He slammed the base of the staff into the ground and copies of it erupted from the ground under every construct creature. The iron-ranked constructs exploded into chunks at the sheer force, the bronze likewise destroyed at a blow. The silvers survived, but were tossed into the air. Emir was already moving. He vanished from the spot, leaving an illusory afterimage behind as he appeared next to the startled human. Emir had already dropped the staff and used both hands to snap the suppression collar around the human’s neck.
Emir’s concern was that suppression collars took a few moments to adapt to the wearer and suppress their powers. The human’s hands shot up to pull the collar off, but Emir slapped his hands away. Emir could sense the effect on the enemy’s aura as the man’s powers were suppressed. The enemy sneered at Emir, lunging towards him as Emir sensed a silver-rank power suddenly rising up inside the man. It wasn’t the man’s own power, but something inside him. Emir retreated in an instant, leaving another afterimage in his place.
Huge, crystalline spikes erupted from the man in every direction, greater in volume than the man’s own body. They ripped him to shreds from the inside, leaving a bloody carcass draped over a strange star of jagged crystal.
A half-dozen damaged, silver-ranked constructs fell out of the air. Emir moved in a blur as he conjured his staff again and smashed them apart before moving to examine the dead man and the bloody sculpture that had emerged from him. He could sense the magic had faded, leaving an inert object for him to examine.
“That’s not something you just come across on the street,” he muttered to himself as he looked it over. As he did so, he was joined by Constance, his chief of staff.
“This is what happened with the other two,” she told him.
“It wasn’t his power,” Emir said. “It was some kind of object inside him. If we manage to catch up to another one, we’ll need some way to negate it.”
112
The Accumulation of a Life
While the search for answers continued in the astral space, the support camp was suddenly swarmed with bronze-rankers Danielle and Thalia deemed insufficiently reliable to participate. There was also a pair of silver-rankers, one of whom was named Gloria Phael. She had no interest in running the camp but didn’t want a commoner in a position of authority, so she rallied the bronze rankers, ousted Vincent and installed her son in his place.
The administrative skills of the new camp leader left something to be desired and since Jason had stayed on as his assistant, he did his best to keep things running smoothly. This quickly proved infeasible as the new camp leader had little interest in doing, or even hearing about things. This was remedied by having Jason removed as well.
Left idle, Jason spent his time with Gary and Rufus, who was still barely moving. He would robotically eat a spirit coin when prompted by Gary, but never talked. Gary took Jason aside because they were running out of coins and needed clean clothes. Their possessions had all been stored in Farrah’s storage space.
Jason went and found Vincent.
“That worthless, wet sack of nothing actually had me confined to the tent,” Vincent complained.
“Are they enforcing that?” Jason asked.
“No, but it’s still humiliating.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Jason said. “Gary and I need to do something, so we need you to keep an eye on Rufus.”
Vincent had been giving Rufus his distance, at Gary’s suggestion.
“Of course,” Vincent said.
He and Gary went out into the desert. They found a flat space of red, rocky earth, far from the prying eyes of the camp and Jason took out the casket containing Farrah’s body. He had been keeping it in his own storage space since she was brought out through the aperture. She was in a magical casket that would preserve her until she was returned to her family. Jason once had the sombre task of placing another adventurer in an identical casket, and now understood why friends and family were not the ones sent to recover a fallen adventurer.
Jason started laying out a ritual circle with salt, with Farrah’s casket at the centre. Using the powdered cores of lesser monsters, he tested the circle, correcting it again and again.
“I keep messing it up,” he said, voice catching.
“Take your time,” Gary told him.
It went unspoken that Jason could have extracted the items from Farrah’s storage space by looting her body like a monster. They both knew it could be done, but neither man suggested such a defilement.
Still trying to get the circle right, Jason had to stop. His vision was swimming with tears as he remembered Farrah instructing him on his very first magic circle.
“I was just thinking about when we summoned my familiar,” he said. “Remember how we snuck off to the other side of the manor so Anisa wouldn’t find us?”
Gary laughed, reminiscent mirth weighed down with sadness. After days of sombre reflection, the sound was strange and alien.
“You wouldn’t tell us what it was, but we knew she wouldn’t like it, coming from an apocalypse stone.”
“Farrah walked me through the ritual circle. It was a complex one for my first time.”
“You passed out again. You were constantly falling unconscious, back then.”
“Getting hit in the head with a shovel will do that. I sometimes wonder if I don’t have some lingering damage from all that cranial trauma.”
“We’ve wondered that too,” Gary said, and they shared a sad smile.
Jason finished the circle and performed the ritual by reciting an incantation. Items from Farrah's dimensional space started appearing around her casket. By the time it was done, there was a small hill of crates, boxes, bookshelves, cupboards, wardrobes, furniture and various loose items.
“I don’t have room for all this in my inventory,” Jason said. “Some of it won’t fit at all. She had a banquet table in there?”
“How big an item can you fit?” Gary asked.
“About the size of a regular dining table. Maybe half the size of that great long thing. Who needs a banquet table on hand?”
“You’d be surprised,” Gary said. “It doesn’t matter if you can’t fit everything. There are dimensional bags in here somewhere. The banquet table should fit into a bronze-rank one.”
They started sorting through everything, the accumulation of a life. They found the dimensional bags, placing Gary’s things in one and Rufus’s in another. That was only a portion of the pile; the rest they started putting in the remaining bags.
Jason brushed his hand along the spines of books on one of several bookcases.
“She always wanted me to pay more attention to magical theory,” he said.
“Take them,” Gary said. “She’d want you to have them.”
“You’re sure?”
“Just make sure you read them,” he instructed Jason. “You have no idea how often she complained that you wouldn’t learn magic properly. She saw so much potential in you.”
“I don’t know about that,” Jason said, “but I’ll try to live up to it.”
Returning to the support camp, Jason and Gary headed for the large dormitory tent where they had left Rufus. As they drew closer, they heard a commotion coming from the tent and saw people evacuating it.
“MY SON ALMOST DIED BECAUSE YOU COULDN’T HOLD THE LINE!”
Gary and Jason went into the tent. Rufus was standing, his expressionless gaze on a man who had clutched the front of Rufus’s clothes in a first. He was yelling invective at Rufus, blasting out his bronze-rank aura. Everyone else had either backed-off or left entirely.