Chương 58: Chapter 57 - Magic Gems

Blood was still on Ant's boots when the screen asked its question again, patient, like it had all the time in the world. Magic Gem detected. Would you like to absorb the Magic? He looked at Mahkir. Ash still streaked through the fur along his jaw, one ear notched from a hit in the fight that hadn't quite connected clean. Nothing for him. Not from this fight, not from the eight before it that hadn't tipped him over either.

"This should help you," Ant said. Mahkir's ears flicked toward him, not quite understanding yet.

"Help me with what."

"Don't know." Ant turned the gem over once in his palm — small, no bigger than a knuckle, a dull violet that didn't catch the chamber's residual light so much as swallow it.

"Figured it's worth finding out."

"Ant—" Maren started, already stepping closer, her face going tight and focused in the way it always did right before she caught him mid-mistake. He selected yes. Nothing happened for exactly as long as it took him to think nothing happened, and then the gem came apart in his hand. Not shattered. Unwound — like a held breath finally let go, all at once, no warning shot across it first.

Mana poured out of it in a volume that made no physical sense against the size of the thing, violet-white and thick as smoke, and it didn't drift the way smoke should. It moved with purpose, climbing his wrist, his forearm, folding around his shoulders in a spiral that thickened by the second until Ant couldn't see his own boots through it.

"Ant!" Raven's voice cracked across the chamber, high and raw.

"Get away from him — that's not — Mahkir, get him OUT—" Mahkir was already moving. Ant saw him close half the distance in one bound, low and fast, teeth bared — and then saw him hit something. Not a wall. There was nothing there to hit, nothing Ant could see from inside it, but Mahkir's whole body checked mid-stride like he'd run into stone, and he staggered back a step, snarling, circling instead of charging again. Ant.

His voice in Ant's head, tight, controlled in the particular way that meant holding it there was costing him. Talk to me. Now.

"I'm fine." And he was — that was the strange part, the part he didn't have room to think about properly yet. Whatever this was, wherever it had come from, it wasn't hurting him. The mana pressed in against every inch of exposed skin, dense enough that he should have felt smothered by it, and instead it just — prickled. A thousand small points of contact, gentle, almost curious, fingers running along his skin to take measurements.

"I'm fine, I don't know what this is, I can't—" The system cut him off before he could finish the sentence. New mechanics detected. System is upgrading to Level 2. Then the pain arrived, and it did not ask permission first. It started somewhere behind his sternum, a single point of pressure that bloomed outward in less than a second into a pain with no shape he could describe later, no matter how many times Maren asked him to try. Not burning. Not tearing.

Further in than either of those words reached — like the framework holding his insides in their proper order had been picked up and shaken, every piece of it coming loose at once and then, slower, agonizingly slower, being set back down somewhere new. His knees hit the stone floor before he decided to kneel.

"ANT." Maren's voice, close now, and he heard her stop herself before she touched the barrier — heard the sharp inward breath of someone who'd almost made a mistake her hands remembered a half-second before her head did. He couldn't answer her.

Whatever was happening inside him had taken the part of his brain that managed speech and set it aside along with everything else, and all that was left was holding still, and breathing, and waiting for the next wave to come through him — because they came in waves, he realized dimly, each one worse than the last for about four beats and then easing just enough to let him think he'd survived the worst of it, right before the next one proved him wrong. Mahkir. He didn't know if he said it out loud or not. Here.

Still circling, still snarling at a barrier that wouldn't let him close the last six feet between them. I'm here. I can feel it in you, whatever it's doing — I don't know how to stop it. Hold on.

"What's it DOING to him." Raven again, and under the panic in it, a coldness now, casting around for anything that would make the moment make sense.

"It's a rock, Maren, it's supposed to be worthless, nobody said anything about — was it cursed, is that what this is, some kind of trap left in the stone—""It's not cursed." Maren's voice had gone flat, clipped, the sound of someone forcing calm onto herself by main force because the alternative was useless.

"It's the gem itself. Has to be. Raven, get back, further, if this destabilizes I don't know what it—""I'm not LEAVING—""I said get BACK—" It lasted, by the measure Ant pieced together afterward from three different people's shaking accounts, close to a full minute. It did not feel like a minute. It felt like the kind of time that didn't move in a straight line at all, folding back on itself, each fresh spasm of pain resetting some internal clock he had no way to check against anything real. He stayed on his knees.

He didn't fall further than that, though there were points — three, maybe four — where he genuinely didn't know if he'd manage to stay upright through the next one. Then, the way a held breath finally lets go, it started to ease. The barrier around him thinned first — he watched it happen without understanding what he was looking at, the violet-white haze losing its density in slow uneven patches, like frost pulling back off glass under a hand's warmth. It didn't dissipate outward the way it had come.

It drew inward instead, retreating toward him, sinking down into his skin in the same spiral pattern it had climbed him with, until the last visible wisp of it vanished somewhere just above his collarbone and the chamber's ordinary cold air closed back in around him like nothing had happened at all. Mahkir reached him before the last of it was even fully gone, shoving his head hard against Ant's shoulder, solid and warm and real enough to undo the knot in Ant's chest he hadn't known was still braced.

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"I'm okay," Ant said. His voice came out wrong, thinner than it should have, but it worked.

"I'm okay. I think it's — I think it's done." Maren was on her knees in front of him a second later, hands hovering an inch off his shoulders like she still didn't fully trust that touching him wouldn't set it off again.

"Your eyes. Ant, look at me — they changed, just now, they—""What."

"I don't know. They're fine now. For a second they weren't." Raven hadn't moved from where she'd stopped, one hand still pressed flat against her own chest, breathing like she'd run the length of the chamber and back. Her osprey had come down low, wings beating hard and useless against a barrier that no longer existed, and now it just perched on a jut of stone nearby, feathers still raised.

The screen flashed behind his eyes before he could say anything else, stuttering once, twice, like a machine rebooting after a hard fall. System has successfully upgraded. System is now compatible with Magic use. Magic +10. Mana +100. New tab unlocked — Magic. New Skill unlocked — Concealment. Concealment, Level 1 — The user is able to conceal his presence from those around him, using magic to manipulate the light. Warning: may fail against high perception, high level, or high magic users.

Mana upkeep: 1 mana per second. He read it a second time, and it snagged on a memory that had nothing to do with the last minute. The last Wraithkin from the fight — the big one, the one that had only shown itself once the eight weaker ones were already dead. He'd assumed that was just how they worked. Formed late, arrived late, condensing out of whatever the weaker ones left behind.

But if a skill existed that let a creature manipulate light around itself well enough to fool eyes and Appraisal both, that wasn't the only explanation anymore. Maybe it hadn't formed late at all. Maybe it had been standing in that chamber the whole time, watching them clear its escort, and none of them had been able to see it do it. He didn't have an answer for it, not standing here with his knees still unsteady under him.

It could wait until he wasn't kneeling in a chamber that still smelled like the thing he was now suspecting had watched all eight of them die. Ant stayed on his knees a moment longer, not from weakness now but because he needed the extra second just to read it twice.

"Ant." Maren's hands had finally landed on his shoulders, gripping hard enough to hurt in a way that felt like the opposite of a problem.

"Talk to me. What happened." He looked up at her, at Mahkir pressed against his side, at Raven still not moving from six feet away like she wasn't entirely convinced this was over. Whatever answer he gave next, it needed to work for all three of them, and only one of those three could hear the rest of it later.

"I don't know yet." Not a lie. Just not the whole of it.

"Something in the gem reacted to — to something in me. I need a minute before I can say more than that." Maren's eyes narrowed, the particular look she got when she knew she was being handed an edited version of events and was choosing, for now, not to push on the seam.

"Later," she said. Not a question.

"Later," Ant agreed. Raven finally came a step closer, close enough now to see whatever was left on his face, and whatever she saw there didn't seem to satisfy her.

"That's it?

'Something reacted'? You went down like you'd been gutted, Ant, I thought—" She stopped herself short, didn't finish the sentence.

"Never mind. Can you stand?"

"Yeah." He wasn't entirely sure that was true yet, but Mahkir's shoulder was solid against his side, and that was enough to test it on. Raven's osprey settled lower, feathers finally smoothing down, and she went to check the tunnel mouth without another word — giving them space, maybe, or just needing her hands busy with anything that wasn't standing still and watching a man she barely understood come apart on the floor of a cave. Mahkir didn't wait for her to be out of earshot. That was stupid.

"Probably." Not probably. His head came around, ears flat, and there was an edge in it Ant didn't hear from him often — not anger, not quite, but close enough to share a border with it. You picked up a rock nobody trusts, that even the woman who studies this stuff for a living called worthless, and you fed it to a system neither of us understand, with Raven standing right there watching. You didn't ask me first. You didn't even look at Maren before you did it. You just — decided.

"I know." Do you. He pulled back a step, tail low, and Ant felt it through the bond, plain even without words — worry, still raw from watching him go down and not being able to reach him. You don't know what that thing is. Not what it does, not where it came from, not what it might have wanted from you instead of what it gave you. And you handed yourself to it anyway. Ant sat with that a moment, letting the ringing in his skull settle enough to trust what came out of his mouth next.

"The system came with you," he said.

"Since the bond. It's not mine — not just mine. Whatever it is, it's part of both of us, same as everything else that's happened since the wasteland." He reached up, and Mahkir let him, forehead against the ridge of his skull, ash and smoke still caught in his fur.

"I don't know what it is. I don't know how it got here, or why I've got it and nobody else does, or what it's going to want from me five years from now. None of that." His eyes stayed shut a second longer than the sentence needed.

"But it's never once tried to hurt me. Not since the day it showed up. Whatever else it is — it's not built to do that. I believe that more than I believe almost anything else right now." That's not the same as knowing.

"No. It's not." He opened his eyes.

"It's what I've got, though." Mahkir held the look a long moment, calculating behind it in a way Ant couldn't fully read even through the bond — not every thought crossed clean, not even between them. Then, slowly, the tension went out of his shoulders, and he huffed out a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. You're going to get both of us killed being right about something you can't prove.

"Probably," Ant said again, and this time Mahkir let it go. Ant pushed himself up, one hand braced against Mahkir's shoulder until he trusted his legs to hold the rest of it on their own. They did, mostly. His head still felt loose in a way he didn't like, like a rattle trapped in a box a size too big for it. The screen was still up, waiting on him the way it always did once summoned, patient in that flat inhuman way that had never once struck him as strange until right now. Three tabs, same as they'd always been.

User. Kithren. Equipment. He opened User first, and Stats sat where Stats had always sat. Str: 25. End: 28. Magic: 15. Agi: 32. HP: 70/70. Mana: 50/150. He stared at the Magic line longest. Fifteen, where five had sat unmoved through every level since the vortex that first put a number there at all. Ten added, clean, with nothing that looked like it belonged to gear or training — nothing he'd earned the way he understood earning things. Just given.

Mana had jumped harder still, the total climbing from fifty to a hundred and fifty even though the number in front of the slash still read fifty, empty of the new capacity entirely, like a room built onto the house before anyone had moved furniture into it. He backed out and checked Skills next. Appraisal sat there, unchanged. Emotional Control beneath it, unchanged. Nothing new added to the list. Then, below Skills, where nothing had ever sat before, a third heading now. Magic. He opened it.

Concealment sat there alone, exactly as it had read the first time it flashed in front of him — a whole new section, sitting under a tab that had never had a third heading before now. He didn't need to read the description again to feel the weight of it. A skill category that hadn't existed an hour ago, with his name on it now.

He backed further out and opened the Kithren tab, mostly out of habit, half expecting a corresponding shift on Mahkir's side too — since whatever had just happened had come from a bond-native system that was never entirely just his. Stats sat where they'd sat since the fight, level six, nothing moved. Skills, unchanged — Flame Breath, Enhanced Vision, Attribute Sharing, the fourth slot still marked with a question mark that had outlasted every other unresolved thing in his life.

Traits, unchanged, the same two-or-more-enemies line sitting alone in its box the way it had since Mahkir had reached level 3. Equipment came up last — just the slots, laid out the way they always were, weapon and armor and boots and ring and everything Hazel had fitted him with, each one occupied by exactly what had occupied it that morning. Nothing new. Nothing touched. Whatever had just happened, it had happened to him. Not to the bond. Not to Mahkir. Just him.

"We've been down here too long," he said, and his voice came out steadier than he felt, which was something.

"Raven already called it — somebody beat us to this place. Nothing left to find. Let's head back."