Project Seraphina [LitRPG, Magitech, GL]

“Did you get what you wanted out of that?” Chloe asks, her indignance still plainly written on her face. She sighs. “I– I’m sorry, Sera. I just–”

“It’s fine, Chloe. And there’s no need for you to apologize. I appreciate that you swallowed your distaste for these creatures and gave me the time I needed to gain a new Skill.”

“Oh?” Her eyes widen by the tiniest amount. “Are you going to tell me?”

“No.” I grin. “I’m going to show you.” And then I vanish.

Subspace is… weird. I’d expected the blue shimmering and streaking lines passing us by like I’d seen in my dream. This is like passing through a shroud of fog. I can’t see so far as my hands in front of my eyes and– Shit, can’t even move at all. I guess the ‘slip’ in [Dimensional Slip] meant exactly that. Temporary, able to phase through a single attack, maybe outlast a quick explosion, but not much longer.

My [Ether] is dropping quickly, and at an accelerating rate. My senses start to disorient, my mind races, prickly sensations build on my skin. Even my [Health] starts dropping by the time I finally release the spell and return to normal reality no more than five seconds later.

“You–” Chloe wraps me in a big hug. Tears well down her cheeks as she clutches me so tightly that I fear my waist and legs are going to get choked off from the pressure alone. She heals me, then smacks me so hard I nearly tumble to the floor, then heals me again while beating her arms at my chest with no real force behind them.

“You are such a stupid… idiot, Sera! Do you know how much I worried about you?”

I return Chloe’s hug. “Was I gone that long? It felt like just a few seconds for me.”

“You were gone, Sera. Like, gone, gone. There one moment, completely gone; our bond completely vanished; I couldn’t hear you, I couldn’t sense you, I couldn’t— That place in my mind that tells me how you are, it just went silent. I know you said it was just a Skill, but for those few moments, I really thought I’d lost you.”

Strange; I hadn’t really gone anywhere; it didn’t make sense why the bond would suddenly shut off… Unless.

“I’m sorry, Chloe. In retrospect, it’s obvious that that could have happened.” I take a deep breath. “You’re going to want one too for this next part.”

She remains unamused, arms crossed. “I’m waiting, love.”

“The new Skill I got is called [Dimensional Slip]. It lets me slip out of this plane of existence and into another one beneath. I figured I was basically in the same place, so it wouldn’t trip anything–”

“You didn’t notice?”

“I’m sorry, Chloe.” I lower my head in shame. “I was so busy acclimating to being in subspace that I didn’t notice.”

Her expression changes from unamused to irate, then back to resigned. “Fine, it’s a new Skill and I’m glad you waited until after the battle before you started testing it. Although I still want to know why I couldn’t sense you.”

“So our bond only works out to a radius of a thousand miles. Any more and it breaks down. I’d thought, since I didn’t do more than slip out of the principal layer, as the System calls it, that I was all well and good. Except, as I didn’t realize until you told me, the System calculates that distance in the normal, three-dimensional metric. In other words, the distance from me to you was undefinable.”

“So it was like if you were in the Tower and I wasn’t?”

“Exactly. On the one hand, I’m in the Tower, which is definitely within a thousand miles. But on the other hand, we’re not actually physically in the Tower, but instead in some pocket dimension created on another level of reality.”

“I’m… That’s a bit tough for me to think about, Sera. Layers of reality and– Just tell me why your arm was bleeding when you reappeared, please?”

“I hadn’t noticed my arm, specifically, but my health started dropping after a couple of seconds. I think subspace is inhospitable to people as a general rule of thumb.”

“You’re not going to stop using it, are you?”

“I can’t exactly fight one-handed– Wow, bad metaphor.”

Chloe giggles. “Okay, fair, but we should really do some more tests when we’re somewhere safer. As in, not here, unless it’s an emergency.”

I smile. “Something about this place still smells fishy, and I don’t think it’s just the continued presence of undead.”

“Just a hunch, or something more concrete.”

“A hunch for now, but we’re all the way out here; we should try to find the throne room.”

“Throne room, and then the treasury; I feel a place like this has to have a treasury of some sort. Maybe an armory as well; I need a new weapon.”

Chloe has remained a little evasive of exactly what her new class is. I know it’s martial focused, something her newly-toned muscle and outlook speak to plenty loudly. However, she’s yet to reveal any of her new Skills, nor fight in any way other than with the power of her [Heavenly Saintess] class, now upgraded to [Radiant Angel]. That I turned away from an angel class right before Chloe took one up is not lost on me, though I do not lament my choice. She has always been in tune with the ideals and inspiration that an angelic harbinger ought to provide the people.

Nothing on the infernal altar proves to have any value; even the unholy symbols don’t carry the Etheric resonance they would have had they been glyphs of some sort. I take a couple to study— scientific research, of course— and the two of us make our way into the next hallway.

Without the Wraithspawn Core around to produce more of those abominations, the castle is deathly quiet. No scurrying of rats to provide ambience to these broken, nor even their tiny flea and tick passengers bouncing around in search of a fresh meal. More doors open on either side of the hallway, revealing elegant finery and dining furniture fit for a king, but which remain unused.

We make our way to an armory down the hallway. I doubt I’ll find anything of particular value; Filia is a custom-built weapon forged to grow stronger as I do. But Chloe said she was looking for a weapon of some sort, and for her, I would gladly give her the time she needs.

No magical weapons. [Artificer’s Glasses] show blanks. Every spear and sword and bow is completely mundane, which is… It’s wrong. There are enough high leveled enemies here that there should be at least some sort of commensurate treasure. At the very least, some [Ether Canisters] or healing potions or some other consumables.

“What do you think about these two?” Chloe asks, holding up a pair of broadswords. Each of them would have been far too large for an ordinary girl of her small stature, with blades about four inches thick and around three-and-a-half feet in length. As she was, Chloe could swing them as easily as a toothpick.

[Valkyrion’s Perception] kicks in as I observe both of them. Both of them possess subtle imperfections, like small hairline fractures or tiny chips in the blade. Ultimately, I settle on neither of them, instead pulling out a thinner blade on one of the back blade racks.

“Really?” she asks.

“Definitely a cut above the rest in terms of craftsmanship. I’m not sure if my current level of enchanting is sufficient to stop either of those two from breaking the first time they connect with something more solid than a wraith. This one… It can handle a couple of glyphs. Won’t be as good as something custom, but it’ll be serviceable.”

Chloe gives me an indignant look before acquiescing. “I need two of them.”

“None of the others is worth a damn. But, if you need both for some new Skill or fighting stance, then that one, with the bluish-tinged hilt. Will probably still need to be properly honed and maybe sharpened.”

“Don’t you have a [Sharpness] Glyph, Sera?”

“I do, and I will enchant it. But steel isn’t a great conductor for [Ether]. It’ll be serviceable for now, but–”

“Do what you can.” Her hardened features soften noticeably. “Please. And, sorry for being cross with you just then.”

“It’s fine. I know we’re both… more than a little on edge after everything.”

“Thanks, Sera.”

---

After an hour of enchanting in the closest thing to a safe and secure environment I was likely to find outside of a major city— the prison complex, with all the stank and rot expected by such a place— I hand Chloe her new weapons.

[[Swords of Repose]: A Pair of twinned longswords imbued with significantly greater efficacy by a rising enchantress. [Attack] +165. Resonance structures within the blades are attuned with [Light]-mana, further boosting their effectiveness against the undead.]

“It’s the best I could do with the lack of tools and poor-quality materials with which to work,” I say. “I still hope you like them anyway.”

The kiss I get speaks louder than any word.

“Do you notice it as well?” I ask. “The complete absence of anything that might be valuable, that is.”

“I have, but what do you think it means?”

“I think someone has been in this place already. And recently, too.”

“How recently?”

“My guess, yesterday, recently.”

This time a bedroom. The bed is immaculate, the soft and comfortable black sheets rather off-putting given the dark lord who until two days ago sat upon this place’s throne. There’s also a comfortable-looking desk and chair, both made of blackened wood which smells of sulfur and rot in equal proportions. One of the drawers on said desk is ajar, with a number of files inside. I can’t make heads or tails of most of them given the unfamiliarity with the script, but with virtually limitless [Inventory] space at my disposal? In they all go.

“Yesterday?” Chloe asks. “That suggests that this was all staged.”

“It might’ve been. I realize it looking back; I just assumed that Scarlett was the lieutenant that Fornieth spoke of, and Forneith just sort of accepted it as such.”

“You’re saying it could have been someone else.”

“Especially considering there’s another me going around. If there’s one other Seraphina out there wearing my face and claiming my identity, what’s to say there’s not two, or three, or hundreds?”

“You really think there are hundreds of you?”

“It’s not pleasant to think about, but that photo I saw didn’t look fake. And the FBI agent I spoke with was… competent, all things considered. Maybe it was doctored, somehow, and I suppose there are plenty of people who would want to frame me for some high crime to damage my reputation, but–”

“Quiet, Seraphina.” Chloe switches to telepathy in a tone that screams finality. “Do you hear that?”

It’s faint, but I do hear something beeping in the distance. The two of us follow the sound like it’s a homing beacon, finding our way into what has to be the throne room. A perfectly elaborate throne, bones and skulls and other iconography of hellish origin briefly catches my attention before it’s stolen away by what’s right behind the throne.

The beeping coming from the massive bomb, possibly nuclear, proof that the entire thing has been a setup from the beginning, grows faster and faster. I take Chloe in my arms and the two of us start flying out of the castle, Chloe using a [Scouring Light] to break us a hole to escape with all due haste.

But even our top speed isn’t going to be fast enough to escape the potential blast radius of something that large, especially if this is nuclear, or worse, some sort of Ethertech-based bomb. I hadn’t ever thought to actually create one, and sure as hell wasn’t going to give that information out on a silver platter. But there were enough principles that I had given out that a particular type of person with the right mindset and resources certainly could.

The beeping speeds up until it finally flatlines into a screeching sine wave that screams one thing: death. In the instant before the explosion of blue-white light takes hold of us, I grab Chloe with both my arms and wrap her into my embrace. I don’t know how or even if this is going to work, but it damn well better, because this is one fate I absolutely will be defying.