Edge Cases

90 - Book 2: Chapter 27: Rock and a Hard Place

90 - Book 2: Chapter 27: Rock and a Hard Place

Anton, it quickly came out, had happened to be carrying a large load of mana slivers when the Roads had shut down presumably the exact moment the bonus room had been created, and this little pocket of reality had become 'real'. There was, he explained, a blip in his memory there. He'd been overwhelmed by a harrowing sensation of deep nothingness before his thoughts had flowed back to him, and when he came back to himself, he was lying collapsed on the ground, the mana slivers scattered all over the ground.

He hadn't managed to become properly real immediately. What Anton remembered and had never really questioned until now, when the memory was directly called to his attention was that he'd simply carried those slivers around and gone about his daily routine. It'd been what he was doing at the time, after all, and so he kept going on autopilot.

Anton's face couldn't go ashen. But Vex watched as he slowed his words mid-explanation, as though he was finally thinking about the state he'd been in, and he just... stopped talking. He sat there for a moment, not saying a word, and Unea glanced at him in concern a moment before he shook off whatever fugue had briefly taken him.

"...At some point," Anton eventually continued, "I suppose I remembered enough of myself to divert from the path. I finished delivering the slivers I was carrying, and then I wandered."

"You just wandered?" Misa asked. Anton shrugged.

"I do not think I was fully awake, even then," he asked. "I did not think anything was wrong, explicitly; I remember only the vague thought that the closure of the Roads made everyone subdued."

"The important thing here," Sev said, "is that the slivers can fix this."

"I think so," Anton agreed, but he looked hesitant. "But it still took a long time, and it took a lot of them. When I finished delivering them, I think about half the original load was gone. I assumed I lost them while carrying them around, but..."

"It's possible you absorbed them somehow." Vex glanced at the slivers he'd inadvertently created while trying to understand his own personal glyph; they shone there, oddly tempting, shimmering with a prismatic light. Now that he was actually paying attention to them...

They weren't like mana crystals at all. He didn't sense mana in them, the same way he did with mana crystals.

"Why are they called mana slivers, anyway?" he asked. "Do you know what they are?"

"The mana only started rewarding them after we got stuck down here," Anton said. He shook his head. "They help us cast. Extend the effects of some spells, or let other spells do things they should not be able to do. They are valuable. That is why Teque keeps a store of them we do not store it for citizens, but so that we can cast citywide magics if we need to."

"Have you ever needed to?" It was Misa that asked the question. It wasn't sharp and pointed, exactly, but there was a certain tenseness in her words.

"...Once." Anton frowned, and Unea looked at him; the ladybug-woman looked like she wanted to speak up. When Anton didn't continue, she did.

"It was hard for him," Unea said. "He had ta make the call to use it. Parasites got in here through the Roads nasty little fellas. Latched on to mana signatures and ate away at people, then puppeted them with their own personal mana. And in case you're wonderin', no, that ain't happening now. They're shit at pretending, and we checked."

"It was one of the first things I looked into," Anton muttered softly. Unea shot him a sympathetic glance.

"He lost his family in that spell," she said. "Though I s'ppose they were lost before that spell was ever cast. A lot of us lost someone. We have magic, but we ain't got any signs to fix anything like that."

They were silent, at that. What was there to say?

"Misa," Sev said quietly, and the woman stopped, putting visible effort into restraining herself. Her fists clenched and unclenched, and Helg watched her, impassive to her fit of rage. "Helg, we're coming up with a solution. You don't have to go that far."

"You don't know that your solution will work," Helg said. "And I don't trust that you won't interfere with what your system is doing. Especially since our individuality is at stake. Even if I trusted you, I'm not sure I'd be willing to bet on something like that."

"We won't," Sev said. "We want to find a way to fix this, not"

"The slivers you want to use are crucial to our security," Helg said. "Let's say I do trust you, and we go ahead with this plan of yours. Do you think the people of Fendal that we save are going to be grateful? Or are they going to look at their friends and family, half-alive, and decide that we're the ones causing it? Because we are, whether we choose to do that or not, and there's one very obvious solution to that. Kill every single one of us so that your system doesn't have to choose. Meanwhile, we throw away one of the tools that make us as effective as we are."

"Fendal isn't equipped for fighting," Sev argued.

"Neither are we," Helg snapped. "We have mages that can fight, but the majority of our population isn't built for fighting. Their signs are for learning and studying the nature of the world, not combat. I am not risking our people, and you are mistaking this for a discussion. It is not.

"I am telling you to leave both Fendal and Teque. Your presence here is no longer welcome. You have two hours to grab your things and leave, after which we will use force."

Sev clenched his fists now, angry. Vex wanted to speak up, but he saw the burning in Helg's eyes, and his words caught in his throat; what could he say, here, that could help?

He should have seen this coming. Should have kept what was happening a secret, so they could figure out a fix before

"You're just completely fine with letting others suffer for your sake?" Misa asked. She was angry, too, but she kept her voice controlled, like a tightly-wound spring. "Noram? Even you?"

Vex hadn't even seen the otter. But now that otter version of Noram or perhaps he wasn't Noram at all, and simply someone that had taken on Noram's name in the exchange of whatever reality-stuff it took to make a person stepped forward, a little ways down the stairs. He'd been hidden in Helg's shadow before.

And he looked awful.

Not physically, exactly. But there was a sense of defeat in his shoulders, and the spark he normally had was gone; he stared blankly at the four of them like he didn't know what to say.

"Well?" Misa demanded.

Noram looked down, and then away; that alone spoke volumes. Vex couldn't help but wonder exactly what Helg had said to the archmage to get him to look so downtrodden.

"This is wrong." It was, surprisingly, Anton that spoke up in their defense. The beetle-man stared straight up at Helg. "We should at least look into helping them"

"Maybe years from now, if we have enough slivers and we're confident that we can take on Fendal," Helg said. "But you gave up your right to make these decisions because you couldn't take it. You gave this position to me. And I am using that authority."

Helg stared down at the four of them. "Two hours," she said. "And then you leave. Whether you want to or not."