Looming Shadow: Journey to Chaos book 2 (39 page)

The arrogance was
similar, but the tone was less mature and more insecure than the Dengel he knew.
This scroll presented an image of Dengel as a pimply, stuttering, and attention-seeking
teenager whose only friend was this mystic no one else had heard of. The
thought made him chuckle.

Grey Dengel manifested
in the seat across from him. Although his eyes were stern, his face was tinged
pink.
You are laughing at yourself. When we met, you were my fan, just as I
was for him.

“
Touché,
” Eric
admitted and continued reading.

“The First Mother has
already granted me her blessing of monstrosity, as she has done to the rest of
the elfin race, her chosen and favored race, and so am I already closer to her
by the nature of my birth than the decaying and flea-bitten humans fouling up
the planet.”

Even back then, he
was a specist.

“It is my great
fortune, and no doubt the continued blessing of the Great Mother, that I found
such a magnanimous master as Aeirk Valeten. Surely, with his help, I shall gain
the highest level of enlightenment, perform the Chaotic Starlight, and see into
the heart of the omniverse hanging from the branches of Noitearc. His teaching
style has such uniqueness and his training methods have such chaotic thought
invested in them that I shall never find another remotely like him (Nor shall
he ever find such a worthy and talented student as myself.).”

Get on with it!

“Chaotic Enlightenment
is a process and each step brings the disciple closer to chaos itself. This is
the greatest power a mage can achieve for chaos is the purest and most potent
form of mana; from which all things are born and, in it, all things die. To
perform the Chaotic Starlight is to perform the first act of ...Creation
itself.” 

Eric jaw dropped. With
his eyes just as big around, he asked, “Are you serious?”

I do not joke about
Chaos.

Eric smirked. “Ironic.”

Grey Dengel scowled.
Impudent.

After ten pages of
bragging, excuses, and the various deeds of Aeirk Valeten, Eric was ready to
pull his hair out. He was no closer to confirming whether or not “blessing of
monstrosity” was the same thing as “mana mutation.” On the other hand, he
learned more about this Chaotic Enlightenment.

The first level was
simply magecraft: the knowledge that you possess, power that can be used to
shape the physical world, and the ability to channel that power. The second
level was Mana Conversion: the understanding that everything in the world is
mana fundamentally, from matter to space to time, and thus that everything
could become mana again and transform into something else. The third level was Chaotic
Starlight: knowledge and ability to generate chaotic energy within a world
fruit. The fourth level was unity with Chaos; in other words, becoming an
avatar of Chaos.

Huh, I’m halfway to
full Chaotic Enlightenment without realizing it.

I wrote the book for
the first level and I raised your simple mind to the second level.

Yet even you can’t
help anyone with the third.

It’s in there
somewhere. I doubt I would have learned it without recording it.

After many more pages,
Eric gleaned enough information for a practical spell; Mana Compression. It was
a mana bolt technique used by this teenage Dengel as a training exercise for
controlling highly concentrated mana. As he read further, he realized the mana barrage
was derived from this technique. Instead of releasing the gathered mana as
several bolts, it was released as a single bolt of tremendous power. It didn’t
seem special, but the text stated that continued use of it was supposed to
cause an epiphany in the user about the nature of mana and thus the world as a
whole.

As far as Eric could
tell, it was exactly what it said on the tin: compressing mana between one's
hands until it became highly concentrated. There was nothing technically
complicated about it. All that one required was a great personal supply of mana
and the will to control it. However, a warning followed its description.

“Chaos is a duality and
reality is opposing forces. The greater power stored in a bolt, the greater the
strain it exerts on the body. Therefore, only those blessed with monstrosity by
the Great Mother, such as myself, should use this technique. A human will
surely and grievously injure themselves.”

Challenge accepted.

At an isolated corner
of the plateau, Eric drew his staff and then focused mana at its tip. He
brought out enough to create a bolt bigger than his head and compressed it all
into a pin. He repeated the process and, by the third layer, he felt like he
was pushing water into a vat. The mana wanted to leave. It wanted to escape his
grasp, but he compressed it tighter and tighter. After an eighth compression,
he held a shimmering seed of brilliant and angry energy. Grey Dengel's lecture
came back to him.
I am a god.
Then the seed exploded.

 It left a crater in
the ground and made his ears ring. His staff was dusty, but neither the crystal
nor the wood was cracked or damaged in any way.

“Wow,” Eric whispered.

“If that was your hand,
it would be goop,” Basilard said.

The veteran mage stood
next to him with a disapproving look on his face. When Eric came to him for
advice on the spell he’d found, he said it was impractical. When Eric insisted,
he laid a number of ground rules: use the
Soiléir
crystal, point it at
the ground away from you, and go no further than eight compressions. This was
the result.

“No healer alive could
fix it. If that was a staff of lesser quality, it would have shattered and sent
a feedback pulse that would cause spiritual trauma.”

He pointed to the
Soiléir
.

“This is a storehouse
for great quantities of power in tiny spaces and this light is a proxy for your
soul so the pulse can't reach the real deal. Do you understand now why this
technique is not in your book or mine?”

“Who cares?” Tiza
shouted. “Do it again!”

“If I recall
correctly,” Haburt said, “there was a sect two thousand years ago that
committed mana-powered suicide in the belief that it would reunite them with
Lady Chaos. Could this be the technique they used?”

“Yes,” Grey Dengel
said. “I learned this technique from them.”

“Daylra, I could be
very powerful offensively with this. I'd like to continue practicing.”

Basilard looked off
into the distance. “I won't forbid it, but I want you to think about what would
happen if you injured yourself and who would be affected by it.”

He left the area
without looking back. The rest of the group followed suit until Eric was alone
with Zettai. She hadn't moved from her seat.

“After everything I've
seen you do, I have no doubt that you can handle this. I want to be there when
you do so I can learn it myself.”

“You want to be my
student?”

“Yes! I've been
practicing!”

She put her hands
together and closed her eyes and, after thirty seconds or so, a tiny blue speck
appeared between her palms. Extending her arms, she pushed the speck forward
with her will, but only succeeded in pushing it past her fingers. Even this
effort made her break out in a sweat.

“Don't push yourself.
If you're going to be my student, I don't want you to hurt yourself.”

I did not like
seeing my students injured either.

You hated teaching
in the Dragon's Lair.

Incorrect. I had a
favorite pupil and she was an Otherworlder like yourself.

Eric threw himself into
his physical training with a passion: punches, kicks, patterns with the staff.
Basilard often lectured on the importance of physical conditioning for a
mercenary and he had been slacking off for mysticism. This failed to clear his
head, so he instructed Zettai in the movements, but that only made it worse.

 He drew, compressed,
and fired mana until he was exhausted. He examined them closely and discovered
that no two mana bolts looked exactly the same nor felt the same way. Some were
spheres, but others were more oval or ellipse. One time, he even got a square. As
he pulled more and more mana from his soul, he noticed some were warmer or
colder. Some were rough and jagged, and some transparent and breezy enough to
fall through his fingers. Nor were they all a solid generic blue, but there were
subtle variations. A bolt might be darker at its core and blue-white along the
edges like a cross-section of a planet. Different shades of blue could be
interlaced across the bolt and solid at either end. Gasping and sweating, he
dropped to his knees and lay back.

“Zettai!”

Zettai looked up from
the meditation pose Eric taught her earlier. “Y-yes?”

“I want you to tell me
what you see.”

Zettai thought for a
moment.

“If you flatter me,
I'll smack you upside the head.”

“I see mana bolts
and....one cycle of the flow of power. Mana comes from the soul and leaves
through the soul and exits through the gates and out into the veins and back to
the Sea of Chaos and then returns to the soul. Mana bolts are, in this sense,
no different from mortal life because they are different states of the same
energy.”

“You're a quick learner,”
Eric said with a smile. “I wish you had as much mana as I do. Then we could
move past theory and into practice.”

Zettai pawed the ground
bashfully. “We could go to Mount Heios. Then I’d have plenty of mana.”

“No. That’s too
dangerous. A Fog cloud that big is guaranteed to have powerful monsters inside.
It’s best to stay away from it.”

At last, he lost the
battle with exhaustion and fell backwards. He looked at empty sky above his
head. In Ceiha, there were no large buildings nor airships; nothing that could
reach the stars, let alone the clouds. Only the occasional dragon passing
overhead broke the endless sky.
Kallen would probably fly here just to prove
she can and I can't stop thinking about it!

Grey Dengel was not the
real Dengel. It was an illusion born from spiritual residue and Eric's
imagination. It was little more than his imaginary friend and at the same time
was not created by his imagination. Because of this, no matter how hard he
tried, he couldn't decide for himself if Grey Dengel was speaking naked factual
details or if he wanted Dengel to think of him as his “favorite pupil.”

Were you telling the
truth? Who was it?

If you want to learn,
then study.

Supporting himself by
his staff, Eric began the slow journey back to Haburt's yurt. Zettai jumped up
to help him and, suddenly, Eric felt like an old man. Better yet, an ancient
sage with a beautiful and adoring female pupil. He shook his head.
I must be
truly tired if I’m thinking thoughts like that.
When they arrived at the
yurt, Zettai sat at his feet to listen to him.

“
Today, I received
the first fragment of good fortune since I was coerced into joining this
patchwork guild,
” Eric read aloud. “
Being as I am the Captain of the
Mage Team, I am required to meet each and every lower life-form that the
so-called 'Mother Dragon' picks off the street. However, this one was
particularly interesting as she was a human who claimed to be from another
world. She appeared to be of mature age and yet possessed little knowledge of
even the most basic elements of this world: too ignorant even for amnesia.
Because of my own curiosity, I decided to train her myself
.”

Eric chuckled.
Confident, rude, curious:
This is the Dengel I know
.

“The Otherworlder possesses
remarkable natural stamina; greater than humans of equal level. She is also
capable of drawing power from the Great Mother in greater speeds. I shall keep
an eye on this human. Perhaps she will prove useful in advancing my own
knowledge. While I have temporarily paused in my pursuit of Chaotic Enlightenment
and the Chaotic Starlight in order to haul this fledgling guild out of the
refuse, I have not ceased my attempts to study magecraft itself.”

There it is
again...The Chaotic Starlight...Judging by the tone, this is when he was a full-grown
adult. He must have really wanted it if he's still trying...

“After observing my Otherworlder
for some years now, I am prepared to put forward a hypothesis: While the spirit
of an Otherworlder is weaker than those native to this world, once they adjust
to the raised mana levels, they gain the advantage of deeper reserves. A
non-elf must retain a certain degree of mana at all times, for non-elves lack
our Seed of Chaos and can exhaust themselves. When this limit is breached, the
non-elf will experience shock, coma, and finally, death.”

That must be what
happened to Nolien in the Yacian Caverns...No wonder Tiza used that soft voice
of hers...
Soft, sweet, comforting, and so unlike her normal rough and
abrasive attitude. He'd like to hear it more of –
If Tiza heard that, she'd
gut me like a fish and then eat my liver.

“My Otherworlder has
a greater limit because her body is born coping with less. It may be compared
to cracks in the ground of a desert lake: The water fills the cracks before the
lake itself. In addition, she can pull more mana faster as her soul is used to
working harder. Apparently, there is no mana, or extremely little, coming
through the Ten Elemental Mana Gates of her home world and so the greatest
source of nourishment for the soul is itself.”

A smile crawled across
Eric face. Dengel was praising Otherworlders and, in doing so, praising him!
Then, the smile inverted.
No matter how good at magecraft or how renowned
for his research, praise from someone like him is worthless.