“Fight!” Geistig shouted.

I held back my body enhancement, preparing for a longer fight. Tishina manifested her shadow armor, and ran towards me. I spat out a mound of tar at her feet, which she jumped over using her shadow mouths as pole vaults. One of the mouths shot towards me, opening its jaws wide enough to surround my entire body. At the last moment, I released my body enhancement and hopped clockwise and backwards, out of her range. I pelted her with another blast of tar, which whipped out of the air. She continued chasing after me, just barely unable to keep up with my speed.

I continued pelting her with tar, building up a pool on the ground and on her whips as I rotated around her, making sure to keep the fight localized in one central areai. Eventually, the tar was spread enough that she couldn’t move properly without stepping in a pool of it, sticking to her legs and slowing her movement. She stumbled for a half step, and I used that moment to launch a spark at her.

A sphere of darkness was cast around her, completely blocking line of sight. Smoke rose out of it, but Tishina was still within.

A few seconds passed, and nothing happened. “Geistig?”

“Eyes on the fight.”

A chunk of burning earth suddenly launched out of the darkness at me. I lashed my tongue against it, turned in place, and went to throw it back at the angle it came. As I turned, the laughter started up again through the mind-bridge.

Tishina was hiding behind the rock, running in step with it, and I just turned my back on her.

I let go of the rock, and used the sudden change in momentum to hop back, but Tishina was too close to escape now. Her shadow mouths bit into my skin, picked me up, and smashed me back down to the ground.

I clawed at the shadows, but they turned ethereal as they made contact. Once again, she picked me up, and smashed me down, and I was powerless to resist, powerless to stop this elf from overpowering me. This sadistic, laughing el—

The voice does not control me. The voice does not control me. Tishina is a person, not just an elf. Tishina is not one of those who harmed me. The voice does not control me.

She smashed me down again, and my body enhancements faded.

“Tishina, that’s enough!” Geistig shouted, ending the match.

“But we were just getting started…” Tishina frowned.

---

I don’t know why, but I’m not quite ready to give up on the idea of the black sun tattoo. Geistig said it was dangerous, and assured me that it wasn’t relevant to the elven suns, but I’m just not convinced. There’s something pulling at me, telling me to keep going. It felt… Almost like the monster voice, but how can that be? I’m not in monster form. Well, technically Dryads are humanoid monsters, but that’s not the same.

Rather than spend hours or days searching through the archives on a random symbol, I paid the 20 mana crystal fine to ask IKE to procure a few books on the topic. I approached the sphere of purple mental energy, and entered a room that almost seemed imaginary. The walls shifted from purple to gray to white, constantly fluctuating shapes and solidity. One of the walls grew millions of eyes in a moment, and a voice echoed in my head.

“State Your Inquiry” It boomed.

“I have met an elf with a branded black sun on the back of his hand. I wish to know more about their organization.”

“Analyzing… 138 Results found matching the description of a ‘black sun’. 136 have been determined to be above your clearance level. Books titled: ‘Vorfahr’s grave’ and ‘Vorota’s dream of elven perfection’. Would you like the relevant information summarized?”

All but two books are out of my clearance level? And what does this organization have to do with Vorota, the creator of gates? Or Vorfahr’s grave, for that matter? Haven't they both been dead for millenia?

“I repeat. Would you like the relevant information retrieved?”

If it’s only one book, I can read through it without IKE’s help. I might as well ask a different question I’ve been meaning to ask. “No, change inquiry. Artificial powers in humanoids.”

“There will be an additional charge for changed inquiries of 500 gold. Will you proceed?”

“Yes.”

“Analyzing… 18,589 results found matching description of ‘artificial humanoid powers’. 7,124 have been determined to be above your clearance level. Would you like the relevant information summarized?”

That would be much more difficult to do on my own. “Yes.”

“Summarizing available information on artificial humanoid powers…

The proto-powereds, excluding Vorfahr who supposedly created them, are widely thought to have had their powers granted artificially.

Since the creation of the Orcish race, artificial powers have been a highly researched field of study, with no results deemed ‘morally acceptable’ by the Interplanetary Government. An inescapable trend has been found, wherein the sapience and sentience of an individual — monster or otherwise — is severely diminished the more their powers are tampered with. No known artificial monster species has been able to survive longer than one year with anything further than a statistical alignment change, even when mental capabilities being entirely removed was considered ‘morally acceptable’.

Orcs are a prime example of this trend. As a humanoid monster species artificially created by the dwarven collective, their powers were mostly limited to being statistically modified through altering ambient mana levels of different alignments. As a result, the majority of their species have had their cognitive abilities severely impared.

End summary. Please exit the terminal, or make a new inquiry.”

Even as a summary, that’s… A lot to process. Is it suggesting I have one year to live? Am I going to die? But it’s also suggesting that I shouldn’t even have the ability to think, if my powers really are artificial. There’s something else going on. Something IKE can’t tell me.

“State your next inquiry, or you will be ejected.”

“No additional inquiry required.” A doorway manifested on one of the walls, which I promptly left through.

Several hours later, I found and skimmed through the two books IKE had mentioned with my first inquiry. Apparently, there were some unconfirmed rumors of Vorfahr’s home planet inhabiting a system with a black sun. I say unconfirmed, mainly because the age of monsters took place shortly after Vorfahr died, making any information inherently unreliable due to the fact that there was essentially no place for large-scale society or information gathering to take place.

As for Vorota’s book, it was apparently among those that IKE had searched through for references to artificial powereds. Vorota seemed convinced that the answers to a better elven race lied in the creation of a new species, rather than ‘cleansing’ of the imperfect. Using references to the same black sun as listed in ‘Vorfahr’s grave’, Vorfahr attempted to create an intergalactic gate to learn from the Dwarven ancestors to learn from the creators of the proto-powereds. This led to the ‘Poteryannyymir incident’, where Poteryannymir, one of the elven colonies, was destroyed. Most of the elves who opposed the ‘great culling’ called Poteryannymir their home, thus leading to the political situation where their independent cities' culling practices continue to this day, unopposed.

The fact that Vorfahr and Vorota are related to both topics I looked up is odd, but considering how significant and unusual they are, it’s not entirely surprising. I highly doubt the black sun branding I saw was related to Vorfahr’s home planet, so for now, I’ll have to consider this a dead end. The artificial power thing also seems leadless. Maybe if I could get further clearance, I could continue looking, but I’m already going to be spreading myself thin with my subspace, school, training, etc.

With my research put on hold, I exchanged Rhannu’s book for another, portaled to my subspace, and spent the rest of the night drinking to forget.

By Vorfahr’s beard, I can’t even do that!