The Ruler of Ruin

I spent over an hour sorting through my abilities. I came to a single conclusion, which was that I vastly underutilized my powers. They were still so new that I didn’t have the mental muscle memory to fall back on them. Sure, I was currently trying to keep a lid on the details of my powers, but once I left the Plains of Valor that shouldn’t matter as much, and I could embrace the new me. I didn’t want to live with secrets and constantly worrying about keeping a trump card hidden. Even as a powerless blank I had found that aspect of the adventurer lifestyle to be utterly unattractive.

My understanding of Fortress Restoration had gone beyond what Arx Maxima had explained to me. Yes, the power worked by absorbing kinetic energy and converting that to stored energy for healing, but it also had two distinctive mods of operation. Gradual, passive healing which always was on fell under the Constant Maintenance mode. This was the mode that cleansed my fatigue and kept me battle ready at all times. There was also an Instant Repair mode that I could activate to spend my own astral energy on to produce instant, dramatic healing instead of the slow regenerative qualities of Maintenance.

Sense Vector, similarly, was a vastly more complicated power than I had first assumed. When I catalogued a vector quantity that I had the capacity to understand, it went into a catalog or library of aspects of reality that I could manipulate through Modify Vector. Lock Vector seemed to work completely independently of Sense Vector and Modify Vector. I didn’t need to understand a damned thing to make it stop doing things. I suspected one of my missing powers from the Administrator concept was going to be Create or Add Vector, and it would utilize the same library Modify Vector did.

If that weren’t enough, Summon Delirium of Ruin had a complexity to it that I had a difficult time piecing together. When I explored the power, I realized I could access the vast plethora of spear designs I had seen when I first summoned the spear. With intense concentration, I could modify my spear on summon. Did I need a longer blade? A shorter tip? More of a javelin? The options seemed to cross all types and variations of a spear, including polearms.

While I let my mind drift across the vast catalogue of spearheads, shafts, and butts, I concluded that they were all normal. Sure, they were made from material that could cut EternaStone with ease, but none generated fire, ice, or anything like that. It made me wonder if that was an upgrade direction I could take the Summon Delirium of Ruin ability in, or if I even needed too. Perhaps that was a use meant to be discovered in my vector abilities?

I drifted to sleep, satisfied that I had learned a little about my abilities, and felt closer to them than ever before.

I fell through darkness. Gusts of black wind whipped around my naked body, pressed hard against my scaled hide, but didn’t hurt me. I fell, and fell, but the winds pushed me this way and that through the darkness, until I jolted through clouds full of arcing black lightning, which provided just enough illumination for me to notice the black winds. I crashed, forcefully, into a small island of rock that floated in the eye of the storm.

Above me, Katrina raged in all of her glory. The hauntingly destructive winds of the Ebon Gale, the electric bolts of black lightning, the churning clouds of chaos, all combined into the greater whole that was Katrina, The Nothing Storm of Madness and Oblivion.

Those dark gusts of wind caressed my scales roughly, and I could feel tiny amounts of my life force being drawn out by them to feed the Matriarch of Destruction. The wind couldn’t pierce my scales, but it could press against them and wiggle, tickling out bits of my life. I assumed it was life, it could have been my sanity, too. No one really needed either of those things, did they?

“Hi,” I called out to the immense storm. It didn’t answer me, but harsh winds pushed me down against the island of rock I’d crashed into, until I was prone, forced to stare up at the storm. Mixed with the teasing, caressing winds, and the chittering voices of doom, I almost felt like this could turn erotic. If a hand shaped gust of wind descended…

That didn’t happen, though.

Instead, Katrina snacked on my life force, licked and sucked the sanity from between my scales, and then carried the energy up into the heart of the storm. While this happened, I had the perfect view of how the Ebon Gale flowed and twisted. Here it was a gust, there it was a breeze, and over there it was a tornado that devoured some far-off realm in the Gossamyr. The constant pressure also exposed me to the whispering voices of the Ebon Gale.

Some, it seemed, were hungry. Others were angry. Many were gibberish I couldn’t understand. Maybe they were the animals that Katrina had obliterated over the years? There was a universal truth to the Ebon Gale, and to Katrina itself, though. Negative energy. It could destroy anything. Sanity, material objects, souls, even realms. It wasn’t just negative energy, it was the essence of negative energy, the energy that destroyed other negative energies, the pinnacle of oblivion.

My powerful scales that held up to the potent winds? Slowly ground to dust, like stone in a desert. The regenerative power of Constant Maintenance mode of Fortress Restoration failed to keep pace with the destruction. Surges of Instant Repair restored my scales, kept more of myself inside of me, but I couldn’t maintain that indefinitely.

Or could I?

I focused on my concept of Arx Maxima, the Ultimate Fortress. Arx Maxima could withstand anything, as she described it, except whatever she hit when the cataclysm happened. Space debris, radiation storms, all sort sorts of things that were just vocabulary I had picked up from Aurelian’s memories, that I only understood as vague mental pictures.

Fortress Restoration healed me, but there was more to survival than simply being healed or not being dead. A beloved word from the Stellarae Enclave bubbled to my mind. Adaptive.

I focused on the pentagon that was my vitality, where Arx Maxima had been enkindled into my heart, and I pushed one of the two inactive nodes to develop and provide me with adaptivity. Why shouldn’t a fortress change to defend itself from attacks?

“Clever boy,” Arx Maxima cheered me on, but I barely registered her words or presence.

I pushed energy into the node of the pentagram, bound it with my desires, and power burned through my lungs, and expanded through my entire body. My scales tingled, and the amount of energy that Katrina stole from me dropped to almost nothing, less than the Constant Maintenance mode healed me for at least.

I laughed in unrestrained joy and looked upon the glory of Katrina unburdened by fear for my own safety. I watched the lightning, the wind. Euphoria bubbled up in my heart at the transcendent beauty of oblivion, mixed with the hysteria of existence as the destroyed desperately, futilely, sought to seek safety.

That’s when I noticed the drain on my energy Citadel Adaption cost me. It was a minimal, but constant, cost. Unlike most of my abilities and their one-time costs, it had an upkeep for any alterations to improve my survivability. Mixed with the other energy intensive powers I had, like Galvanize and Vector powers, I needed a way to offset the power consumption.

I considered Arx Maxima, and the Stellarae Enclave. Why couldn’t I take it from them? They had wealth beyond measure. Arx Maxima had those DarkStar Cores producing power, or whatever they were. I had seen the images of her power generation capabilities in Aurelian’s mind, vast machines that had storms like Katrina in them, like the chaos storms that floated around Arx Maxima’s body now.

I tried to repeat what I had done with Citadel Adaption, on the Envoy concept bound to my strength. I focused my will on what I wanted, increased power flow and regeneration. Arx Maxima had told me, I thought, that the crystals embedded within my flesh were precisely for this purpose. So why didn’t I have the advanced stores of energy she promised me?

An ability manifested out of my desires and flew to me like a messenger bird. It struck my arms and branded itself upon my soul. Images filled my mind. Vaults full of gold. Strange screens with the ledgers of incredible stores of food, EternaStone, and so many other material goods. Cylinder tanks full of seemingly dead bodies. Soul-shards bound with the wisdom of ancient sages.

Mine!

I formed Wealth of the Enclave as an ability. In its basic form it tripled my astral power regeneration and doubled my capacity to 3,000/3,000. Additionally, if I were aboard Arx Maxima, it would also allow me to access the vaults of the Enclave. Somehow. That part wasn’t immediately clear to me, and until I made it back to Monados, was irrelevant.

I let out a sigh of relief and returned my gaze to Katrina. The storm put on a show for me. Katrina obliterated a realm full of people who looked like the Barakin I’d killed in the arena. Nothing survived her rampage across the vast marshlands of the Barakin realm.

Somewhere, far down, deep in the darkest recesses of my mind, whispers told me that I should stop the storm. Life was sacred, and all of that stuff, like I shouldn’t spectate the death of a whole realm. It was so far away I didn’t even really hear it. I heard the rumble of the storm, the explosions of thunder, the maelstrom of madness that devoured an entire realm and wanted more, would consume more. Eventually.

Katrina didn’t actually think, it was my thoughts, I realized, that guided the storm across the lands of the capybara people. It was my emotions that pushed the storm to consume the creatures, not out of malice or hate, but simply because they were there and it was the nature of Katrina to destroy, or so my mind had decided.

I hit the floor of our room in the Guesthouse in Stonehollow with a thud.

Remy groaned in his sleep, something that vaguely sounded like ‘leave me alone’.

Chrys was missing.

Where is Chrys?

“Receiving crafting lessons in the common room,” Arx Maxima calmed my worries before they could blossom.

Claire shot up out of bed looking confused and ready to fight, her lacy underwear didn’t conceal much of her body. I momentarily was taken off-guard by her figure, and then it dawned on me I was on the floor and looking up.

“You okay there, Em?” Claire asked me. I couldn’t tell if I was about to get yelled at for waking her up, or if she was worried.

When I looked down at myself, I could see why she was worried. Large parts of my bed had disintegrated. I hadn’t destroyed the bed with my body, but with the powers of Katrina, and the Hysteria of the Ebon Gale. The power danced in my legs, flowed through my soul, the culmination of hours spent watching the dark winds of Katrina, the Ebon Gale, as they obliterated rodent people.

Maybe, just maybe, I was a monster after all.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I sort of shaped three new abilities in my sleep. As you do.” I grunted a slightly glib answer to Claire, while I stood up and took stock of how much of the bed I had obliterated.

“Ooohkay. I’m going back to sleep,” Claire declared and then did just that, and she seemed to immediately fall back asleep.

Which left me to face the events of the night on my own.