Guild Mage: Apprentice-Chapter 118. The Tidal Ruins

The first lightning strike took Karis by surprise: the Antrian engine of war didn’t even have time to raise his arm and summon a mana-shield before a blinding, forking lash reached down from the heavens above and struck him.

Liv caught only a glimpse of it, because she was busy making certain she didn’t kill herself with the attack. Even as she’d finished the incantation to summon lightning with the forbidden royal word of power, she’d twisted the mage guild ring on her finger, activating a contingent spell she hadn’t actually had to use in a very long time.

A sphere of adamant ice encased her, strong as steel and much more pure than the ocean water that crashed around the reef and soaked her clothing. As Liv had learned through experimentation six years ago, training on the beach at Freeport, it was enough to protect her from a lightning strike at close proximity.

It was not enough to stop her from being thrown off the reef by the blast, and the ice sphere splashed into the waves, where it bobbed, floating. The side that had been closed to Liv’s lightning strike was cracked, half-melted and pitted, with sea-water leaking through and slowly making a puddle of saltwater at the bottom of the globe. While the ice might float for now, Liv didn’t expect that to still be the case once the leaks had a few moments to do their work.

She hesitated just long enough to empty her mage guild ring, the pommel of her wand, and the set of golden bracelet and rings she’d won from Princess Milisant. Sixteen rings; that, and a single casting of a frozen shard in the last button of her wand, and the ice-sword that would be created when Liv twisted the hilt. She wanted to believe that the lightning strike had destroyed Karis, but she couldn’t count on that.

With one deep breath to center herself, Liv used the waste-heat she’d gathered in her body to melt away the floating sphere, and splashed back into the waves of the bay. It took her a moment to find the reef, again: the blast had knocked her off to one side, and then the tide had carried the floating orb of ice in to the second sandbar, where she was now able to get her boots onto the sand. The troughs in between waves came only up to Liv’s chin, which allowed her to bounce up from her toes when the peaks came. Without waste heat suffusing her body, she shivered.

Karis was a smoking, blackened wreck atop the reef. Waves broke around the antrian like a boulder, and Liv noticed a scrap of shattered steel floating on the swell just out of reach. For the space of a heartbeat, she waited for the massive war machine to move, and almost dared to believe the fight was over.

Then, with a grinding sounds and the ear-splitting shriek of broken metal plates against each other, the Antrian turned and stumbled off the reef, dropping into the water with a splash. Liv lost sight of him when her feet touched sand at the bottom of a trough, then bounced up, trying to get a glimpse.

Nothing. The Antrian was somewhere beneath the waves.

Liv thought about summoning another mana construct to carry her, then discarded the idea. With only four or five spells, at most, left in her arsenal, she wasn’t going to waste any mana on convenience. Instead, she began to swim, weighed down by her boots and sodden dress, toward the reef.

She thought that she might have reached the third sandbar when a wave of dense mana swept over her. It wasn’t so chaotic as an eruption - no, this was like stepping into the shoals of a rift. But Liv had been out to the third sandbar before, during the king tide, and she hadn’t felt such a sensation then. What had changed?

Liv could only think of one possibility: Karis had found the entrance to the Vædic ruins, and opened it. Where else would such a density of mana be leaking from? It was easy enough to adjust her own body to the sudden saturation, but Liv guessed there would be a higher than normal amount of mana-beasts to deal with during the next king tide.

There was a certain satisfaction in the idea that Liv had wounded the Antrian severely enough to force it to disengage from their battle, but the problem now was to first find where Karis had gone, and then somehow pursue it underwater. Liv reached the reef, dove, and opened her eyes, trying to make out, by the light of the shining waystone, whatever entrance or door Karis had found.

It took three dives, with Liv resurfacing between each gasping for breath, before she found the mark she’d carved into the reef during the king tide. On the fourth dive, she searched beneath it, and recognized the rough form of an entrance, set back into an angular structure, that Captain Athearn had pointed out on the centuries-old charts of the bay. The walls were so covered in coral growth now that they bulged in deceptively organic shapes, but Liv recognized the place all the same. She swam forward, toward a set of dully shining blue lights, and found that a massive sheet of metal, with coral covering one entire side, had been ripped away and cast down onto the sand. Beyond it was a dark tunnel, lit by the light of mana-stones.

Liv kicked forward; she didn’t think she could hold her breath for much longer, but she wanted to at least get a look before she had to surface again for air. To her surprised, she fell forward into air, tumbling onto a metal floor that was slick with a puddle of sea-water. Liv gasped for breath, then turned around.

Updated from freewёbnoνel.com.

A wall of water, flat as a window-pane, covered the entire entrance to the tunnel. There was nothing to hold it there: when Liv reached out a hand, she was able to stretch her fingers back into the ocean, then withdraw them again, dripping wet.

Karis was nowhere to be seen.

Liv pushed herself up to her feet, took her wand in hand, and crept down the hallway, deeper into the Vædic ruins. There were puddles of water in front of her, extending down the hallway, which she presumed marked the passage of the enormous war machine. Thankfully, rather than being entirely smooth steel, which would have been slippery, Liv found the floor was textured with small, ‘v’ shaped ridges that gave her boots something to grip onto.

Mana-stones were set at regular intervals along the ceiling, providing enough light to see by. When she came to the first intersection, where halls broke off to either side, Liv found two oddities. The first was a slab of glass, set into the wall to her right, about the size of a slate. Lines of blue and gold were etched across it, softly glowing, along with small, neat Vædic sigils. It took her only a moment’s glance to realize that it was a map of the ruins.

The second thing that stood out in the otherwise quiet, clean and orderly environment was that two metal doors had been ripped off the hinges, revealing a dark shaft that extended down. Liv pictured what the intersection would have looked like, before Karis reached it, in her mind: the hallway leading in from the entrance would have ended at the doors, with a new hallway extending out to right and left, and the map set conveniently in the wall for the Vædim or their servants to find their way.

Karis had clearly proceeded down.

Liv turned back to the map, and found where she was standing. One hallway led off to ‘Breeding Tanks,’ and the other to a ‘Control Room.’ The shaft, on the other hand, was labelled ‘Tidal Generator.’ Liv moved her lips silently as she sounded out the words: they were a disorienting mix of the familiar, and the bizarre, just like when she’d first read the sigils which marked locations on the waystone beneath Bald Peak. ‘Breeding,’ she understood, and ‘Control Room,’ as well as ‘Tidal.’

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“It was a fishery,” Liv remembered. “The breeding room would be where the oysters grow,” she reasoned. “Control Room is obvious. Tidal... Generator. Generate what? It can’t make the tides go, can it?”

In the end, she decided that it didn’t matter. Karis had descended the shaft, and so Liv would have to follow. It was clear that, whatever the result of the battle on the beach, Professor Jurian would not be arriving soon enough to stop whatever was happening in the ruins. She stepped to the very edge of the shaft, and extended her wand.

Before Liv could summon a platform of mana, however, a shining blue disk flared to life, filling the entire shaft. Cautiously, she reached out one boot. The disk was solid, just like one that she might summon using Aluth. When it did not instantly vanish, Liv put her weight down, then walked into the center of the shaft. She gasped when the disk fell out from beneath her, descending at a smooth, swift speed, carrying her down.

Liv felt it when she passed from the shoal to the depths, and had to concentrate on her breathing for a moment to manage the mana pressing in on her. Just being inside the rift had already caused her to recover a ring’s worth of power, even taking the time to adapt herself slowly. She didn’t want a repeat of what had happened at Bald Peak, if she could avoid it. By the time the disk came to a halt, and then dissolved beneath her feet, Liv thought that she had the pressure under control. A part of her wondered if she was using her Authority to filter the mana of the rift, and Liv hoped she had a chance to discuss it with Archmagus Loredan later.

Wand raised, Liv crept forward out of the shaft, following the small puddles of water that led her on, like the prints of game in the wild. There was another slate-sized piece of glass on the wall, just outside the shaft, but she ignored the map. It looked identical to the one she’d seen already.

Stairs led down into a vast, cavernous space that hummed and throbbed in a deep, rhythmically pulsing sound. There were great machines filling the space, and Liv realized that using the word ‘ruins’ to describe this place was completely inaccurate. The Tidal Rift may have been sealed for over a thousand years, but the ancient machinery of the Vaedim did not look as if it had aged even a day.

At the far end of the cavern was a great pane of glass, twice as long as it was tall, making up nearly the entire wall. Lights flickered across it, drawing shapes and entire paragraphs of Vaedic text that flowed, hung for a moment, then vanished.

Karis stood in front of the wall, arms raised, and it seemed to respond to the movements of the Antrian’s enormous gauntlets. “You are too stubborn for your own good, Livara, of the line of Celris,” the machine rumbled. It turned away from the lit glass, and she was able to see just how much damage her lightning had inflicted.

The stroke must have fallen directly on Karis’ chest, because the heavy steel cuirass that served as its torso was shattered. A great rent opened into the Antrian’s torso, blackened and scorched all along the edges, and within Liv saw -

Her mind revolted at it, and she had to fight the sudden urge to empty her stomach onto the steel floor of the room. Liv had, only a few weeks earlier, been forced to watch Professor Annora drill a hole into a student’s head to relieve the pressure of a swelling brain. She’d butchered her fair share of game, as well, from rabbits to bucks, and Liv had also grown up in a kitchen. The sight of organs was nothing new to her.

She had not expected a pulsating brain, suspended in some kind of bubbling fluid, all encased within a glass jar, set inside of the war machine’s chest. There were tubes coming in and out of the glass, running into the damaged interior of Karis’ mechanical armor, and Liv could hear all manner of whirring, clicking, and even the venting of steam.

“I thought you were built,” she said, unable to tear her eyes away from the horror inside the machine.

“I was a loyal soldier of Antris,” Karis responded, slowly striding forward toward her from across the great room. “Wounded in battle against your rebel ancestors. Crippled. Until my god gave me the chance to be born again, no longer weak and mortal, but clad in steel eternal and unyielding. Powered not by a heart, but by mana-stone.” He raised his gauntlets, and flexed mechanical fingers. “With the strength to crush a man’s skull between my hands as easily as you might squeeze a fruit, girl. This is the blessing of my god. A thousand years later, I remain. Life eternal.”

“It’s horrible,” Liv exclaimed. “A thousand years, with no one to touch you? Do you even eat, or sleep?”

“I no longer require such things,” Karis said, coming to a halt perhaps twenty feet in front of her. “They are mere weaknesses.”

A sudden clanking and shifting came from Liv’s left, and she turned, searching the darkness, before forcing her gaze back to the Antrian.

“The mana capacitors,” Karis explained. “I have set them to disconnect from the Tidal Generator.”

“Capacitors?” Liv repeated.

“Beyond your primitive understanding,” the Antrian told her. “You’re all such savages. You’d rather roll around in the mud and shit, like animals, than serve the gods that created you. Pathetic. I will be taking the capacitors back to my lady. The only question, girl, is whether you stand aside, and allow it to happen, or if I leave your corpse behind when I go.”

“Your lady,” Liv repeated. “That’s Ractia, isn’t it? The Lady of Blood?”

“The last of the old gods,” Karis said, nodding its head. Liv couldn’t help but let her eyes drift down to the pulsating brain in the machine’s shattered chest. That was the real Karis, after all. Everything else had merely been built around it. The last piece of his natural body.

“I saw her once, you know,” Liv said. She let her wrist hang loose, the wand comfortable in her fingers. The brain. That was where she would strike. The weak point. “In a vision. She looked beautiful, but - terrifying. Cruel. That’s who you want to serve?”

“Loyalty is rewarded,” Karis replied. “Disobedience punished. I have already been given this body, when I should have died ages ago. A debt I can never repay. And what I have been promised...” That horrible, rattling laugh came from somewhere inside the damaged machinery. The Antrian raised his left arm, and his blade’s edge lit with a sheen of blue mana.

Liv snapped her wand out, pressed the last button, and shot a single shard of needle-thin adamant ice directly at the brain inside Karis’ chest. The war-machine that had once been a man raised his right arm, and with the spark of red sigils, his mana-shield caught the shard of ice, knocking it off to one side. He charged forward, but Liv was already moving, dashing to the side into the banks of strange machines that thrummed and pulsed with light.

“Get back here, girl!” Karis shouted, following her into the jungle of bizarre shapes.

Strange pipes and beams of metal ran overhead, connecting things that defied Liv’s comprehension. There were more panes of glass, each lighting as she passed, and in some places she could feel the heat of the machines around her, or the rush of air, expelled from some incomprehensible apparatus. Karis followed her, but the monstrous war-machine had to move carefully, enormous as he was, while Liv could slip around and beneath, due to her slim body and short stature.

When she’d finally lost herself amidst the machinery, Liv stopped, leaned back against the wall of the room, and tried her best not to make a sound. She couldn’t summon lightning in here. For one thing, the clouds were so far overhead, with so much coral, water, and metal between her and the sky, that she doubted she could even reach them. Even if she could, the lightning would be diverted long before it reached her target, striking the coral or the waves or who knew what else, instead.

That meant she was restricted to Aluth, and Cel. For a moment, Liv contemplated trying to open a hole in Antris’ mana-shield, just like she’d done the barrier around the college campus, but she suspected that would pit her Authority against his, and she hadn’t exactly been coming out on top of those contests when she practiced with Celestria. That meant she either needed to break the war-machine’s arm off, exhaust his supply of mana, or catch him by surprise.

Setting a trap, however, required casting. And casting required making noise, because Liv had never quite gotten the hang of doing it silently. And noise would draw Karis right to her.

Liv closed her eyes, and focused on her breathing until her heart slowed. She could still hear the monstrous war-machine stalking through the room, hunting her, with each footfall a clank of metal on metal.

She raised her wand, and envisioned the incantation she wanted to use. With her lips pressed firmly shut, Liv shaped her intent, felt the mana within her, and thought the incantation without speaking. Please, she couldn’t help but add to the words. Please, please.

Cel stirred in the back of her mind, and a sculpture of ice began to form in the darkness.