Forged Legacy

Tuesday’s battle ended with Harvey and Tyler standing next to Celeste as they watched the true demons struggling to cut down what remained of Heaven’s conjured beasts. He’d gotten almost nothing out of the fight, but still found himself smiling as he watched Hell struggle just like they had the week before.

“Feels good to be on this side for once,” Celeste said.

Harvey and Tyler both nodded, listening to the crack of snipers taking down any exposed enemy they could reach. There weren’t many since Hell was still hiding behind their wall of decomposing gluthogs as best they could, but any dead demon was one they wouldn’t have to fight tomorrow. Once it was clear there wouldn’t be any sort of counter-offensive, Celeste led them back to the teleporter.

“Are you ready to get your anointment oil, Tyler?” Celeste asked. “I got permission for you to watch the refinement process, Harvey, so you can learn to make it yourself.”

“Is it not just normal ink?” Harvey asked.

Celeste chuckled and said, “No, it isn’t. It’s a good thing you didn’t try doing this yourself. Sometimes I forget you’ve been skipping all the lessons the others got taught weeks ago.”

Tuning the portal to the same market inside Elysium where Harvey bought his aethersteel and learned the self-repair arrays, the three of them walked through. The normally bustling streets were almost empty as most of the soldiers were still wrapping things up after the day’s battle, letting them walk right into the alchemy workshop.

“Celeste!” the woman greeted cheerfully. “It’s been too long.”

“Nice to see you too, Lily. You guys are in great hands. She helped me with my own anointment.”

“Yours was easy. Only a few minor alterations to the standard patterns and ingredients used by our Templars. I can’t wait to see what we can cook up for you boys! Wait, where is the third one?” Lily asked, barely able to contain her excitement. Despite Celeste’s assurances, Harvey was starting to worry about the alchemist. Every angel he’d met so far had perfect skin and wore immaculate clothes, but Lily’s hands were just as stained as her robes. It didn’t look like something she could just wash off either, but like her skin had turned a sickly mix of green and purple that should’ve easily been healed with skills like Cash’s.

“Their father is trying to finish leveling up his Profession so he can ascend to F-Grade, so I figured we would wait to work on him since his weave isn’t ready to start pushing towards E-Grade yet,” Celeste explained.

That seemed to put a damper on the woman’s excitement, but she perked up when Celeste pulled the body of a Fulgur Phoenix out of her spatial ring and let it thump to the floor. The massive bird took up almost the entire storefront section of the alchemy lab, and Lily practically vibrated as she picked up one of the wings and began inspecting the feathers. “Just one?”

“Three,” Celeste responded.

Lily audibly gasped as her eyes snapped to Tyler. “Are you trying to kill the boy?”

“Wait, what?” Tyler exclaimed.

Celeste groaned when she saw Harvey’s eyes go hard. “If the Commander wanted them dead, he’d have put a spear through their hearts while they slept in his mansion. He gave us three so you could make a larger batch and use the resonance from the third one to experiment with the pattern.”

“Oh good. One probably has enough to evolve his weave, but two should give us the resonance for something truly powerful. Condensing three into a single batch of oil would’ve been suicide, and I’m not going to take part in some kind of half-baked assassination attempt.”

Celeste smirked at Harvey before adding, “Half-baked assassination attempts are their area of expertise.”

Harvey didn’t like how cavalier she was about this, but admitted that she and Lily both had put all the risks out on the table. Putting the massive bird back in her spatial ring, the three of them followed Lily through a door in the back of the small storefront and into a larger alchemy workshop. The merits of slipsacks were once again put on display as what would’ve been rows of shelves holding materials in a lab back on Earth was condensed into a single shelf of slipsacks with signs displaying what was stored inside them. A stone workbench had cauldrons of various sizes ranging from his own inkwell to a small bathtub. Each was covered in complex runes powered by essence crystals embedded in the silver. A quick scan showed that he only recognized half of the runes making up the arrays. When Celeste told him the alchemist had agreed to show him the ropes, he thought he’d watch her do it once and then take care of his own anointment materials himself. Now, he realized just how much equipment and expertise evolving a weave was going to take. Aside from the cauldrons, the room had a 12-foot-tall ring of silver that looked more like a teleporter than the ornate crystal mirrors the System actually used. It exuded power that Harvey could feel with his aura. Not dangerous per se, but chock full of essence. Next to it stood a blank, 8-foot-tall mannequin that looked like an angel with its wings outstretched. It too radiated power, and Harvey wondered what a mannequin needed all that essence for.

“Pretty cool, huh? I remember my first time in the lab,” Lily said wistfully.

“What is this stuff?” Harvey asked, taking a tentative step towards the two machines.

Lily rushed past him, removing the mannequin’s wings from its back before beckoning him towards it. “See for yourself! Send a strand of your aura into the mannequin, and it will create a replica of your weave.”

When Harvey hesitated, not sure if he was willing to give Heaven a perfect replica of the inky veins carrying his essence through his body, she laughed. “You’re going to have to do this eventually if you want my help. The oil we create is only half the process. The other half is finding a pattern that helps to attune your weave with the resonance, and for that we have to account for your weave’s current shape.”

Harvey acquiesced and connected to the mannequin with his aura. In moments, the inky black veins that had become hidden since his evolution to F-Grade were put on full display, looking exactly like they did whenever he actively channeled essence through them to feed one of his skills.

“Wow! A few sections are much thicker than they should be for a newly-integrated human. Did you manage to injure your weave somehow?” Lily asked.

Harvey was shocked she could tell from a glance at the mannequin, but didn’t try to hide anything. “I nearly shattered it fighting an F-Grade iron elemental back when I was still G-Grade.”

“But your body should’ve died before it could ever touch your weave?”

Harvey was about to explain when she raised a hand to stop him. “Sorry. I don’t mean to pry. It’s just interesting, that’s all. That second machine holds you still while I apply the oil. Your weave is one cohesive system that covers your entire body, so anointing it one piece at a time isn’t ideal. Putting someone on an operating table and flipping them over halfway through tends to mess up the patterns, so we use one of these to suspend you in midair and cover every inch of you at the same time. It's kind of fun to just float inside and have someone spin you around. My assistant and I like to do that when we're bored.”

Tyler instinctively moved to cover the more delicate parts of his body. “Every… inch?”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“You’ll be naked as the day you were born! But don’t worry, I’ll be gentle.”

“Great,” Harvey sighed.

Lily pulled four chairs out of a slipsack and gathered them around her workbench, where Tyler gave a rundown of his skills, legacy, and developing combat style. The ingredients for the oil itself would largely dictate the type of stat boosts evolving his weave would provide, but letting Lily in on his path would help ensure the oil and pattern she created gave the best results.

When she had Tyler slice his hand open and add a decent volume of blood into her largest cauldron, Harvey asked, “What’s the difference between anointment oil and inscription ink?”

“They are very similar, and many have tried anointing themselves with inscription ink before. The problem is potency. If you were to try and anoint yourself with inscription ink, you’re basically shattering your weave and hoping the ink can build a new one out of the dust. The odds you manage to finish drawing the pattern before you pass out from the pain are essentially zero, and that requires having enough ink to cover your entire body in the first place.”

Harvey thought back to when he created his Prophet’s Suffering Ink from Marcus’ Imprint. Julius and the remnant will of the thanefire drake barely managed to break him out of the illusion before he started painting his face with the stuff, and knowing that he’d have likely shattered the weave in his head and rebuilt it in Marcus image if his own Willpower had been any weaker sent a shiver down his spine.

“Making that much ink would take a lot of blood,” Lily continued. “Anointment oil is more delicate, trying to bend the existing weave while reinforcing it with resonance rather than breaking it completely. We use a mix of the blood of the person being anointed, my own blood so I can better control the refinement process, resonance-dense materials like the Fulgur-Phoenixes, and large amounts of an alchemical solution that provides the bulk of the fuel the weave needs to heal and refine itself as it bends into the new pattern.”

She punctuated her explanation by pouring a barrel of light blue liquid into the tub, filling it until it was ¾ full. Harvey was happy to see something other than blood made up the majority of the liquid since getting that much from his brother safely would've taken days. The solution filled the room with a refreshing minty-herbal scent that washed away any lingering fatigue the three still felt after days of fighting for their lives.

“Tyler, I need you to imbue these runes with your Imprint for as long as you can. I expect you will run out of mental energy before the concoction is done, but the more of your Imprint we can infuse in the oil, the better. You ready?”

Tyler nodded, pushing his aura into the array while Lily did the same with the rest of the runes covering the massive cauldron. “Celeste, I want you to lower the phoenixes into the cauldron slowly, one after the other. We’re making a bigger batch than normal so we need to be careful that none of the liquid splashes out. Tyler should only need around ⅔ of the oil to evolve his weave, and we’ll use the rest of it testing patterns on the mannequin.”

“Should I wait a while between adding each phoenix?” she asked.

“No,” Harvey answered. “She needs all the resonance at once.”

Lily nodded in agreement. “He’s right. Adding your resonance one wing at a time just makes the oil weaker. That’s why we’re making one huge batch instead of creating two with half the ingredients. The potency of the oil we use to anoint him and the oil we create his pattern with has to match for our tests to be accurate.”

Celeste did as she was told, carefully lowering the massive birds into the cauldron as the runes dissolved them into pure resonance. Once the third disappeared, she joined Harvey, where they silently watched the woman work. Judging by the lightning glowing from within the tub, Lily was contending with a massive amount of resonance. Harvey could feel the strain on her spirit with his own aura, but couldn’t do anything to help. His blood wasn’t a part of the mix, giving him no way to add his own Willpower into the process. Having two alchemists trying to combine the soup of blood, herbs, and body parts into a cohesive oil probably wouldn’t have helped anyway since they’d both be stepping all over each other. All they could do was wait the hour it took Lily to finish the process. Tyler had managed to keep infusing his Imprint almost the entire time, and both he and Lily were dripping sweat when the glowing runes covering the cauldron finally faded.

“That was hard,” Lily croaked, the words coming out hoarse as her mouth was completely dry. Tyler nodded in agreement, leaning over with his hands on his knees while he struggled to catch his breath.

“Brutus must really like you guys to give you the ingredients for such potent oil.”

Lily guzzled water from a massive canteen, half of it spilling out the sides of her mouth to join the sweat drenching her robes. Wiping her lips on her sleeve, she ladled out a bottle of oil and had Tyler imprint his weave onto the mannequin. Harvey tried to follow her explanation as she tested various patterns, but found himself struggling to keep up. Luckily, the Cognition Matrix was committing every word and every pattern to memory, building a database he could use as a foundation for his own tests later. Learning how to create and apply anointing oil was something he had to figure out so he could help Hannah, Elena, and all the other people from Veils End evolve to E-Grade since their own trial didn’t come with a group of angels to show them the ways of the System.

The first thing he picked up on was that Lily couldn’t just draw anything she wanted. All of her patterns had to stay close to Tyler’s existing weave. Otherwise, the lines covering the mannequin would shatter during the simulation, and Tyler’s weave would fade away. That made sense considering the goal was coaxing the weave to change rather than rebuilding it from scratch.

“Is it safe to say most of what’s actually evolving the weave to E-Grade is that alchemical solution, and the resonance is just trying to adjust the channels to be more efficient whenever they’re channeling the same resonance?” Harvey asked.

“I’d say that’s a fair interpretation of the process,” Lily answered as another pattern broke and faded away. “The essence of the Fulgur Phoenix and the lightning resonance within is making his weave stronger than if we used the solution alone, but you could manage an E-Grade evolution without it. Most people don’t manage to develop a resonant weave this early, but I’m hoping we can manage it for your brother with such strong ingredients and a matching Imprint.”

“Is it bad to attune my weave already?” Tyler asked.

“Not unless you plan to completely change the direction of your path to something antithetical to the concept. Even adding a second resonance-based Imprint like fire or air shouldn’t be a problem. Skills based on them wouldn’t get the same boost as having a lightning resonant weave will have on something like your Fulmination skill, but that’s hardly a problem. The only problem would come from switching to something like earth that naturally opposes the lightning resonance.”

That was good to know. He wondered how Lily was so confident they could cross the threshold into a truly resonant weave when she wasn’t already intimately familiar with lightning resonance as a whole, but found that you didn’t need personal experience with the concept to find a suitable pattern as long as you had the mannequin and enough oil to test with. After a few hours of testing, she’d created a working pattern, and even managed to refine it with the remaining oil Tyler wouldn’t need. That meant Harvey could still help Hannah, with her more nature-oriented skillset, evolve her weave even though he wasn’t a beast tamer himself.

“Alright, you two can wait outside while I paint on the first round of oil. Unless you want your brother to see you hanging naked upside down,” Lily said.

“Hell no! I’m still coming to terms with you seeing that!”

Harvey and Celeste both laughed at Tyler’s nervous shuffling before stepping back into the main storefront. An assistant had shown up sometime during their session and was selling various potions and other alchemical creations to the people filing in from the now bustling market. Harvey didn’t know what made Lily’s creations better than what you could buy from John’s mirrors located all around the trial ground, but her steady supply of customers meant she had something good to offer. 30 minutes later, Tyler walked out of the backroom wearing a plain white robe that had been cut down to fit his much smaller human body. Harvey paused when he saw dark scorch marks tracing his brother’s face where the electric-blue oil had burned into his skin before flaking away. The surrounding flesh was pink and tender, making Tyler look like he’d fallen asleep on the beach while someone drew on him with a tiny black marker.

Lily followed behind him, drying her just-washed hands on a new robe that she must’ve changed into after soaking through her last one. “Come back tomorrow! His weave needs time to stabilize between applications, but we need to do this every day until we run out of oil. Try and decide what materials you want to use, Harvey, so we can make sure we finish before the war’s over.”

Tyler shuddered at the mention of going through that again, but didn’t say anything as he shuffled as far away from Lily as he could get. His feet had to be just as burned as the rest of his body, and the thin flip-flops Lily had provided alongside the robe weren’t doing much to ease the pain.

“It will still be a few weeks before the rest of Hell’s lieutenants kick the bucket,” Celeste replied.

“Better safe than sorry!”

The three all thanked Lily for her time before walking their way back to the teleporter.

“How did it feel? She’s not worried about the robe messing up the pattern?” Harvey asked.

“Most of the oil already dried and flaked off. The robe is to protect my skin from how tight my normal clothes are,” Tyler answered.

“Aw, you’re worried about your skin? We can't have you getting wrinkles,” Harvey mocked.

“You’ll see,” Celeste laughed. “Everything gets all… tingly.”