The strain was terrible. If Scorio hadn’t gone through endless months of sustained effort, hadn’t spent hour after interminable hour wrestling with Crush, pitting himself against immovable objects and unstoppable forces, he’d not have had the will.
But he persevered, and finally the third needle burst free and arced around to spear into the saurian.
Who lay bloated and dazed, satiated but unable to move.
And by the gods, the pressure abated.
And here was where the Delightful Secret Marinating Technique came into its own. Once the cycle was initiated, the flow of mana became easier to maintain. The Gold fell toward his Heart, passed through it, passed back out, but Scorio required less and less effort to make it do so.
For an agonizingly endless stretch of time, he shepherded the Gold as he wished, keeping enough to maintain his Ignition but tamping that amount down to a whisper so that the damage ceased, and forcing the rest of the Gold back out.
Only then did Scorio relax enough to appreciate the pain.
The pain that came from even touching Gold in the first place.
Scorio wanted to scream, to clutch at his head. He felt as if his very soul were splitting, the flesh suit of his body about to be torn asunder by terrible pressures from within. The fabric of his being was fraying. His Heart was a mass of charred slivers held together by his will alone. Golden flames raged about it, spiraling up like an inferno, dozens of yards in height.
With supreme effort Scorio reduced the influx by a fraction more, amplified the outgoing streams.
Some hours later the saurian burst.
Scorio couldn’t see it happen, his eyes were directed up at the shelving, but he’d sensed the bloating, the bursting point, and pushed his will forward.
COME.
Another had come, and that expenditure of his will and mana in his reservoir had lessened the strain on his Heart.
The second the next saurian was in range, Scorio hit it with both streams of Gold. This one was larger. It immediately relaxed, delighted.
Turn, Scorio commanded it helplessly. Go. Come closer. Open your mouth. Close it.
With each command he expended a fraction of his mana.
And then he realized he could summon his Shroud.
It flared to life, sustained just outside the coffin.
Attack me.
The saurian lunged forward and snapped at the Shroud. The sheer power behind its attack shattered the invisible shield, but with shuddering delight Scorio summoned it again.
Never had he been so glad for how much mana it took to sustain.
And causing the saurian to attack caused it to expend mana in turn.
Life became an endless loop. Scorio maintained his Shroud and compelled his saurian to attack. The beast, reveling in the pure mana, happily did as it was bid.
And Scorio kept his Heart together through sheer bloody-minded focus.
Eventually the mana built up in this fiend beyond its ability to control; it exploded in a gout of blood and flesh, bones and burning hide, but a third was already there, drawn by the corpse of the first which it had set to devouring.
This one was a hoary elder, massive as The Sloop, hide encrusted with ridges, a true monster.
Scorio poured the twin streams of Gold into it and raised his Shroud.
His Heart hadn’t guttered out once.
Scorio summoned his Shroud and ordered the monster to attack.
It shredded his Shroud and knocked his coffin over.
For a second, Scorio’s focus broke.
Gold washed over his mind.
It felt like dipping his head into a bucket of boiling water.
Scorio screamed and reasserted his control.
Raised his Shroud and resumed pouring the Gold mana out.
The ancient fiend shuddered in pleasure and tore his Shroud apart.
Again Scorio summoned it.
Lost it.
The cycle repeated itself.
And slowly, painfully slowly, he started to become adept at using both his aura and Shroud at the same time.
It took five times as long for the third fiend to explode as the second. It tried to break away at the last, but was stupefied by its meal and accustomed to obeying Scorio.
When it burst there were four more to take its place.
Scorio kept staring up at the ledges. Scores of fiends lay dozing.
He knew them all.
Had crafted backgrounds and names for each one.
But now they were nothing more than lifelines.
Whatever it took he was going to survive, even if it meant exploding each and every one of them.
In the depths of his mind Scorio began to laugh. It was a helpless, manic sound, one step short of deranged. The fourth saurian had slowed and grown transfixed by the flood of purified Gold.
Scorio raised his Shroud and tried to make it wider, thicker, to use more mana. When it was as large as he could make it, he directed the saurian to attack.
It tore his Shroud apart with humiliating ease.
So Scorio just raised another.
For an endless span of time that became his existence. He measured time in terms of the number of saurians killed, but he lost count somewhere in the forties.
The rocks around him grew littered with corpses, bones, half-devoured fiends. The others would descend and consume all the bodies, leaving one of their number behind as Scorio’s newest target.
Forty fiends.
The Gold mana that had pervaded the prism had ceased spreading cloud-like through its body and instead now simply poured through the hole which had widened to the size of Scorio’s fist.
But as time passed Scorio grew ever more inured to the pain of Gold.
A deep and savage satisfaction filled him when he considered his Heart again. It was still a charred wreck, but already it had begun to heal.
After all, what had everyone from Hera to Dameon told him? The only way to repair his ruined Heart was to burn high-quality mana.
Sure they’d been talking about Iron, maybe Bronze.
Had never dreamed that he would become a wide-open channel for endless Gold. But that’s what he was doing now. Without surcease. An endless Ignition. And for all the damage the Gold did, it was now healing his Heart at a slightly faster rate.
Just barely noticeable.
But by the time Scorio burst his sixtieth or so fiend, he realized that his Heart looked like black stone again, not burned wood. The chunks and slivers were coagulating together, reforging into a whole.
And not a rough obsidian chunk as before.
It was reforming into a sphere.
Scorio had no idea what that meant. But he kept channeling.
After a while—weeks? Months? After an infinitude of its own duration, Scorio realized that he no longer needed to focus quite as hard. The Marinating Technique kept the loop going, and now he could summon the Shroud reflexively.
And it had grown.
Had grown monstrous, in fact, like some rare and strange mushroom fed blood and ichor and hideous enchantments. At first it had been the size of a regular shield, a few feet down, one or two across.
But it had slowly swelled in size so that now it was three yards in diameter. With time to kill Scorio experimented on shaping it. He could flatten it into a disc or curve it around into a hemisphere.
His saurian exploded, falling over wetly atop the pile of other corpses.
Scorio seized control of his next victim and commanded it attack him.
The fiend lumbered forth and snapped at the Shroud.
And failed to break it.
This time it twisted its head to the side and really chomped.
The shield cracked but didn’t break.
Scorio instantly reforged it.
For the first time his shield survived the Gold-fiend’s assault.
Scorio ordered it to continue assailing him but it couldn’t get through. He increased the pressure of his aura till it was throwing itself at him in a paroxysm of fury but still the shield held.
He needed to try a bigger saurian.
Finally this one exploded in a riot of guts and ichor. Scorio selected the largest specimen in range. It wasn’t the biggest he’d lured to him, but it was almost two thirds the size of The Sloop. Scorio fed it a good amount of mana first, then ordered it to attack his shield.