saw it as their sworn duty to continue past death in assistance of the clan and each other.

Warlocks on the other hand, found it to be living hell. Both for the tomb bound soul and for the people within attack range of the angry dead. The only way to keep one behaved was by threats of some kind that would last beyond the grave.

What surprised Hexis was how confident all our knights were in carrying around a dead soul within them, when historically that was just asking to get killed. He chalked it up to surface clan ‘indoctrination.’

As for what I ended up finding to trade was a more fun story. Hexis was a collector. So I offered him something to his collection of trinkets that he knew no one else in the world could possibly have.

A fully loaded decorative pistol with a magazine of specially made occult bullets that would penetrate anything, and then explode the moment the sides of the round had enough friction. It meant they’d never be recovered by anyone when fired, since the fractal would be blasted into pieces.

He’d never end up in a situation that would need him to shoot the pistol, but still enjoyed the idea of having a one-of-a-kind weapon.

He haggled for more of course, the greedy bastard. The pistol was good and clearly something that appealed to his collector’s interest. But as a warlock, he wanted a staff. Not just any staff, one built to store a massive amount of power. He was going to pair that up with the lightning fractal, amplify it. The more power, the longer distance and the more he could cast.

Wrath had that built for him in one hour flat, with the largest cost being filling up the entire staff with power cell fluid in stable suspension. Low safety on that, Hexis could just as easily zap himself to death with it, or the whole thing could explode if the power cell went supercritical, but he insisted on trying to fill it with as much bang as he could possibly fit into it. If he ever had to use it, he wanted it to do the job.

And with that the deal was done. As for why he decided to give me some high powered occult fractals for basically novelty weapons he had no chance of maintaining in the long run, he claimed he’d grown mildly fond of my antics and having more to my arsenal means I had a higher chance of returning back safely. Besides, he’d eventually pick up something interesting while teaching the clan more occult and founding a branch here.

I think I’m growing on the uptight bastard.

All in all, he’d given me four new fractals. One for increasing gravity, one for decreasing gravity, and the last two were paired up to make lightning.

“The gravity fractals will eat away at your resolve.” He said, sliding over a long equation. “Using too much of it will sap you of all willpower. All that would be left is a desire to sit down, surrender, and let time pass by.”

“I’m familiar with the odd requirements fractals have.” I said. “I did dabble in your ‘forbidden fractal’”

“Then you’ll be aware of just how difficult it is to work with. Each fractal stands as a singularity, demanding unique approaches to access and manipulation. And ways to teach you are unfortunately limited by vocabulary. There are no words to accurately describe how to command these fractals.”

I knew what he meant. The occult wasn’t something I could explain either. If I tried to tell him how to work the mirror fractal, I think I would end up confusing him more than helping him. Same back at me.

He burned the paper away, leaving it in Journey’s memory banks.

Funny enough, the inverse fractal to cause gravity to suck down on a point wasn’t the negative. Because that would have been too simple for the occult. It was a completely different equation that had near nothing similar. The only similar point was that it would also eat away at resolve, like its sister fractal.

Lightning was on a different track as well. It was split into two occult fractals used back to back. The first seemed to clear an entire tunnel of air in the shape the caster wishes. Hexis said it ionized the air, made it smell metallic. Like ozone. Effects would only last a heartbeat at most, before physics decided that was enough fooling around and collapsed the tunnel of air.

The second was the spark of lightning itself, which would then travel through the tunnel of changed air, if the whole process was done fast enough. Power seemed to correlate with anger.

The more pissed off you felt, the stronger the current. It didn’t seem to eat away the anger unlike the gravity fractal and resolve. So keeping something in mind and letting it smolder would be perfect.

Issue was that all of it was mind-weaving occult. Using the fractals as they were like plain ones didn’t do much of anything.

The gas fractal only made a weird sphere-like shape of air around itself ionized. Lightning would give a rather weak discharge that could go in any direction based on physics. Gravity plates did mess with gravity, but only affected what was touching it.

Without having practice on how to truly impose my will on the fractals, they were effectively useless.

“Useless? I certainly think not.” Hexis said, huffing. “Even base fractals can be powerful if used in creative manners. To illustrate, I once utilized this very fractal to suspend my intolerable mentor’s bed mid-air, much to his dismay.”

“You stuck the plate under his bed. I’d need to stick this plate on a metal monster moving faster than anyone has any business going, with two blades and an attitude problem. And underground, I’ll need to face worse. How are you going to stick plates on targets like those?”

Hexis folded his hands together, then leaned forward. “You can craft occult bullets a master smith would feel envious of, all at a small scale. Why are you limiting your production to simply that? Metal monsters are made of metal. Consider having the plates magnetized and miniaturized in your rifles. These would appear as benign as conventional bullets, to be ignored like any, yet would prove infinitely more lethal once your target finds them firmly attached.”

…

“I believe you have a very good point, master.” I said. “A very, very good point.”

“I always do, apprentice. When you do discover the means to killing Feathers with regular ease, do pass down the knowledge. It would serve mankind greatly, equipping the Deathless with more potent arsenal against demonic forces.”

“Don’t you mean it would serve your pockets the most, since you’d be the ones making said arsenal?”

He smiled, “Bargains do not necessarily have to have a singular victor.”

I gave him a firm handshake on that. “If it’s not something the clan wants to keep under wraps, I’ll see about making sure you’ve got those same tools.”

He was right. If I did discover something that could kill Feathers reliably, and then went off underground and fell off a cliff, it would be a tragedy if that knowledge died with me.

I left with a very good haul that day, more than just four occult fractals. He did warn me that lessons would continue on schedule and I was expected to attend them. If I went to sleep at some ungodly hour in the night, just to play with the new toys I had, that was very much my problem to solve.

I swore up and down I’d go to sleep on time, but I think we both knew I was lying.

“The issue with these fractals is that they need some high level of focus to use.” I said, tapping the plate in front of me. Just because I had one plan to make use of the basics, didn’t mean I couldn’t learn how to cast these spells directly.

My usual suspects were hanging around in my room/workshop. Wrath on my chair, dust of black wrapping around her frame and across on the desk where smaller plates were being built wholesale out of the aether, and Cathida glowering down from the armor’s position, as incessantly requested by her.

As for why we humored her with this, simple: It’s a bribe to have her behave. And it worked exactly as hoped. Insult throwing was minimized, and she was slightly less cranky.

“How long would you need to learn four more fractals?” Cathida asked. “You already soak up occult like a sponge baked under the sun. Are you implying the one thing you’re good at, you ain’t good enough at it?”

Slightly less cranky, emphasis on the slightly.

“I just need more time to crack the code. Hexis tried to explain, but it’s really hard to tell where a soul tendril is supposed to fit into a fractal. Left right, three inches off the side, none of that really applies.”

“You should forget about the lightning then. You’re too obsessed with it, just ‘cause it’s flashy looking.” Cathida said. “Don’t see any use for it either with your hocus pocus or being used the regular way. The gravity fractals do have some use. If this magnet business works with Tenisent, he’ll have a lot less options to avoid attacks. You’ve still got to get the defense side of all this pyrite plan going.”

“I would concur with the engram.” Wrath said, “You have been attempting to work with these plates for three hours. You should consider seeking out Captain Sagrius and discussing with him options for defense.”

“Silver tits has the right of it.” Cathida said. “You’re wasting your time with these fractals, trust the design you made and let her build it. It’ll work just as well, and without the resolve drain silvershit. We’re good on offense, you need defense.”

So that brought us back to the current plan: Asking a tomb-bound soul or a few to join up in the traditional way. Maybe that might be the difference between surviving long enough to land enough damage to pop their shield. I walked out of my room and roamed around the estate, looking for where the captain was.

Sagrius wasn’t in the training courtyard, which came as a surprise to me. I found him in the mess hall, eating with two other Winterscar knights.

While we’d gotten quite a few new knights, it still was a small crew, so it was easy enough to learn everyone by name. Even the ones that hadn’t joined me on the expedition down. Listra and Jovian were next to him, coaxing him on.

As for the captain, his eyes locked onto me as I walked in. The other two knights quickly noticed and made space for me to sit.

“Evening all. How’d you get him to sit still and eat?” I asked. He’d been notorious for eating while training. Half the complaints from staff were about him.

The knight to his left, Listra, gave a broad smile. “We annoyed him to death.”

The other laughed, “We invoked your name in all this, m’lord. Told him that him being rested and properly taken care of would increase his efficiency in keeping you safe. He ran some numbers and found it true.”

Sagrius remained blank. “All voices and half of my own, agreed keeping the human side healthy and rested would increase performance.”

“However you all managed to convince him, I’m happy to see him eat some real insect instead of the ration bars.” I said, “And hopefully I won’t have to deal with all the complaints from staff.”

“They were accommodating to my request.” Sagrius said, eyes going down to his plate. “Nutrient and calorie dense foods only.”

Effectively they’d done as he asked. Saw bits of diced frostbloom which usually made everything taste worse, despite it being a superfood.

“How do you like it?”

He frowned, thinking. “I do not know.” He eventually said. “It is food. It has taste. I remember disliking the taste. I do not mind it now.”

That reminded me of how machines viewed taste - something novel. There was no such thing as something tasting bad. “Sounds like the armor side is talking.” I said. “But other machines I’ve met rather enjoy eating. Some more than others.”

“Wrath?” Listra asked.

“Wrath.” I confirmed.

“Drink?” Jovian asked.

“Assuming the glass doesn’t have a Wrath-shaped bite on it, I’d like that.”

“It doesn’t.” He said, taking them out with a wink. “I hid them just for this.”

I’d come originally to talk to Sagrius’s group of knights, see if any of them could migrate onto Journey and help fight off Father. Ended up just passing a good time catching up with the House knights. More joined over time along with some servants on break and even Sagrius seemed to crack a smile unintentionally at some point. Much to his own surprise. The knights within all spoke of it as a sign of recovery.

Sure, the fractals were still waiting to be truly cracked into. And while the lightning did seem like a dead end until I mastered mind-weaving or figured them out in full, the gravity plate idea Hexis had suggested had that conniving potential to catching Father by surprise. And being uncounterable, if mixed with the right plan. I had time to tinker and polish it all until it worked.

Until there wasn’t. On the way back to my bed, I found an orange blinking dot on the top of my HUD. A comms call request had arrived during the night. From a frequency hardly used.

Abraxas.