am-books Chapter 160 - Another Route
Chapter 160 - Another Route
When the time loop started fresh, Mirian spent some time in the dorms one night quietly breaking into people's rooms and investigating their spellbooks. It had the advantage of both disrupting the initial conditions Troytin would encounter, and offering her a quick way to get several spells without scribing them. She left a few of her usual surprises, then traveled to Palendurio and hired a new assassin to go after Troytin.
Mirian spent two cycles training her speed, strength, and agility with Rostal, then two more perfecting the obstacle course. The tricky part was at the end. To replicate the reversal of gravity, Mirian had to precisely channel into her levitation wand so it was exerting a force exactly twice as much as gravity on herself, then had to continue channeling while also twisting her body like a cat so she could land upside down on the hanging platforms.
Meanwhile, she continued to iterate her designs with the artisans in Frostland's Gate, and sketched out new ways to streamline her work. In those cycles, she started stealing Professor Cassius's eximontar, a beautiful creature named Winterblossom.
One day, I'll have to ask Cassius how he came up with that name.
Winterblossom was proud, aggressive, and also significantly larger and faster than any of the other myrvite mounts. It took Mirian a bit to figure out just how Winterblossom liked his mana threads, but once she figured that out, the mount took a liking to her.
Having practiced leaping about her model of the death corridor until she was absolutely sick of it, Mirian was ready to try the Labyrinth again. She cleansed Torrviol of spies, set up new pitfalls, then headed north.
On the steepest sections of the pass, Mirian took to levitating both her and Winterblossom up the steepest parts of the mountain trails. At first, Winterblossom kicked wildly and made a distressed chittering noise, but eventually, he got used to it. Overall, she was still saving mana and reducing travel time.
Her next innovation in saving time came as she approached the highest part of the Littenord Pass. Winterblossom was pretty good at navigating the snow, but it was still deep. When she'd tried giving Winterblossom ice-crafted snow shoes the first time she'd stolen him, it hadn't worked, and the eximontar had made his displeasure known. But walking down the deep drifts took time, and keeping track of the trail was equally annoying. This early in the cycle, she had no footprints or travelers to follow.
Looking down from the height of the pass, it was a long slope, treacherous with ice and a few short cliffs.
I have to fight gravity the whole time to get up here. Why not use it to speed my descent? she thought.
Her stolen spellbook didn't have exactly what she needed, but the spell would be a fairly simple one. She spent some time by the warmth of the traveler's obelisk scribing away as Winterblossom tried to eat different kinds of fir needles. The dumb animal lacerated his tongue on a sword-pine tree, then stomped around in a panic until Mirian could finally calm him down and hold him still to heal him. At least the priest's healing techniques work the same on eximontar, she thought.
Finally, she'd scribed the spell: nested perforated force spheres.
It was actually two separate spells so she could control the mana flows going into them separately, but she thought of it as a single thing. If it worked, she would get down the mountain in record time.
"Ready, Winterblossom?" she asked. The creature made a weird clicking noise with its mandibles. Mirian guided it over to the edge of the trail where the downward slope began, levitated them slightly, then cast the spell around them.
The inner force sphere was designed to stay still and keep whoever was in it upright. The outer force sphere could roll as much as it wanted, and the air holes in both would make sure they didn't suffocate. Mirian used a force spell to drag a rock into the back of the sphere to start their momentum, giving them a solid thwack!
They began to roll down the mountain. Winterblossom, inured already to levitation spells, still didn't like the feeling and made his displeasure known, but couldn't move much. Mirian was focused on putting more mana into the second part of the spell so the outer sphere stayed intact. They began to bounce down the mountain, accelerating far faster than even a double-conduit levitation wand could manage.
Mirian let out a whoop as the force sphere tumbled down the path, launching itself off a cliff. There was a feeling of falling and Winterblossom made a gross noise, but then with an explosion of snow they hit the slope and kept going, continuing to build speed. Wind and flakes of icy mush streamed through the air holes, while the sphere kicked up clouds of snow on both sides, adding some friction, but not nearly enough to slow them much.
She kept channeling, feeding more mana into the outer sphere as it was bombarded by stray rocks and little falls. Winterblossom made another noise, then gave up and lay down, only crushing Mirian's left leg a little. The bottom of the inner sphere started to get damp with slush as the snow they careened over melted and found its way in gaps.
The sphere tumbled down another slope, then splashed into the shallow mountain stream. Once they were in that, they started making even better speed. Mirian shrank the inner sphere slightly so the water didn't fill too much, but this late in the season, the stream was mostly frozen over. The sphere continued, smashing through a cluster of icicles on one rocky bank, breaking off the branches of shrubs that had leaned too far into the stream and startling the five hells out of a group of elk that had thought it was a safe time to get a drink.
At last, they reached a valley, and the sphere ground itself into enough snow on the flat plain that it came to a halt. She dismissed the spell, laughing from the joy of it. "Oh, come on Winterblossom! That was great!" she told the eximontar.
Winterblossom turned his head and snorted, clicking twice.
Mirian let the mount pout, and levitated up above the canopy to see how far she'd come. In the distance, she could see the pass they'd come down, looming high above them. That probably saved me a half day or more, she thought.
Winterblossom needed a bit more time to lie in the snow, but judicious use of the grooming brush and another offering of mana finally got the beast to get up and continue. Once away from the slopes, the path was almost a straight shot to the village.
***
Again, the antimagic suppression field was active. Mirian grimaced, and summoned Eclipse. If only I knew more soul magic, perhaps I could use something that could harm something like a golem by itself.
She came at the golem under The Spear That Cuts Water, using her enhanced agility to dodge its first swipe at her. As she ducked under it, she cut upward. Sparks flew and there was a terrible screeching sound as the blade scraped the metal arm. She dodged again, then plunged her blade into the central eye—
—or tried. The blade hit a powerful force barrier, somehow active despite the magical suppression field. Normally, Eclipse would shear through it, but the barrier remained intact. Light began to bloom where her blade met the barrier. The golem made a howling noise, and Mirian felt a churning feeling inside her. The spell resistance of Eclipse was tied to her soul, and though it was enhanced by the property of the special metals, it was still linked to her. She could actually feel soul energy being consumed, like water meeting fire and erupting into smoke.
She withdrew the blade, gasping for air, body shaking. Fortunately, the golem seemed shaken as well, which gave her valuable seconds to dive out of the way as it recovered and sent two of its arms crashing down toward her. I don't think that's a fight I can win, she decided. So it's similar to the other puzzle. Solve the room while getting chased around. Only, without levitation, and without anyone to take over if I get tired.
Mirian started moving around the room looking for switches as she wove around the pillars, dodging the slow-moving golem. When she had enough distance, she hoisted herself up onto a rectangular pillar, then leapt to a slightly taller one a few feet away and grunted as she pulled herself up again. To her dismay, the golem's hands reformed into a claw-like shape that pulsed with energy. It attached a pair of them to the pillar, then slowly began to climb.
No rest then. I'll have to train my endurance as far as it can go. She leapt to another platform. Blue glyphs lit up as she stood in the center of it. Mirian quickly jotted down its position, caught her breath, then kept going.
***
The next room had a golem too, and as soon as the first one broke off its pursuit, the one in the next room was after her. Mirian switched to the Lone Pine form just to ward away the weariness. At the top of the room, she had to scramble to get out her ink bottle to help find the switch that was lit by ultraviolet light before the golem climbed up and swatted her off.
Then, as she stumbled through, there were two golems waiting for her, a little one and a big one. Damnit, she thought. There was no time to rest. She circled around to where one of the taller pillars was closer to the wall and used that to leap back and forth between the two until she was at the top.
That should give me a chance to catch my breath, she thought. The larger golem would at least be slow to climb up, which would give her—
That's when she saw the small golem leaping from pillar to pillar, making its way up to her. Still with the damn antimagic field.
Desperately, she used one of the kicks Rostal had taught her, hitting the small construct in midair as it leapt toward her. It plummeted to the ground with a crash. She looked down. The energy forming the central 'eye' was chaotic, and the energy along its limbs crackled. It seemed to be repairing itself, but it at least was temporarily disabled. She doubled over, breathing hard, muscles trembling.
Good. Just need a minute. If I can incapacitate the first one then—
That was when she felt her leg snatched by a thick claw. It dragged her backward with incredible speed, and she was plummeting to the ground—
***
The Ominian walked with her under a night sky. They were in the Endelice Mountains again, the dark ice of the glaciers glimmering with reflected light from the stars above.
"Does it have to be so hard?" she thought at Them, since she had no physicality.
THIS PLACE crooned the Ominian, and took another step forward. The Ominian was perhaps six times taller than the myrvite Titan; the beast would have been like a small dog to it. Yet, even as They walked, there was a tenderness to Their step. Even though there was nothing around them but jagged mountains and a frozen world, They stepped as if it was a garden full of delicate flowers.
"Why do you walk Enteria? Are you leading me to something? Am I on the right track? What is the path forward?"
A dozen times before, she'd asked similar questions, and the colossal Elder God, or statue, or whatever it was, had simply ignored her. Now, They turned.
Pictures flashed through her mind. She saw a long road of cobblestones winding through a valley, then the streets of a city, though the architecture seemed wrong—all the buildings too shiny and tall to be real. Then the roads began to split, the trails fanning out, and in the same logic of dreams, she knew there were more roads than there was space to fit them all. The roads became branches of a tree, and she saw the tree again, the one that was half-aflame.
Thousands of paths, hundreds of thousands—half of them burning. In the haze of smoke and destruction, it wasn't clear which of the tangled branches led to the fire, and which to the greenery. WHICH PATH? came the words in her mind, blazing there like a scream.
She had no answer. They had no answer.
She woke in her bed again.