Chapter 152 - Sibyl of the Sea
At some point, the sibyl must have concluded any further strikes would not suit its purposes—no further mangroves suffered its wrath. Now, it simply hovered, gliding through the shallow waters without making them stir.
They were one and the same, after all.
It moved so slowly that a certain forester found himself pondering many a topic as he fled at an equally measured pace—not relaxed, but not daring to burn through his energy, either. This may very well become a battle of attrition.
The man Veit had accepted as his father was not a warrior, not in any traditional sense—never had been. As a boy, he recalled questioning that fact. It might not even have been the first time he did, but it had certainly been the most memorable, with his father taking on an odd expression before smiling, gently but… firmly.
“Niemat. Think about it. There are people with the most fearsome skillsets, seeking to hone them through centuries of battle. Then there are people who choose the Skills most aligned with the path they dream of pursuing in this life. They have no need for battlefields, and every second in which they breathe is one in which they accumulate power. Their skillbound level count will always be ahead, and their merges will one day be absolute. You could be a specialized warrior with several millions of points on your <Body> , sure. Or you can get to a million on each and run away while the specialist is trying to figure out where all these lifelike sculptures all came from.”
The words of wisdom Aitel Khödan had dispensed upon him and his sister were almost universally intertwined with copious amounts of what could only be described as unhinged commentary, but they resurfaced every now and then, leaving the Cambion to parse just what his subconscious might have been trying to tell him.
It indeed took Veit another moment to refocus, just as he slid through the shade of the next mangrove. The piece of advice he’d been looking for had not even been part of the same conversation. The words that resonated with what he had been considering a mere day ago.
“You need almost never attribute to malice what can be explained by mistakes—almost never. Analyze the situation. Lock in on who is responsible, and why they would ask this way.”
“There should always be a reason, even if you aren’t personally in a position to understand what it is.”
“…Then again, some people are just pricks.”
Veit ignored that last part. Still, in the day he had spent playing this little game with the sibyl wearing an Immortal’s corpse, he felt he might have finally begun to understand. In truth, never before had he actually been in a position where he needed to. He did not seek out people who could trouble him, and he was too strong to be bothered by those who still did.
His initial instinct had been to attribute the slow hunt to sadism. It was what would be expected for a monster.
But this was not a monster.
Who. Why.
This was a sibyl, the sea’s will made manifest through a broken vessel that nonetheless held some of the faculties the sea never could. It wanted to do something to him, wanted so deeply enough to push past its struggles, to make an effort at reassurance.
Its ominous comment on their first meeting, and how it stalked him across the mangal now, it could not—should not—be driven by malice, because the sea was not capable of emotion at all.
That was what scared Veit the most, from the second the realization struck. This was not a thing that could be reasoned with, because it operated in a manner that was alien even to the likes of him.
Fear kept him on the move. Yet resignation remained, almost as heavy as the thickness that permeated the air within the more waterlogged parts of the mangal as the sibyl’s Presence warped the landscape itself. Something like this was not meant to linger past the waves for so long.
The scent of brine was utterly inescapable, even after he’d started to make a point of not breathing during most of the day. He broke and gasped a couple times, unused to pushing himself like this, but he kept at it. Perhaps it was just stubbornness—Veit was not unaware of the inevitability looming over all of this. The sibyl would catch him, and there was nothing he could do about that.
But it was holding back. It was respecting an unknown boundary. And if that allowed him to stretch things out, if that gave him a few more hours to just not be within its grasp, Veit would not hesitate to take full advantage of that.
If the sibyl wished to touch him, it would have to deign to approach with overwhelming force.
By now, the event at the estate Veit was technically supposed to be watching—though he did have a bigger concern at the moment, woefully so—had dispersed a while ago. He had missed the entirety of it, and was in no position to do anything about the absurd burst of energy he sensed from the area, but knowing people would be far less likely to be impacted by this standstill eased his dread minimally.
For all he did not trust the sibyl to actually be in the right about what it considered to be not meaning him harm, Veit did still believe it would not kill him outright.
And living meant being able to deal with any consequences, regardless of specifics.
Nothing is unfixable save for final death.
He had stopped believing that, once, and he would never forgive himself, because he had been wrong to.
Another step that encompassed meters, another mangrove. He could keep this up for weeks, but he held no doubt in his mind that the sibyl could, too. Something had to change, even if nothing could.
Perhaps his nature had morphed that stubbornness, that unwillingness to surrender, into blatant arrogance—but Veit found he truly did not care. Whether he stood a chance or not—and he was not so deluded as to pretend he did—he would not cower indefinitely, waiting for the sibyl to either tire him out or make its move.
In his lifetime, he had forgotten more than half the constructs he’d made and learned from—some too useless, others simply created for the sake of practice. But if there was one thing Veit knew for a fact, it was that he had them. Any base he could think of, any component, he already had at least one of them.
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After all, what was the point of having a bottomless inventory if he couldn’t make his own life easier?
Having no set form in mind, he got around to simply making anchors he could build upon, pentagons of unnaturally dense bone soon scattered almost randomly around the mangal. He summoned the pieces one by one before shaping them, and left them wherever they just so happened to land before continuing his run—distance would be of no issue.
He kept the creation of more to a minimum, choosing to only draw upon the pieces he’d brought out when needed. Glass had always been much, much easier to simply will into existence regardless. At last, his makeshift constructs had a form, something between a flower and a star with impossibly shimmering bone at its core. Five tendrils of glass, streaked with filaments matching the central bone, sprung from each pentagon.
By the time he had made a twelfth one, something in the air shifted, and Veit did not bother with summoning anything else from his inventory. The sibyl was not so mindless as to not have noticed he had been doing something, each leap becoming marginally swifter. Tenser. Its fingers all bent slightly, hands open as if ready to grasp or lash out.
Doomed to failure or not, the window for action remained—for now.
Veit inhaled deliberately. He would have loved to claim nervousness was unbecoming of him, but circumstances excused all that. If nothing else, this was the first time in ages that had him feeling justified in letting loose like this, consequences be damned.
A moment later, he did exactly what he recalled recently warning a certain girl to avoid doing—still aware of each step, each duck out of the way, a second spark of awareness bloomed hovering in place amidst the mangroves, and then a third.
The pain erupting within his skull did not prevent him from adding a fourth, feet landing with a splash just as distant tendrils began to move, slithering around the branches of mangroves, testing the feel of movement itself. They could not see, had no components with which to see, but nonetheless moved.
Regardless of whether this had an impact or not, Veit grew more certain by the second that he would be doing absolutely nothing afterwards. This distinct impression that his head was one misstep away from a figurative and perhaps literal explosion was even starting to impact his ability to avoid obstacles as cleanly as he normally would, and he had yet to take the final step.
With the full dozen under his control, he did just that.
{Object-Soul}.
Doing this for more than one construct at once was something he had been holding off on, perhaps out of sentimentality, perhaps out of fear. At the very least, splitting his consciousness between two of them would have been an interesting experience. A special moment.
This, however? This leap had been unconscionable, born of desperation—only his experience with detachment kept him going as he became aware of each tendril as if it were yet another limb. The feedback from each construct all but mapped out the mangal, to himself and to every piece. One could not give life to the inanimate, not truly if in any way at all, but that was precisely the art tied to this particular combination of Affinities.
Yet the sheer quantity was well on its way to tearing him apart—he had moments to work with.
Veit moved towards the sibyl for once, in all thirteen directions. He had neither the need nor the energy to bother with walking anymore, not when most of him was just flying anyway.
If the sibyl showed any reaction, he was unaware of it. The world narrowed—there was only the target, and the self. He had the presence of mind to not touch it with his body, shifting back at the last moment as a tangle of bone and glass wove itself around the sibyl at speeds befitting an Immortal.
It could and should have simply shattered its way out within but a moment, yet it seemed even nearly mindless vessels of the sea were still capable of surprise.
Veit cradled his head, unsure as to why everything alternated between vividness and blurriness, or why warmth kept spilling between his fingers, for all the outline of a plan remained, he felt a distant awareness of something being quite wrong.
That, he could work with. Detaching without detaching, using his nature without truly stepping away from the world—that had been what he meant to do… {Vanagloria} had its ways. As with all other Proclivities, it stemmed from a being that could challenge gods.
That which reigns supreme is not one above all. That which reigns supreme is not one above gods. That which reigns supreme is one who needs not all. That which reigns supreme is one without gods.
And where did the sea stand, between gods and Devils? Such a question may yet find itself answered.
Had he been in his right mind, that line of thought might have worried him—still did, for about a split second.
The moment he flexed the Proclivity, every bit of himself snapped back into place, constructs stiffening into lifelessness around the sibyl they encased.
It screamed—Veit might have done the same, had he been able to so much as move a muscle. When he next moved the constructs, there was no awareness to them—it was simply as he willed.
And, vessel of the sea or not, the sibyl would likely have a hard time reaching him even in his current state, as the tendrils dove into its skull before the sea’s will reasserted itself. Sibyls depended on the physical to a considerable degree—Veit had no doubt this would significantly impair it.
Most of his growing confusion stemmed from the fact that it had… it had actually worked? The lapse in the sibyl’s presence had been brief yet undeniable. It had gone from an insurmountable existence to just an Immortal corpse and back within a blink. Glass cracked as the sibyl’s renewed movements shattered constructs almost accidentally, yet it stumbled.
It grasped at the nothingness in front of it, unseen in a way it had never been before. Something animated it still… just not enough to compensate for damage that catastrophic.
He would pay for this—Veit could feel that almost at a primal level. But even now, as the waters near and above the mangal began to audibly shift, he found all fear overshadowed by shameless delight that he had been correct about one thing.
However it was that the sea functioned, it shared enough similarities with how abilities based around splitting and infusing one’s consciousness that, in intentionally using his own Affinity as a template for a disruption effect, he had actually managed to sweep the sibyl along, if momentarily.
Veit let out a laugh. In his delirium, the success thrilled him, for all he had always known the real reason that girl’s destruction of a sibyl unnerved him hadn’t been because he had ever doubted he could do the same. No, the issue was very much the fact that he knew he shouldn’t.
Knowledge he had just ignored.
At some point, he had ended up on the ground. He made a deliberate effort not to look into his updated Visible Status Effects—he had just broken an unknown something that would undoubtedly take a long time to recover, but he could worry about that if he even made it past the day.
At once, the sibyl seemed to fold in on itself, chest practically slamming against the front of its thighs before it collapsed on its knees. It spasmed, locked in place, before going eerily still, its limbs now all at impossible angles.
| You have caused the abandonment of a Level 2378 Incarnation! [Royal Warden {Gravity} - Destined Executor {Avaritia} - Born Dancer {} - Eternal Guardian {Water}] |