Misbegotten Memories

Chapter 291

Hector flew at the tank monster with as much stealth as he could manage.  He didn’t want to draw its attention by converting miasma this time.  No.  He’d get close this time so he could tear the monster apart.

His plan, if it could be glorified with such a name, worked.  He made it close enough to land atop the massive boxy dome.  The solid miasma of its construction tingled on his bare feet, its contrary resonance in passive conflict with him.  Hector forced his domain upon the substance, gritting his teeth with effort.

Nothing.

The will of the monster was too strong for him to directly contest control of its body.  When the barrel of the gun adjusted, he switched to attacking the next best thing.  As part of the tank’s body liquefied to become a missile, Hector worked his full might to convert it.

Success came with a cost.  Half-converted miasma shot forth as his domain screamed in agony.

The tank paused its forward momentum as if deliberating its next move.  Then it fired towards the far off walls of the Stronghold.  Hector just barely managed to repeat his trick, transforming the missile before it could leave his range.  A harsh scream tore free from his throat.  He knew he couldn’t thwart many more of the missiles.  That fact drove him insane.  The thing had to die.

A vision of Nestor hit him, followed by one of Rodrick.  People kept dying in this damn war.  It was a war that selfish humans were fumbling, true, but mostly it was a war brought about by the essence of hate invading worlds to target people.  There didn’t seem to be anything meaningful he could do.  Not for the war and not even for Stronghold Epsilon.

In that moment of hopelessness, a distant figure rose into the sky like it was flying.

The leaping idiot, carrying a dense ball of silver light, collided with the front of the tank’s main body, just ahead of where the tank treads began.  A split second later an explosion of silver energy tore apart a full quadrant of the monster.  A tread and several gears fell free to clatter on the ground, immobilizing the monster.

Hector had to burn cosmic energy to keep his perch.  His domain burned in agony from all the misuse he'd put it through, but he laughed, tears streaking down his cheeks.  “Good job, Leroy!”  Another friend sacrificed to the altar of humanity.  At least this one secured a momentary victory.  Was that the best that could be hoped for any longer?  Surrendering everything for little wins that would ultimately be forgotten?

So be it.

When the gun next fired, Hector threw his domain into high gear.  The missile decomposed into cosmic energy.  Also, his domain went numb.  He’d done some real damage, he knew.  Hector’s harsh laughter rang in his ears.  Momentary victories.  Insignificant delays.  He’d do his part if that was all that was left.

A levitating platform hummed above him suddenly.  Brilliant white blinded him as a beam cut away at the monster’s gun.  He covered his face with an upraised arm to escape the glare.  His insight caught the resonance of another missile being formed.  He had no strength in his domain left to counter it.  There was nothing more he could do.

The liquid missile caused the compromised barrel to explode.

Hector tumbled back along the roof of the tank before coming to a stop.  When he stood, he gave a feral smile.  The gun was gone, blown to pieces.  Making the monster as impotent against the Stronghold as Hector was against it.

The tank sat there in deliberation.  Then, a decision reached, its form collapsed entirely, causing a tsunami of unbound liquid miasma to rush in every direction.  It was a suicide equal parts dramatic and calculated.

Hector tumbled into the center of the mess, domain inoperable, flaring his aura to seal himself away from the poison.  The miasma had taken on the consistency of molasses.  He sank slowly through it, helped along by semi-solid tendrils that dragged him deeper like a morsel to be devoured.  He briefly attempted to swim, which only caused him to become more entangled.

So he let the miasmic goo drag him deeper.  His hope was to walk free once he reached the ground.  As minutes turned to hours, Hector accepted that the liquefied corpse of the monster did not intend to set him onto a solid surface.

Suspended within the mass like fruit in a Jello mold, Hector struggled for a time.

His physical strength proved woefully insufficient to the task of escaping.  It also used up cosmic energy he needed for more critical purposes.  Foremost among those was maintaining his aura.  Letting the miasma invade his body would be a death sentence no matter what insights he possessed.  A close second was energizing his metabolism.  He could survive indefinitely without air or water or food if he had enough cosmic energy.  If he ran out, though, that would be the end.

Submerged, barely able to move, he settled on a survival strategy.  Cultivating constantly with his externality to replenish his reserves.  Empowering his aura barrier.  Fueling his body.  Energizing his mind so he wouldn’t slip up from exhaustion.

Once he was set up as efficiently as possible, his thoughts began to stray.  The impact of losing Nestor still had him reeling.  That experience was tangled up with Rodrick’s death.  If he followed the threads in his heart, both of those connected to his father, mother, and brother.  He’d lost his real family on Earth over many years.  And out in the wider multiverse he was still losing adopted family.

The fatalistic mood that had struck him after witnessing Nestor and Leroy die slowly departed.  It wasn’t an invalid way of looking at things.  They were all going to die.  Most likely not to old age, either, given the state of the war.  But obsessing over the inevitable end would not help anything.  The answer, he believed, was to do his best while he was able.  That was in his control.  It would have to be enough.

While replaying the death of Leroy in his mind, he decided that someone’s best could be more than enough.  The simple man had wanted to be a hero.  Maybe that desire was influenced by propaganda, but all ideas came from somewhere.  And he hadn’t been tricked into fighting a war against some group of fellow humans just trying to live their lives.  Leroy went out serving humanity.  It was a better death than many people with drastically greater intelligence managed.  Hector would be content if his exit from life were so meaningful.

Cocooned within the sea of miasma, Hector persisted.

For how long he could not say.  It wasn’t a short length of time, that was certain.  He entered a meditative state as every normal sense was denied him.  There was only his mental sense, which only ever reported the presence of miasma in every direction.  He idly wished that Volithur had been given an opportunity to study the substance.  Who knew what knowledge a truly powerful mental sense could divine from a close look.

His only real focus was on the management of his energy reserves.  As much as possible he had to limit output to match what was coming in.  That was the key to everything.  His reserves were only about a quarter full at the start of his entrapment and declined to around twenty percent before he stopped his initial struggles to conserve energy.

Reserves continued to decline, though at a slower rate.

There came a point when they eventually dipped below ten percent and Hector wondered what he was doing.  Delaying the inevitable?  His situation seemed like a microcosm of the struggle humanity faced.  Just hanging on in a hopeless situation.  Stubbornly defying nonexistence.

Well, he was stubborn.  Often in ways that benefited no one.  Harnessing his grit in service to his natural inclination to live seemed like a perfectly reasonable strategy.  Faced with death, Hector understood at an instinctual level that he did not want to go.  Not now, not ever.

The drive was so powerful that Hector suspected he would have gained an insight from it if he used life energy like the Alfar.  His cosmic energy didn’t resonate with the right concepts, though.  The Xian way of surviving was to sever oneself from reality to rise above it.  It wasn’t really living at that point, it was continuance.  An instinctual drive was the path of life.  He suspected the Xian equivalent would be more about a refusal to accept.

Throughout the ordeal, Hector’s aura went through cycles.  It would ache for a while.  Then it would settle down and accept the new normal.  Then the burden would grow until the ache returned.  Again and again it repeated.  The pain he felt wasn’t a monolithic thing.  It had individual flavors he could pick out.  The exhausted burning.  The tingly stabs.  The bruised ache.  Even a weird hunger – like his aura desperately needed to eat something.

He continued to persist, watching his soul reserves dwindle.  There was a limit to how much his externality could replenish.  His greatest strength as a cultivator was not enough for this situation.

When he hit what he estimated as seven percent, the most welcome sense of his entire life greeted him.  Cosmic energy from outside penetrated through the gel-like miasma.  Given all the time in the world to observe the phenomenon, he could only come up with a single explanation.

Mitigation Squad was cleaning up the battlefield outside of Stronghold Epsilon.

It was like being trapped in the collapse of a building, accepting his demise, then being found.  They didn’t even realize what they were doing for him until only a barrier of miasma a meter thick separated them.  Their ‘digging’ grew far more targeted all of a sudden, spearing directly for him.

His feet were exposed first.  The reduced pressure on his aura was so welcome he almost passed out from relief.  They followed the line of his body up, releasing him over the course of several hours.  He couldn’t even care that when his lower half was fully free, his dangling bits were fully exposed to the world.  Knowing he would live made everything acceptable.

After freeing one of his arms, they pulled him free.

Hector opened his mouth and breathed for the first time in… however long it was.  The precious air tasted cool and sweet as it slid into his lungs.  “Thank you,” he said repeatedly.

Matthias and Purification wrapped him in a blanket and sent him to rest with a crew of Jinn guarding Mitigation Squad.  Hector lay down on the bed of a Rover and instantly slept.