Chapter 20 - Blood and Powder

  "Flip a coin a thirty-five times. If it lands on heads every time, you too could be The First Emperor."

  - A common sentiment among The First Emperor's detractors.

  Ira watched from the side as Samir worked on Solis.

  “Unfortunately,” Solis began, all teeth and blood. “I still have a spear sticking out of my shoulder.”

  “I can see that,” Samir said, studying the young man's wounds.

  “Really? Cause last I checked it's still in there?” Solis tried to laugh, but only managed a hissing growl. “God, these things suck.”

  “I’m going to tell you what I’m going to do and then I’m going to do it. I can’t use my class to heal you with since the spear is still lodged in. It’d just heal over the spear keeping it further wedged in place. So, I’m going to have to pull it out and then heal you.” Samir took off his shirt and balled it, handing it to Solis. “It’s not great but you need something in your mouth so you don’t bite your tongue.”

  Solis didn’t argue, just groaning and biting down on it.

  “Okay. One, two—”

  Samir pulled early, and Solis let out a louder, more pained groan before falling to the ground.

  Then, placing a hand on the wound and rinsing it with water, the wound slowly began to mend. He broke off part of his attention to look at her and Dimitri. “I do not have enough mana to stitch the wounds in a single sitting. We will be here for a while yet, I think. I have enough for [Stabalize] for the inbetween.”

  Solis let out another weak groan, pawing the shirt out of his jaw. “Ambient. Mana.” He managed to hoarsely say.

  “What?”

  “Dome. Air tight. Ejected mana. Still more with [Circulation]. Give it… an … three hours.”

  Ira frowned and partially activated one of her [Skills], gaining a vague sense of [Energy] and [Mana] in that half-state between activation and triggering. The mana seemed different somehow, but she couldn’t describe how or if it was just her own mind. Samir, though, just pursed his lips into a scowl.

  “You think the corruption will be gone by then?”

  Solis nodded, some amount of color coming back to his face.

  Through a sigh, Samir accepted whatever Solis had just said. “Fine, I’ll do what I can in the meantime. This is an emergency. Be careful and don’t move much. I’ll be keeping an eye on your corruption levels in the meantime.”

  “I know. My. Limits.” Solis rasped out

  “I hope you do.”

  Three hours later, all the corruption inside the dome had been purged completely, leaving only raw ambient mana. With that, Samir had the entire supply to use as he saw fit, as did everyone else. There was enough to go around that everyone could comfortably refill their mana reserves and have [Translate] constantly active.

  An hour after that, Solis’s shoulder was mostly mended, but it still hung weakly at his side, and a large pink patch that looked like a starfish had exploded and then embedded itself where the spear used to lie.

  Most strange of all, however, was that the young man was already up and about, pacing back and forth – itching to keep moving forward.

  “Solis,” Samir tried to say, but Solis just kept talking, bulldozing through.

  “We can break the original dome and start picking off crickets. Same dome strategy as before. We don’t even need to do that actually. I can just make more and more domes and each one I can turn into one like this full of ambient regenerating mana and then—”

  “Solis.” Samir tried again, voice sterner.”

  “We’ll follow the wall until we find a crack and hold up there. Hopefully find some people to help and—”

  “SOLIS,” Samir shouted, his hands and teeth clamped dangerously tight. This time, the young man said nothing, turning to face Samir.

  “Yes, we do that first part, but you need to slow down. We got into this situation by rushing, so let’s slow down and take a second.”

  ‘No,’ Solis thought, automatically denying Samir’s words. He couldn’t slow down. Not now. Not ever. This was already too slow. Every second felt like a waste, but arguing right now would get him nothing and waste even more time, so he just nodded.

  He looked over to Ana and Hans, the worry on their faces plain to see as they held tightly onto Ira’s hands.

  Solis took a breath and let his manic energy fade, or at least he tried to. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get it to dissipate. He felt on top of the world right now. Like he could do anything. He couldn’t get rid of that energy, but he could fake it. One last deep breath.

  “I’m alright, Samir. Truly. My arm hurts like hell and that was dangerous. Far more dangerous than it should have been, but no one besides me lost more than half their [Shielding], and the truth is we can’t stay here. We’re surrounded by monsters and we will run out of oxygen eventually. We just got out of a fight. There’s no time to slow down and process.”

  “I don’t like it, but Solis is right,” Dimitri said. “If we stall now it’ll be harder to get moving again. Going forward I’ll cover all of us in my [Skill]. It takes more mana, but it seems like we have that in abundance now.”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  The Russian man grimaced as he spoke, not looking Solis or his wife in the eyes.

  Ira, for her part, nodded, albeit reluctantly. “We came out here to look for people and help them. Fights were inevitable. The bugs use strategy, we know that now.”

  Everyone turned to look at Solis, whose dome they were stuck in.

  The question on all of their minds was obvious.

  ‘How?’

  The first thing Solis did was something he should’ve done before they left, but his habit of keeping Enhancement Points in reserve had really screwed him over this time. Selecting the last [Skill] he needed for his class, Solis studied the text.

  The skill mold for [Domain] was different from the rest, more similar to [Mana Manipulation] in the way it seemed to try to find a pathway in his brain that didn’t exist, and got frustrated after not finding it. Eventually, the skill settled, and everything clicked.

  The domain was small, just in a space immediately around him and inside his body, but he felt the mana far more clearly, and when he moved it, the sensation was that of moving a new limb that he had no prior understanding of. He could shape his [Domain] with just his mind, but found that the skill only responded reliably when paired with hand or body movement.

  He snapped out of his fascination with the skill and returned to the present. It would help him with [Circulation], but that was about it for now.

  Solis got to work. First, he organized everyone in a row and created a tunnel around them, then he shoved as much mana as he could into the tunnel before cutting it off from the rest of the dome. One wall closed off the tunnel from behind, and another wall cut it in half, with the majority of the mana being in the cut-off portion for storage, then he motioned for Ira to take the front.

  “I’m cut off from making anything outside until there’s a path. You break the dome and then I’ll quickly make a wall with some holes so I can build forward in sections. I make the next leg of the path, fill in those holes to make it mana tight then we release the mana stored in the back to eat away at the new corruption until it’s mostly gone. Rinse and repeat. It’ll be slower than before, but faster than making dome after dome.”

  Solis drew out the diagram on the floor.

  Ira shook her head and sighed a tired sigh. “All this magic is going over my head Solis. Just… this is safe right? Not crazy magic safe, but actually thought through safe.”

  Solis gave the woman a small smile, “As safe as I can make it. If anything goes wrong I’ll have mana in reserve, and there’s enough Dimitri can keep his protection skill running the entire time. Slower, but safer.”

  Nodding, Ira moved up, “Just tell me where to punch.”

  The five of them made their way through the ever-expanding tunnel. It wasn’t always perfect; sometimes a cricket wouldn’t leave its path, and so Solis trapped them inside, which forced Ira to deal with them. She could handle one fine enough, but when there had been no choice but to trap five in the next section, the situation got trickier.

  That particular problem had been solved with working the monsters into stone straightjackets, but it took more time.

  Sometimes the tunnels had to be wider, sometimes they were a tight squeeze for everyone. At one point, the jungle floor had rumbled, causing a section behind them to break, sucking out much of the growing reserve of mana. That was dealt with by adding another wall.

  Solis kept working after everyone had stopped to sleep, pushing forward several sections at a time. Every change in watch shift the group moved back up to meet him before bedding down to sleep once more.

  Eventually, Dimitri gave up on sleep and joined Solis as he built.

  The forest was dark, the light bulbs having dimmed so only the barest outline of the canopy and undergrowth could be seen.

  In the distance, crickets chirped.

  “Ira said you’d talk to me about something, a few days back, but you never did.”

  Solis tensed. He had forgotten about that. He had hoped Ira had forgotten about that, too.

  “I don’t really want to talk about it.” he admitted.

  “A man’s right.” Dimitri nodded in turn. “I’d like to make some observations if you’ll listen.”

  “Sure.”

  “You’ve almost died a few times before this. Before the System even. No one fights for their life like that unless they have, and then can joke about it right afterwards, but you aren’t a soldier either. Too young, and you don’t have our brand of discipline.”

  “Yeah.”

  “When’s the first time you killed someone?”

  A long pause as Solis’s uninjured hand froze in the air. He didn’t know what to say, or how to say it—

  Dimitri spoke first.

  “The first time I killed someone, I was twenty-two. I wanted to do my country proud, help those in need, and free them from injustice. I didn’t know much back then. Joined the military. Operated a drone. Saw some troops and pressed a button. Thought nothing of it. Joked about it with my mates. I didn’t think about it for another five years. Then one night I woke up screaming, top of my lungs. Couldn’t get it out of my head, just had the same nightmare over and over, which was crazy because by that time, I had killed a lot more people. Then I started thinking about it when I was awake. When I got out of the military, I started drinking bad, every day I’d come into work a little drunker than the day before. Hid it well enough. I worked as a bouncer back then. Big guy, ex-military. Was a good fit. The bar owner, real sketchy guy, saw and said he’d seen a lot of people like me. Drinking. Aimless. Said there was a job that I could really help with. Could get a little illegal, but nothing that carried prison time. Had nothing else going, so I agreed.

  "I was paid in cash and powder. He said it’d help me get my day going, or keep it going. ‘Little bump in the morning to get you out of bed never hurt no body.’ Told me on the job that a job was important sometimes, and I should use a bit to make sure I was up and aware.

  "Slowly, he started paying me more in powder than cash until eventually it was just a discount on the stuff.

  "The jobs got more dangerous. More violent, but I got a bigger discount. When my apartment threw me out, I was offered a place to stay and meals provided. Eventually, I was breaking bones, stomping heads on curbs. I shot someone and didn’t think about it. Left them in the alley. Still, don’t know if they died or not. Back then, I didn’t care, but I didn’t have nightmares, so I thought it was fine. It’s a long story from there, but eventually I got out. Got clean. Found God. Lost God. Found them again. Fixed my life, and the nightmares came back, but at that point I wanted the nightmares.”

  “Why?” Solis asked, not having taken his eyes off the man at all.

  “Because they let me know I still regretted my actions. That my soul wasn’t too far gone.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  It had nothing to do with him. His situation wasn’t even remotely the same.

  “Because sometimes it helps to talk and sometimes it helps to listen.”

  …

  Solis said nothing for a long moment, staring off into blank space. Finally, he spoke.

  “It started when I was twelve. After I escaped 'Father' with my sister.”