Ebony's Fable

Five wondered whether Lure's information source was Mr Guru…they seem to believe that Ebony wouldn't take rash actions for no reason. There must be a root cause before an effect comes.

Five did embody that, yet he was curious whether these mighty warriors could stand and watch as he took down all those who had already attacked.

"STOP ATTACKING!"

"Unhand that man!"

"Criminal Ebony. You're under arrest."

Three clear-headed individuals yelled but Five did not record their gravitational figures in his memory.

Five put the frozen head in his hand under even more pressure of flames while stepping on the lower body with a spiked chest and imbuing an even greater flood of mana.

"You got the wrong person. I am Ebony's Fifth Apparition. If any of you leave, Ebony is in danger. That is a fact. Fortunately, I have never been injected with mercy." With his speech done, Five had bought enough time to cordon off their camp and everyone he could sense within a gravitational lockdown.

The massive mana drain was hardly a concern. Five was the unaltered battle thirst of Ebony in one Number, untainted by the noise of research, curiosity, data.

There was no mana. No Aether sorcerers. No known objects or items to deliver messages. It may be possible that they had some special item that doesn't work with mana that could deliver messages. Eidolon was a concern for sure, yet Five did not sense a single Portable Module on anyone here.

These poor soldiers, their livelihood and situation had nothing to do with Five. They were a possible threat, and threats were to be removed.

"I'll bury you properly." It was unfortunate.

Five couldn't leave their bodies in one piece.

There was too much that could be found out from a dead body. At least on Teheil, burial in areas of Cushioning will have their entire bodies turned to essence for the hungry parasite of a worldcore.

A silent gust of wind passes by every one of their necks. Yet they first covered their ears from the screeching of nails against metal and a variety of alien noises. Five's Resolves' Cadence only radiated their Aura of pure battle lull.

The mana-less Cinderashians started to float a metre above the ground before their heads met resistance on their head and shoulders. Smashed between flat screens of gravity, gravity mana quickly centred itself into a vortex.

The protected head spoke out in shock, "no-nothing in your profile suggests a mass murderer. Even avoid killing as much as possible. Who are you?"

"Avoid killing? Ebony might find some value in these lives. I am his Fifth Apparition. I value my life, and this is more efficient." Five raised the head to eye level. The helmet had shattered, unmasking the head of hair on the Cinderashian face. Bloody without scars, of flesh and bone.

It ruled out some Boiler Knights' children or descendants, for some of them weren't fully organic. Gearhart, for example, his sons had literal metallic cogs inside their chests where their hearts are.

"My father will chase you down to the ends of hell." He took the full brunt of Five pulsing their simulative aura out without looking away.

"Gearhart will come sooner or later. I'm sure you've already sent a message about me. Tell your father to sit at home and mind his own business, or come and join you," Five somehow knew the moment the aether item protected this man, a message of some sort was probably already sent. The man was right. He probably didn't have to kill everyone in the camp, and the result had already been decided.

Five already did. He didn't think that much.

'I spent too much mana, and the absorption is stronger than Ebony transmitted to me. I don't have more than 8 days left on Teheil before I dissolve to nothing.' Five had a more dire situation than the thoughts of 'innocent' soldiers. As far as he was concerned, an additional living Cinderashian soldier was an additional thorn in Ebony's side.

No matter how weak they are.

Five dropped the head under his feet to keep it from escaping as he noticed that his mana and hence, his Will weren't absorbed as fast from the blood core and hair.

After a simple calculation without confirmation, he broke the blood orb from its frozen state and bled it across his body. Disregarding the fact that this would make his body less disposable, and if he lost a part now, he might lose the generation he got from the mana chassis.

Five did not need to look human either, so he erased the runes that gave him skin colour. Turning back to icy blue before being dyed in blood red.

'Extended to 42 days. I need to hurry.' Five kicked the head back up into his hands. This body was no longer disposable unless he was willing to let go of portions of his blood core that had been liquidified and refrozen across his red body.

He pointed the head in different directions and asked about the races present. He felt facial muscle twitches or a flash of uncertainty and retested it multiple times to get a gauge of lies and truths.

'So this way is danger and this way is safe.' Five felt every shiver in the man's facial muscles. The man was surprisingly badly or never trained as an actor and a liar.

If he hid his expressions better, it would require Ebony or Xin to be present to gauge the wavering of Intent and Will to determine a lie from a truthful statement to the speaker's awareness.

Scout Pigeons were a waste of his lifespan.

He made threads of gravity mana and shot them out as far as he could before letting them burst back to normal to give himself pulses of perception at a further location.

'Where are we….this is not anywhere close to where Ebony used to be.' Five met with a predicament. He seemed to have landed on a completely different landmass. Not a sign of camps and landmarks or the same regions of Cushioning and Golden Fields were present.

It was like a brand new place. Although they knew that Teheil was far larger than Elcra or Cinderash in terms of landmass, it was truly bad luck if he landed on a different continent somehow. And he didn't even know if there were multiple continents or a sea on Teheil.

At least according to the information Ebony gathered while he worked here, no one had said anything about a sea or multiple continents. Teheil felt like an asteroid, just a massive rock with weird natural weather and underground minerals.

Five was currently stuck with the assumption of 1 continent, but he was in a distant location from the war and invasion.

He did not have the time nor the mana to limitlessly expand his mapping of his surroundings. But searching just the dangerous and the 'safe' direction seemed to be a better clue than nothing.

The capability to split himself into two and search both directions was unexpected to his prisoner, who was simply waiting for death.

One of Five's half carried a head and the other the body from neck down.

"Father!"

Or rescue.

Fives' icy face twitched, his red countenance curled a lip subconsciously. He ignored the blindingly bright aura and stared right at the spatial tear…Mr Ezekiel. The space user gunman wasn't here, he just sent support.

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Five should've known…he did know.

'A pity….' Five dissolved into the ground as a puddle of sludgy ice, unable to bring the head or body away.

As much as he was built for fighting, Ebony did not take away his survival instincts. Any of the Boiler Knights was too much at the moment, for Ebony and Five both.

The very earth was vaporised and a new volcano was beginning to form around and above him but Five had slipped away just in time. Well, he got bathed in molten earth for a split second, but it didn't melt him. Nor did it lead to the Boiler Knight catching onto his presence.

They weren't exactly experts in hunting and tracking, especially on a parasitic worldcore like Teheil making things extremely difficult for many magic types and all forms of mana-based spells. Aether was not free from this parasite either.

But the Boiler Knight's aether, or his technique in brute forcing control over his aether to prevent Teheil from ripping it away was achieving the same effect as a very stable mana and mana chassis, allowing him to put his aether-based spell into effect.

"Till next time, filth." The Boiler Knight muttered softly in the distance, assured that Five could hear him.

"Stay on Teheil and I'll look for you." Five didn't know what he was doing but he was a creature of Will not thought. And this was his will.

Now, if only he could hurry and get this silly fetch quest done, he would have a Boiler Knight to disturb.

As a sound mage, Five couldn't be located when his words were transmitted from every direction. Unless a mind or arcane mage was present to pick out the mental energy used to move mana, and backtracked to the source. Yet no Cinderashian Telepath was present.

Five had been going in two directions from the get-go, each copy of him….was fully him, but the Will they were made of was tied to their bloody ice body. He did not and could not maintain a conscious connection between two bodies. Teheil simply didn't allow thin threads of mana that would carry his Will to be undisturbed.

Five-Half expected the head to tell the Boiler Knight so they could at least chase one of them down but he didn't feel any attempts on his back, so he assumed the other Five-Half got the shorter end of the stick.

'He must feel suffocated by Teheill weakening his Aether and his very Physique.' Every creature landing here that couldn't fight the Worldcore's drag would feel drained. It was hard to say if the Boiler Knight was a victim of the Worldcore or not, but the lack of chase seemed to say so.

Both Five-Halves thought the same thing and were free to roam. Instead of others, they cared more about themselves as they were victims of the parasite of a Worldcore too.

Each of them had 21 days of life, if they didn't expend any more mana than they had or enter regions with even greater Cushioning.

Five-Half in the direction of 'danger' indeed found danger. Another curtain of cushioning and darkness. He could only hope it was not home to Cushioning dwellers and was a curtain to the Altarbound Kin.

Five-Half in the direction of 'safe' found not another camp of Cinderashians, but in the form of an unoccupied Golden Fields. That was unexpected. If they knew the location of a Golden Field, there was no reason to leave it empty other than a lack of manpower. After safe-half stepped into the range of the Golden Fields, he stopped dying as quickly. Extending his lifespan significantly.

The unoccupied Golden Fields didn't even have a trace of prior occupation, just 35 square kilometres of wild vegetation.

Without magic, it would make sense that finding these places on such a wide land was difficult. Moving was difficult with the Cushioning. An unoccupied Golden Fields should not be as rare as he'd imagined.

Five had an overwhelming advantage moving through the Cushioning. Phantom's Flicker made him almost free from the effects of Cushioning under level 4 and reduced the effect of stronger Cushioning than level 4.

Safe-Half spent 3 days searching underground for the possibility that the same material gravity cube was grown here. The darkness hardly mattered when he saw gravitational and vibrational waves.

While Safe-Half didn't find a single hint of their gravity cube, they did find a weird fruit. For a Golden Field, it had been an extremely rare find to find a singular plant of a certain species and not an abundance of them.

Moreover, it was brimming with gravity mana.

Sadly, Danger-Half was holding onto their bracelet and spatial storage, and they couldn't keep a spatial storage inside a spatial storage. Danger-Half also held their personal gravity cube.

He had worries that Preserving with Coreflame or plucking the fruit would cause it to lose efficacy immediately. Especially when his spells would dissolve over time on Teheil. In fact, even spatial storage didn't work normally here. Most people couldn't use it due to the fact that they couldn't use mana to operate the item. More poorly made spatial storages simply fall apart and have its stored items either destroyed due to unstable space or spit out due to the collapse upon entry of Teheil.

The majority of Ancient quality spatial storage was still usable and free from damage on Teheil, so the main problem was operating it.

Safe-Half left the fruit alone. Unless people could seep through the earth like a sludgy liquid, it was going to be hard for anyone to find it.

Five never thought about it, but Ebony would soon feel what Xin felt when she was out here. There was nothing to fight. Nothing to hunt. And other than this fruit, since they were in the Golden Fields, there would be nothing to eat either.

Outside the Golden Fields must have been hell to the hunter with limited mobility.

'I need a more efficient method to scout. Gravity will be my best bet since it's still moving normally even on this parasite, but I can't sense far enough without Scout Pigeons, and I can't extend my Will further without pumping it into mana.' Five considered pumping his Will into ambient gravity mana. However, that would probably only lead to his limited Will being dragged along the normal cycle of gravity mana.

In and of itself, that seemed like an interesting data collection.

To observe how natural gravity flows in a body of mass as large as Teheil might help refine some of their gravity spells. However, it was unlikely that he would be able to pull himself out or control the ambient gravity should he go to the centre of mass to be spit out across the planet again. The risk was too high, and Five did not get a strong curiosity injected in him. Curiosity had always hampered his efficiency after all.

Pondering on his options, he walked in and out of the Golden Fields to further test the effects of this light and the darkness past the Golden Fields.

As he considered efficient options, he noticed something.

The Golden light flows and seems to have surface tension. It may be the grey light that pushes the gold light down on Five's body when he passes through the film.

'The light moves. It doesn't come from the sun, it's being drawn to the ground. Almost exactly like gravity mana.' It was not the time to think whether the gold light is cycled around the planet like gravity, but this revelation that the gold light and grey light regions weren't permanent fixtures but had physical properties that could be studied was a massive discovery.

Next, Salf-Half picked up random objects and materials within the Golden Fields and tossed them out to check if the phenomenon is the same.

'It doesn't stick and no film is created.' Salf-Half dissolved himself and shot an ice ball out.

He kept repeating it with thinner and thinner mana densities before he decided that it was due to the mana density, perhaps the purity of his body that made this effect possible. Will might have affected it too.

Then, he boxed up air in ice and hopefully, this golden light was boxed up too and tossed it out before opening a hole in the box.

'Wasn't able to grab much….but its possible.' Salf-Half watched as the bundle of golden light didn't move into the ground or up into the sky. It shifted left and right before coming back towards them.

'What in the….' Safe-Half only had Mana Discern and gravity to help him this time, as the gold light caused extremely minute vibrational changes. The grey and gold light could be differentiated rather easily with purely Mana Discern, not because the 2 lights were giving off foreign mana signals but because all other energies and ambient mana within the gold and grey light flowed differently.

The grey light absorbed, the gold light vomited out energy to other forms of mana it touches.

It did not include Ebony back then, but Safe-Half had already felt that the gold light was testing the waters when it touched his body. As if the gold light was determining whether he was a natural material to be nurtured.

However, their Will probably stopped the gold light from giving Safe-Half any sort of infusion of energy.

There were materials of various elements, and ice elemental materials existed here.

Teheil or this gold light was likely trying to figure out if Five was one of these materials. Just pure ice mana would help. The gold light simply passes through without doing anything to a sheet or ball of ice on the floor.

'There is a decision process being done before Teheil or this gold light determines what to boost the growth of…. the gold light is a living being. And so is the grey light. Maybe…extremely tiny particles that form a hive mind? And this hive mind may even be the Will of the Worldcore?' Safe-Half still had some of Ebony's imaginative abilities.

While Safe-Half couldn't get the parasite to strengthen him, he already figured out a plan to move outside the Golden Fields and die more slowly. All he had to do was pack some gold light particles with him.

As he was able to toss it outside, he could trap it inside super dense, mana-chassis-covered ice. It didn't take long before he managed to trap more within this bloody ice body of his.

'I can't seal it at all, Preservation Coreflame can't even latch on.' Under his icy skin, he tried to burn and trap the light but they were able to move in and out of his body with relative ease. Hence, they keep dragging themselves back into the area of the Golden Field. Making it look like he was covered by a film whenever he walked out of their range.

Safe-Half did not experiment or figure out how to be more efficient any longer. He immediately spawned his Scout Pigeons and packed the gold light into streams of mana.

A moment of protection was all he needed.