Chapter 241 - In the Depths

Mirian started her attack with a barrage of spells, first opening up with greater lightning and then following it up with disintegration beam and force drill. The first spell splashed against the centiscerator’s carapace, sending electricity dancing across the black plates. The beams hit her target, but they seemed to do little. The force drill was the most effective, sending splinters of the carapace out, but she’d underestimated the spell resistance the abomination had. Despite its lack of a soul, the plated carapace was nullifying a great deal of her spellpower. Briefly, the thought that such a thing should be impossible flitted through her mind, but there was no time to think about it.

The abomination was nearly on top of her when Mirian used accelerated levitation to zip to the side. Several of the beast’s spines scraped over her black shield. She turned the arcane force generated from absorption into shatter stone spells. The centiscerator wasn’t actually made of stone, but the destructive force spell didn’t actually need to target rock to be effective. Hairline cracks formed along the places she hit.

Then, the creature skittered around in a circle, only as it moved, the front of it disappeared.

Mirian immediately closed her eyes, using her active divination spell to feel for where it was moving in the fourth dimension. It’s coming around to hit me in the back.

She zipped upward, sending force detonation spells out into the place the centiscerator was moving through. This time, she was rewarded with a screeching sound, but she’d forgotten to keep an eye on all the parts of it. Dozens of thin spines erupted from its back half, all aiming for her spot in the air. Her black shield was overwhelmed, as the needles had the same spell-resistant properties that the abomination’s carapace had. Three needles skewered her, piercing her gut, her shoulder, and her thigh. Her shield spell dissipated.

Mirian attempted to blink away, but she should have known better than trying to use a dodge through the fourth dimension against a beast that moved through it naturally. The volley of spines followed her and two more of them hit her, one in the chest and another in the leg.

Worse, though, she’d failed to do anything with the excess arcane energy her black shield had provided before it was extinguished. The arcane energy erupted like a cloud, parts of it spontaneously forming into other energies. Bits of electricity and flame spat out as she felt random pushes and pulls against her body, the force pushing around the spines embedded in her. Her concentration failed, and she released the other spells she’d been maintaining.

As she fell from the air, Mirian shifted her dervish stance away from Dusk Waves to Lone Pine to manage the pain. She was also lucky. The splash of arcane energy that had just gone off seemed to confuse whatever senses the centiscerator was using, and so as it reared up on its back legs and tried to bite Mirian, its legs and mandibles struck at the cloud where she’d been.

That gave Mirian a moment to put a shield back up. She fell back on prismatic shield, since she was far more practiced using it, just in time to ward off the centiscerator’s body as it dropped its front segments down, trying to crush her.

Mirian grit her teeth, using a move objects spell to rip the spines out of herself, then flooded her body with soul energy to heal it. Then, she pulled heavily from her soul repositories to coat her offensive spells—

—only to find the gathered soul energy sucked away by the enervator that her father was locked in combat with. She caught a brief glimpse of the bindings Gaius was weaving. It seemed right now he was caught in a defensive battle.

Then her attention was forced back to the centiscerator that was trying to crush her. Letting it consume more soul energy had to be a mistake, so she instead focused on the raw power of her spells, slowing her casting down in favor of hitting consistently in the 120 myr range.

She cast shatter stone once, twice, three times—then again, and the centiscerator reared back, letting out a terrible cry that seemed to come from every direction at once. Fragments of it were splashed across the room, and its head segment was in ruins.

Mirian turned her attention back to the enervator—it was doing something to dissolve Gaius’s bindings, and he was in a desperate struggle to ward it away—but then the headless centiscerator redoubled its attack, coiling around her not just in three dimensions, but in four, and then squeezing.

Mirian remembered, too late, that abominations of the Labyrinth weren’t anything like the life on the surface. Heads were just aesthetic choices to them. They contained no real necessary functions. Eyeball had alluded to all Elder creatures having similarly distributed biology. There was no weak point; she needed to destroy all of it.

Her mana was rapidly draining as she was forced to pump more and more of it into her prismatic shield just to keep it at bay. Mirian manifested Eclipse, driving the adamantium blade deep into the creature, then following up the attack with multiple force drill spells in every direction. She became a porcupine of force spells, each whirling cone of jagged force energy sending out splashes of carapace. The abomination didn’t relent, but her outward push of spells had given her enough room to maneuver. She shot upwards again with an accelerated levitation, then hit the coiled up creature with a full powered cascading inferno. Even through her shield, Mirian felt the heat wash over her as blinding flames streamed down and exploded, forcing the centiscerator back.

As the beast recoiled, Mirian didn’t relent. She continued levitating in the air and sent down spell after spell, beating the abomination back with force blast spells. With its carapace mostly shattered, she now used an enhanced version of her force blades spell.

A standard force blade spell involved around four or five thin lines of force, pushed at the target. Her modified spell involved dozens of blades coming at the centiscerator like a storm, the slashes repeating like waves of rain. The abomination screamed again, but Mirian’s shield suppressed the worst of it. It attempted to skewer her in the air again, but this time she was ready and wove around, dodging the spikes it flung at her as she continued her assault. The force blades tore up chunks of sinewy flesh and tendon, but the centiscerator kept moving. For all that it looked like an ice carnipede, it was far more resilient.

Then she felt a sucking on her aura, and the places where her mana was connected to her spells was siphoned away. She fell from the air, landing hard, and looked to her father.

He was retreating across the room, desperately putting up walls of runic bindings as the enervator advanced on him, floating casually toward the necromancer. Its four arms kept jabbing at Gaius, and every time they did, they sliced through his wall of bindings and sent ripples through his outer soul energy. No doubt, his own aura was under attack too. And if the enervator can do that while still interfering in my fight…

Mirian slammed the centiscerator up against the wall with a force barrier, then aimed a full power disintegration beam at the enervator. She watched in horror as the beams fizzled. If the centiscerator’s spell resistance was high, the enervator’s spell resistance was unbelievable. Arcane spells would be useless against it.

The enervator burst through another of Gaius’s barrier and Mirian could see it siphoning pieces of him. She charged in, dashing through the air, slashing through one of the spike arms of the abomination. As the severed limb fell to the ground, the enervator spun on her, its three arms jabbing in and out. Her prismatic shield burst apart as they hit it, and she could feel the abomination trying to establish siphons to her aura. Now it was her turn to backpedal, trying to throw up a defensive wall of runic bindings and cutting apart the bindings the enervator was weaving.

The distraction lasted just long enough.

By now, the enervator had collected enough soul energy that Mirian could sense it, rather than the void it had held before. Gaius’s black line spell smashed into the central crystal where the soul energy was densest, detonating it. As untamed soul energy burst out from the enervator, more cracks appeared in its crystal. White light streamed out of the openings, cloud-like wisps floating about instead of blood. That meant it was leaking arcane energy. Hope flashed through Mirian. It can be killed. Then she felt something strange. The enervator was still moving the soul energy it was collecting somewhere, displacing it. As the movement of it increased, her divination now detected its movement. It was going from the enervator to the—

One of the needle-like legs of the centiscerator pierced her. It went through her spine and out her gut, sending out a spray of blood. Even in the Lone Pine form, she blacked out briefly, and came too as she was hurtling through the air, right before she slammed into the wall and blacked out again.

She opened her eyes on the far side of the room, blinking back stars. She didn’t know how much time had passed, but it must have only been a few seconds. When she looked down, she saw her father had healed over the gut wound, but she still couldn’t feel her legs. Mirian went to send another pulse of soul energy through her wound to cut off some of the internal bleeding, but realized her spellbook had been flung away from her, the chain shattered. She began to cast through her amulet to start the process of de-manifesting it so she could re-manifest it, only to feel a burst of pain as the enervator siphoned from her again. This time, she felt the tendrils of its spell against the surface of her soul as it raked away a piece of her, sending disruptions spiraling through her aura.

Even in the Lone Pine form, the pain was incredible. She struggled to stay conscious, desperately sucking the remaining soul energy she had stored in the repositories at her belt to heal herself.

Meanwhile, Gaius was now contending with both creatures. The centiscerator that she had thought was on the verge of death was gliding through the room, seeking to coil around the necromancer. Her father was keeping it back, but now the enervator was taking advantage of the distraction. His spells—both glyphic and runic—were being cut apart. She tried to tell him that he needed to kill the enervator first, that it was fueling the centiscerator’s healing with the soul energy it was displacing, but the words wouldn’t come out.

Just as Mirian finally resummoned her spellbook to her side, the two abominations struck simultaneously. The centiscerator came down on Gaius’s shield, dozens of legs and spines piercing it as the enervator stabbed him with two of its spikes. She watched in horror as his soul energy flared—

And broke.

Her father’s body collapsed. Two of the enervator’s needle-arms held up his chthonic needle.

Some years ago, Mirian had theorized how ‘Atrah Xidi’ might be using a dervish soul form to increase the power of his spells. It turned out he hadn’t been doing anything of the sort, but the idea had been intriguing. Her unconscious mind had been playing with the idea ever since.

Now, Mirian rose up from the floor, levitating since her legs still didn’t work. The surface of her soul boiled, not with the Last Breath of the Phoenix form, but with something new. Her soul had become something that flowed through her will intuitively. With the lessons she’d taken from Ceiba Yan, her soul was more malleable, and as rage overtook her, it burned at her command.

Mirian opened up with a barrage of shatter stone spells, throwing back the centiscerator and re-shattering what carapace it had regenerated. As it reeled, she gathered every last bit of soul energy from her repositories that was left. The enervator reached out to snatch it, but she’d structured the burning fires of her own soul in a net of runic bindings to repel it, embracing the terrible pain that shot through her.

Then she unleashed.

The runic black line spell that she cast was less a line and more a pillar. It sapped all the light out of the room and smashed into the enervator’s central crystal, and this time, the crystal didn’t crack—it shattered. Soul energy exploded out uncontrollably, far too volatile for the abomination to do anything with it. The enervator might be resistant to spells. It might be able to displace soul energy. But everything had its limits.

She hadn’t found hers yet.

Mirian screamed as she continued to cast, the pillar of dark soul energy continuing to smash into the enervator. The crystal shards erupted with light, and then the whole creature detonated.

There was a flash, and cracks shot up through the room, radiating out from the new crater in the floor and reaching all the way up to the vaulted ceiling. All that was left of the enervator were tiny splinters of crystal and pieces of charred flesh, hot enough they glowed.

Mirian then turned her wrath on the other abomination. She didn’t know what she was casting, only that the spells came to her like breath. Force, fire, and lightning slammed into the centiscerator in waves, lighting up the room with flashes as cacophonous thunder, drowning out the screams of the abomination. Mirian advanced through the air, eyes burning silver and full of fury. Her blades ripped apart the abomination’s flesh, while her fire seared it into chunks of charcoal. It became shrouded in a cloud of black dust as it was shredded and carbonized. Again, Mirian pinned its ruined body against the wall, but this time, she didn’t relent. She slammed it again and again until more cracks danced up the wall. She didn’t stop until every segment had been diced, crushed, and seared.

Then, she stopped, breathing ragged. It felt like she was covered in burns, but that was just her soul. The pain was intense, but she let it wash over her. She dropped down next to her father’s corpse and wept.

It’s not real. It’s not like with Leyun at all, she consoled herself, but that voice was lost in her grief. He’d be back the next cycle, but here, now, she’d lost him, just like she’d lost her mother.

“Why?” she asked, looking up at the ceiling. Somewhere above the world was the Ominian, sitting on the throne of Their Mausoleum, both alive and dead. Somewhere in the vast cosmos was Eintocarst, God of the Labyrinth, though He could as well be alive and dead too. “Why? Why build all—this? This damnable Labyrinth. These abominations. The puzzles. The trials. Why?” she screamed to the empty room. “To make us prove we’re worthy? To make sure we’re good enough to live? Don’t you want us to save Enteria? What in the five hells is the point?”

There was, of course, no answer. She had come to realize that some of her questions would never have answers.

The last echo of her voice faded, and the room was silent. 

Mirian lay on the ground, legs crumpled beneath her, sitting by the still corpse of her father. Eventually, she lay on the ground, falling into meditation. Despair was easy. Grief was simple. She needed to let go of them. They’d do her no good. There was no one to share them with anyways.

She closed her eyes, feeling the cool stone on her back. Her auric mana restored itself quickly. Finding soul fragments and drawing them into herself took longer. Little by little, she pieced what she found together, then used them to bind more of the dispersed soul energy in the room and pull it into her. The enervator had shredded it and chewed it up, using most of it to regenerate its ally, but there was still enough left.

Some of those soul fragments were from her father, though there was nothing of him left in them. Still, she let that soothe her, and then went to work on fixing her damaged spine. It was an injury that her brute-force method of healing hadn’t worked on, so she slowly wove the runic bindings she needed, using glyph magic to piece back together the missing bone. She kept herself in the Lone Pine form to dull the pain, until at last, the lines of nerves were reconnected and she could finally feel her legs again.

The fight and then the hours of careful healing work had left her exhausted, so she lay there a bit longer. Finally, Mirian stood, letting the cool air of the Labyrinth wash over her. Then, she took the pouches of materials that Gaius had on his belt, trying to keep her feelings tamped down, and only partially succeeding. She approached the first of the two Vault doors. It was time to see if this had all been worth it.