012 - New Gihn III: Escape
“-Ive had to reconstruct their River Step with my own formulas, loathe as I am to part with my work. What's more frustrating is that their tasteless poems and ridiculous notions of 'oneness with the flow' and 'being of the River' are bleeding through and taking over the spell, enough that I, who rebuilt their quaint little magic from first principles, have become unable to cast it. This is why I detest primitives.”
-Personal journal of the rogue mage Inneol
The tunnels beneath the fortress were a labyrinth of red stone, whose winding tunnels were oppressively silent. Ai flew through the stone corridors of the New Gihn stronghold, hovering as close to dead center of the tunnel in order to stay off of the ground and maintain speed and silence.
This wasn't a natural cave system, nor was it a recent excavation by the bandits. The walls were almost fluid, almost appearing as though they were shaped by running water, but clearly being influenced by human builders in their construction. The walls were worn smooth by human hands over centuries, perhaps millennia of use, beautiful reddish patterns in the stone blending into each other as though they were a river.
Faint lines of defunct spellscript were etched into the ceiling, still visible after all these years despite having the magic behind them having unwoven over the eons. Ai slowed for a fraction of a second to run her hand along the wall. The stone seemed to hum against her palm.
[Sun]-[Perpetuity]-[Humanity]-[Sanctuary]-[Gihn].
It was a Ve’un. But not the bureaucratic and rigid weave that Benessel used, and certainly not the Dirge standard. This ward was ancient, almost like the sort of magic she would have encountered while dungeon-diving back in the day. Any new information to add to the Dirge community wiki, especially if it had to do with magic, and especially if it seemed to predate the timeline of the game.
"Three thousand years old, maybe?" Ai muttered.
The Gihn people hadn't just found these caves. These tunnels had been prepared especially for them, or at least their ancestors, thousands of years ago. This was a shelter against the Veh, from a time when the Varran tribes of old were still fighting over scraps in the sand.
Aru growled low in his throat, his claws digging into the fabric of her cloak. Ai felt it too. Ahead, the air grew thick with the metaphysical stench of an active Brand. They moved on. Left at the fork. Down a spiral ramp that seemed to have been sung out of the rock rather than carved. Right through a narrow fissure.
The signature of the [Brand] grew stronger until finally, Ai burst through a final archway and into a wide, circular chamber.
The room was dominated by a pillar of carved rock in the center, around which the rest of the cave had been hollowed out. Chains of rusted metal had been driven directly into the stone, and hanging from them, slumped and broken, was a man in a tattered Varran uniform.
That had to be Captain Iorec.
Standing over him was a tall figure, gaunt to the point of emaciation. His skin was pulled tight over his skull, and his eyes burned with a predatory intensity. His Brand was Burned onto the back of his right hand, still soaking up his followers’ existences to fuel his own.
And that had to be Inneol. He had a hand on Iorec’s forehead, splayed around his skull like a spider trapping prey.
"Enough," Ai’s voice was a thunderclap in the enclosed space. "Step away from him."
Inneol’s eyes flicked to the ceiling, then back to her. A sneer twisted his lips.
"What useless brats," he spat. "But you’re too late, Varran. I’ve gotten the intelligence I wanted. I’ll let you choose. It’s either me or him.”
He slammed his hands together.
[Faultline]-[Fracture]-[Propagation].
To Ai’s senses, Inneol’s Semblance felt cold and cynical. She felt its pull on reality before the first pebble could even fall. He was going to bring the entire cave system down.
"[Collapsing Mountain]!" Inneol yelled.
He turned and bolted, blurring into motion in a jarring, friction-less burst that was nothing like the [Canyon River Step] that Povi and the other Gihns used, shooting toward a tunnel on the far side of the chamber.
Above them, the ceiling groaned. Ancient Gihn spellscript flared and died as Inneol’s spell shattered the structural integrity of the stone the spells were etched into. Huge slabs of rock began to detach from the roof, cracking and booming as they started to fall.
"Leave me!" Iorec croaked.
Ai looked at the captain. He was conscious, but barely. His face was a drab gray, drained of color and life. He hung from the chains by his wrists, feet dangling off the floor.
"Don’t bother saving me," Iorec wheezed, "Go! Catch him!"
A Dirge for the Sun loved to throw curveballs like this at the end of its questlines, to force its players to make meaningful, often impossible choices for the sake of developing their characters’ stories.
Save the NPC or defeat the villain? Ai hated binary choices.
"Be quiet please," she muttered, "I'm doing both."
She surged forward, weaving a dome of [Force] over her head with her left hand as she reached for Iorec with her right. His chains were thick enough to resist physical tampering and magically resilient enough to deter all but the most skilled mages. Given time, she could unlock it, but there wasn’t any.
Time. It always came down to time.
Ai growled in frustration, then grabbed the cuffs binding Iorec’s wrists. She’d force her way through. No fancy spellwork. No weaving. Just the barbaric application of overwhelming metaphysical presence.
The world groaned under her Semblance.
The cuffs shattered explosively. Shards of metal bit into Iorec’s wrists, and he cried out in pain as he dropped. Ai caught him before he hit the floor. He was heavy, dead weight in her arms, but Ai had min-maxed her carry weight for loot runs years ago.
[Strength]-[Reinforcement]-[Counter-Force].
She wasn’t much stronger—low stats didn’t allow Strength buffs to scale that well—but the concept of lifting became trivial regardless. She hoisted Inneol over her shoulder as if he were a sack of feathers.
"Hold on," she ordered.
"You're insane!" Iorec screamed over the roar of falling stone. "The whole cave system is coming down!"
"I know."
Ai turned her eyes to the tunnel Inneol had fled down. She had to be faster than the spell as it propagated through the stone. She engaged her flight spell, but this time, the world would acquiesce to her demand for [Velocity].
She launched herself into the tunnel and the world blurred into streaks of red stone.
Behind her, the chamber she had just left ceased to exist, crushed under thousands of tons of rock. An explosive shockwave of air pushed her forward, dust and wind buffeting her, Aru, and Iorec as she flew.
Ai sped through the collapsing tunnel, dodging falling stalactites with millimeter precision.
Left. Dip. Bank right. Throttle up.
Iorec was screaming something unintelligible into her back, but she tuned him out to focus on the terrain. There was a pinprick of light ahead, quickly becoming larger and larger—the exit!
But Inneol’s spell was propagating faster than she could move through these tunnels, not without causing harm to Iorec and Aru. The roof directly in front of her began to buckle, a massive slab of stone tilting down to seal the way shut.
"Oh no you don't!" Ai gritted her teeth, extending her free hand forward to blast through the rock with a crude application of [Force]. Her Semblance pressed the single semiotic link into reality with all the force of a battering ram. She shaped the kinetic barrier by forcing reality to accede to her demands, forming a pointed nose-cone of force around herself and her charges. They’d punch through or die trying.
Ai accelerated even faster, pushing every spare bit of effort into generating speed—until they hit the falling rock slab at the speed of a bullet train.
BOOM.
They punched through the rock, exploding out of the side of the cliff face in a shower of dust and debris.
Ai spun in the air, killing her momentum with a counter-thrust of kinetic energy. Her stomach lurched sickeningly, as she hadn’t bothered to prepare a weave to counter the symptoms of motion sickness to compensate, but that She drifted down to a rocky shelf jutting out from the canyon wall, bathed in the blinding light of the midday sun.
She landed, her knees bending slightly to absorb the impact, and gently deposited Captain Iorec onto the ground. He scrambled away on hands and knees, retching in a panic as he nearly collapsed on returning to solid ground. He was hyperventilating, his mind barely processing the roller coaster ride of mortal peril that he had just experienced.
"Stay here," Ai said, her chest heaving slightly as she caught her breath as well. "Breathe. You're safe."
"Safe?" Iorec choked out, staring at the cloud of dust billowing from the collapsed tunnel mouth. "You... we... the tunnels..."
"I told you," Ai said, straightening up and adjusting her braid. "I did both."
She walked to the edge of the cliff face.
Inneol was falling along the canyon wall, allowing gravity to claim him, falling backward into the open air of the canyon basin below. He was a shrinking speck against the rust-red backdrop of the canyon floor and plummeting fast, far faster than terminal velocity should allow for a human body without magical intervention.
Ai narrowed her eyes, reading the intent radiating from him. There was a sudden, violent rejection of downward momentum as he transitioned from a vertical fall to a horizontal sprint, his movement a jagged line drawn over the ground.
Did he really think he was going to get away?
"Aru." she said. The lizard-dog popped his head out of her cloak, appearing slightly shaken but panting eagerly.
"I’m actually annoyed now. Let’s hunt that guy down."
Ai stepped off of the ledge as Aru barked his agreement. It was time to finish this chase.