No revelation comes to me over the following few days. No matter how much I try to force my way through the threads, I can’t force the system to show me more. My amalgam remains frustratingly lesser; the excision is keenly felt.
We’ve settle into a routine—Adrian transports us, then me, then Sierra, and then we walk. There’s not much to see around here, unfortunately. The Wastelands are, well, wastelands, and that’s before considering the damages Sersui has inflicted upon them.
It’s hard to grasp the true scope of something as powerful as a Titan until you experience it for yourself. Spending day after day traveling at top speed and still seeing nothing but ruined valleys with not a hint of moisture to them pounds that sensation in mercilessly.
Every time we have a chance to take a break and recover our magic, I choose to activate Descent unto the Void. It’s getting easier and easier to transport myself in and out of my nullspace, though the cost and effort I expend to take anything or anyone else in remains roughly the same.
I progress the skill to level 4 in three days; I can’t tell if that’s fast or slow. With a rarity and tier that the system itself declares to be irrelevant, I have no way of judging what this is like. It doesn’t progress evenly, either—it feels like it’s advancing in hops, skips, and jumps alongside flat, stagnant plains.
When I realize I’m not making progress on selecting a Path, I try to forcibly redirect the threads. If I can’t create a Path of my own, I can at least increase my understanding of the nullspace I do possess.
Even without any Paths, it’s strong. I know that much. My nullspace and my domain are linked in some way, I’m sure. In both, I have unparalleled control over blood, divine, and demon magic. I haven’t actually used Carnelian Domain since obtaining the nullspace, so I can’t be sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the domain is a projection of my nullspace into the outer world.
Given the fact that my domain is the most powerful non-Titan magic I have access to and my nullspace is stronger, I want to find a way to manifest it outside of the space itself.
So far, none of my efforts have borne fruit.
“Ah, training a new skill?” Sierra asks on the third day as I emerge from my nullspace once more, sweaty and bloody and no stronger than I was before.
“Trying,” I reply.
“Try a little harder,” Adrian suggests. “I don’t think you look scary enough yet.”
I stare him dead in the eyes. He stares back for two full seconds before snorting and returning his attention to the waves pushing us.
His gaze, I notice, is hollow. There’s no light behind his eyes.
“I’m not sure what I’m missing,” I say. “I’ve tried implementing what we talked about. It’s not working.”
“It may be the conflict drive,” Sierra says, gauging my reaction.
The term is familiar, but it’s ever so slightly out of reach, slipping through my mind like sand through open fingers.
My memory is perfect.
Sapphire.
I shake my head. “Explain?”
“Fight shit, get stronger,” Adrian quips. He doesn’t even bother laughing at his own attempt at levity. “Same routine you always do.”
“It is somewhat more complex, but it does ultimately boil down to battle,” Sierra says. “You may have noticed that you advance significantly faster during combat.”
I nod. “Yeah. Since creation day. I can train up skills and acquire new ones naturally, but the biggest jumps I see are after fights when I Devour someone or in the middle of one.”
"The system rewards usage, not theory. Practice is useful for reasons beyond levels, but true growth is always accomplished through clashing against one another.”
“I haven’t noticed.” I pause. “Then again, most of my life so far has been fighting. Excluding the decade and a half I spent waiting for a class evolution, of course.”
“Naturally,” Sierra replies, taking it in stride. “You’re an experiment, and the Jade family involved you. That never ends well for the subject. They learned a lot from us, you know?”
“Who’s us?” I ask. I have a sneaking suspicion I know the answer.
“Me,” she says. “Adrian. Jess. Rias. More that you have not met and will never met. We were you, years before you.”
Adrian turns away from us, sinking into his water in the fetal position. I pretend not to notice.
“He’s… sensitive about it, still,” Sierra says. “He loved them. More than I ever did, even.”
“Who were you?” I ask. I know startlingly little about Sierra. She’s Marie Jade’s niece, I know that much, but that’s all. Her personal life before she wandered the Crowned Islands is a mystery to me.
“The little Jade prodigy,” she sighs. “That was me. Born to it, Aunt Marie said. I knew my way around magic and the system like I breathed it. So, of course, like any good aunt, she decided to integrate me into one of her experiments.”
I raise an eyebrow. “She seems to have a lot of those.”
“You can’t even imagine. Our project was the culmination of a long series of lessons about the conflict drive. We got official sponsorship from the United Containment Coalition. It was supposed to be a breakthrough in system science: Probability Project 447. Hex.”
“Since you’re still standing here, I can’t imagine it went lethally wrong.”
“It didn’t. It succeeded, but we didn’t know it then. None of the test subjects knew. Of the twelve of us, I was the only one to retain my memory of the procedure. So I could administer it to future batches, Aunt Marie said.”
“And what of it?” I ask.
“It would be easier to show you,” Sierra says, cupping my cheek in one hand. “With your permission, of course.”
I nod.
“Link,” she whispers, and suddenly, my system speaks with another voice. Sierra’s system is less harsh than mine. Pleasant to listen to. It could have been a singer.
The trait its lyrical tone shows me, however, is anything but pleasant.
Hexed
This is an intrinsic trait and cannot be displayed without True Understanding.
So long as you live, you will be sent spiraling into danger. Major or minor, friend or foe, cataclysm or Titan, you will always find conflict. Run, hide, fight; in the end, no matter your path, you are Hexed. You will never know peace.
“One year after we were branded with this, the Titan of the Empty Void emerged for the first time in three centuries,” Sierra says. “One year later, the reflection cataclysm occured, displacing us thousands of miles. One year after that, I met you.” She pauses, looking at me meaningfully. “I have reason to believe that you, too, possess this trait. If there is one thing Aunt Marie never does, it is stop.”
I take that in. It’s a lot to digest, but it’s easy to believe. I’ve faced adversity everywhere I go; is it so hard to believe that it’s a trait and the will of the system that has pushed that along?
It’s not hard to believe, but it’s impossible to accept. I don’t care about finding peace. That was never my path.
I care about being able to choose. If the system is making choices for me, then the system is alive.
And if it is alive, it can be killed.
No revelation accompanies my thoughts, but a piece of the puzzle clicks in. Sierra’s explanation is nowhere near enough to satiate the gaping hole in my amalgam, but it lays a path.
“In the end,” Sierra says, “We are fighting an impossible battle. Adrian and I are the last two survivors from our batch. We won’t make it much farther.”
I look into the water, where Adrian is spinning now, still clutching himself. He looks listless. Soulless.
“An impossible battle, you say.”
“Mm. I will survive as long as I must, but there will come a day where I can fight no longer. You will need to be aware of that. You can make the impossible possible. Defeat the undefeatable. As much as I wish I could, I cannot.”
“Then we’ll find a way,” I reply. “You know more about the world than me. You can unlock my potential. We can advance together.”
“Evelyn, you’ve crossed every line everywhere,” Sierra says. There’s a hint of sorrow in her voice. “It’s beautiful. It truly is. And I would lead you to the ends of the planet and back, but that’s not the life we can lead. The world will be against us.”
“If that’s how it is, I’ll fight the world,” I say. “And I’ll win.”
Sierra smiles wistfully. “That’s my Evelyn.”
I smile back, then sigh. “I should return to practicing—oh. We must be getting close.”
Halfway through the sentence, I see a sign of civilization on the horizon. I think we might be leaving the Wastelands.
Not that the surroundings give much clue. We must’ve traveled three hundred or so miles by now, and Sersui’s attack still leaves marks. It’s nowhere near as prominent as it was before, but the terrain is still shaken. We’ve left the epicenter of the Titan’s emergence long ago, and yet the difference between desert and plain is impossible to distinguish.
The city on the horizon, however, is surprisingly intact.
“Adrian,” Sierra says, reaching down into the solid water with a touch of magic. “Up.”
Adrian rises, staring at the two of us dully. “I saw. It’s a city.”
“Lorris, if my navigation is correct,” Sierra confirms. “There’s a UCC outpost here. If Evelyn can cloak properly, we could potentially use their transportation to arrive to Zelin later. Though inactive, I do still have honorary operator status.”
“Could work,” Adrian says noncommittally. “We need to get closer to try.”
When we’re within a mile or two of the city, Adrian stops his Hydrokinesis, citing a lack of power. Sierra ferries us instead. It would be easier for me to Bloodpath the three of us in, but blood magic is rare and forbidden enough even outside the Crowned Islands that I, the Blood Reaper, am too distinctive. Shame.
Just as Sierra goes to create her forcefields, though, the space around us warps.
It takes me a moment to realize that it’s not us that’s being transported. Someone else is coming in.
Not a Titan, at least, nor a proto-Titan. I can still sense them every time I close my eyes, and the nearest one is hundreds of miles beneath our feet.
A man who wears a hollow crown steps through the spatial distortion, and it snaps shut.
I don’t even let him open his mouth before I drown him in Wraithfire. Applying Smite and Soulrend is simply natural on top of that.
“Ah, none of that,,” he says, his visage drowned by a mass of black-burning flame. “This is mere projection. I cannot harm you. You cannot harm me. I simply wish to make your acquaintance, blessed one.”
“Descent unto the Void,” I order. The image of the Whitestar king flickers away for just an instant alongside a perfect sphere of land right around him, and then the unfamiliar face returns. He looks annoyed.
“We would be honored to work with you, blessed one,” he tries.
“Fuck off,” Adrian says.
“He’s Deadmarked,” Sierra sighs. “A cultist. Lovely.”
I think back to the objective I first received upon leaving Novarath. It did specify that the Deadmarked were poised to take over the kingdom. At some point along the way, we got thrown off the rails. I suppose that means their plot succeeded.
Hexed. The word won’t leave my mind. That’s what this is, isn’t it? Just as we escape one fire, we find another.
Fine then. I’ll face it with everything I have.
That does not mean I need to entertain this man.
I continue walking.
“Let me tell you how this is going to go,” I say. “I’m going to find you, or you’re going to find me. One way or another, you will attack me or try to capture me with everything you have, and you’ll fail. You’ll fail just like everyone ahead of you has failed. A Titan couldn’t stop me. What makes you think you can?”
“My friend, I simply—“
“Exorcise,” a new voice orders.
I whip my head around, searching for the source of the voice. Blood Sense didn’t see this man coming, even though he’s human.
The Deadmarked cultist’s image freezes in place, then pops like a soap bubble.
A moment later, Blood Sense finally reveals the location of our new acquaintance.
I recognize this face.
So you survived.
“Miss Carnelian,” Kirin Uten says, inclining his head as he floats down from the sky above us. “Jade. Stahr.”
“Operator Kirin Uten,” I reply. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“The reports of a Titan emergence around Whitestar’s Lorris,” he replies, reaching out into open air and withdrawing a familiar bomb. “Would that happen to be you?”
No revelation comes to me over the following few days. No matter how much I try to force my way through the threads, I can’t force the system to show me more. My amalgam remains frustratingly lesser; the excision is keenly felt.
We’ve settle into a routine—Adrian transports us, then me, then Sierra, and then we walk. There’s not much to see around here, unfortunately. The Wastelands are, well, wastelands, and that’s before considering the damages Sersui has inflicted upon them.
It’s hard to grasp the true scope of something as powerful as a Titan until you experience it for yourself. Spending day after day traveling at top speed and still seeing nothing but ruined valleys with not a hint of moisture to them pounds that sensation in mercilessly.
Every time we have a chance to take a break and recover our magic, I choose to activate Descent unto the Void. It’s getting easier and easier to transport myself in and out of my nullspace, though the cost and effort I expend to take anything or anyone else in remains roughly the same.
I progress the skill to level 4 in three days; I can’t tell if that’s fast or slow. With a rarity and tier that the system itself declares to be irrelevant, I have no way of judging what this is like. It doesn’t progress evenly, either—it feels like it’s advancing in hops, skips, and jumps alongside flat, stagnant plains.
When I realize I’m not making progress on selecting a Path, I try to forcibly redirect the threads. If I can’t create a Path of my own, I can at least increase my understanding of the nullspace I do possess.
Even without any Paths, it’s strong. I know that much. My nullspace and my domain are linked in some way, I’m sure. In both, I have unparalleled control over blood, divine, and demon magic. I haven’t actually used Carnelian Domain since obtaining the nullspace, so I can’t be sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the domain is a projection of my nullspace into the outer world.
Given the fact that my domain is the most powerful non-Titan magic I have access to and my nullspace is stronger, I want to find a way to manifest it outside of the space itself.
So far, none of my efforts have borne fruit.
“Ah, training a new skill?” Sierra asks on the third day as I emerge from my nullspace once more, sweaty and bloody and no stronger than I was before.
“Trying,” I reply.
“Try a little harder,” Adrian suggests. “I don’t think you look scary enough yet.”
I stare him dead in the eyes. He stares back for two full seconds before snorting and returning his attention to the waves pushing us.
His gaze, I notice, is hollow. There’s no light behind his eyes.
“I’m not sure what I’m missing,” I say. “I’ve tried implementing what we talked about. It’s not working.”
“It may be the conflict drive,” Sierra says, gauging my reaction.
The term is familiar, but it’s ever so slightly out of reach, slipping through my mind like sand through open fingers.
My memory is perfect.
Sapphire.
I shake my head. “Explain?”
“Fight shit, get stronger,” Adrian quips. He doesn’t even bother laughing at his own attempt at levity. “Same routine you always do.”
“It is somewhat more complex, but it does ultimately boil down to battle,” Sierra says. “You may have noticed that you advance significantly faster during combat.”
I nod. “Yeah. Since creation day. I can train up skills and acquire new ones naturally, but the biggest jumps I see are after fights when I Devour someone or in the middle of one.”
"The system rewards usage, not theory. Practice is useful for reasons beyond levels, but true growth is always accomplished through clashing against one another.”
“I haven’t noticed.” I pause. “Then again, most of my life so far has been fighting. Excluding the decade and a half I spent waiting for a class evolution, of course.”
“Naturally,” Sierra replies, taking it in stride. “You’re an experiment, and the Jade family involved you. That never ends well for the subject. They learned a lot from us, you know?”
“Who’s us?” I ask. I have a sneaking suspicion I know the answer.
“Me,” she says. “Adrian. Jess. Rias. More that you have not met and will never met. We were you, years before you.”
Adrian turns away from us, sinking into his water in the fetal position. I pretend not to notice.
“He’s… sensitive about it, still,” Sierra says. “He loved them. More than I ever did, even.”
“Who were you?” I ask. I know startlingly little about Sierra. She’s Marie Jade’s niece, I know that much, but that’s all. Her personal life before she wandered the Crowned Islands is a mystery to me.
“The little Jade prodigy,” she sighs. “That was me. Born to it, Aunt Marie said. I knew my way around magic and the system like I breathed it. So, of course, like any good aunt, she decided to integrate me into one of her experiments.”
I raise an eyebrow. “She seems to have a lot of those.”
“You can’t even imagine. Our project was the culmination of a long series of lessons about the conflict drive. We got official sponsorship from the United Containment Coalition. It was supposed to be a breakthrough in system science: Probability Project 447. Hex.”
“Since you’re still standing here, I can’t imagine it went lethally wrong.”
“It didn’t. It succeeded, but we didn’t know it then. None of the test subjects knew. Of the twelve of us, I was the only one to retain my memory of the procedure. So I could administer it to future batches, Aunt Marie said.”
“And what of it?” I ask.
“It would be easier to show you,” Sierra says, cupping my cheek in one hand. “With your permission, of course.”
I nod.
“Link,” she whispers, and suddenly, my system speaks with another voice. Sierra’s system is less harsh than mine. Pleasant to listen to. It could have been a singer.
The trait its lyrical tone shows me, however, is anything but pleasant.
Hexed
This is an intrinsic trait and cannot be displayed without True Understanding.
So long as you live, you will be sent spiraling into danger. Major or minor, friend or foe, cataclysm or Titan, you will always find conflict. Run, hide, fight; in the end, no matter your path, you are Hexed. You will never know peace.
“One year after we were branded with this, the Titan of the Empty Void emerged for the first time in three centuries,” Sierra says. “One year later, the reflection cataclysm occured, displacing us thousands of miles. One year after that, I met you.” She pauses, looking at me meaningfully. “I have reason to believe that you, too, possess this trait. If there is one thing Aunt Marie never does, it is stop.”
I take that in. It’s a lot to digest, but it’s easy to believe. I’ve faced adversity everywhere I go; is it so hard to believe that it’s a trait and the will of the system that has pushed that along?
It’s not hard to believe, but it’s impossible to accept. I don’t care about finding peace. That was never my path.
I care about being able to choose. If the system is making choices for me, then the system is alive.
And if it is alive, it can be killed.
No revelation accompanies my thoughts, but a piece of the puzzle clicks in. Sierra’s explanation is nowhere near enough to satiate the gaping hole in my amalgam, but it lays a path.
“In the end,” Sierra says, “We are fighting an impossible battle. Adrian and I are the last two survivors from our batch. We won’t make it much farther.”
I look into the water, where Adrian is spinning now, still clutching himself. He looks listless. Soulless.
“An impossible battle, you say.”
“Mm. I will survive as long as I must, but there will come a day where I can fight no longer. You will need to be aware of that. You can make the impossible possible. Defeat the undefeatable. As much as I wish I could, I cannot.”
“Then we’ll find a way,” I reply. “You know more about the world than me. You can unlock my potential. We can advance together.”
“Evelyn, you’ve crossed every line everywhere,” Sierra says. There’s a hint of sorrow in her voice. “It’s beautiful. It truly is. And I would lead you to the ends of the planet and back, but that’s not the life we can lead. The world will be against us.”
“If that’s how it is, I’ll fight the world,” I say. “And I’ll win.”
Sierra smiles wistfully. “That’s my Evelyn.”
I smile back, then sigh. “I should return to practicing—oh. We must be getting close.”
Halfway through the sentence, I see a sign of civilization on the horizon. I think we might be leaving the Wastelands.
Not that the surroundings give much clue. We must’ve traveled three hundred or so miles by now, and Sersui’s attack still leaves marks. It’s nowhere near as prominent as it was before, but the terrain is still shaken. We’ve left the epicenter of the Titan’s emergence long ago, and yet the difference between desert and plain is impossible to distinguish.
The city on the horizon, however, is surprisingly intact.
“Adrian,” Sierra says, reaching down into the solid water with a touch of magic. “Up.”
Adrian rises, staring at the two of us dully. “I saw. It’s a city.”
“Lorris, if my navigation is correct,” Sierra confirms. “There’s a UCC outpost here. If Evelyn can cloak properly, we could potentially use their transportation to arrive to Zelin later. Though inactive, I do still have honorary operator status.”
“Could work,” Adrian says noncommittally. “We need to get closer to try.”
When we’re within a mile or two of the city, Adrian stops his Hydrokinesis, citing a lack of power. Sierra ferries us instead. It would be easier for me to Bloodpath the three of us in, but blood magic is rare and forbidden enough even outside the Crowned Islands that I, the Blood Reaper, am too distinctive. Shame.
Just as Sierra goes to create her forcefields, though, the space around us warps.
It takes me a moment to realize that it’s not us that’s being transported. Someone else is coming in.
Not a Titan, at least, nor a proto-Titan. I can still sense them every time I close my eyes, and the nearest one is hundreds of miles beneath our feet.
A man who wears a hollow crown steps through the spatial distortion, and it snaps shut.
I don’t even let him open his mouth before I drown him in Wraithfire. Applying Smite and Soulrend is simply natural on top of that.
“Ah, none of that,,” he says, his visage drowned by a mass of black-burning flame. “This is mere projection. I cannot harm you. You cannot harm me. I simply wish to make your acquaintance, blessed one.”
“Descent unto the Void,” I order. The image of the Whitestar king flickers away for just an instant alongside a perfect sphere of land right around him, and then the unfamiliar face returns. He looks annoyed.
“We would be honored to work with you, blessed one,” he tries.
“Fuck off,” Adrian says.
“He’s Deadmarked,” Sierra sighs. “A cultist. Lovely.”
I think back to the objective I first received upon leaving Novarath. It did specify that the Deadmarked were poised to take over the kingdom. At some point along the way, we got thrown off the rails. I suppose that means their plot succeeded.
Hexed. The word won’t leave my mind. That’s what this is, isn’t it? Just as we escape one fire, we find another.
Fine then. I’ll face it with everything I have.
That does not mean I need to entertain this man.
I continue walking.
“Let me tell you how this is going to go,” I say. “I’m going to find you, or you’re going to find me. One way or another, you will attack me or try to capture me with everything you have, and you’ll fail. You’ll fail just like everyone ahead of you has failed. A Titan couldn’t stop me. What makes you think you can?”
“My friend, I simply—“
“Exorcise,” a new voice orders.
I whip my head around, searching for the source of the voice. Blood Sense didn’t see this man coming, even though he’s human.
The Deadmarked cultist’s image freezes in place, then pops like a soap bubble.
A moment later, Blood Sense finally reveals the location of our new acquaintance.
I recognize this face.
So you survived.
“Miss Carnelian,” Kirin Uten says, inclining his head as he floats down from the sky above us. “Jade. Stahr.”
“Operator Kirin Uten,” I reply. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“The reports of a Titan emergence around Whitestar’s Lorris,” he replies, reaching out into open air and withdrawing a familiar bomb. “Would that happen to be you?”
