The Sixth School.

Chapter Seventy Two: A convergence…

Greg could feel his expression contort into a grimace at the foul smell that came from the cave. His teacher stood to his right and Olivia to his left. Greg only cast a quick glance at the suited figure of Slenderman, the fictional horror figure from his previous life, standing on the other side of the familiar. This was the latest image from his memories that the being who tried to take him over had become fascinated with. Towering over them at almost nine feet in height, other than the maw with far too many sharp teeth that it called a mouth, its head was a smooth surface with no visible features. From its bald head to its complete lack of eyes, nose, and ears, it was an unsettling figure to look at. However, it was this featurelessness that made the act of waving its hand before its head as if trying to ward off a bad smell all the more comical.

The smell coming from the cave wasn’t just of decay. In a way that Greg couldn’t comprehend, it seemed to transcend simple rot and touch upon the very essence of corruption itself. Greg wasn’t even sure how he knew what the true essence of corruption smelled like but that’s the only thing that came to mind even as he fought the urge to puke. After his teacher had pointed out that his late uncle was their best lead in finding the site of the convergence, Greg’s first thought had been the frustrating realization that they might have sabotaged their best lead. They had, after all, wiped the memories of his cousin of anything that involved his uncle and the magic he’d mysteriously obtained. It, however, hadn’t taken a lot of thinking past that for Greg to remember his uncle’s secret cave lair.

Much like his teacher, his uncle had either carved out or found a secret cave from which he’d been operating. Greg had planned to take this cave for himself and make it his lair for when he needed to do things away from the eyes of the townspeople. With his daily schedule learning under the healer, however, months had gone by without him coming back to it and eventually it had slipped from his mind. Unfortunately, the cave itself wasn’t all that he had forgotten as the stench that almost felt physical was reminding him. After killing the last dark crawler, Olivia removed all of its viscera and buried it in a pit. The hard shell of the beast, however, had been left inside the cave to allow any viscera that might still be clinging to it to rot and fall off leaving behind the shell only. How such a putrid smell could last for the several months that had passed since he left the cave, Greg couldn’t even begin to understand. He, however, found himself thinking that the abyssal realm was one that he’d probably never want to visit.

There was some murmuring to his right and three bubbles of clean air appeared around the head of his teacher, his own, and that of Olivia. Greg turned to his teacher with a grateful look on his face and this mercy. “You’d be shocked by the kinds of smells you get exposed to as a healer,” She replied to his silent gratitude. “Especially when you have dealt with as many plagues as I have. I’ve encountered smells that left me unable to eat for a few cycles. A way of dealing with foul smells is not optional if you wish to last in this profession,” She said. While her tone sounded casual, Greg could recognize when his teacher was offering him useful advice and so he took her words seriously.

The three of them, plus the imitation of Slenderman, walked into the cave, although the latter had to crawl on all fours owing to how tall he was. Apart from the massive black carapace of the Dark Crawlers, there wasn’t much different about the admittedly empty cave. The scrying pool was off to one side of the cave and the rest was just open space. Greg could see that their plan had largely worked as there was no viscera still clinging to the black carapace. What they hadn’t foreseen, however, was what the rotted flesh was doing to the ground around it. Rather than drying up over time, the pool of black sludge around the carapace seemed to be eating up the ground around it and turning into more of the sludge. Greg couldn’t help but turn to his teacher to see if she would make anything of this.

In truth, the cave had been a long shot. While Greg knew that his uncle had been operating from this place, he hadn’t been sure that they’d be able to find anything significant or useful after so many months. Greg himself had been inside it once and yet he hadn’t seen anything that would suggest that two worlds were colliding. In the end, it was just a cave, a conveniently hidden space that one could use for clandestine operations, should they so wish. Much as he hoped for more, a significant part of him feared that this simple reasoning was what had compelled his uncle to use it as his lair all those months ago. Even what was happening with the carapace, while odd and somewhat disturbing, was something that had taken place after the fact. His uncle had been dead and the staff he found confiscated by the time Greg left the carapace of the dark crawler inside this cave.

The healer spared little more than a glance at the carapace and the slowly growing pool under it before moving deeper into the cave. Greg’s fears that this would be a dud grew just a bit when his teacher did a visual sweep of the cave and didn’t seem to find anything of interest. His teacher, however, didn’t give up as quickly as Greg had been fearing. Instead, she closed her eyes and stretched out her other senses. Now that he was a first-tier mage, Greg picked up on a slight wave of mana bursting out from the healer and spreading out to the whole cave. At first, Greg thought that it was an imitation of sonar and that the mana would bounce back towards her. That, however, wasn’t what happened. Instead, what she had done was less of sonar and more like a sphere of mana. It didn’t just hit and bounce back, rather it lingered on everything it touched. From the slight furrow in her brow and the look of concentration on her features, Greg couldn’t help but wonder if his teacher was ‘seeing’ everything that her mana touched all at once. The thought, however, disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. If seeing was all the healer wanted to do, she’d just turn her head this way and that, not waste mana frivolously. She was probably doing something more that Greg couldn’t as yet understand.

When his teacher finally opened her eyes, her head turned toward the far wall of the cave. Following her line of sight, Greg saw what looked like a small table of stone with a stone bowl on top of it. Greg had seen the two before but had never thought anything of it. After all, if his uncle had been using this cave as a lair, having a place to eat from wasn’t that odd. From the look of interest that his teacher sent the bowl even as she moved towards it, Greg was starting to suspect that perhaps the items had been used for more than just pure sustenance.

“There was a ritual cast here,” The healer almost immediately confirmed Greg’s suspicions as she moved towards the small table. “The traces are rather faint, but that’s not surprising given that they are almost a cycle old,” She spoke her thoughts out loud, probably for his benefit.

“It had to be a powerful ritual, at least tier-three if its traces have lasted so long,” Olivia chimed in sounding pleased.

“Is that a good thing?” Greg asked, picking up on his familiar’s delight.

With a nod, she confirmed. “It is.”

Without waiting for him to ask, his teacher launched into an explanation. “Think of mana like water. Anything you do magically, whether it be a spell or a ritual, disturbs that water and causes ripples. The lower the tier of spell or ritual and the mana used in it, the smaller the disturbance. Conversely, the higher the tier of spell or ritual or the grade of mana used in it, the bigger the disturbance it causes. But while mana behaves a lot like water, it isn’t water. Any disturbances will linger a lot longer than they would in water. Tier-one spells or rituals will usually take a day or two to fade. Those at tier two might take a few weeks, those at tier three, three to four months, and so on,” she explained.

Greg’s confusion at her statement was immediate. If the mana of tier three mages could only last about three to four months, why were they so happy? This ritual, after all, had taken place a little less than a cycle ago. “You are forgetting something, Master.” Greg’s confusion must have been clear to see as Olivia chimed in. “Your uncle wasn’t a third-tier mage!” she said simply. A short answer, but it caused Greg’s eyes to go wide with understanding. Indeed, his uncle hadn’t been a third-tier mage, instead, he’d been a tier-zero mage. A fact that changed the whole equation.

According to Olivia, the ritual cast here was only at tier three. The defining feature of tier-zero mages, however, was the fact that it wasn’t their own mana that they used. Instead, whatever higher being they were connected to, they would channel their mana to perform feats that they otherwise wouldn’t have been capable of. Had his uncle actually been a third-tier mage, then any trace of this ritual would have disappeared months ago. The higher tier of mana that he had channeled to perform this ritual had left a deeper imprint in the mana left behind hence why it could still be detected.

“I understand that as a tier-zero mage, casting a ritual at the third tier has left an imprint that can still be detected long after it would have otherwise dissipated. However, I don’t see how that helps us find the site of the convergence,” He plainly admitted.

“Again, think back to the example of water,” His teacher said. “If it has an easier way to follow, water will never take a harder one. A stream of water will not dig through rock if flowing around it is easier. In much the same way, mana flows through the path of least resistance. Now, there are certain beings powerful enough to project their power across realms should they wish to. But how do you think the mana would behave if there was already a weak point connecting the two realms?” The healer posed.

“The mana would flow through the site of the convergence to cross between the two realms,” Greg replied, immediately understanding why the fading traces of the ritual were so crucial. “So if we can trace the flow of mana that empowered this ritual, we can follow it back to where the bridge between the two realms is forming,” He stated.

An approving smile crossed his teacher’s lips as she nodded. “Exactly,” She confirmed even as an instrument appeared in her hands. The thing looked a lot like a snow globe, except it had several small dials around the base. Despite what it looked like, Greg suspected that he was looking at a strange compass of some kind. The reason for this suspicion on his part was the golden arrow that was floating inside whatever fluid was inside the globe. From the way the arrow kept shifting in all directions, it was immediately clear that this wasn’t some magnetic compass. Also, unlike the normal compass that Greg was familiar with, this one seemed to be a three-dimensional compass as it sometimes pointed up, down, or even diagonally. 

Crouching low so that she was closer to what Greg now knew to be a small altar, his teacher began to carefully adjust the dials around the base. It was just a guess on his part, but Greg suspected that his teacher was tuning the thing so that it locked on the abyssal mana. If his guess was right, then she’d have to be very precise in calibrating it. Not only because ambient mana was usually a mix of most kinds of mana but also because abyssal mana wasn’t native to this realm. Greg didn’t know if this would make it stand out more or make it that much harder to lock on. What he did know, however, was that the very ground under them was soaked through with the mana. There was a very real chance that it would just point downward if the healer didn’t get it right.

Greg’s expression turned serious as he turned away from his teacher to face his familiar. ‘Olivia,’ He mentally called to her. ‘I really hope everything goes alright,’ He continued through their link when she turned to him. “However, I suspect that whatever power it was that gave that staff to my uncle won’t be willing to see this convergence closed so easily,” He said. In truth, Greg didn’t know if whatever force it was that was behind the staff was even paying attention to the convergence or not. But it was a good way of avoiding having to say that he was afraid of whatever fate might be cooking up for him. “You have a spending limit of five million magic points. Plan for the worst possible outcome you can think of,” He instructed.

It galled Greg that his strategy for meeting every life-and-death situation that he’d found himself in so far, was to outspend the problem. That’s how he’d beaten his uncle and it had also been how Greg had been planning to beat the obsidian earthmover. Now, for the third time, he was about to face another life-and-death crisis and his only viable strategy was to spend mountains of points in an attempt to stay alive. One might argue this was only to be expected given that Greg had been facing insurmountable odds each time, just as was the case presently. To Greg, however, it only made him keenly aware of how weak he was. He yearned to be able to face any challenges that came his way with his own strength, rather than having to rely on external items.

There was a small smile of approval on Olivia’s lips. Whether it was because of his thinking ahead, or because she approved of his desire for power, Greg didn’t know. Still, whether it be one or the other, Greg didn’t care all that much. On her part, Olivia turned to look at the healer who was still fiddling with her compass and a contemplative look crossed her expression. After a short internal debate with herself, she seemed to make up her mind before turning back to him. “You might not like to hear this, Master. But if I’m planning for the worst possible scenario, then you aren’t the one I’d spend the five million magic points on,” She stated.

Contrary to what Olivia feared, the words didn’t sting. It was one of those things that immediately strike you as true as soon as you hear them. Greg had just entered the world of magic while his teacher had risen through it for the past several centuries. Having several magical items in his hands would be a way of keeping him from succumbing too quickly to whatever they might find. Giving those same tools to his teacher, however, would be a force multiplier. She would go from dangerous to lethal! There wasn’t even a question in the matter, his teacher would be their ultimate weapon if there was a fight ahead. ‘Spend another five million on her,’ Greg immediately commanded mentally. Just because he understood and agreed with what Olivia had just said, didn’t mean that Greg would take his own preparations against fate any less seriously. It would be the height of irony to die after arming another and neglecting to do so for oneself!

‘If you can, then think of her as the main attack force and myself as the supporting force in a fight. Our goal is to increase her lethality in any way we can!’ Greg said, taking Olivia’s suggestion a step further. Greg was almost certain that if he tried to fight alongside his teacher, he'd slow her down and interfere with her rhythm rather than help. He was, after all, still a novice in both mundane and magical combat. Rather than force himself into a role that he wasn’t as yet suited for, why not do all he can to make the healer even more dangerous than she otherwise would be? 

“Got it!” The healer called out, delight in her voice.

Both he and Olivia turned to find his teacher holding up the compass. The golden arrow inside the snow globe was no longer turning randomly in all directions. Instead, it was steadily pointing diagonally upward but, off to the healer’s right. “It would seem that the convergence is occurring higher up the mountain,” She explained even as she turned and moved towards the mouth of the cave. Following the snow globe compass with his eyes, Greg could see that no matter which way she turned, the arrow kept pointing in the same direction. Though he hadn’t exactly doubted his teacher, Greg was glad to have this reassurance that the item was working.

“Wait,” Greg called out to his teacher, causing her to pause and turn to him. “We need to plan out our approach…

***

Alena was in a daze. It was one thing to work out that the boy was probably able to receive magical items from his familiar in exchange for all the sex he was having, and it was something else to see it in action. Alena was certain that if the situation didn’t call for it, the boy would never have revealed anything to her. On the advice of his familiar, however, he had decided to arm her and they needed her input on what would best serve her. To just call out something and have it given to her a few seconds later, was a heady feeling that Olivia wouldn’t forget any time soon.

A deep and dark part of her had immediately regretted ever coming up with the contract between herself and the boy. Alena, however, had clamped down hard on that part. The boy was her student, and given all the attention he seemed to be drawing from powerful entities, could one day prove to be a rather formidable ally. Mercifully, for her undeniably envious heart, there was a limit. The boy only had access to items up to the third tier, and not everything she called out was available. The ‘shop', as the boy called it, had most things, but not everything under the sun!

She was now armed enough that even if they met a fourth-tier level threat, she was reasonably confident she’d be able to come out on top! If they didn’t encounter anything, however, she would have to give everything back. This wasn’t because of the boy being stingy or because he had suddenly gotten a change of heart about giving her all the items that he had. Instead, it was the result of a technicality in the contract they’d signed. The boy and his familiar could have tried to guess what would have best served her in a fight. That, however, would have more than likely led to them getting more things wrong than right, given that they weren’t familiar with how she fought. Out of prudence, they’d been forced to get her opinion by telling her to ask for the things she’d need to fight at her best.

Their contract, however, was clear, she couldn’t ask anything of the boy, directly or indirectly, without offering something of equal value. Thus they found themselves in an awkward situation where she couldn’t tell him what she needed without violating that clause. In the end, Alena had been forced to first offer up a tier-seven charm that would render one nigh invisible to all scrying, divination, and fate-tracking methods. It was an item that Alena wasn’t really willing to give up, it would be useful to her when she began pursuing her revenge. As such, the agreement between them was that if they didn’t encounter any danger, then she’d give everything back and get the charm back. If they did encounter danger, Roka would consider the items given to her the price for hiring her to protect him against whatever danger they would find there and so would still hand her the charm back. Of course, knowing that it was next to impossible, if not suicidal, to try and deceive a tier-seven mana contract, Olivia fully planned to act the role of bodyguard and protect the boy with everything she had, should they encounter danger. That way, it would be a legitimate exchange. 

Alena glanced at the boy standing to his left for a second. Despite all the preparations they’d made, she was reasonably certain that everything would be fine. Convergences were a slow phenomenon. More likely than not, they would find it still unopened and with nothing to fight. She had communicated as much to the boy, but, for some reason, Roka seemed to be certain that they were on a war path. He couched his language in ifs and just in cases, but Alena had seen that look in his eyes so many times in her life. The look of someone feeling forced into a corner and ready to fight with everything they had for a chance at survival. Why he was so certain that this investigation would end with a fight, she didn’t know. Perhaps his uncle had left a deeper scar in the boy’s psyche than she realized. The fact that they were dealing with abyssal mana again must have dredged up the suppressed feelings back to the surface. Even as she turned her gaze back forward, she resolved to help him work through those feelings after this whole ordeal was done with.

The three of them completely ignored the townspeople who looked up and pointed at them as they floated over the town in their ascension of the mountain. One of the items that they’d gotten from the boy’s mysterious shop, was a tier-two floating vessel. Despite being called a vessel, the thing was little more than a small platform that a maximum of five people could stand on. Shaped like an arrowhead, the one controlling the vessel was supposed to stand at the tip of it. Anyone else was supposed to flank the one controlling the vessel to either their right or left. In short, they ended up standing in a triangular formation. Olivia was at the head with the mana flow compass guiding her, while she and the boy stood on either side of the familiar.

There were more powerful flying vessels that they could have bought, both at tier two and three. After some deliberation, mainly between herself and Olivia, they had chosen to go with this particular vessel. The main reason was that it required very little mana to operate for a tier two vessel. It would make little sense to arm up as if they were going to fight for their lives only to expend all their mana getting to the battlefield. This was also the reason why Olivia was piloting the vessel instead of her. Since she was to be their main fighting force, just in case of anything, she needed to conserve as much of her mana as possible. In exchange for a lower cost in mana, however, they’d had to settle for a vessel that couldn’t go that high or that fast. Sure, they were moving at almost five times the speed they otherwise would have if they were moving on the ground, but all in all, it wasn’t fast enough to avoid detection. Hence the spectacle they caused below as they rapidly ascended the mountain.

Most of their flight up the mountain was uneventful. If the Mana flow compass didn’t keep a steady bearing, it would have been easy to think that they’d been wrong and there wasn’t anything worth investigating on the mountain. It wasn’t until they were three hours into the flight up the mountain that they caught the first signs that something was off. One out of every ten trees seemed to have taken an oily black hue, was withering, or sick and twisted in some way. The further up they moved, the more she started to notice trees with growths that she was reasonably certain were made of flesh, as opposed to plant fiber. The first creature to attack them actually died from one of these trees.

Given her hundreds of cycles of experience working with various creatures, Alena had known that the howling monkey was rabid the moment she caught sight of it. Noisy creatures whose howls could be heard for miles, especially when they started howling as a troop, howling monkeys were so loud that they came to be identified by the sound they made. Luckily, they preferred living at altitudes that few people could match. Living in troops of about ten to twenty monkeys, they were exclusively vegetarian in their diet. Which is why, it immediately struck her as odd when Alena caught sight of a howling monkey on its own without its troop. Worse still, the absence of its troop could be explained by the fact that it was gorging itself on the disemboweled body of another monkey that looked a lot like itself. The whole troop had probably been turned cannibalistic by the corrupting abyssal mana. Whether the troop had scattered or she was looking at the last survivor, Alena didn’t know.

When the shadow of the vessel they were on passed over the creature, it immediately abandoned its feeding frenzy. Its head snapped upward to glare at them before it let out a howl of fury, much louder than what its small frame would suggest it capable of. There was no forethought in the creature before it started clambering up the closest tree in an attempt to chase. Though they might not be sentient, most creatures had some degree of ability to make judgments on how much danger other creatures posed. Most creatures on this mountain that sensed her aura usually turned and ran. There was none of that with this beast. It wasn’t even that it had judged them to not be a threat. Instead, any threat assessment had been skipped altogether. The thing had just seen them and immediately decided that it wanted them dead!

Unfortunately for the howling monkey, in its rush to get at them, it passed close to a large bulbous growth bulging from the trunk of a particularly thick tree. Fast enough that not even she was certain she would have been able to dodge, Alena watched as the disgusting bulbous growth split into two, and several sickly grey tentacles the width of a finger shot forward. The howling monkey’s momentum was immediately arrested as the tentacles easily punched through its skin and in some cases bone. The monkey had had its back to the bulb, so the attack came from behind it. One tentacle went through the back of its skull, three through its upper back into the monkey’s thoracic cavity, including one that shot right through the monkey’s spine as if it wasn’t there. About seven or so tentacles sunk into its lower back, and into its abdomen. A final few attached themselves to the monkey’s limbs.

In a matter of seconds, Alena watched as the monkey’s body was reduced to a husk, its innards being sucked through the tentacles back into the tree. The most eerie part of the whole spectacle wasn’t the monkey’s screams of agony, no. It was the fact that it kept that unwavering glare of murderous hatred fixed on them right up until those eyes turned glassy, then popped as a tentacle emerged from one then the other. Only skin and bones were left of the monkey, and yet, not even that was spared. Fast as they had emerged, the tentacles pulled what was left of the monkey back into the bulbous growth which closed up once more. The sound of snapping bones was all that was left of the howling monkey.

It wasn’t until the sound of bones snapping went quiet that they realized that the vessel had inadvertently come to a stop. None of them could even question the familiar as to why, as they had all been unable to turn their eyes away from the horrific spectacle that had just played out before them. Alena couldn’t help but glance once more at her student, finding herself very happy that he’d been paranoid enough to arm them for the worst. All of a sudden, she wasn’t feeling as confident that things would work out without much fuss. “Let’s keep moving,” she instructed, doing her best to keep her voice from showing just how disturbed she was.

In the end, the fact that they were on a flying vessel several feet above the trees helped them avoid a lot of the battles that seemed to be taking place on the ground. The deeper they moved into the more infected territory, the more twisted everything became. Everything, be they hunter or prey animal, was attacking everything else. And as if that wasn’t bad enough none of the creatures fighting were normal. Almost every single one of them had been warped in some way, and very few in a beneficial way. Twisted limbs, bone spikes growing through skin in painful ways, large tumor-like growths, open wounds that didn’t seem to be healing, and so on. It was as if some nightmare had escaped the realm of the ephemeral and jumped into reality.

A few beasts did catch sight of them from the ground like the howling monkey had, some even made an effort to get at them. Instead, the two times they were actually attacked, it was from birds. Most of the beasts in this section of the forest had probably flown away before they were caught in the hold of the abyssal mana. These two were among the unlucky few that didn’t. Both times, Alena easily dispatched them. Rabid or not, the mountain was mostly full of mundane beasts. If she could so easily deal with an obsidian earthmover that had reached tier three, then the mundane birds posed zero challenge to her. Still, it didn’t give her any confidence about what lay ahead.

Close enough to the peak of the mountain that the air had started turning chilly, they found it. The were no dramatic or ostentatious signs of a bridge between two worlds forming. One who couldn’t sense mana wouldn’t be able to tell that anything was off if everything around wasn’t being morphed and twisted in strange ways. However, given that the convergence had been nigh undetectable all this time, Alena wasn’t that surprised by this turn of events. The sudden and sharp spike of Abyssal mana that seemed so thick as to choke out everything else, was the only signal they got that they were right on top of the convergence. As it turns out, she had been right, the doorway wasn’t open, But rather than the several months, possibly years that Alena had been sure they’d have, the unrelenting torrents of abyssal mana that seemed to be crossing over into this realm from somewhere, indicated that they’d found a convergence in its last stages before opening. If they didn’t do anything to stop it, the doorway between realms would probably be complete in a few hours, a day at the most!…

***