The Ruler of Ruin

The bisected wall revealed a tunnel. The tunnel had more than enough room for me to stand in, and I had to extend my reach with Delerium of Ruin to touch the top of it. Warm air tickled my nose, and carried the unmistaken humid scent of mineral rich water. The periodic stalagmites along the cavern floor gave proof to the mineral contents of the water that dripped from the stones above. The floor of the tunnel shifted and twisted, the uneven ground filled with scattered rocks and pools of mirror-still water. Some of the pools were no more than an inch, while others could be up to a few feet in diameter. The larger ones, if I looked closely enough, had tiny organisms inside of them that I only noticed because Vector Sense betrayed their presence.

Through some trick of the lights, I thought I saw flashes of Amaranthine reflect on the surface of the pools of water. Yet each time I investigated it, I couldn’t catch sight of her, or my own reflection. I had given mine up, so perhaps I was like a vampire now?

I wandered down the tunnel for close to ten minutes before it opened into a large, sprawling subterranean chamber. Near the ceiling, stalactites hung like ancient chandeliers. Thick patches of luminescent moss created a powerful radiance in the chamber easily equivalent to the brightest full moon night, if not much brighter. The large space was filled with climbing stalagmites of various colors, and clustered around them were egg piles. The largest crab I’d ever seen, easily twenty feet tall, clacked between rock formations to check on existing eggs, or laying new ones. It had a dark burgundy shell, and its claws radiated menace.

The floor of the cavern might as well have been made of crabs. Hundreds, to thousands, of the little bastards skittered across the cavern. A constant flow of the crabs went into and out of what looked like a subterranean lake. More went in than came out. I Imagined the lake provided them with the majority of their food, but it seemed to also have predators that the crabs didn’t face on the dry ground of the cave.

If Katrina wouldn’t kill me too, I’d just summon a storm and call it done. But there were no assurances I’d be able to avoid the storm myself, so Katrina was out of play. Which meant I had to solve this with my spear, and walls. I retreated down the tunnel and tested out a theory quickly. I could throw Delerium of Ruin and summon it back to me instantly. The energy drain was negligible. With that sorted out, I crept back to the chamber and formulated a battle plan.

“Do I have enough energy for this?” I asked the floating crystal that was Arx Maxima, while I imagined horizontal walls floating below the chandelier-like stalactite covered ceiling.

“Yes. If I assigned statistical representation to your energy pool and ability cost, a ten foot by ten foot by one foot wall costs one energy. Your energy pool is 1,000 units of energy in this scenario. Your generative range precludes reaching the back half of the cavern from here. I estimate with your current position you could cover 75,000 square feet of the cavern with walls, which would cost 750 energy to fill. This would leave you with 250 energy to combat the survivors. Your current regeneration rate is 1 energy per second.”

“However, you have several other issues preventing this from being a wise course of action. First, each standard wall weighs approximately 15,000 pounds. Generating 750 walls would spontaneously create 11,250,000 pounds of rock. That much weight could destroy the subterranean system we are within and make achieving our goals difficult. Additionally, the immense burst of Astral Power could destabilize this realm and risks causing unknown phenomena. Finally, you are not yet skilled enough to generate that many walls simultaneously.”

I felt like Arx Maxima had kicked me in the stomach. The details of my powers were still beyond me, but apparently, not beyond Arx Maxima.

“Create Wall,” I whispered after I changed my visualization. If I couldn’t make hundreds of ten by ten walls, could I make different dimensioned walls? Yes, yes I could. I visualized a ten by one hundred rectangular wall, with a thickness of one foot. It solidified into the air with a tiny drain of energy from me. The three-dimensional vectors from Vector Sense formed immediately, and showed new acting forces before I could really register it, and the first wall plummeted. I quickly formed three more across the chamber.

“Fuck, Wall!” I frantically erected a wall in front of me to block any counter-attack from the crabs, or getting hit by my own attacks, which turned out to be the biggest threat. The wall wobbled, cracked, but held together as four shockwaves formed, one after another, as the slabs of walls crashed into the cavern. I peaked around the edge, to watch the Broodmother push the walls that had struck it off. Cracks ran through its exoskeleton, blood flowed across it, but it had survived. None of the little ones had.

I hadn’t prepared myself for the cacophony I’d created. If ten by ten by one weighed fifteen thousand pounds, then ten by one-hundred by one would be a hundred-and-fifty-thousand pounds. I’d created four of them and dropped them to the ground from mid-air, about sixty or seventy feet up.

I don’t know if the Broodmother saw motion, but the moment I peaked my head around the wall to look at it, it shuffled to face me and its eyes glowed. I darted behind the wall again.

“It has sensed your mental presence. Blocking its line of sight will prevent it from successfully landing a psychic attack on you. I suggest you dispatch it before it crosses the room.” Arx Maxima said the last bit a little too cheerfully for my liking. I gripped Delerium of Ruin tightly with my right hand, and poked a hole in my wall with the tip. Such a tiny hole allowed me to view the immense monster that was the crab, but wouldn’t let it target me – I hoped.

When the Broodmother got within one hundred feet, I jumped to the side, locked onto the large mass of the crab, and hurled Delerium of Ruin at it. The weapon shot through the air with a speed that surprised me. I really needed to test how strong I was now. The spear left a slightly sparkling trail of energy behind it, and then it impacted the crab. I don’t know how far into the animal it went, but the whole spear vanished inside of it.

I didn’t jump back behind the wall quick enough, and pain seared through my mind, knocked me down, and I had to clamber and half-crawl behind the wall while vomiting.

“Did you forget you were in a fight?” Arx Maxima asked flatly.

“Summon Delerium of Ruin!” I cried and tried to make my brain work properly. Nothing happened.

“Summon Delerium of Ruin!” I shouted again, envisioning the spear in my hand. It flowed into reality in a jerky motion, and then solidified. Its weight felt comfortable in my hand, but a sense of dread filled my stomach. Psychic attacks were rough. Dozens of the tiny crabs hadn’t come close to the power of the Broodmother. If I took another one of those I might not be able to recover before the damned thing got to me.

“Create Wall!” I growled while pushing my face against the hole in the wall. The Broodmother had covered two thirds of the vast chamber and barreled towards me. Where was the brain on a crab? Did a crab have a heart? I dropped a thirty-foot by thirty-foot by five-foot wall on the damn thing. The Broodmother was so large that I didn’t have any concerns about the weight hitting the crab. It never even occurred to me that I had to account for the speed of the crab, the acceleration of gravity, or anything like that.

Instinctively, I knew where to put the wall to drop it on top of the crab. Or was it instinctively? While I pictured it equations flickered at the edge of my sight near the vector displays on the Broodmother. Arx Maxima had mentioned I would have access to her computational powers, was this the form it took? How deeply imbedded into me had Arx Maxima made herself?

I heard the crash of the wall against the hard exoskeleton, accompanied by another shockwave and tremors through the ground, I leaped to the side and hurled Delerium of Ruin a final time. Again, I knew exactly how much force to put on the spear, as calculations flowed across my vision and a mental guideline appeared for my arm to follow and launch the spear from.

The Broodmother balanced on the cusp of life and death. That last wall falling on it had caused significant damage. The power of its impact had done a ton of damage to the mindcrab and unleashed a shockwave of kinetic forces that juiced most of the crabs internal organs. The wall settled and pinned the crab to the ground, half of its body shattered and obliterated beneath the 675,000 pounds of stone.

Maybe it was over-kill, but the Broodmother still lived despite the insane amount of damage I had dealt to it. Its exoskeleton had suffered horrendous damage, and the back half of its body had been savagely destroyed by the last wall drop. My spear blasted through the face of the crab and out the back, and the light of life left its eyes, but not before it blasted my mind with unadulterated psychic power. My nerves felt like they were on fire, I smelled eggs, my vision swam, and I coughed blood. The Broodmother had put all of its power into that final mental blast, determined to take me to hell with it.

“It is dead. Focus. Turn your damage to health. Like a building that can be repaired, your body is a fortress that can be restored.”

A bright hot rage bubbled in my chest, and I wanted to scream at Arx Maxima. I wanted to tell her to fuck off, or to let me die in peace, but I didn’t get powers to give up the first time I got a bloody nose. I followed Arx Maxima’s instructions, and dove into the concept of Fortress that I had bound to my heart, or to vitality. If Fortress were a pentagon, Create Wall represented the first point, and the other four were empty.

Fortresses could be rebuilt. Walls could be repaired, or even made higher and denser. With materials, labor, time, and expertise the ruined skeleton of a building could become a flourishing defensive structure. For some reason, all of those strange silicate bits of Arx Maxima that had bound and inserted themselves into my body stirred in my mind. Could they be used to repair myself? They saturated my flesh.

I sensed wordless approval from Arx Maxima.

The image of a hammer and trowel laying before a repaired wall appeared at the second point of the pentagon, and I could feel my energy depleting as they and the crystals healed the damage caused by the Broodmother. It wasn’t instant, it hurt like hell, but I knew immediately that I’d survive.

“Congratulations, Emery. Not only have you bested a foe much stronger than yourself, but you have awakened a new ability.”

“Yay me,” I slurred before I tried to roll onto my side. The very thought of standing up made my stomach churn, but after a few tries I managed to make it onto my side. Arx Maxima floated in front of my face, obscuring my sight of the crab slaughter I had committed. The scent of eggs faded slowly, only to be rapidly replaced by the awful smell of crab. I vaguely recalled Dad and Remy mentioning that mindcrabs were a delicacy and tasted amazing, but I couldn’t get the scent of rotten crab out of my brain.

“Do I have crab in my mind nose?” I asked Arx Maxima.

“You shouldn’t talk yet. Let the restoration do its work, then you can claim the crystal from the Broodmother. Maybe it’ll have clothes in it if you’re lucky.”

For a brief moment, I caught a glimpse of faceted red gem-like eyes watch me from the surface of Arx Maxima, but then they vanished as if they’d never been. Did something in the deal I’d made leave me thinking I’d seen her? Had her Fey Glamour been so powerful I would be haunted by her for the rest of my life? It was a distraction that might make me miss something important.

Fragment? Crystal? I vaguely recalled that Arx Maxima wanted me to get something from the giant crab, but the thoughts wouldn’t link together properly. Clothes, though, tempted me greatly. A rock pressed painfully against my hip, and as numbness retreated from my limbs, I realized that a rocky floor made for an exceptionally poor bed.

“I want pants!” I half demanded, half lamented.

Arx Maxima flashed a burst of light. I don’t think it was a color I knew, but somehow it seemed as if she’d just sighed at me.