Chapter 302. Meet the Reaper

The energy in my body dims as I suck my own life force to form the soul gem. The gem in my hand is only half-formed. A sense of dread fills me. Is this really my limit?

“Take my energy,” Red insists as the time left dwindles to fifteen seconds.

I don’t second-guess his generosity and reach out for his body, siphoning the energy away roughly, having no time to gradually drain him. With Red’s addition, I complete the soul gem–a tiny prismatic gem the size of my thumbnail. It’s not a particularly powerful gem, but it’s what I need.

I slam the gem into the bone shards, animating them. The resulting creation isn’t a true flying construct, but it doesn’t need to be. It won’t be flying–it will be falling. Very, very quickly.

“Five seconds,” Red announces.

The bone shards whirr with the energy of the gem. Red boosts himself and tags the shards with his foot, kicking them ahead of us with the power of his ascendant energy. We’re already going extremely fast, but the energy of the kick accelerates the bone construct to incredible speeds.

What happens next elapses so quickly that I can barely follow it, relying on my trained perception to keep up.

The shards obediently follow my will, the energy of the gem suffusing them. As they reach the mesh, they expand, forming a glowing violet ring for me and Red to fall through. They aren’t immune to the disintegrating power of the net as they push outward on it. They won’t survive more than a moment of contact.

Almost simultaneously, the wind that would normally push back on my bones dissipates, signaling Red’s influence on the wind elementalist.

Moving faster than even the last round, Red and I zip through the hole in the net unscathed.

“Where is he?” I ask, inquiring after the wind elementalist. My bone construct swings around toward me and Red, slowing itself down in a loop. Red and I begin a wide, gradual swoop to bleed some of our speed, but we’re still moving faster than would ever be advisable for humans. We can’t change our speed too quickly or we’ll die.

Red leads the way. The wind elementalist is in freefall when we find him. With a cold scowl, I tear the powerful Cloud practitioner apart, ripping away his bones and draining all the vitality from his body.

Remind me not to get on your bad side when you’re low on vitality, Maria remarks.

Ignoring her, I convert what I collect into another soul gem, this one slightly weaker than the first. I break both gems in half and reforge two gems of equal potency. I form the bones into two thick bone shields complete with handles to grab onto, each socketed with a soul gem. I grab mine, though grab is perhaps the wrong word. As fast as we’re going, I can’t move my arms, much less grasp anything. Instead, I use my practice to force my arms up and maneuver the shield’s handles between my fingers. I do the same for Red, who lets me manipulate his arms without any hesitation, likely having experienced this in scenarios.

Maria’s wings fall dark, while Red’s booster goes dormant. I activate both constructs and they move with our current velocity. Slowly but steadily, they exert a pulling force on us, but pull in a sideways direction, gently angling us to the side.

So begins our long spiral down to the surface, the constructs allowing us to fall and lose velocity faster than normal.

Toward the end of our descent I fall through a flock of birds. They bolster my collection of bones and provide proper flight foci. I groan softly in relief as the shields more easily fly themselves, now stable without my constant control. Additionally, as the shields lengthen to surround us like small shuttle capsules, they more easily absorb the forces of our descent.

That’s a good thing given how close we are to the ground at this point.

Ultimately, our landing is anticlimactic. The shuttles move too fast for a perfect landing, but the area is a flat plain–the same surroundings as the first round, when Bresnir hid in an underground bunker. They speed nearly parallel with the ground for a few minutes before finally coming to a stop.

Red sags against his bone enclosure. The bones part, allowing him to leave. He takes one step forward and nearly collapses.

“Fuck,” he says simply, speaking out loud. “Remind me never to donate vitality ever again.”

I don’t bother pointing out that his vital signature is still brighter than mine. With a thought, both bone capsules come apart, the bones assembling into something new behind me.

“I must admit, if I weren’t hovering myself in place, I wouldn’t be able to stand.”

His eyes fall to the incision in my suit and he switches to mental communication with Remorse. “Are you okay?”

I chuckle. “I have been through so, so much worse. Come–we have a Dark practitioner to find.”

“Do we, though?” Red asks. “We haven’t heard the Discardia welcome yet for this round.”

Just as he says that, Holiday’s familiar voice chimes in our ears.

“Welcome to Discardia. You are on level five. Your objective is to make your way through all five levels–this is the final one. Congratulations on your progress thus far.

“You have been sent to evaluate the qualifications of a half-step ascendant. You traveled to this half-step ascendant’s world and entered the atmosphere one minute and forty-six seconds ago.”

I’m getting déjà vu, Maria says. ‘Entered the atmosphere forty-six seconds ago’ was the announcement from round one. The only difference now is ‘one minute’.

I honestly hadn’t noticed, but now that she points it out, I think she’s right. A chill runs down my spine.

“Find the half-step ascendant, judge them, and return to Eternity. Reward: victory. Note: if the competitor perishes, the round will restart.”

I bring Maria’s observation up to Red.

“We’ll have to keep that parallelism in mind,” he says. “Knowing Holiday, it can’t be a coincidence.”

I recall what Maria pointed out to me before regarding the meaning of Discardia: discard. “This is the final round. It’s perhaps a way to judge what we’ve learned… or perhaps more specifically, what we’ve un-learned.”

Red’s gaze is thoughtful as he mulls that over. “So this scenario may be like the first. Not identical, otherwise we could find Bresnir now, but similar.”

I nod, then gesture to a point on the horizon. The impact module is still active even after we’ve touched down. It clearly marks where we’re supposed to descend. Bresnir probably won’t be there, but without any other leads, we might as well go there first.

I turn to my construct. I don’t have many bones to work with, just the birds and a human skeleton plus two rib bones. My creation is similar in form to a wyrm, but it’s stout and lacks most of a true wyrm’s protective plating. Despite its diminished appearance, the wyrm is as intimidating as ever–perhaps even more so, at least up close. Its soul gem eyes shine with ominous violet light, the dark gems themselves appearing like big, dark pupils. They’re socketed in the skull of the elementalist, while the largest bird’s beak is affixed to its mouth. It’s frozen in a ghastly grimace, extracted human teeth line the beak’s rim.

Is your goal to make your constructs as horrifying as possible? Maria asks.

I just told it to assemble into a wyrm, I protest, which it did, admirably, in accordance with my will.

So, you’re saying its form is a product of your subconscious?

I snort. Honestly, I can neither confirm nor deny it.

The wyrm stops before the impact marker, which hovers over a short, fortified building.

“This is the same fortress we landed in at the beginning of round one,” Red says. “We didn’t destroy it this time.”

I tap my chin and consider what to do next. We could go to the nearby city and collect information, like we did in round one, but that feels like the wrong move. We’re supposed to have learned something. To Holiday’s credit, I do feel like I’ve learned a lot regarding descents, enough to realize the responsibility is heavy and the duty fraught with danger.

As we stand outside the fortress, unsure of what to do, a voice sounds from a speaker array mounted on a post.

“Welcome, august ascendant.” The voice isn’t Bresnir’s; it belongs to a man. “Half-step ascendant practitioner Kyla Bresnir awaits you in a bunker several miles away. At the end of this recording, a collection of constructs–the very best our organization has to offer–will escort you. I am her second in command. She charged me with creating this recording, and I have delivered the message she wished me to send. However, as a personal friend of Kyla, I will say this: she is cruel and uncompromising, but she is fair and honors those who serve her.” The voice pauses. “If your judgment is her death, may it be quick and painless.”

The recording stops. Red and I exchange a complicated look. Cruel and uncompromising? In the third round, Bresnir held entire cities full of civilians ransom. That may not be this literal copy of Bresnir, but it’s the same woman.

A door opens on the fortress’ façade. Three lithe panthers emerge from a dark corridor, their claws covered in light-absorbing Dark energy. They bound over to me and Red in formation, one panther in the lead, with the other two flanking our side.

“We can follow them safely,” Red says.

The panthers are fast, but slower than my wyrm. A minute passes before Red speaks again. “They really are taking us to her,” he says. “She’s above ground, waiting. Ready.” He blinks. “There’s no trickery this time, not that I can sense from her thoughts, though I can’t completely trust those.”

Red must be making a reference to the oath-bound necklace around Bresnir’s throat, one that she can trigger to break her own mind. Red can skim her surface thoughts without her noticing, but a true intrusion would be felt. If Bresnir had a way to know if she were in a scenario, she could trigger the necklace. I deem that unlikely; besides, if she shattered her mind, the effects would be rather obvious. We didn’t notice before because Red was torturing her insensate.

As we approach the woman, the panthers fall away and join Bresnir, standing at her flanks and behind her. I can sense her vitality as we approach. She’s not fully corporeal–present enough that I could hurt her, but not outright assassinate her. Red could likely still break her mind.

To be fair, this entire scenario is unfair to any half-step ascendant, Maria says. Normally, there would only be one ascendant to face off against.

I’m not an ascendant in this scenario, I state, but your point is taken.

When we are only a few feet in front of her, we stop. I follow Red’s lead and wait quietly for Bresnir to act.

Our other interactions with the woman were so quick. I only ever saw her face when we killed her on the boat and in the round where we tricked her into ascending to Eternity before killing her. Both circumstances happened amidst chaos. We also saw her face on broadcasts, but those were unflattering and outdated portraits.

Bresnir is a weathered woman. Her eyes are hard, dark, almost black, but glinting silver with the glow of her practice. Her hair falls lank around her shoulders, gray like a crone’s, but it possesses a natural luster. Crow’s feet cut lines around her eyes and the light brown skin stretched across her cheeks is slightly sallow. She has no laugh lines. Her head may be uncovered, but she’s wearing a sleek black combat suit whose capabilities I can only guess at; we’ve never been in a situation where she could bring its power to bear against us.

To speak, she must make her mouth, throat, and lungs corporeal, leaving herself vulnerable. She seems hesitant to do so, but in the light of our silence and inaction, she takes the risk.

“I’ve given this day much thought,” she finally says, chuckling bitterly. “The day I meet the reaper in the flesh.”