Unbound

Chapter Seventy - 070

He stared at the darkened door for a long time.

Why did she...? I could have saved her. We were right there.

He felt...what did he feel? Felix wasn't sure. There was an ache, a hollow just below the ribs and in the back of his throat. No tears though. Felix hadn't known Magda for long, and tears felt...It felt wrong. As if he was mourning someone, and that wasn't right.

Pit rubbed up against him, a soft warmth against his hands and legs. Worry and sadness and no little bit of fear wafted from the tenku with every pulse of his heart. Felix gripped his Companion with his left arm, hissing in pain as his body rocked the broken bone in his right.

She's not dead yet. She...can make it out.

He wasn't sure who the lie was for, Pit or himself.

Felix looked around. It was utterly dark within the chamber, a velvety black completely different from the gloom of the maze. This darkness had weight to it, and it pressed down upon him. Felix blinked and tried to activate Manasight. There was a moment of pressure, somewhere between his eyes and brain, and then it passed with a faint, inaudible pop.

Manasight is level 38!

Manasight is level 39!

He beheld a storm. A vibrant, resounding riot of colorful vapor above him, roiling in the air, the earth...everything. It was like a thousand miles of ambient Mana had been compacted and stored in this place, held within like a stormhead that never broke. It was so intense that Felix had to turn off the ability after only a few seconds, plunging his world back into primordial darkness.

Ow. The sight of all that Mana had hurt his brain, stretching some part of his mind painfully. A full forty seconds after, Felix still saw flashes of blue and gold at the corner of his vision, a familiar and unpleasant sensation. Pit nudged him with his beak, and he felt a sense of urgency flare along their pact.

He's right. Grimmar is in here.

He stood up, using the stone object behind him for support and cradling his busted arm. Were it not for the pain that pulsed along his snapped humerus, he would have felt disembodied, a floating eye in a sea of inky black. He glanced at his Health, his HUD the only thing visible in there: it was only at 15%, barely rising above a hundred points.

I can't fight like this. Will my regeneration heal my broken bones? How long would that take? He panted into the darkness, the effort of standing up taking more out of him than he anticipated. Do I have the time anyway? Or is that giant just waiting around a corner, ready to rip my head off?

He figured if it was gonna happen, it would have already. Grimmar didn't seem to be the patient type.

A blinking in his vision made itself known in that darkness. Truthfully, it had been blinking for a while before he'd been thrown into this chamber, but Felix had been...preoccupied. Flaring Pain Resistance and his Willpower to ignore his aching arm, he toggled his notifications.

Pit's Bite is level 24!

Pit's Rake is level 23!

Pit's Wingblade is level 19!

Pit's Frost Spear is level 17!

Pit's Cold Resistance is level 16!

Pit's Poisonfire is level 13!

Your Companion Pit Has Gained 2 Levels!

+4 VIT! +4 PER! +8 AGL! +8 DEX! +6 WIL! +2 END! +4 INT!

Pit fairly glowed with energy, a light that might have been faint in the daylight was nearly blinding here. Felix could tell the tenku fought to not make too much noise, but still let out small peeps as he fairly shook, his body washed by the System's energy.

Good. At least one of us--

You Have Gained A Level!

You are now Level 22!

+3 to WIL! +2 to INT! +4 to DEX! +1 to END! +2 to PER! +2 to VIT! +4 to AGL!

You Have 5 Unused Stat Points!

Oh hell yes. This is what I needed. I can dump these points into Vitality and boost my healing a little.

Felix took a shuddering breath as the System's energy ran through him, individual level gains not carrying quite the same oomph as before. Then, as he prepared to assign his free stat points, the stream turned into a raging torrent that physically shook Felix's body. He gritted his teeth, the vibrations making his arm clench and tighten; he could practically hear his bone grinding against itself. Blue and gold flashed across his vision, more powerfully than before as a rising chord vibrated within his soul. He fell to his knees, and something cracked beneath him.

What? His muscles rippled and twisted, agony to his bruised and battered limbs. What is happening?

Felix's heart beat a rapid-fire tattoo, less a beating and more thrumming along inside him, pushing his blood through his body that he felt change with every passing second. His skin hardened, his muscles tightened, his bones burnt as blood poured through them like magma. That magma felt all the worse along his right arm where the break was a discordant burr in the pulsing symphony that roared all around him. A twanging steel string, broken and buzzing among the punishing swell of harmony.

He screamed.

This felt like his Body was Tempering all over again, but that was impossible. He hadn't even used any Essences. Wisps of blue and sporadic gold streamed from his body and lit up the dark, a bonfire to Pit's candle flame. Wild shadows danced around a wide open antechamber as his senses pushed outward, expanding farther than they ever had before. His breathing became a stentorian labor, his every twitch and shift a groaning sigh in the stillness, and even the dark became less so, lightening to an impenetrable gray.

A jolt of power rushed up his spine, spinning with a fervent gusto as something within him was changed and...remade. It brought Felix to his feet, faster and smoother than he'd moved in a long while, the ground cracking once again beneath him. The storm of energy burst through his skin, his body unable to contain it all and it flared blue-gold around his flesh. A corona of fire and crackling azure lightning.

Then it was done.

Congratulations!

You Have Achieved The First Threshold!

All Primary Stats Exceed 100!

Title Earned!

The Broken Path (Rare)!

You walk a path toward terrible power. Pray you have the wisdom to use it or else fall to Ruin. +10% Journeyman Tier Bonus (Body, Mind, Spirit)

Requires: All Primary Stats Exceed 100, Level Below 50, Lost Race (Nym)

"Haah, haah, heaah," Felix leaned against the wall, gulping for breath as his heart rate slowly returned to normal. "What...the shit was that? The Broken Path?" He shook his head, dismissing the notification. "That description is...ominous."

Felix wiped sweat from his face, flicking it away to his side before he realized he'd done it with his right hand. Surprised, Felix held up his right arm, feeling not a single pang or spasm of pain. Hesitantly, he poked his left hand fingers into his bicep, and beyond the skin and muscle he felt a slight ache to his bone. Whatever had happened to him hadn't healed him completely it seemed, and he had a feeling that if he strained to hard it might break again. Even still, it was a miracle.

How? He'd experienced bursts of healing before, namely when he'd Tempered his Body, but that had healed him thoroughly. This had...remade him, in some way. As if all the physical changes his body had been experiencing as he raised his stats was condensed and enhanced. His skin and the muscle beneath it felt rock hard yet pliant in a strange dichotomy of sensations that gave him a sense of power. He ran his hands over the rest of his body, marveling at the subtle yet definite changes. He took a single step forward, feeling his joints move just a touch quicker, as if oiled or something. Each step was followed with a faint cracking beneath him, and when Felix knelt down he realized the tiled flooring was breaking beneath his weight.

Delicate flooring.

He stood back up and took a deep breath. Pit trotted toward him, moving unerringly in the dark. Weakened arm or not, it's time to move forward.

Though the darkness had lightened some, it was still an opaque curtain before him. With a little trepidation, Felix activated Manasight again. The riot of ambient Mana returned, but this time the piercing pain did not, and it only remained slightly uncomfortable to view the storm of power that filled the antechamber. With some effort, Felix focused his eyes beyond the swirling clouds of Mana, focusing instead on the details of the room itself.

Manasight is level 40!

He was in the entryway, and aside from the circular doorway out, there was a number of faint paintings on walls that curved into a semi-circle. The ceiling arced high above, a soaring design that reminded him of a cathedral, ribbed and vaulted. Behind him, on the other side of the pillar he'd fetched up against was an archway leading further into this...palace? Temple?

What is this place?

He knew it was the center of the Labyrinth, and so it must contain something powerful, important, or dangerous. But other than that, neither Felix nor Magda had a clue what they had been walking into; it was something they had discussed off and on, though without any real clue to the truth. Callie had said it was dangerous and deadly, and that had been enough for Magda. Felix frowned. It was enough for him too.

Just assume this place is trying to kill me. After all, that's been the consensus so far.

In the spirit of survival, Felix checked his person. He had no shirt of course, tattered pants, and boots that were on the edge of death. Tucked in his belt was Vessilia's potions case, his Crescian blade, and the crude fang...

Shit. I dropped the fang. He rubbed his temples, furious. I must have lost when the giants hit us. Fuck.

Frustrated, Felix walked toward the paintings on the walls, stepping a bit closer to make out their details. He moved through the swirls of ambient Mana, their touch like a delicate caress along his senses that he fought to shut out. The murals were faded with age, far more than the murals out in the Labyrinth. For how long they must have been down here, Felix was surprised any sort of paintings existed at all. These depicted tall folk wearing robes and armor walking alongside a plethora of pale-furred people the size of human children. Other, more strange peoples populated the images, but each working seemed centered on those first two.

Nym and Geist.

Here in the antechamber, a Nym was wearing a crown of bronze and holding aloft a scepter of some sort of pale metal. The Geist beside them held an unfurled scroll, and had their mouth open as if they were reading aloud. Felix followed the mural along the wall, passing through the archway and into a long hallway. He moved a slowly and quietly as he could, though the racket he'd made previously would have woken the dead. The hallway was clear of any people thankfully, Risi or otherwise, so Felix returned to the walls.

A story was being told in these murals, and Felix was enraptured.

The Nym and Geist traveled all over the land, from rolling hills to deep forests, wide lakes and frigid mountains. Sometimes they were joined by others, more Nym and Geist or even a smattering of other races Felix couldn't identify. There was a stretch of silver forest, each leaf etched in shimmering metal. A deep, achingly beautiful lake, swarming with life hinted at beneath the languid ripples. A range of mountains that towered above the clouds, their peaks split. And through them all, Felix saw a familiar detail: a bronze spike, like two pyramids stacked atop each other, stabbed into the ground.

The same as the Guardians' enchanted collars, only several orders of magnitude larger.

The Nym and Geist were shown at each of these sites and many others, standing to the side of the spikes as if investigating. Each time, the locations changed and the two figures seemed to grow wearier and wearier, subtly drooping at the shoulders and knees. The Nym did not raise the scepter quite as high, and the Geist unrolled less and less of its scroll until finally, the two stood in a verdant valley filled to the brim with flowering fruit trees. Here, a massive spike had been embedded, larger by far than any that had come before, and the two figures stood tall and proud. Jubilant.

Felix kept walking, the hall long and uninterrupted by nook or cranny. It was just the story.

The next mural showed a collection of buildings sprouting up, small and grey at first but quickly growing complicated as the mural extended down the hall, larger buildings with more ornate architecture populating the area around the spike. Flying creatures swarmed the air, colorful and wild, while a plethora of peoples filled the growing city. Shelim, he realized. This is Shelim. This city. Felix could pick out a familiar layout, done in multiple concentric circles that radiated outward and intersected. He recognized the groupings of towers, their heights far taller than the other buildings, save for the spike itself. He could even spot the bronze domed capital building, at the edge of the spike's grand grounds.

He found his eyes drawn upward as the mural changed again. Now the spike...shimmered, almost, despite the static nature of paint and dyes, appearing to pulse through the city entirely. A dark amorphous shape was painted above the bronze spike, its thundercloud shape radiating colorful lines into the city and land beyond. The lines were inlaid metals, sparkling as they described perfect parabolic arcs, each terminating in a swell of color that even the Ages hadn't much dimmed. It was, by nearly all accounts, a marvelous and powerful image.

But to Felix, who's eyes could barely leave that ominous thundercloud, he felt it radiate something else. A powerful sense of...need.

Deep in his belly, above his navel, Felix felt an ache. It howled softly with an echo of his empty hunger, the first wakening pangs of a slumbering beast. There was a connection, a kinship that he felt with that shapeless mass. A yearning that made moving his eyes away a feat of mental strength. When he did, he found the rest of the mural gone. The hallway stretched on for twenty more yards, but someone or something had shattered the walls, ripping the facade off with massive claws spaced feet apart. The ground was littered with chunks of broken rock.

There is something very bad in here, Felix swallowed as he looked at the jagged rents through solid stone.

He stepped forward, more cautious than ever among the fallen stone, moving toward the edge of the hall. He heard voices, faint but growing stronger with each step, and Felix was surprised to realize he recognized both of them.

"I am not worthy of your attention," rumbled Grimmar, his voice muffled for some reason. "It is an honor to breathe the air around your hallowed flesh."

"Indeed," said a far daintier voice, the simple word conveying a sense of resignation and weariness. "I see that you have claimed my gift, bestowed upon your ancestors so long ago."

"I have, Mother," Grimmar grated as Felix peeked around the corner, where the hall opened up into a huge open space. Polished granite stretched across the floor, smooth and unmarred. Shadowed alcoves dotted the far walls, which were circular much like the antechamber, surmounted by fluted pillars and covered in elaborate carvings of vines and leaves. The roof arched upward, unsupported by any beams or braces, and bright natural light filtered down into the chamber. The sunlight filled the space with such radiance that for a moment Felix forgot to breathe, the bloom of illumination too bright to see beyond for the barest of instants. When it cleared, Felix could see Grimmar kneeling on the floor, head down and hands pointed forward as if he were praying or...or prostrating.

Beyond him, centered in the circular space was a bronze spike that stretched forty feet up, maybe a quarter of the way to the ceiling, shimmering with a restrained power that nevertheless felt fearsome. The surface was crawling with sigils that flared and faded in rapid succession, never in the same sequence or position twice.

"I hope to be worthy of this smallest piece of your divinity, Mother."

Nearly hidden by the giant's bulk, a woman stood. She was dressed in a simple, flowing gown of pale, wispy cloth that seemed to float around her in a breeze that wasn't there. The woman laughed, a bright sound that sent a wave of serenity crashing through Felix. The walls of his Bastion of Will shook, the dark stone quaking beneath that gentle surge, but they held.

Bastion of Will is level 36!

Bastion of Will is level 37!

Bastion of Will is level 38!

Breath Control is level 21!

Breath Control is level 22!

Felix ducked back behind the wall while he strained to control his breathing, feeling as if he had just run a marathon. Sweat beaded along his forehead, mingling with the dried blood and grime from his recent battles, dripping down his bare chest and back. He flared Meditation, trying to calm his mind, but he was shaken.

That's...holy shit, that's not good. He swallowed, working spit from his dried tongue.

I think I'm in trouble.

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