Universe's End

“Brace for impact!” Kai Rong shouted as she and Flair stood near the front of their pack.

Roxy did as told, flashing several talismans as golden walls surrounded them, Kai Rong and Flair’s auras spiking immensely.

It was just in time, too, as the black surge struck them. Imagine a sandstorm, a blizzard, a pyroclastic surge, and a tidal wave of cursed radiation.

That was the Black Surge, the not-uncommon storm pattern of Oscuro.

It wasn’t their first time bracing through one of the storm surges. Kai Rong’s aura took on a defiant feel, like an unbreakable oak in the face of powerful winds. Flair, meanwhile, burned as brightly as could be as the two handled the bulk of the effort to hold back the Black Surge.

Roxy did what she could; her golden domes blunted any excess that managed to push through the auras of the two tier-eights.

But it was a wonder how most could make much progress through Oscuro; the Black Surges weren’t just becoming more frequent; the latent shadow miasma was growing thicker and stronger too.

Well, it is advertised as a tier eight playground; we’re just taking advantage of a loophole to be here.

Holding their ground like that for nearly fifteen minutes straight, at last the surge died down.

“Fun,” Flair said, sweat beading his brow. “Silver lining, I haven’t practiced using my aura defensively like this in quite some time.”

It had been three months since they’d first entered Oscuro, three months of the most hostile land Roxy had ever known.

Not that she had known that many, but in her father’s words, semantics.

Black Surges, shadow miasma, crawling with powerful tier eights and overflowing with an abundance of tier sevens that seemed to infest the place like cockroaches. Eating and drinking had to be accompanied by a half-hour session of simply regulating one’s internal ecosystem as the toxic substances sought to destroy oneself from the inside out.

Then there was the literal atmospheric pressure. Surprisingly, Roxy was the one who noticed it the least. Each of her companions spoke of it, feeling as if an ocean were bearing down on them, and that was aside from the magical pressure of the miasmic shadow pneuma's density.

But they’d been slowly making progress. They’d seen no sign of others, which was both a blessing and a curse as Roxy chewed her lip, thinking about how they were all doing.

On the positive side, the experience had truly been highly beneficial for Roxy. Her climb through tier seven was skyrocketing, and she’d already been moving at an accelerated pace. She had been maybe a fifth of the way through tier seven, looking at eighty to one hundred years total for tier eight. Still, the three months spent in Oscuro, of surviving Oscuro, had seen it increase dramatically; three months of travel had equaled roughly eight years.

Again, it wasn’t for free, though. Every moment was a constant struggle; the deeper they went, the more she had to regulate herself constantly. Elijah was actually faring worse than she was, having begun to rely on items specifically designed to mitigate environmental hazards. Which helped a lot, but it also heavily reduced the natural ascension progress boost.

With the most recent Black Surge subsiding, the group pushed forward once more, the same scraggy badlands they’d grown so used to seeing, the only changes being the occasional section of utter spatial wreckage, marked by what looked like a city that had been exploded from the inside out and flung into the air, suspended there. They’d never been able to make sense of just what they indicated, but Roxy was fairly certain she was missing something about them.

“Oh, pause,” Roxy had called out suddenly, as the group responded.

“What’s up?” Flair asked.

“I’m getting a read on some potential goodies,” Roxy answered. One nice thing about her empathic pulse, something she’d been getting quite a lot of practice with since they’d arrived in Oscuro, was that it was a rather clever method of detecting where hidden treasures might be.

Simply because hidden monsters usually guarded those hidden treasures.

“Direction?” Kai Rong asked.

“That way,” Roxy pointed to somewhere south-east of where they were traveling, a deviation from their original direction, though not as if their original path was rooted in anything in particular.

“I’ll lead,” Kai Rong answered by saying the obvious.

“Well, it sure as hell won’t be Elijah leading,” Flair snorted.

Rolling her eyes, Kai Rong led the way, several rings orbiting around them as they walked. It was annoying to Roxy that she couldn’t get a grasp of the strength of what they were approaching, but there was a limit to what an empathic pulse could determine; it ultimately was nothing more than an emotion sensor, even if it could be used for so much more than that.

Frowning, Kai Rong flicked her wrist as one of her rings shot forward, slamming into the ground before vanishing.

“Liminal space,” Kai Rong answered. “A fold in reality. I’m not precisely an expert on the field, but I have learned some from studying Lord Founder’s work within the original Rong complex bloodwood grove.”

“Illusions are baked into it as well,” Elijah said. Now that they were closer, his face had scrunched up as he was able to reach out and ‘feel’ the area.

“Hang on,” Kai Rong’s frown deepened. “We’ve got-”

“Incoming,” Roxy said, finishing the sentence as she felt the surge of malice rushing toward them.

The ground burst open like a putrid boil overflowing, the liminal space releasing its denizens as Kai Rong’s eyes widened.

“Back!”

Pouring out from the ground was a swarm of tier eight Oscuro Hounders, eyeless reptiles the size of huge wolfhounds, covered in what almost looked like Velcro armor, countless tiny hooks covering their bodies as they surged toward the group.

Rather than retreat, Kai Rong snapped her fist forward, several rings echoing the strike through the body of the lead Hounder.

“Flair!”

“On it!”

The typically lackadaisical adventurer leaped into action, his attitude pivoting on a dime. Fire roared out from him, his knees and ankles trailed by fiery exhaust like a rocket in takeoff. Funneling his hands in front of his mouth, a magic circle bloomed into existence before a condensed column of fire roared out, swallowing the next Hounder whole before ballooning into a massive wall of fire that obscured the other Hounders.

“They can still sense!” Roxy shouted, the eyeless Hounders uncaring of having a wall of fire in the way.

“Course they can,” Flair grunted. “Flame Chariot!”

Upshifting into a higher gear, Flair shot forward, launching a flying kick into one of the monsters and launching it away before funneling his hands once more and bellowing even more flames forward.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on NovelFire. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Elijah, meanwhile, suddenly held a flute-looking instrument made of pitch-black wood. When it barked out, the sound that came was far lower in pitch than might be expected, a dark, punchy rhythm that made the wall of fire seem to glow more harshly as light and darkness contrasted around it. Roxy’s own blood felt as if it were boiling, something deep and primal inside her stirring.

The Blood Hymn.

Aside from the illusions he could craft from his songs and music, there were other effects the man had learned to channel through sound that changed depending on the instrument he played. His current instrument was one Roxy had made for him, crafted from bloodwood and Black-Tongue bamboo discovered in a single offshoot cavern on the third floor of the Maw. It was a buffing instrument, but one that wasn’t to be used lightly; it fed on the listener's own vital energies to fulfill its effect.

Kai Rong, leading from the front, was a striking machine, punching out the monsters as they surged, seamlessly rotating rings off of her body to be used as harrying tools, only to zip back onto her arms or legs right when she needed the extra boost of a ring echoing back even greater power.

Flair’s fire continued to grow, burning down the monsters, yet they kept surging, their number alarming Roxy.

Just how many of them are there?

“Exalt, Growl!” Roxy finally called out, sliding a finger alongside where the blade should have been on the pommel of her formless sword. The golden blade appeared instantly as Roxy focused on the horde of Hounders.

Where do I even start?

They were tier eight. What exactly was she expected to do against so many of them?

Well, doing nothing does nothing.

A single one of them would rip her apart, but that wasn’t a good reason to stand around twiddling her thumbs. Sweeping her blade out, a crescent arc of glorious light rushed forward, slashing into one of the Hounders, cutting into its thankfully rather shoddy armor, which seemed to exist more to hurt others than to protect itself.

Which meant rather than splash harmlessly against the monster, it managed to draw a single deep cut that oozed purple blood but otherwise did nothing.

Right.

This would be about where her father summoned a bajillion exploding projections, or rained down hell with arrows that also exploded, or launched a bajillion weapons from his inventory… That also exploded.

Roxy couldn’t do that. That level of wide-scale manipulation required a level of practice with projection magic that no one else was crazy enough to emulate, given how impractical projection magic was, typically speaking. An intimate understanding of what was being projected was often the prerequisite, something only crafters would have. Roxy could copy that part of the equation; the problem was that it also required spooling up a considerable number of mental threads to mimic the same scale.

Which was an absolute no-go for Roxy ever to be her bread and butter.

Blowing up weapons, instant detonations of their significance into pure energy, was also something Roxy could technically do, but E.O.N above was it wasteful, and only someone like her father, whose hobby was being a hermit, had those sorts of stores of weapons on hand—also, the only one with a large enough inventory to store so many in the first place.

As for bow stuff, or really just other weapons in general? Roxy couldn’t lie; she was utterly shit with weapon swapping. She could use them to an average level, but her father could pick up any weapon and be damn close to looking like he’d been using them his entire life. Still not to the level of a true dedicant of any specific weapon, but he’d been around long enough that he had a level of skill that was derived from time and effort, talent be damned. Roxy, well, not so much. She was just average, and while maybe, in time, she could polish those skills, she didn’t have that sort of time; she needed to be strong now.

It had been something Tsarina had been drilling into her for years, the need to forge her own path, and Roxy had begun to really dig into that.

She’d chosen the way of the sword. Oh, sure, she wasn’t the first sword user, but the sword was a deceptively complicated weapon. Spears, axes, hammers, and maces were the most common weapons for a reason: they were easy.

A spear was thrust forward; its reach made it great for avoiding having your face eaten. The ability to use them with a shield, or even to throw them, made them great beginner weapons.

Axes were another simple weapon: chop to the heart's content. The force behind the swing of an axe and the force concentrated in the axe head made it easy to avoid hurting oneself and to deal with more heavily armored enemies. You could even elongate the handle and, tadah, greater reach and the ability to leverage more power.

Hammers didn’t even care about cutting. Blunt force could crush armor and pulverize joints, and no sharp edges to hurt oneself on or fixate on technique.

Maces sat somewhere between axes and hammers, blunt force but with the addition of stabby bits.

But swords? To use a sword well took practice. Outside of the pommel, or depending on if it was a double-edged blade, the entirety of a sword was dangerous, to oneself or allies just as much as to a monster. Then there was the fact that unless one was focusing on thrusting stabs, they didn’t distribute force nearly the same way as the typical weapons of choice.

All of it came together so that, while swords weren’t exotic weapons, the sort she’d expect from her father, they were far less common than one might expect.

Even the schools of thought regarding swords varied dramatically. The standard weapons were simple enough that they did not need any ‘patrons,’ though the existence of the Spear made spears especially well regarded. Without a leading figure in the use of sword skills, and with the sword already being more difficult to use than common choices, there was no discernible ‘proper’ sword art.

Was it speed, to cut before something could realize it was cut? Power to cut through mountains? Perhaps even using a sword as a sort of magical focus, better able to handle such things with its extended body.

All valid thoughts, but none had felt right to Roxy. She was, at her core, a cognition-first fighter like her father. The sort of speed or power needed to cut before one knew they were cut, to chop through anything in the way, they would never truly be hers unless she changed her entire path.

But there was power in thought, and cognition was the realm of thought.

Find a way to be useful.

She could release an Exalt Roar, but that would ultimately get her two, maybe three, attacks off before she became a liability.

How can I contribute?

It was hardly the first time she’d encountered this problem: tier eights appearing, Flair and Kai Rong handling them, Elijah supporting, and Roxy sending out little golden crescents to say she was there.

It wasn’t enough for her, a feeling that had been building and budding inside her now for some time.

She wanted to be something more. Needed to.

Like a spark in her mind, Roxy suddenly raised Exalt skyward.

“Glory of Golden Futures!”

In her mind’s eye, Roxy had been unable to shut out the image of what she needed to be. Rather than chase it away, it occurred to her that she might need to embrace it.

Projection magic wasn’t her forte, but it wasn’t as if she hadn’t ever practiced projection magic; it was just the nature of who her father was that had made that all but an impossibility to Roxy.

Combining that with the mental image of herself, to her left and right, two figures began to appear, shining, golden versions of herself. They seemed older, wizened, even if they looked visually identical.

Minus the entire ‘made of golden light’ aspect, of course.

Oof. That’s about as taxing as two uses of Roar.

“Advance,” Roxy said, as the two golden apparitions raced forward, into the thicket of tier eight monsters. It was a good thing they were made of golden light rather than any physical form, because they would have been torn apart in an instant, having nearly identical attributes to the still-tier-seven Roxy. Each time Roxy felt them take ‘damage,’ she could feel the newest skill, an awareness of a pending notification, confirming to her it was a genuine combat skill, destabilizing.

Then don’t take so much damage.

With the range of her empathetic resonance, Roxy suddenly realized that while she could feel everything as normal, she also could feel the golden clones as if they were her own body, a disorienting feeling of existing in three places at once. That disorientation was enough that she-

No, my clones.

-took several extra hits for free, but acclimating, she found herself fighting through the horde of Hounders, each clone holding an ethereal version of Exalt as well. Striking ‘directly’ with the blade, Roxy was able to inflict actual injuries. She was still more of a nuisance than a danger, but she was also a distraction, and, relying on her empathic resonance, she began to have some success dancing around the battlefield.

One minute and thirteen seconds. That was how long she managed to hold out the apparition skill until it fell apart, no longer able to take any more conceptual damage.

It was one minute and thirteen seconds in which Flair and Kai Rong had been able to let loose, capitalizing on her sudden growth.

Punching through the last of the monsters, Kai Rong flicked black blood from her fists, her rings suddenly snapping through the air as they too dislodged the blood of the Hounders.

“One-oh-six, I think I counted?” Flair said. Given his proclivity for fire, there was no blood on him, burnt away in the scorching magic.

“Twelve,” Kai Rong corrected. “You missed six.”

“Ehh, hard to keep that stuff perfectly accounted for when I’m also juggling Ignition’s brain-breaking,” Flair snorted before turning to Roxy. “Now, not bad. Really not bad. What the hell was that new move?”

“I wanted to be useful,” Roxy huffed. “And a bunch of glorified light show attacks wasn’t going to cut it.”

“Huh, well, it was damn impressive. Those dumb mutts couldn’t differentiate between those golden versions of you and actual people; they keep wanting to maul them.”

“It was quite impressive,” Kai Rong said, her lips never quite reaching a smile. “But be mindful you don’t use such a skill as a crutch. It can just as easily hamper your growth if you grow reliant on something else to handle your foes. In fact, it would directly weaken the skill as well if they are based on your own abilities.”

“Noted,” Roxy answered. “I wasn’t exactly planning to overly rely on it, though. It’s more like… reinforcements on demand?”

“Now I feel the useless one,” Elijah snorted.

“Hah, as if. You may only be tier seven, but man, that flute gets me going. Allows me to skip straight into the second phase of Ignition.”

“A battle hymn is always appreciated,” Kai Rong agreed. “That both of you can prove of assistance on a tier eight battlefield is already beyond what the majority of tier sevens could ever dream of.”

“I suppose,” Roxy huffed, before glancing at the liminal space.

“Roxy is right,” Flair said, catching sight of where her gaze had landed, his smile returning. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry, after all. Time to see just what they were hiding!”