Chapter 369 - Deadman's Wonderland

I only get to say this once every hundred chapters.

Nice.

Also! Yippee! More chapter, and pretty soon after the last one! nice!

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In an ideal scenario, one’s works should be impeccable. Unimpeachable. Every project should take all of your focus, all of your dedication, and exactly as many resources as needed to make sure that it endures and does all that is demanded of it.

We rarely live in ideal times. While time for proper set-up is essential to any array-wielder or crafter, sometimes one must rely on what they have previously crafted, or, at worst, learn to properly shorthand their work in the moment. 

It is in many ways a mark of expertise, to be able to craft complex spellwork or arrays in short order, using less steps than one might consider usual, safe, or, at times, sane. Other times, it’s the mark of an arrogant junior, over-reaching their grasp and about to have their camp-fire array detonate and take all their fingers off. 

So, in this course, we’ll begin by making you craft the same array repeatedly. The first example should be to the utmost of your abilities within two hours. The second, you will have thirty minutes. The third, ten minutes. We continue until all of you have either succeeded, collapsed, or lost something vital.

- Lessons on the “Ideology Of Practical Arrays”, a mandatory course in the Builders and Scholars Academies, Second Ring. Taught by Level 6 Array Wielder Ryo “Slaughter The Foolish” Mai

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She’s a terrible mom. 

It’s an annoying thought, because she really is doing her best. She genuinely thinks that she’s doing the best she can, and she’s doing everything she can to make sure the kid is safe, taken care of, kept away from the main conflict- and yet, here she is. Back in the fight again.

Sure, the timeline is to blame- world’s ending pretty quick. Emperor’s coming, fucked up and convinced they’re right in… whatever they’re doing. And there’s Taurus, there’s the Church, there’s the missing pieces of her, the Fengs, the Pack… so many horrible, terrible, incredibly powerful things that could turn against her, put her directly in their sights, and take her son. Unmake him.

Paste him into red nothing against a wall.

So she has to get stronger. Has to take risks, Has to challenge herself and do whatever it takes to come out stronger on the other side. 

So she keeps him close, and keeps him at arms length but also right up against her, and makes another little baby war. 

It’ll probably be good for him, power-wise. He’ll get to see some interplay of wider conflicts, get to understand the sorts of orders that get sent out and the scale at which things operate, and his cultivation is pretty much guaranteed to advance just by being near the conflicts and the losses, nevermind the resources they’ll be able to get from this when they win.

An explosion nearby, shattering part of the landscape. The rich, loamy dirt, turned over and over by the grave-diggers, is blasted apart, revealing skeletons layered a dozen deep beneath the dark. As the light of the world above touches them, they spasm, and begin to come to motion, emerging back into the world.

She keeps walking, ignoring that whole mess.

She’s going to win. When she wins, not if. No alternative allowed.

But even if it’s the exact perfect ideal-most thing to ever happen for his powers and his ability to protect himself and is, to the best of her knowledge and ability, the absolute healthiest and most reasonable and most functional thing she could possibly do for him… she’s still a bad mom. 

He doesn’t have a real home, except maybe by her side. He doesn’t have a real support group outside of her and Li Shu. He doesn’t have friends his age, or the kinds of experiences that shape a person outside of their power.

The fact that he’s fucking incredible is the main and really only reason why he’s ok. The fact that he’s taking the lessons he’s taking, understanding the things he’s understanding, is down to the fact that he is an exceptional young man. She’s not sure where exactly he gets all his compassion and patience from, because fuck knows there isn’t nearly enough of it in the world around him. 

Ugh. Frustrating.

The sky whistles, and it’s the whistling of a half-dozen mechanical things, gleaming chrome and brass and silver wrapped around enamel and bone and bone preserved in such a way as to become pitch-black, oil-rich tissues dribbling tar down from above. They beat brass wings and exhale from alien vents for their propulsion, each one with ten arms that double as legs, a central maw of ossuary rings like an altar and mouth both right in the middle of them. 

Before they cross over to her side of the battlefields, missiles of alabaster and oil-rich earth fly up, each one emitting something like its own gravity, drawing in the world and burying it within themselves. Half of the flying corpse-abominations are absorbed and dragged into the grave-missiles, but half make it through, ripping and tearing at space to force things to tear apart of move out of their way. One of them gets close enough to start launching attacks of its own, rings of black lightning fracturing through its ten limbs and extending down to the ground below, bringing Ruin to what they touch. 

A stray crossbow bolt the size of a city street launches from seemingly out of nowhere, obliterating the construct and spearing through the one behind it.

It all circles back, right? The world is wrong. It’s worse than it should be. To make a better world requires power and understanding, and almost more than either, it requires the removal of the things making it so intrinsically worse.  

So, she gets back to fighting, and practices under pressure, and gets scarier and scarier all over again. 

For all that Glorianna is actually pretty good as a teacher, even if she’s a shit person who Raika is absolutely going to fucking End, she’s just… not the kind of teacher Raika responds best to. Learning the runes, learning the scripts and formulae and spellcraft required to craft arrays of all sorts, that’s all plenty valuable, but the theory of it all… well. She’s never been much of an academic, and she’s always learned best under a particularly violent sort of pressure. 

Turns out, a lot of the work of spellcrafting is about making sure your spellwork doesn’t, like… explode. Doesn’t destabilize, or create an unpredictable effect or whatever. So, as it turns out, if you don’t really care about that stuff, just about getting the job done, it can really get streamlined. 

It’s messy, and unpredictable, and hard to control and destructive and impermanent- and it turns out, she’s really good at that. 

An engine screams, louder than the sounds of the armies of bodies tearing each other apart. The thing it comes from thunders forward on massive wheels, the world before it reforming into tracks and steel pathways that it links to to launch itself forward. A hand bursts from beneath the soil, tar dripping from Echo-flesh and scaled up to almost twenty feet tall- it grasps the train in its palm, blocking it path. Instantly, the tracks carve through it, the front of the locomotive drilling through the construct holding it- but it’s cheaper to make a ghost-hand than it is to make a whole engine. Designed to fail, the hand breaks apart, thousands of wraiths with malformed bodies and Echoing Deaths spilling forth to swarm into the carriages and gears of the train, attacking anything they can find within, inflicting their own Deaths onto what they find and consuming what they can.

So yeah- when it comes to getting good enough at spellcraft to surprise or out-fight people who have been at it for eons, she’s found her best bet to be “do something so insane they don’t expect it”. Really, it’s more a continuation of her usual mindset in combat than anything. She might be counted amongst the Bishops by right of “surviving” her fated End, but she’s the least of them by far. She’s yet to meet one that can’t overpower her directly, even the more delicate sorts like Glorianna, and pretty much all of them have more experience with or specialization in the spectrum of powers that can be made or found in their art. 

So, she has to have options. Has to be versatile. Has to be adaptable. Above all else, has to be surprising, and willing to do things pretty fucking stupid, in the pursuit of getting what she needs.

Finally, she reaches the point of the trenchwork that she was looking for. 

She drops into the labyrinthine series of open-air trenches, one of the many networks established over the last few days of conflict. Beside the clean skeletons and ghost-fleshed humanoids that make up the majority of Godsfall’s forces, summoned from their sarcophagi in the city proper or from carefully prepared catacombs, there are hooded, hunched figures, often found clutching at picks and shovels. The Dirt-Turners, worshippers of the Burrowing Saint, believe in the sanctity of overturned earth, the peaceful rest of a well-made grave… and, admittedly, are really good at building tunnels. Now, they work to constantly reinforce and expand the open-air tombs of the trenches, slowing the enemy advance, launching sapper’s raids, and allowing forces to relocate under relative security.

They’re nice enough. Don’t talk much, and most of them have or wield Deaths involving suffocation and entombment, which tends to make their presence… touch to enjoy. Still, now that she doesn’t need to breathe, it can be alright, and many of them are downright friendly.

One in particular perks up as she arrives, a thin waif of a figure with two shovels, one in each hand. 

“Ah! Bishop Raika!”

He bows at the waist, the heavy robe / cloak that his order wears obfuscating nearly everything about him save the pallid hands he grips his tools with. “This lowly one is honored to have been able to be of service, blessed Lich. I, Su Mar, can only pray that my work is deep enough to reach your standards.”

She smiles, rolling her eyes a bit. “Thanks, Su Mar. I’m sure it’ll be plenty. How much did you find?”

He rises back up, though the cloak stays up, hiding his face in shadow. “This lowly Excavator has managed to secure the equivalent of thirty-six intact corpses, milady Bishop. While most have been modified by the works of those smoke-stackers of Mortaris, there should be enough flesh or flesh-equivalent to still be of use to you!”

“Should be. Lead on, Excavator.”

He bows again before turning to head back through the trenches, deeper into the maze. He, like most Dirt-Turners, walks hunched, accustomed to tunnels and back-breaking weights, but he’s fast, seemingly at home with the knee-high mud and the towering walls of solid earth on either side of them. She follows, the sounds of the battle above muted by the protection of rich, night-black earth to either side, but every now and then she’s forced to pause alongside Su Mar as a mechanical appendage stabs through a tunnel wall, or to duck into an alcove as an artillery shell detonates nearby, filling the trenches with flame and chemical fumes. 

Still, it takes less than a minute for the Dirt-Turner to guide her into one of their tunnels, angled down and back towards the city.

Several others of his order mill about here, reinforcing the chamber repeatedly with alterations made to the dirt with touches of their digging tools. She’s not sure if they’re alive, per se- they don’t have heartbeats, but they don’t read to her arcane senses as Echoes, and aren’t skeletal. She’s pretty sure there’s no one among them at the level of a Bishop, but most that she’s talked to have seemed more conscious than most of the corpse-citizens of Godsfall. 

Su Mar bows in greeting to those they pass, who bow in return (and deeper when they see Raika passing). He doesn’t waste any time, though- in moments, they’ve passed through the tunnel into the massive chamber beyond it, and the pile of bodies in its center.

There’s nothing intact about them. To call them “bodies” implies a certain degree of recognizability, of functionality- in truth, the bits and pieces in the center of the man-made cavern seem more like the remains of an explosion. Bits of torsos, leftover organs, limbs and heads divorced from any central trunks. There’s something off about them, too, beyond the damage.

Raika steps close to the mound, extending her senses out towards it. The flesh is… diseased. No, that’s not right- it’s not the same kind of feverish static that an infection or rot looks like to her Death-vision. It’s more like there’s… barely any Death to them, even so viciously unmade from any kind of function. Like they weren’t alive enough to really hold the kind of energy she’d expect.

She makes a note of it- everything she learns here is information gained against Mortaris, after all. Their invasion force presses against Godsfall, so it’s useful there too, but she has multiple cities to beat before this is done, and their assault is, in effect, a big distraction.

Kinda. If they do wipe her out or get a surrender, then they do also just win her little challenge. 

Seo En-Hyun is holding most of the city’s north side on his own, his laughter booming over the battlefield, but she knows that he, and the other Bishops, aren’t putting their all into this. Wasting meaningful power, or genuinely harming their would-be allies, all for the sake of her war-games would defeat the whole purpose, after all. 

In many ways, they’re acting as the fortifications that allow her to shift the situation- or not. 

She shakes her head, refocusing. That’s big-picture shit, and it can go in the background. She makes a note of the way that the Mortaris’ soldiers remains feel, and then gets to work.

With a flick of her wrist, she lets a few dozen of the worms in her slip free of her flesh and splatter against the walls and floor. They get to work immediately, guided by the Death she projects out around them, trailing spiral formations and lopsided runework.

“Ah… Bishop, I…”

She turns her head to look at Su Mar, who bows instead of continuing. 

“No, go ahead. What is it?”

He hesitates, but… “Well, milady, it’s just that some of the… minor details of your working seem to be-”

“Oh, they’re garbage. Don’t worry about it.”

“Ah! I… don’t see, Bishop.”

She smiles at that, teeth glinting in the dark. “Oh that’s excellent. This Bishop loves honest people. Stick around, Su Mar, I could use someone not afraid to speak their mind.”

She also, notably, doesn’t stop her etchings. Runes for incarnation, for movement, for heat and fusion and transmission, decorate the space around the array she’s been practicing, spawned from Lu Karai’s aid with her “hex-hounds”. Su Mar, trapped by his proximity to her, stands quite still, but she can feel the Death around him flowing into his shovels, manifesting the idea of a shield-plane before him. The luckier Dirt-Turners further out just start to scuttle away from the center of the chamber, sometimes directly back out the tunnel they came from. 

She doesn’t mind. If you saw someone slinging fuel and matches about wildly, it’s recommended that you step back. What she’s playing with is considerably more dangerous, after all.

Reaching into herself, several smaller azaleas drift into existence, manifesting at points along the spell-circle. Many of the worms integrate them into the array, and before long, they supplement the missing energy that the strange limbs should be providing, but clearly aren’t. The array lights up in that shadowy veil beside reality, where Echo and imprint glow brighter than the material, and she smiles, pushing more power into it, sending her worms on longer and stranger patterns.

If Glorianna could see, she would be scandalized. Just makes the whole thing sweeter, really.

She pushes, rot and malfunction running through her arm as she channels more of her Death through her anchors, and the pile shifts. Stirs. Wisps of ethereal mist begin to flow inward, summoned out of the earth and down the tunnel they came from, suffusing the pale corpse-flesh of the pile. The meat dissolves into the idea of meat, liquifying and refusing under the effects of the array, and then-

A spasm ripples through the pile, and it expands. Then another, and a bubble forms on one side, a tumor of corpse-flesh expanding fast. Several worms divert from where their finished arrays sit, diving into the mass even as their siblings continue carving.

Ideally, she really should have made the entire array, with all of its supporting spellcraft and formations, before activating the central stuff. Runes to balance out the creation, careful and detailed inscriptions to guide the growth and transformation to exact specifications.

That’s hard. Worse, everyone else knows how to do it better than she can, faster. 

Better to improvise and run with it.

The pile convulses, conjoining into a massive teratoma of corpse-flesh, growing fast enough to start to threaten the array on the ceiling above. A chasm tears itself free on one side, and an exhale of corpse-gases pretends at being a moan, loud enough to make the air in her lungs tremble. 

The mindless, formless thing turns, bubbling like wax as grave-fat and muscle and bone intermingle. The array empowers it, guiding ambient energies and her own infusion of power to animate, conjoin, morph, shape, but the seemingly haphazard runes and “poorly-designed” array circuits leave too much uncontrolled, too much to spasming mutation-

And then she gives one final push, and the worms finish the last of their carvings.

Instantly, the secondary spell-circle lights up, actively altering the original array and restraining it, reflecting the chaotic mass back into itself. The cycle of power loops on itself, the original, malformed spell inverting into a new shape.

The mass of corpse-ooze collapses on itself, the array snapping apart and fracturing- and dozens of smaller blobs collapse about the floor, glowing with Echo-stuff and liquified tissue.

And then they start to move.

The worms she cast into the original mass extend themselves through the body mass she’s formed, rapidly taking control. The things that form are less solid than her earlier hex-hounds, more of them waxen and malformed- but the Echo-stuff compensates, the imprint of functioning biology meaning more than its material existence. These beasts are slick, boneless save for their claws and the occasional armor-plate or sharpened thorn.

They’re ugly. Malformed. Barely passable as spellcraft, barely functional by any standards. They’ll last hours, at most, and have basically no functional commands or powers infused into them.

But they’re also hyper-adaptive, easier to destroy than disrupt, impossible to subvert and turn against her, and also, they work. Only because of the worms, and her Death she “wasted” to empower them, and her improvised spell patterns, and-

Well. And they work.

Wordlessly, she gives them her first command, and the slithering worm-hounds launch themselves forward, spasming as much as running, rolling as much as galloping, squelching noises echoing up the tunnel behind them as they leap into the fray.

“Alright! Didn’t explode. Great success. Good job, Su Mar. Want a job?”

The Dirt-Turner looks up at her from under his hood, hands trembling a bit. Then he nods.

She smiles wide again. “Good. Come on, then- I’ve got stuff to do at the frontlines, and I could use a good trench-digger with me.”

She can’t help but laugh as she walks off, listening to the terrified “gulp” of her latest recruit. 

He’ll be fine. 

She’s not that bad of a mom. She might traumatize someone utterly, but she’s yet to have anyone she’s taking care of explode or anything. That’s high standards, this day and age.