While Keldryn and Anza busied themselves with Keldryn’s channels, Mikayla hesitantly let Asika take her hands. She closed her eyes and reached inside herself, tracing the veins that ran down her left hand. After two weeks of practice, it was no longer difficult to follow her twin flows of mana and stamina.
However, as it turned out, she barely needed to. Asika’s mana invaded her veins again, a strange pins-and-needles sensation that in a strange way reminded her of radio static. It targeted the closest stain - oh god the stains. She’d managed to forget that her body was full of filth, and being reminded of that fact made her want to rip her own skin off and run it through a laundromat. Maybe ten laundromats.
Wait, wasn’t that exactly what she was supposed to be learning to do?
Mikayla picked another stain, smeared across the muscle at the base of her left thumb, and drove her Mana towards it. She focused on finding the seam, the tiny, almost-nonexistent delineation where her flesh ended and the filth began. It took several minutes of agonising frustration, but finally she managed to find the edge.
Now what?
Mikayla glanced back at Asika and found that she’d already mostly purged an impurity from her wrist. Taking a deep breath, closing her eyes, and reaching inside herself, she focused on what Asika was doing, exactly how she was removing the splatter of poison.
Her Mana was working with a mechanical precision that awed Mikayla. Asika’s projected energy had been sculpted somehow into what looked like a thousand tiny drill bits, semicircular and beveled with spiraling patterns, each seemingly the size of a molecule. They wore away at the stain, parting it from her body with phenomenal precision.
A faint whimper escaped Mikayla’s throat. Even if Asika’s ability was an inherent boon of her race and humans weren’t expected to be able to compete, it didn’t seem fair. She could barely make her Mana move according to her whims. Forging molecular-sized corkscrews from her own vitality was completely out of the question.
“What’s wrong?” She opened her eyes to find Asika’s solid sapphire orbs peering into her face through the bars, the lines around her eyes crinkled in concern.
“How am I supposed to do that? I’ve had Mana for two weeks. Less than that, actually, it’s only been, what, thirteen days? I can’t make my Mana into those, um, tiny drills? I can’t even see how to start,”
“You don't have to,” Asika soothed her. “I get it. I’m awesome. But mortals spend their entire lives figuring this out. I did warn you that you’ll need remedial lessons. For now, just focus on making your Mana spin. A spiral that sucks up the impurity and loosens it enough to be expelled is the most basic way to do it, and that’s all you need. Like this,” Mikayla felt that Asika was pausing in her efforts, instead shaping her Mana into what felt almost like a mop, a central point that rotated and dragged with it trailing ribbons of energy, sweeping through her veins as though it were a ballerina.
“Uh, o-okay,”
Mikayla marshalled her Mana, focusing and stretching it until there were threads of glowing red in her mind’s eye, within her veins. She wove them together and twisted them, like braiding a rope, letting the ends of her threads fly outwards and drag across her insides.
She’d likened it to a mop, but could intuitively sense that the comparison wasn’t doing her any favours. Asika’s conjured drills were as hard as diamond. Mikayla needed her spiral to be as potent as a buzzsaw and strong like a sander.
As she leveraged her Willpower into making it spin harder and faster, trying to make her ribbons more like metal than cloth, Mikayla couldn’t help but notice her Mana bar had gone spastic. It kept dropping, but then jumping back up, though never quite returning to where it had been.
[MANA: 1576/1600 > 1532/1600 > 1573/1600 > 1528/1600 > 1570/1600]
“Hey, Asika, what’s going on with my Mana? It’s bouncing up and down,”
“Oh yeah, right sorry almost forgot to mention. It’s a weird little thing because you’re using Mana but you’re not actually projecting it outside your channels, so it mostly just flows right back into your reserves and you barely lose any. Thank my ancestors, it took four hundred years to make it that efficient!” Asika cheered.
“Right. Thank you, Asika’s ancestors,” Mikayla semi-seriously prayed, then resumed focusing her Mana mop on the stain.
Asika watched as she refined her technique, nodding encouragingly. “That’s right! Scrub it away with your Mana!”
Despite her words, Mikayla couldn’t ascribe a word like ‘scrub’ to what she was doing. It was more like using her Mana as a hose, a power washer of sorts, but one that looped back on itself and just kept going, losing only a scant few drops with each rotation.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
It was dull and tedious work, but she could see the stain, slowly yet surely, flake away under her efforts.
<=====}—o
The sky-fluff parted around the Giant Roc as she dove from above, her wake leaving a brief hole that was already starting to fill.
She didn’t understand the sky-fluff. In this world where everything fought, where life was an endless series of eat-or-be-eaten encounters, it was passive. It had never fought back when she passed through it. It wasn’t like the blue and the black, or the ground-crawlers. It healed itself every time she hurt it, so it had to be alive, but it had never sought reprisal against her.
The ground came into view, the familiar sight of the tall-nest appearing. She’d dallied on her way back from the metal vessel full of little black ground-crawlers, drifting around the region as though searching for something, even if she was unable to put words to what it was that she sought. Only accidentally straying too close to the territory of the Big Grumpy Old One to the west had convinced her it was time to return home and rest properly.
She laid eyes on the tall-nest once more. Was this a good place to stay? This was where her chicks had died. That made her feel all twisted up inside. Maybe it would be better to leave and find a -
Something was squatting in her nest.
It had seen her too, a creature only half her size, covered in white-grey fluff and opening a massive eye to leer at her. A low, rumbling hoot of warning sounded from the intruder’s small, weak-looking hooked beak.
The burning-crackling was back inside her. And then it was outside her, flying from her eyes and from her wings and peppering the invader. It twitched, wings spreading and flapping into the air.
How dare it. How dare it how dare it how dare it try to take her chicks’ nest?!
The Owl’s wings extended, pinions splayed so that each individual feather was visible. Swirling clouds of snowflakes gathered in the spaces between, and with a mighty wingbeat it thrust them outwards as a spray of razor-sharp splinters.
The Giant Roc twisted in mid-air, shielding its eyes with one wing as the blast hit. Weak. Too weak to hurt her. It would be too weak to take a serious blow from her.
An expanding wave of lightning was released from the Giant Roc’s wings, crashing over the top of the tall-nest. The Owl was forced to ascend further to minimise the damage, and she closed the distance, shrieking in righteous fury and driving her beak into those infuriatingly massive eyes.
But before she could land the blow, her body froze up, a sensation of sheer cold running through her body. She froze for only a moment, but that was enough to interrupt her momentum and send her dropping towards the side of the tall-nest.
Do not touch the tall-nest’s sides. Her dam had taught her that and she had taught her chicks that. Ignoring the rain of frigid, cutting snow that the Owl threw down at her, she frantically changed course and cleared the side of the building.
No sooner had she gotten far enough that she could focus on the fight once more than her adversary was swooping down at her, cold energy cloaking its body as its talons extended into wickedly sharp, serrated blades.
The Giant Roc could recognise a trump card when she saw one, and responded in kind.
She rolled in mid-air, not caring that she was exposing her vulnerable chest to the Owl, head bending down as lightning flowed up her wings, to her eyes, and coalesced at the tip of her beak.
She had the pleasure of watching the Owl realise how badly it had underestimated her a moment before a wide beam of electricity reduced its head to dust.
The Giant Roc cracked to the ground, trees breaking and splintering under her weight, and the scorched remains of the Owl landed on top of her. She started to pick herself up, shaking out her wings.
The blue box appeared, and her heart stopped.
[YOU HAVE EARNED XP POINTS FOR KILLING A BLIZZARD OWL!]
[TIER UP! CONGRATULATIONS, YOU ARE NOW TIER 13!]
The text was meaningless to her, but she understood what it represented. Power flowing into her body. Proof that she had earned the right to continue living.
This could be it. The blessing she’d been praying for. She knew what she wanted, she had received it once already. The boon that would engender new life inside her, the [PARTHENOGENETIC REPRODUCTION]. Surely it would be here, surely the blue box would reward her.
[SELECT AN ENHANCEMENT]
[WRATH OF THE STORM]
[DECAY-INDUCING TALONS]
[ELECTRICAL ACCELERATION]
The Giant Roc felt like she’d lost her chicks all over again.
She forced herself to lift back into the air and flapped upwards until she was settling into the tall-nest. As soon as her claws were on the ground she let her whole body droop into a heap of loose feathers. She simply didn’t have the energy to hold herself upright, not after her hopes had been so thoroughly dashed.
As she nestled down, she picked the first option, just to remove the awful spiteful prompt from her vision, and felt the power of the blue box improve her body. Her feathers grew darker, the burning-crackling grew somehow stronger and cooler. She probed it, and a strange black substance that she recognised as sky-fluff seeped out of her feathers.
So that was what the sky-fluff was. It wasn’t a living thing, it was a weapon. What sort of creature could wield such a mighty weapon as to spread across the whole sky in every direction?
It didn’t matter. The strength welling up inside her could not return meaning to her life. It was pointless.
There was nothing left to do but bed down and sleep. To wait until the next fool tried to claim her territory, or until she ran out of food. Whichever happened first. She couldn’t bring herself to even care.
Maybe she would feel better after some rest.
<=====}—o
“So, I know this is a weird question, but why were you scared of dancing men?” Keldryn idly asked. They’d been going for hours, until finally their Mana had bottomed out, and were now waiting for it to tick back up.
“I was what?”
“You mentioned it to Asika, earlier. Something about dancing men and whatever a hobgoblin is?”
“Dancing,” Mikayla faltered. “The Boogeyman?”
“The dancing man, yep. Why was he scary?”
“. . Asika, I’m supposed to talk to you when the System’s translating something wrong, right?”
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