32. Tether

[Delta Alana Skyisle]

One moment I was enjoying Dante’s dream, sitting inside a Moscow café and the next, the dream became engulfed in pure-all consuming darkness. In horror I realized that he was dead.

Overseer Kliss stood over the crib holding a blood-covered knife. It was definitely her. I didn't notice her earlier, didn't pay enough attention! She was barely visible, hidden under some kind of attention-bending, light-warping concealment cloak. It was hard to focus on her, but I prevailed. She couldn't hide from my Infoscope when I focused all of my attention on her.

Her face was twisted up in agony, all of her muscles twitching as if she was fighting herself. She had found a way around the Vow. She got into the house, completely unnoticed, again! I noted yet another Master-Key on her finger.

Arghh!!!

I looked back at the body of Dante. 

No, no, no! 

I flashed to the wall, trying to activate the hexagrams. I had no Modify skill to activate them. That was Dante’s job. Damn it all!

I flailed left and right in a panic for a moment. I was completely useless as an Infoscope. I needed Modify as a skill and I needed it NOW. I needed it a minute ago! Dante had used it through me so much I had a pretty good memory of the fractal. The memory decay was a problem though, bits of essential information were missing. I filled them with the best of my knowledge, but it took another minute. I pulled the [Defragmenter] out of my skills and replaced it with [Modify].

I flew across the house, igniting one hexagram after the other. 

Time! 

Every passing second of time was working against me. One of the batteries was completely drained and the other was halfway empty. One by one the machinery of [Temporal Rewind] began to click into motion, the runes within the walls igniting and re-aligning. I knew that I was too slow, too late.

There wasn’t enough power to wind the house back in time far enough.

Five minutes felt like a lifetime. Kliss slowly retreating down the stairwell, trying to leave the house. She twitched with every step, in obvious pain. What would happen if she managed to leave before the hexagrams aligned? According to what I knew from the two tests we conducted, it would create a pre-determined ghostly copy of her that was impossible to affect. The ghostly echo would simply fall apart when the effect of the rewind finished.

The massive [Rewind] hexagram aligned just a minute before Kliss escaped the house.

The house stilled every molecule inside it's rooms, suspending everything and everyone. The giant hexagram ignited and the house became bathed in the spell, winding backwards in time. It only wound itself six and a half minutes back before the last battery ran out of power.

No more Rewinds, no more redos left. A thousand years of stored mana gone in a flash.

The dagger was descending down onto Dante's head. I flew towards the Overseer and clawed, chomped into her soul with all of my blades.

She screamed and the aim of the blade faltered. The steel dagger slashed across Dante's head, not directly into it.

The Overseer screeched, dropping the blade. She had failed!

I pulled on the queen bee. The swarm woke up, thousands of bees making their way downstairs. My little, lovely fiery stings of justice. I would make her pay.

"Bees!!!" Kliss cried, face askew in panic. I wouldn't let her live. This time I would burn her to ashes.

Before the bees reached her, the Overseer flung herself through the window. The level 24 Acolyte of Equality was strong.

She rolled across the yard, shards of glass and wooden parts of the frame trailing in her wake.

The swarm followed her outside… right into the rain. Heavy drops of water struck the bees from the sky, bringing them down to the ground. In seconds a third of the swarm was defeated by mere rain! I pulled the rest back before I lost all of my bees.

Damn this wretched weather!

The Overseer looked back at the broken window and the falling bees.

"Ha… ha ha ha ha!" She laughed madly. "You can't hurt me in the rain! Of course! Beemancer! I am a friend of the Alans! I only wanted to protect them from the aberration! See? See! The Alans are safe! Super-extra-safe!"

She laughed madly, retreating into the darkness. Dante was bleeding behind me, slowly dying from the deep gash across his face.

I abandoned my desire to follow Kliss and turned towards the second bedroom. I reached my mother in seconds, bit her soul.

"W-what?!" She awoke with a gasp.

I spun in the air in front of her eyes.

"The ghost! You are real! You attacked my soul! What's going…"

I flashed out of the door, spinning in the air.

"Dante! Dante is in danger!" I yelled through the swarm.

Mom took four seconds to digest my buzzing words.

"Georgi! Wake up! WAKE UP!" She screamed, shaking our dad.

She rushed out of the bedroom and into Dante's room. Her hand was on his sliced face in another 34 seconds.

"Heal!" She yelled, pushing a healing spell into the cut. I hung over Dante's crib.

"HEAL, damn it!" She yelled, casting the spell again and again until she was completely drained of mana.

The cut became smaller, but it was still bleeding. Mom slumped down, unable to stay upright. Dad rushed into the room. He quickly assessed the situation and ran back, returning with a needle and thread to stitch up the cut.

The blade of the Overseer was cursed in some manner, mom's heal didn't seem to be able to fix the cut fully.

I flashed into Dante's Mindspace. Bessie was almost completely dark. A few red lights twinkled in the groom.

Dante was slumped over the controls, a massive, shimmering gash visible across his avatar. A similar gash went across the mainframe of Besm-6, all of the panels dark.

"Dante! Wake up! Wake up damn it!" I grabbed and shook him.

His avatar fell apart into shreds in my arms. More lights went out on Bessie.

His body was failing catastrophically. I saw myriads of afflictions flash across his status menu. His tether failed. Dante's soul began to drift away, sinking into the Astral.

"No! I'm not letting you go into the deep! You didn't give up on me, didn't cast me out when you had the chance!"

I turned every single tendril of the Infoscope into a Tether, burning through my mana. I tethered, wrapped myself around his emerald soul, hung into it, not letting it drift away into the endless darkness where the Hunters lurked beneath the curtain of the world.

“Get Tamara! Now! His heart is stuttering!” Mom yelled.

“I’m on it! Hang on!” Dad replied. I heard the sound of his feet rushing away.

I wrapped my homomagicus body around Dante's soul like a protective shell, clinging to his dying, physical body with a few of my clawed tendrils.

"You will not take my brother!" I hissed, sinking into the Astral with him. 

I held, pulled him back with all of my being. I doubted that the Omniscience would interfere this time around. I had to keep his soul away from the reach of the all-consuming, all-grinding wheel of Samsara.

"He is mine! Mine!"

My body woven from mana currents was fragile, weak. I was probably the most Intelligent thing in Skyisle, but I was absolutely pathetic when it came to magic and strength. The Infoscope began to come apart. I lost tendrils one by one. 

The pull of the wheel, the current of the Astral that drew him away was strong. Much stronger than my Infoscope. 

I was coming apart at the seams. I couldn't hold onto Dante's body!

[Affliction: Soul Decay - 5% ]

[- 7%]

[- 12%]

Only one tendril remained between me and his body. It began to tear.