Mage Tank

I took a deep breath and formulated my argument.
“Delve Core 1156 has suffered significant damage to his chassis and has become non-responsive,” I said. “The perpetrator is suspected to be another Delver, but I am unable to determine whether that Delver has been killed. An entity that matches the Delver’s appearance is currently interfering with the obelisk for Delve 1156-B, but the avatar Hysteria is also present, and they are known to mimic appearances.
“I believe Core 1156 needs to be inserted into the Delve obelisk to facilitate repairs. If the person in the obelisk chamber is a Delver, we can intervene and gain access to the obelisk. If the entity within the chamber is an avatar, accessing the obelisk would present even greater risk to the Core.
“Additionally, the Delver is supported by a full five-person party. Knowing which members still live will further improve our ability to render aid to the Core.”
“What’s the other one?” I asked.
“That never went out?”
As the System described its process, I was struck by how bureaucratic it sounded, and I began to wonder who or what I was talking to.
System Core 1 sounded like a manic sadist with enough conflicting personalities that their use of the royal “we” was entirely justified. System Core 2 had the mellower vibe of a slightly put-out technician who’d resigned themselves to being the only person competent enough to deal with the ever-growing pile of shit on their org’s to-do list.
Whatever I was currently speaking with had a much dryer and more robotic tone. It matched
of the messages I’d received during Delves, but rarely what I would get when having more of a ‘conversation’ with the System. I’d always been confused by that tonal shift, but now I wondered whether this was something completely different from either of the two main cores.
Also, Avarice was close to the Delve? How close? Had she never left the Closet?
“Clarification: to whom am I speaking?” I asked.
“Alright. Mind if I call you Sub-el? Short for Sub-eleven?”
“Huh.” Someone else had beaten me to the nickname. “We’re in a bit of a time crunch, Sub-el. If we bundle those System Calls together, what’s the ETA on a response?”
“Is it possible to speed that up?”
“Does that last forever, or only for this request?”
“Uh, you know what? Sure. Let me buy that processing power.”
I watched my Rep go down by one, and found myself wrestling with a new wave of anger boiling under my skin. I hadn’t known what to expect from using System Call, but–
No, that’s not true. I’d expected it to be cool as shit.
I’d been planning on adding “Master of Systems” to my parade of personal titles, flaunting my ability to call down the power of a globe-spanning magical intelligence on a whim. I would speak, and the System would heed my words, eager to satisfy my demands!
Instead, I’d gotten access to a ground-level support bot aaaaaaand Mother. Fucking. Microtransactions.
Dealing with hotline support while losing out on valuable working hours was annoying on its own, but suffering through time-sucking escalation protocols while lives were at stake was fucking intolerable.
Having to pay to reduce my hold time was also obnoxious, but the rich-dick side of me appreciated having the option, and the convenience of the transaction was impeccable. I hadn’t even had to read Sub-el my card number, everything was already on file.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
That… was a decent haul. Eighteen skill levels, but it looked like the System had been holding out on delivering some of them since before the big fight.
Had my Diplomacy skyrocketed because of my meetings with the Hiwardians, or had dealing with Hysteria also helped? I’d gotten a Mystical Magic level during my attempted escape from Hysteria, which was
dealing with the Hiwardians, so I suspected whatever made Diplomacy advance was something that happened afterward.
Maybe facilitating a meeting between an avatar and an elder god counted as diplomacy? We were definitely engaging in one of the oldest forms of diplomacy, which was killing the shit out of people who disagreed with us.
“Defeated,” Varrin growled as he read the notification for the enemy archer.
“Wishborn are created to fulfill a wish,” said Xim. “They’re spawned by feeding a powerful desire to an ancient blood ritual. When they die, their body is banished back to the Third Layer, but they can’t be fully killed until either their purpose is fulfilled or it becomes impossible to achieve.”
“The big-sworded Hyrachon said they were born to protect someone,” I said. “But the person they were protecting is dead now. Sounds impossible to me.”
“Then the wish was more complex,” she said. “It could have been something like ‘Protect my person and seek vengeance on any who do them harm.’”
“Great. How long until they can return?” I asked, looking at the ‘defeated’ corpse.
“It takes longer each time they’re banished, and it depends on the strength of the ritual. There’s a whole poem about it, but it’s really cryptic so I won’t recite it to you. The baseline is thirty days, then three months, then three seasons, then two years and one season. It keeps multiplying by three from there, but it’s offset by the length of time they were active and fulfilling the wish.”
“In other words,” said Varrin, “it is not a problem for today.”
“Sounds like it,” I said. “But at some point between thirty days and several years from now, we might have an angry shadow man coming after us again.”
“Then we will kill him
,” said Varrin.
“Good enough plan for me. We didn’t get Buster or Fluffy, either. Veil was their transportation, so they’re probably stuck in here.”
“We can find and finish them later,” said Xim. “What are we doing about Hysteria pretending to be the Wishborn and messing up your obelisk?”
“One sec,” I said. Sub-el had sent me another notification, but I’d ignored it while we’d discussed.
“Ten? Holy shit, that price went up fast. Sub-el, how long is the wait right now, and how long would it be if I paid for it?”
“Is that max speed?”
“Hmm. Neither of those time frames is helpful. Can I send a message to Avarice directly?”
“This is some bullshit,” I muttered. I looked around aimlessly for a second, my muscle memory searching for a way to mute my mic with Sub-el. I decided to take a big step to the right and look up at a
part of the ceiling. “Hey! Avarice! You around?!”
No impossibly tall women appeared.
“Why are you trying to call for
avatar?” Xim hissed at me.
“Avarice can be helpful,” I said. “She sold me those Holy Waters and the orb that broke Hysteria’s illusions.”
“Yeah? What did that cost you?”
“A few vines and a quest.”
“A ‘quest’,” said Varrin, sounding less than enthusiastic. “What
of quest?”
“I’ll tell you the terms later, but I think they’re favorable.”
“This is a quest that
doing, right?” said Xim. “Alone, without involving us.”
“No, it’s a quest for the whole party.”
“I see,” said Xim. “What are you planning to trade to her now? I can respect you doing what needed to be done to get us out of Hysteria’s trap, but I’d rather not barter away any more of our future than you already have.”
I considered Xim’s question while waiting to see if Avarice would show up. Even if Avarice
around, would she notice me yelling her name from inside Grotto’s bunker? It’s not like she was the avatar of hearing or anything.
Maybe I could summon her at a crossroads by burying a box containing a self-portrait, some graveyard dirt, and a bone from a black cat.
More seriously, she would probably appear if a good enough deal was floated her way. Having a supernatural sense for discounted goods was believable enough. Plus, according to Sub-el, she was already close by.
“I have an idea,” I said. “I don’t think it will require us to do anything more than what we’re already willing to do.”
Xim crossed her arms and waited for me to enlighten her, while I asked Sub-el to show me the contents of the message Grotto was trying to send to Avarice. After quickly discussing with the group, I made a few modifications.
I felt like an asshole for what I was about to ask Sub-el, but I didn’t feel like I had time to mess around with the ground-level support AI.
“Sub-el, I’d like to escalate this matter to SC2.”
“Override code 003 isn’t good enough?”
“Is there an override code for an avatar being inside one of the Delves and fucking shit up?” I asked, thinking back to when we’d first encountered Orexis. “What about code 001?”
“Are you authorized to make a final determination of what actions should be taken during a 001 event?”
“Does your role allow you to unilaterally disregard a suggested course of action if an appropriate basis for a 001 override is found?”
“If the information on Avarice is restricted, then how can you conclusively say that sending her a message has no rational relationship to the code 001 problem in Delve 1156-B?”
“Yes, please and thank you.”
A new notification popped up telling me that Sub-el was working on it, but they didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry.
“While that’s happening, I’m going to try and get more intel,” I said, stepping up to the mini-obelisk at the room’s center. I went ahead and connected to Xim and Varrin using Reveal, so they could share my vision.
The runes along the pillar were dark when I went to grip it, and a gentle pulse of mana failed to drag my sense of perception off into the Delve. I closed my eyes and ramped up the mana I was sending into the small obelisk, until I was no longer being gentle. I was being quite vigorous with the pillar, maybe even a bit rough.
“This seems needlessly sexual,” said Xim.
I cleared my throat and refocused.
After a few more seconds of effort, the small obelisk lit up and my vision split away from my body until I was staring at the main obelisk chamber from above.
The fake Wishborn had opened up and disassembled a small section of the obelisk, and attached a clear, cylindrical device to the obelisk’s central rod. Whatever it was, the device was siphoning off all of the Dimensional mana that would otherwise be fed into the Delve’s operation and the Closet’s expansion. That was an enormous amount of mana every second, but Hysteria’s device was swallowing it up like it was nothing.
I looked away from the item and swept my view around the chamber. Etja was still in the hallway just outside, passed out and half-buried in a wall. Neither Nuralie nor the Zenithar were in sight.
Curiously, Hysteria was standing a couple of feet off the floor. Grotto had designated the bottom two feet of the obelisk chamber as inventory slots, to contain the Immature Dominion Ivy Plants. Since all the slots were filled, it created an invisible platform.
Items in inventory slots were sent into stasis, preventing them from deteriorating. Animals couldn’t normally be placed into the inventory stasis, but the ivy plants didn’t violate that rule, apparently. It would presumably keep the ivy plants from growing, and as I took a careful look, it appeared that Grotto’s impromptu solution had worked.
However, the vines had already begun the process of growing when Grotto locked them down, and the stasis hadn’t stopped them from expanding strangeward. The little vinelings were already connected to an entire universe of plant.
I considered how I could use that to my advantage as I turned my attention back to the cylinder attached to the obelisk. After studying it for a minute, I realized the device wasn’t
the torrent of mana, it was
it somewhere.
The cylinder flashed, and a new figure appeared a few feet away from Hysteria. Before I could worry about the avatar portalling in a new team of invaders, I realized that the person wasn’t really there. This was some sort of projection.
The hulking figure was looking away from Hysteria, speaking to someone who wasn’t part of the projection. Hysteria crossed their arms and tapped a foot, waiting on whoever this was to address them.
When the man turned to acknowledge the avatar, a shadow of his soul slipped into the image, and my stomach turned. He wasn’t surrounded by a form-hugging soul halo. He was swallowed by a chaotic swarm that my Sight could barely make sense of. It bathed the chamber in a discordant chorus of presences, each one tumbling over the next, struggling for dominance.
The figure towered over Hysteria, their body wrapped in dark robes and chitinous armor. The lower half of his face was covered by a thick, hanging cloth. Beneath it was a dripping, red stain that soaked through his chest.
The storm of souls snapped to order, aligned in a unified grid that oozed with purpose. When the monstrous Davahn spoke, there was no mistaking who it was.
“Hysteria,” said Brae’ach, his voice underscored by soft clicking. “I trust you have good reason to call upon me.”