013 - New Gihn IV: Inneol
“—I was watching the Karravar [kava] VOD to catch up on this week’s Titanomachy content and I need to put this somewhere or I'm going to lose my mind. Olympos [godz] had [Ayle] bracketed. Two heavies running OHKO [Obliteration] builds. We're talking the highest single-hit damage in the meta rn, and these guys figured out a way to spam them. [Ayle] just shrugs it all off like nothing ever happened! afaik she runs a high-INT glass cannon build. I've watched it back eleven times and I still have NO idea what she did, anyone got any theories?”
-Posted on discussion board /dirge/recap/ in thread “just watched [Ayle] vs [herc_u_deez_nuts]+[gordian], wtf???”, July 4, 2124
Ai stepped off of the ledge.
She didn’t need a complete spell just to control her fall. She just let the [Flight] weave she was already maintaining slacken, allowing her to gently drift downward. The air rushed past her, warm and dry, carrying the scent of ozone and rusty tang of the region’s red sand. In her hood, Aru gave a small yip, his claws digging gently into her shoulders for stability.
As she descended, she kept her senses locked on the mage below. Inneol hit the ground with barely a puff of sand. He redirected the kinetic force of the impact, instantly launching off of the ground. He treated the canyon floor less as a surface to land on and more a surface to ricochet off of.
He was fast. Blindingly so. But something about his movement bothered Ai.
She frowned as she accelerated her descent, swooping down to intercept him. She had watched Povi use [Canyon River Step] the other day. Despite the boy’s clumsy execution, that spell was fluid and elegant, a poem written in the language of the landscape, nurtured and carved into reality over generations.
[I/Blood-of-the-Gihn] am/are the [River] of the [Canyon]. The [Stone] yields to the [River]. Therefore, the [Stone] yields to [I/Gihn].
It was a spell born of cultural memory, tying the concept of the [Gihn] people to the [River] that so exemplified their home. The caster believed they were part of the landscape's history, and the landscape recognized them in turn.
Inneol moved across the canyon with little regard for the [River]. He burst forward in straight lines, stopped on a dime, pivoted forty-five degrees, and burst away again.
It was clear he wasn’t using [Canyon River Step]. His spell was much more algebraic, systematic, formulaic in its construction. It was two simpler chains recursively concatenated into one: [Vector-Control], chained to [Friction-Nullification]. In a way, it was similar to her own sand-skimming weave.
But unlike both her spell and [Canyon River Step], he had tried his level best to strip the spell of its cultural signifiers—the reverence, the flow, the history—and left only the raw, brutal syntax of motion. He wasn't flowing with the terrain. He was calculating the optimal vector to traverse it and forcing his body—and reality— to comply.
It was a well-designed spell. Scientific, even. But it offended her on a deep level.
Ai landed twenty meters ahead of Inneol, her sandals touching the sandstone with a soft tap. He skidded to a halt, heels carving deep grooves into the rock as he dumped his excess momentum into the ground.
He was a tall man, gaunt, with the same fanatic gleam in his eyes that she’d seen in the other bandits. But where Povi’s eyes had been filled with desperate belief, Inneol’s were cold. Detached. The brand on his hand—that charred smudge on his soul—pulsed with a bitter heat.
“You’re persistent,” Inneol spat, his voice rasping. “And you’re skilled—I’ve never seen a karra fly like you do. Who are you?”
“Ayle,” she slipped into her role, letting [Ayle of Berenna] come to the forefront. She straightened her posture, letting her cloak settle around her. “And I’m just a passing mage who’s quite cross with you.”
“Arrogant, to claim that name,” Inneol sneered. He raised a hand, his fingers twitching in a rapid, complex pattern. “This isn’t where my journey ends. Die, Ayle.”
The air between them shimmered.
Ai felt Inneol’s weave forming as his Semblance pressed it onto reality. It was less a poem and more an equation. The man was grabbing the concept of [Atmosphere] and forcing it into the role of fuel.
[Air]-[Ignition]. [Atmosphere]-[Containment]. [Remote]-[Activation].
It was a localized thermobaric explosion, set to go off right in front of her face. He was ionizing the air, compressing the oxygen molecules into a dense pocket right in front of her face, and introducing a thermal trigger.
Ai was feeling spiteful.
She reached out with her mind and touched the chain of Inneol’s spell-logic. He was defining the space around her as a makeshift combustion chamber, but a chamber implied containment. It implied walls. But they were outside, under the great expanse that was the open sky.
She whispered a single conceptual correction into the weave.
[Limitless-Sky].
The concept of [Containment] that the spell relied on to generate pressure fizzled out.
A spark flared as reality began to respond to Inneol’s Semblance, but washed away harmlessly. Without a pressure vessel, the explosion had become just a puff of warm air. The violent reaction Inneol had demanded simply failed to find purchase in a reality that Ai had reminded was limitless.
Inneol’s eyes widened.
“You’re skilled, I’ll give you that,” Ai critiqued, “But your spellcraft is uninspiring. If you need to rely on the physical presence of oxygen, you should at least secure the metaphysical right to contain it.”
Inneol growled, and stomped his foot to activate his next spell, his Semblance swelling in response. The ground rumbled.
“[Devouring Pitfall]!”
The sandstone beneath Ai’s feet turned to quicksand instantly, eager to swallow her whole. This particular spell was seemingly based on a clone of one of her favorite desert biome disablers, but Inneol’s spell was again, uninspiring. At the base of his chain was the semiotic link: [Stone] is [Devouring-Sand].
She countered it. [Stone] is [Memory]. [Memory] is [Timeless-Past].
Her Semblance made it so.
The quickstand stopped moving as individual grains of sand remembered being solid—and went back to how they used to be.
“Unimaginative. And you call yourself a mage?” Ai mocked Inneol.
Inneol gritted his teeth, a vein pulsing in his forehead. He clapped his hands to create a loud burst of noise. The air screamed in response. [Sound] [Propagates] and [Vibrates]. [Vibration] is [Heat]. [Body] is [Water].
[Sound]-[Boil]-[Body].
A torrential wave of noise buffeted Ai. He was trying to vibrate the water in her cells until she boiled from the inside out. Ai raised a single finger. She caught the logic of his spell—the reliance on a medium to travel. Sound needs air. Sound needs connection. She introduced a concept that severed that connection.
[Silent-Vacuum].
The roar of the spell immediately cut off. It collapsed in on itself, turning into a mild breeze that ruffled Aru’s fur where he peeked out from her hood. Aru yawned, unimpressed. Inneol staggered back, his chest heaving. He looked at his hands, then at Ai, a dawning horror in his eyes.
Good.
“Why don’t you use the [River]?” Ai asked, taking a step forward.
Inneol blinked, the question catching him off guard. “What?”
“Your movement spell,” Ai clarified, gesturing vaguely at the canyon behind him. “Your men—Povi, the others. They used [Canyon River Step]. It’s a beautiful weave. It relies on the semiotic link between the Gihn people and the erosion patterns of the valley. It taps into a historical narrative where the user belongs to the flow of the river.. But your spell is completely different.”
She tilted her head, her golden eyes boring into him.
“You taught those kids the Step, didn’t you? I can see the syntactic similarities. So I’m curious. Why?”
Inneol straightened, his expression hardening into a mask of arrogant superiority.
“The [River] is a superstition,” he sneered, brushing dust from his robes. “A metaphorical crutch for simpler minds. Povi and the others needed a fairy tale, but I have no need for such primitive delusions. Magic is the application of eminent will on crude matter, not fancy.”
Ai paused. Primitive delusions.
“Yeah, you’re definitely not Gihn,” she muttered.
“I was Gihn’s liberation!” Inneol shouted, his composure cracking. “I gave them the tools to reclaim their land from the Republic! I took their precious culture and refined it into a weapon! I gave them the power they needed to resist their oppressors! They failed to repel the Varrans, not I!”
“You didn’t understand the [River]. You just sold them pretty lies made from their stories,” Ai spoke softly, “You gave them nothing they didn’t already have, and you tried to take everything from them.”
She looked at him, really looked at him. His magic was brittle. Logical, powerful, but without true meaning. Ai’s fury turned to pity.
He would have been an A-Rank player if this were Dirge of the Sun, perhaps even broken into S-Rank depending on the state of the meta. But his magic was entirely academic, without soul or feeling. It lacked the conviction of self and of legacy that so characterized the magic of this world.
He could’ve been more.
Ai felt a headache coming on. If the man who had provided the New Gihn revolutionaries with their Burned Brands wasn’t one of them, that suggested a backer. A conspiracy. If the Brands’ forced their victims to tithe their existence to the one who bestowed them their Brand, then it was reasonable to assume that Inneol too, was tithing to someone else.
Frankly, this was beginning to look like one of the game’s narrative quest lines.
She sighed.
During her Dirge career, Ai had taught an entire generation of players that the lore mattered. That roleplay was the central mechanic of the game. This man lived in the world of the game, but seemed utterly unaware of the very truth of his world, caught up in a very literal magical Ponzi scheme.
“I know what you are now. The role you play,” Ai said, “You’re no revolutionary. You’ve only convinced the Gihn that you are. You’re really just a cheap con-man stuck between your victims and whoever’s holding your leash.”
Inneol’s face twisted into something ugly.
“You know nothing!” he screamed. “I have unlocked secrets the Karravar are too afraid to pursue! I have seen power, true power, earned as we tend to [The Flame] with our [Souls] as [Kindling]!”
The brand on Inneol’s hand ignited with a ravenous fervor.
Inneol slammed his palms onto the canyon floor to activate his spell. He was burning his own life force, feeding that parasitic brand on his hand to pay the spell’s immense metaphysical cost—because he lacked the Semblance to persuade the world to do so, to bend it to his will.
Inneol reached deep into the earth, tapping into the geological stress lines of the canyon. He was turning the entire basin into an anvil, casting himself as the drop hammer. His downward movement would be the trigger for the spell.
The canyon walls groaned. Massive cracks spiderwebbed across the red stone. The air grew heavy, the atmospheric pressure spiking until Ai’s ears rang.
[Siege-Breaker]-[Kinetic-Impartment]-[Amplify]-[Wall-Shatterer]-[Subject-Acceleration]-[Self-Subject]-[Gravity]-[Warhammer].
“[Earth Shattering Warhammer]!” Inneol leapt into the air and shrieked, blood leaking from his nose.
The canyon walls rose up as a tidal wave of solid matter, closing in from all sides. Simultaneously, the gravity in the center of the basin—right where Ai stood—amplified tenfold.
If there ever was a finishing move like from the old manga and anime of the 21st Century, this was certainly one of them.
Ai’s knees buckled slightly under the sudden weight. Aru let out a whimper from somewhere in her hood.
The spell was certainly impressive. Complex. With eight compound links in the spell’s chain, countering it would take time she didn’t have. And she wasn’t inclined to brute force it either, as the collateral damage would be considerable without finesse.
It would probably end up hurting Aru. That being the case, she would lie to the universe.
Ai took a deep breath. The air was thick. Heavy. A massive torrent of stone careened towards her.
She closed her eyes and reached for her signature technique.
She had developed it during the early days of the Titanomachy, a spellweaving technique she had created when she realized that, from a certain point of view, [Cause] and [Effect] could be one and the same. To this day, nobody, not even her Karravar [kava], could replicate its use.
It wasn't for a lack of trying. That was how useful the technique was, and just how outside the norm her thought process was, at least if one were to believe her enemies. Anyone could learn the skill, if they could replicate the mindset. Personally, Ai believed it was a matter of insufficient Intelligence and Semblance.
[Paradox Loop] weaponized the inversion of narrative causality. The principle of the Law of Costs demanded payment for every magical effect. Usually, that payment was upfront—stamina, materials, time. But Ai had found a loophole.
She focused on the future—a hypothetical future, where Inneol’s spell had failed. Where the kinetic energy had remained potential, rendering the spell harmless. She reached out with her mind and grabbed that future. She mentally pulled it backward, overlaying it onto the present.
[Paradox Loop] would allow a spell’s current past to be paid for by its own future result. Inneol’s finishing move would fail—already had failed—because its future [Effect] had been superimposed onto its past [Cause].
As Ai formed her sigil, her Semblance pressed her will into the canvas of reality.
The sensation hit her instantly. A violent lurch of cognitive dissonance, as if her brain had been taken out of her skull, turned upside down, and shoved back in sideways. The world spun in directions that didn't exist. Frigid vertigo washed over her, freezing her marrow even as the desert sun beat down.
And then the taste. Her mouth was filled with the overwhelming taste of the color purple. Purple. It was metallic, fuzzy, and somehow, nauseatingly sweet.
Inneol’s spell collapsed under the weight of its own non-existence. The tidal wave of stone crumbled into harmless dust.
Ai gagged, swallowing her nausea. Inneol, on the other hand, stood frozen, still crouched on the ground where he landed from his leap, his face a mask of absolute incomprehension. The man began to tremble. The backlash would’ve been worse for him. Much worse. His mind futilely tried to reconcile his massive expenditure of energy with its paradoxical result.
“I guess," Ai couldn't help but quip, "I know more about magic than you.”
Inneol collapsed in response, foaming at the mouth in an impotent retort. Ai held back a queasy burp, before reaching up to scratch Aru behind the ears.
“...I wonder how everyone else is doing?" She mused.
Aru huffed. Ai scratched his fur. She kicked the insensate Inneol in the side for good measure.
"You're right. I'm sure they're doing just fine.”