Misbegotten Memories

Chapter 299

They watched the start of the battle from the television of their penthouse apartment in tense silence.  Piercing attempted to lighten the mood a couple of times, but no one would engage with him and eventually he gave up.  The Dragon appeared.  The first salvo failed.  Then dozens of schism beams fired all at once, to no effect.  Then a series of muted antimatter explosions began.  And the Dragon responded by shaking reality itself.  The television feed died.

While all of that happened, Hector experienced something far more dramatic and immediate than pictures on a screen.  From the moment of its appearance, the Dragon’s miasmic presence assaulted him.  It was in many ways the antithesis of his insight.  Faced with such a contrary resonant pattern, Hector found himself facing a truth he had never even imagined possible:  even if his insight represented a fundamental truth, the polar opposite of it could also be true.

The malicious intent behind miasma was no lie.  It was a valid alternative.  Not valid for him, but in the grandness of ultimate reality it found validation.  The attack on his confidence, significant as it may be, was far from the worst of it.  Hector had to studiously rebuff miasma on the mental band.  The Dragon’s vile emanations assaulted every mind within its vast range.

Hector witnessed his friends cower under the onslaught.  They had no defense against such an attack.  His own insight-backed method barely felt up to the task.

Through the thin walls of the aerostat they heard the hysterical screaming of the Arahant ritualists.  Hector flinched as he felt a backlash from the battle of wills propagate through the ritual to destroy the individuals involved.  Without needing to use his eyes, Hector felt what happened to them.  It was a sympathetic reaction.  Human beings were overloaded with fell energies until they exploded one after another in a gory chain reaction.

Piercing seized his head and screamed.  The rawness of his pain cut straight to Hector’s heart.  The man was questing, making him broadly sensitive to resonance.  Restoration looked little better, pale and silently weeping.  Hector thought her realm opened her up to more of the Dragon’s influence than normal.  That vulnerability was a downside of being a Sage.  Touching reality directly opened them up to an avenue of attack that more mundane folk didn’t have to worry about.  Of course, not feeling the resonance through a realm didn’t help non-Sages much when they were being attacked over the mental band.

Gusts of miasma blew through the walls of the aerostat.  Hector could sense it from within the luxury apartment.  He swore and gathered his cowering squad-mates up with force cables.  “Deeper into the aerostat!  We need to get away from the walls!”

They barely made it out of the apartment before the barriers began to decompose into a slurry lacking any degree of cohesion.  The structure of the aerostat, held together by a combination of tensile strength and air pressure, failed.

If not for his cables, his friends would have been sucked out into the dark void.  Hector forced them forward until they reached a central shaft composed of aluminum.  As the corridors around them failed and sloughed free, they were able to climb the staircase upwards.

They emerged onto the top level, just below the rooftop landing pad.  Hector heard machinery squealing as they arrived.  A dozen Jinn were frantically operating equipment.  From what he overheard, it sounded like they’d lost all outside communication and the gravitonics were failing.  The bottom half of their aerostat had already torn free and the rest of the structure was melting apart.

A dark gust of miasmic wind tore through the corridor.  Two of the Jinn collapsed immediately and many more began to cough.  Hector forced his domain to transform the miasma, causing a glowing sphere to form around him.  It was harder than it had ever been to force the change.  The will of the Dragon contested with his own, leaving Hector’s soul feeling raw from the exertion.

Things were too far gone already.  Hector attempted to raise his transit sphere but discovered his externality paralyzed by the environment.  Over time, his externality had been permanently locked into the form of a transit sphere.  Much the same, repeated chaos cultivation had embedded his insight into it.  Faced with the contrary conceptual pressure the Dragon exerted upon the world, Hector discovered his sphere to be absolutely powerless.  The antithesis of his insight ruled this place.

“Guys, I can’t travel us out of here.  Any ideas?”  Hector glanced at his friends only to discover they were borderline catatonic.  He was preventing the miasma from reaching them physically with his domain, but he couldn’t stop the pervasive attack on the mental band.  Mind apertures simply did not extend outward in the same way that a domain did.

Hector looked at the utility room where the whining of machinery grew ever more worrisome.  He didn’t think the remnants of the aerostat would remain airborne for long.  He’d need to fly them to safety.  “We’re going to the roof!”

No one responded to his announcement.  Hector didn’t even know if they heard him.

So he dragged them up a separate staircase to the roof.  As they burst out onto the deck, he collapsed to his knees.  The sudden increase in miasma density hit him like a baseball bat across the back of the head.  Hector struggled mightily to prevent his domain from collapsing entirely.  He needed the cocoon of safety it created to protect his squad.

Everyone else fell at the same time, a byproduct of him being too preoccupied to manifest cables.  The entire might of his domain was dedicated to converting miasma in a glowing sphere that steadily collapsed upon him at its center.

Suddenly, Hector felt a will the size of a world latch onto him.  Even without looking up, he knew that he had come to the attention of the Dragon.  His squad groaned almost as one under the increased pressure.  For a moment, Hector almost came undone.

Then the external stress compressed his mind firmly into the minimal protection of the footprint offered by his insight.  Hector knew without question that he’d reached the very limits of what could be done to his mind by a creature of miasma.  It was terrible and painful and energy-sapping, yes, but it could not get worse.  Galvanized by that realization, Hector forced himself to stand firm.  He would not face his end on his knees before such a hateful creature.

“Please no,” Piercing hissed, an entreaty to whatever power might be able to help.

Seeing his friends quivering on the ground, their minds naked before the potent onslaught, deep sympathy stirred his heart.  They were all as good as dead already, he knew.  Given that unfortunate fact, he much preferred that his friends not suffer in their final moments.  Living through a terminal fall to the planetary surface might not be a good end, but anything had to be better than being unmade by the beast approaching them.

At least he hoped it would be better.  Hector sighed.  There really were no good paths forward.  Only some that were less unpalatable.  “I’ll draw it away.  You guys… try to stay alive as long as you can.”  And Hector leaped into the air, forcing his domain to work harder than it already was.

It took everything he had in him, but Hector managed to move.  He had to drop in altitude to speed up, leveraging gravity to make up for the suppression of his domain.  The Dragon approached, an existence the size of a mountain focused intensely upon him.  It radiated such hate.  Somehow Hector had not only come to its attention but earned its full enmity.

At least he would be remembered in death, if only by this hateful creature.

Quick as a blink the massive maw closed about him, cutting out the last of the dim light and any remaining hope.  The space around him went from the size of a stadium to a coffin in seconds, liquid miasma rushing forth from the gullet of the Dragon to surround him, drag him deeper, and solidify in place.  Only the strength of his fully flared aura prevented the crushing force from immediately turning him to pulp.

He owed Darius for teaching him the Sandwich Technique.  And Isabel for both the Bursting Dam Technique and the Shuttle Technique.  His aura would not be strong enough to resist without training those techniques.  Though as he had those thoughts, Hector realized he would never see his friends again.  Having drawn the Dragon away from his squad, he’d precluded any future where he ever saw them again – them or any other human.  All that remained of his life was experiencing his final moments.

Fatalism did not agree with him.  Neither his temperament nor his insight could accept it.  Hector couldn’t relax his aura and let his death arrive quickly.  Nor could he passively wait for his strength to run out.  He resolved to go down fighting for as long as possible.   His aura was being slowly beaten, forced into a smaller and smaller footprint, but it wasn’t defeated quite yet.

The determination to fight raised an important question.  How?

He was utterly impotent before the might of the Dragon.  His aura was delaying the inevitable, which was more than most people could manage, but he had no means of fighting back.  Without an offense, he wasn’t actually fighting.  His domain grasped at the solidified miasma around him, seeking to enact the maneuver that would shatter the hateful intent.  He might as well have been a mundane man trying to punch through the wall of a bank vault.

Owing to the strength disparity, his domain could do nothing.  His aura and body were draining his energy reserves at an alarming rate just keeping him alive.  His mind barely coped with the fell mental influence.  The only freedom he had was in his externality, through which he could take desperate gulps of chaos from the primordial to replenish his reserves.  That was it, his sole freedom.  He couldn’t raise his externality into reality, only use it to draw forth energy from the primordial.  Every other aperture was either powerless or desperately busy delaying the inevitable.

Every soul aperture lacked freedom other than his externality… and his realm.  He’d always intended to expand it into a second reservoir.  That goal never rose to the top of his priorities, though.  Why would it when he restored energy so fast?  So soon after his last advancement, his realm was still malleable enough to be molded.  Not that there was any reason to consider his realm.  He’d never be able to fill his normal energy reserves, let alone a second reservoir in the little time remaining to him.  And the only other thing he’d ever heard a Xian do with that aperture was create a filter realm – something he had no need of.

A recollection of his last conversation with Evelyn came to him.  It had been an overall depressing encounter, even if at the end she gave him Darius back.  During their brief time together, she explained to him the process of encoding her insight into her realm.  She’d compared it to doing art with her soul.

It was a shame he couldn’t use the trick of the Arahant Sages with his own insight.

Hector turned that thought around in his mind, wondering.  No one had ever explicitly told him that he couldn’t encode his insight into a realm.  It just wasn’t the way Xian did things.  Manipulating resonance wasn’t limited to the Arahants, though.  The Jinn did something similar with their conceptual realms, the only difference being that something about legal energy prevented them from glimpsing ultimate reality.

So why couldn’t he form a realm the way Sages did?  His insight might be limited to transforming chaos and miasma into cosmic energy, but he could use any leverage he could get right now with that particular application.

Hector began moving the threads of his realm aperture.