The Apprentice of Ouroboros [Monster Evo LitRPG Adventure]

“Another attack?! Who, when?” Neska immediately jumped to questions.

The guard wagged his hand. "Last night. Two students were hurt, and one Academy professor was lightly injured. They’re all lucky to be alive.”

Juni pressed in. “Who was the attacker? A naga?”

“What? No. Other students, we think, though the culprits sure vanished in a hurry. Academy security has been leaving no stone unturned on campus while they try to figure out where they’re hiding,” the guard said gruffly.

Neska curled her tail tightly at this latest fresh disaster. No doubt the assassin, the presumptive Markus, had decided to act through others. “Who was attacked?”

“Professor Harvine. Two other students; didn’t catch their names,” the guard shrugged. “Harvine was right pissed. She was fighting Chief Healer Selkie all the way to the medical center. It happened out in the quad, to the east side of the campus. Damn, the strangest thing is how the attackers just vanished into thin air. Harvine swore they melted into the ground.”

This got her attention. “Someone with class powers? An unusual monster mutation?”

“Look, I can see you have your tail in a twist over this, but I’m sorry. I don’t know much more than anyone else. You should all get checked out at medical, too. You look all out of sorts,” the guard said, pointing to her scuffed and damaged scales.

She'd looked better; he had that right.

The weight of the situation settled over her like a lead blanket on her spine. Jurik and Hadley exchanged grave looks, an unspoken worry. They’d been doing that a lot lately. Neska wondered if there was something else going on between them that she wasn’t aware of.

Were they dating? Probably not. Jurik acted like a big dad of monster girls and wayward part-elvens. She almost started laughing when she thought of the absurdity of that statement. Right now, she needed to get healed up and cleaned up properly.

“I see that look, Neska,” Juni said quietly as they entered the main gate. “You can’t be everywhere at once.”

“Sure, I can. I only need more familiars. Or…” She smiled as she withdrew a jar from her pack that remained intact.

Juni went bug-eyed at the very grub-like larvae still sitting in the jar, with Neska having left it open just a little. “Dear Divines, why do you still have that thing?!”

“She is my little grubby. Maybe I can make tamed grubbies.”

Juni tried to form a sentence a few times, then curled her paws, her tail stiff as a board. “Neska! You have a dangerous habit of attracting misfits, broken people, and more monsters than we know what to do with!”

“I’m not hearing ‘this is a bad idea’ from you, am I?”

Juni’s response was to let out an exasperated groan. “Do I even need to spell out what a bad idea this is? It should be assumed at this point! Don’t let Kalloway see that thing. He’ll try to sacrifice it for more dodgy witchy stuff.”

“Or don’t let me see it, because I’d like to examine it from an academic standpoint,” Jurik said behind them, pointing at the jar. “Why that one?”

Neska puffed un annoyance. “I was looking for a humane way of illumination that didn’t involve smearing baby bugs over everything?”

“You burned half the hive. Do you agree that your prior statement sounds a touch incredulous?”

“No, I burned half the hive in response to us being under attack repeatedly by suicide goblins and even bigger, nastier bugs.” Jurik raised his brow in response. “I’ll say this once: if there’s an option where I don’t have to brutally dismember, incinerate, detonate, poison, crush, or curse the ever-loving hells out of the Varadur, I’ll take that option.”

Syrona tapped her snout on the glass, feathers ruffled. “Don’t you dare eat my grubby, missy,” Neska scolded. “We never, ever eat pets.”

“Didn’t you eat whole chickens one time on the road?” Juni asked. “Those could have been someone’s pet.”

Syra laughed, wincing at the bruising still present on her body. It looked like a pale blue jelly had formed on her face and arms, presumably when she was under attack in the Instance. “Juni, don’t tease our snake. You keep guilting her, and she’ll starve to death.”

“Unlikely.” Neska was confident with her arrows; fishing should be trivial now. She’d been good at catching minnows in the pond before her evolution. “Let’s hope Selkie doesn’t give us any grief. I monitored everyone’s reactions to my antivenom, and it should have kept everyone from sustaining any significant toxin damage.”

“Why would she give you grief?”

“She’ll complain I could be saving people’s lives with unconventional healing methods, and that blowing up wasp nests with alchemical explosives is a waste of my talent.”

Hadley laughed uncontrollably for a few seconds. “Were you stung as a small child or something? Because damn, you were utterly savage with the bugs.”

“And now the entirety of Valos is free of picnic pests. Probably.” She knew there were still mundane bugs out there doing their thing. At least those didn’t lay eggs in people and use them as incubators until their young burst out of their bodies. Or corpse. Whichever came first.

Moments later, they arrived at the Redwynn Medical Center. Selkie and several assistants began conducting triage and checking on those recovering from wounds without delay. The healing potions administered after the destruction of the hive had done most of the heavy lifting for those slashed and stung by the wasps. However, two students had taken shrapnel hits from the charging goblin bombers.

Selkie eventually finished up with the others and got to Neska, but she had been giving her queer looks before that. She closed the inspection room door so quietly Neska barely heard the latch catch, then she sat on a small lab bench.

Then Selkie sat there for thirty seconds, tapping her chin as if trying to understand something. “The injuries are right there,” Neska suggested in an attempt to break the awkward silence.

Selkie still wasn't having it. “Neska, I have some questions. For starters, are you close to evolving?”

“No. Not for another three levels.”

“And how many did you gain in the hive?”

“Three, closer to four,” she answered. “Why?”

Selkie rose from the chair. “I’d like to cast a diagnostic spell on you, with your permission. You may notice some mild discomfort. I am interested in mapping out your mana pathways.”

Neska grimaced and showed the intact core from the queen. “I should probably remove this from the room so it doesn't throw off results."

Selkie's resting face was normally calm, with an almost dreamy demeanor, but her breath hitched and her eyes lit with excitement when she saw the core. “Uh…yes. You should set that down.”

Neska opened the door and waved to Brent. “Hold this for me? I need to have my core read.”

He canted his ears, confused. “Should I be worried? You also just handed me something people can and would literally kill for, for the record. Even here among peers. Jurik, here. Tag, you're it."

"I could use this for a Tier four increase. Don't tempt me."

“Or I can swallow it, and then we can determine just how far removed from normal, three-dimensional space my stomach is,” Neska proposed. “It's rather odd how little people have studied the nature of dimensional storage.”

Brent's eyes widened, and he clutched the satchel. “I am terrified of you attempting to swallow a possibly priceless item, Neska. Not even for the value, but what it could do to you if you were to attempt it.”

He's so stressed. He needs extra snugs later. She realized it might be better to propose it in private, where he might be more amenable to stress relief. She smiled politely. “I promise to keep to an acceptable level of risk on my magical experiments.”

“I just felt a disturbance in the world, as if millions of Varadur cried out in terror.” It was almost as if Juni had a sixth sense for when Neska was about to run magical experiments.

Was she that predictable? Nothing terribly bad had happened yet.

She latched the door closed; Selkie rose from her seat, holding a small conical device. “Are you familiar with a spectrograph?”

“No. Should I be?” Neska asked, coiling up in a position so that Selkie could do her work.

The healer waved her hand over the tapered end, mana currents dancing between her hand and the metal surface, polished like chrome. She peered through the device, with a lens on either end of the tapered walls. “This, along with my mana sight, will allow me to read mana flow through your body. It will allow me to map out where it is circulating and its charge. Everyone's mana is a little bit different, and everyone has a unique energy signature. Thus, were I to get a trace of magic from something, I could match it to known sources. Or I could determine what active effects are working on a person’s core.”

“In Common, please?”

“I can detect magic and the general type of it, plus I can see it circulating in your body. Some pathogens of a magical origin can be diagnosed depending on what organs they attack or the type of mana witnessed, as an example.”

Selk peered closer, rotating the lens and adjusting its focal length. “Well, okay. There's your normal mana core. Well developed. Though this is a metaphysical overlay; sometimes location isn't precise when looking at the magical effect of the aether.”

“And what does it look like?” Neska had tried more than once to examine herself with her thermal vision. Unfortunately, it was not nearly as effective as one would think, though she certainly carried a core body temperature above ambient. It told her nothing about her internal mana, and Risha's texts had not delved heavily into the subject. She knew it was closely aligned with nerve pathways and also with the lymph node system. Well, for those who had one.

Then it occurred to her. “Can you see outlines as I can with my hat?”

“You have some investigatory power with that hat? It looks familiar.”

“It lets me see status changes. But its full power will only become apparent as I go up in Tier.”

Selkie chuckled. “Not every class has the ability to sense other spectrums. Or species, for that matter. Mine allows me to see what I would equate to empty spaces, or solid spaces. When attuned, it illuminates the mana flow, like a vector field. The normal human eye cannot process it. But it's…beautiful.”

She was so close to Neska's chest, she wondered if the healer was aware of her position. “So it's like those clouds of gas in the night sky?”

“Or the auroras that you can occasionally see in the northern sky. Sometimes they are visible further south. Your soul core is…a fortified shell.” The healer dialed the lens further, then added a tubular extension with another lens to the device, linking them together. “A very unusual fortified shell. To describe it would require you to understand that the core in your possession is but a fragment of the whole. There are layers of these facets, worlds within worlds within worlds, to describe the pathways of a soul and all its power.”

“That sounds…complicated.” Neska put this study work in her ‘maybe later’ pile after she finished dealing with the immediate threats the Varadur possessed.

Selkie tapped on her scales, putting the device to her chest, and it ran chilly to the touch.

“And these pathways are straight?”

“Oh heavens, no. They loop and invert on themselves. No one has ever mapped a soul with any high degree of accuracy. Some say...hang on a second.”

Selkie stopped and stared through the scope. “That’s odd. This pathway has a different mana. It's a golden resonance, almost citrus. What is this one?”

Neska had no idea how to answer that. She didn't know what to expect. “Is this a good thing or a bad thing?”

Selkie wiped her hair out of her eyes, then moved the device to just above Neska's sternum. Well, what passed for one, as it floated a little bit compared to a humanoid. “I’m trying to filter out the bias from the sheer output of your core. I can't seem to do it because the contrast is so stark. It’s like staring into the sun.”

“Don't stare into the sun; it's universally bad for anyone with eyes,” Neska quipped. Selkie's perplexed expression only grew. “Am I in danger of some lethal medical oddity?"

Selkie stumbled back onto the lab stool, the wheels carrying her a few feet back. She kept blinking as if she'd gotten sunspots in her eyes.

“I don't know about lethal, Neska? But I've never seen someone with a second core.”

That sounds like a lethal medical oddity, Neska. Remember, don’t panic.

I think you know me better than that. Neska tugged her tunic down after it was apparent Selkie was finished. “Okay. Walk me through this. You’re saying I shouldn’t have two cores, or you’ve never seen someone with two cores?”

“Yes, and yes. In all my research, in every article I have read, one soul makes one core.” Selkie sized Neska up, stroking her chin as if contemplating this new information. “Let’s start with the basics. You know what a soul core is, right?”

“Our soul fabricates a metaphysical shell and is housed within it. It’s sort of there, sort of not, and composed of magical energy, or mana, which itself is a byproduct of the exertion of the soul in the world,” Neska summarized. “Risha’s notes were not fully comprehensive on the subject. Or, her best books were stored away securely under her barn. I think.”

Selkie gasped, then her eyes narrowed, and she balled her fists as she shouted toward the ceiling. “That bitch! I knew it; she took journals with her! I mean, sorry, that was rude of me, but Risha’s secretive nature has hamstrung us time and time again!”

Neska let out a resigned hiss. “You don’t know the half of it. Do you know if anyone from the academy or the military investigated the remnants of her cottage?”

“Gorovich and Resalio mentioned it, but I didn’t get all the details. They found something at least,” Selkie said, filling Neska with much-needed relief. “Again, you grasp the basics of a soul. It’s resilient, but it’s the shell that is vulnerable. Sort of like a reversed chicken egg.”

She appreciated the analogy that she could grasp easily. “What about monster cores? Can one be…well, implanted?”

“Ah, glad you brought that up. You’ve likely heard about the monster cores, but you likely do not know the specifics. We can take the specific energy of a core and infuse it into artifacts, rituals, or affix other permanent magical effects onto physical objects.”

Selkie pushed her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose. “The really interesting use of cores came thousands of years later, from research conducted by Arivolian arcanists. For centuries, it was assumed that Tier three was the peak of mortality. It was not. Scholars and arcanists had theorized that our untapped potential lay within the monster cores occasionally found in the native monsters of our world. Unusually resilient or deadly specimens had these cores within their bodies that could be extracted after death."

Selkie took a minute to compose herself, and Neska leaned in, attentive. “The Arivolians breached the Tier four barrier first. They used the cores to reinforce their own souls through ritual processes, reaching a greater potential of the Classes. From Tier four and beyond–well, I suppose up to Tier five, because no one’s gotten higher–the Classes themselves evolve into radical new variants. Though you do find it to a lesser extent at Tier three.”

“So they, what, unravel what makes the core a core, and layer it on like…armor?”

The healer shook her head. “No, this is no barbaric process of stitching and cutting or layering. This is a precision ritual to change the fundamentals of the soul in tiny ways, unlocking ever greater power. I am currently Tier three, but if I could get a core that was related to a monster associated with healing or supportive magical abilities…it could make me, well, a grand healer.”

“The type of core matters?”

“Yes. Some Class evolutions require specific cores for this ritual. Oddly, it is as if the Interface anticipated that we would breach this threshold, because the clean way in which the classes unlock and are defined suggests these classes have been around a long time, unrealized.”

Selkie steepled her fingers together, lips pursed tight. “Neska. What you have is something no one has seen. Or, it has been seen by people who were so damn secretive they took game-changing information with them to the grave,” she added, scowling at the ceiling again.

It was pretty obvious who she was infuriated with. “I don’t know where it came from, but it’s different. It’s brighter, if I had to put a term to it. And it seems to be streaming a tiny amount of this mana into your regular core. But the last time I brought you in, I saw no evidence of it. Or, I wasn’t looking for it.”

Neska mulled the variables for a moment. “It could be related to my Tier coming up.”

“Possible. You were only level twelve when you last checked in. What other factors?”

“The leader of the Varadur tried to corrupt me. Repeatedly, and within a small span of time. I didn’t let up on that abomination of an Instance core until I lit it on fire from the inside out.”

But was that the first time she’d felt it? No, there had been one other time, against Tanileth, the now-deceased Tunnel Viper. That same feeling of energy, but not nearly as strong.

Selkie considered this, shrugging. “Neska, I’ll say this with the seriousness it deserves: keep this close to the chest and only tell people you intimately trust. I can’t even begin to come up with explanations for how this is possible. If you’ll permit me, I’d like to work more closely with you.”

“For my core? Or my venoms?”

“Uh…mix of both,” Selkie said with a soft smile, forwarding her relay. Neska tapped hers against it without hesitation. “Okay, you need to be on a direct line with me. I have no idea if this core behaves or reacts to Ability activation in the same way, or activates different ones. It may impact your class or evolutions. Please, don’t let this devolve into a cautionary tale where a student accrued too much power and suffered a cataclysmic downfall?”

“I’ll try.” She absolutely was going to find out what made this core work. A sharp knock at the door broke their focus.

“Selkie, quit hogging the snake. Is she good to go?” she heard Captain Nevin say from the other side of the door.

“I’m still finishing up my examination and some triage,” Selkie snapped. “Would you rush me if you were holding your intestines in your hands while I tried to shove them back in and then heal them back into their proper position?”

“Uh…no. But seriously, make it fast. I already felt my bowels clench, and not in a good way: Gorovich wants to speak to her directly.”