“What’s the meaning behind all this?” Eshya asks, sitting on the edge of a couch in our tower home. “I mean, why are we fighting these people?”

“Because we have to,” Vii answers her, pacing back and forth while watching me fight through her version of the Skill that preceded my ‘Eye’s of an Empire’ Skill. “It’s how everything works.”

“How does everything work?” Eshya asks. “I like fighting, the satisfaction of winning an important battle. I’d like to change things for the better through violence, the one thing that I’m good for, this doesn’t feel like we’re changing anything for the better.”

“Do you remember how we met?” Nel asks, curled up on a couch and sipping at a cup of tea. “That world of swirling chaos…”

“It doesn’t make sense… you went through that terrible experience, and you came out agreeing with Red?” She asks.

“Dissociation with the memories was a more harmful scar than we’d thought,” Nel whispers, “What do you remember from those times?”

“I remember all of it,” Eshya says. “We crashed on that world and were taken in by a rebel group. They were violent, incredibly violent, and we struggled to survive while learning how to fight for ourselves.”

“It wasn’t simply the rebels who were violent,” Nel corrects her. “The world itself was in violent competition for everything. We make food out of each other, and it is those best with violence who survive.”

Eshya nods slowly, shifting around awkwardly. Has she somehow returned to a point where she still valued the Unified States propaganda?

“Kyra is warring against others who would turn us into food. She is ensuring that our children have a home to grow up in, food on the table, and a peaceful corner of this world to grow up in.

“That is why we kill, it’s why we fight, and it’s what we struggle for. Isn’t that reason enough?”

Eshya nods slowly, pale-faced and taken aback as she seeks through her memories for something to explain the details that she’s forgotten. The memories stored away like books on a shelf, make it impossible to feel them the way that she should.

She’s the same, but not.

“We should be out there, too,” Vii says, looking through my eyes as I tear through a swarm of small beetles, each one only the size of my hand. They die together as I drain them of mana.

“We’re not strong enough,” Nel says. “It is only natural that we stay out of it. We’ll only distract her.”

“Then we get stronger,” Vii says, shivering. “I… I might have a way. No, I do have a way to get stronger. Strong enough that we won’t get sent back home when it gets dangerous.”

“How?” Nel asks, sitting up and facing Vii seriously.

“We just need time, right?” She asks, wearing such a silly grin that shines bright even with the thick nervous energy that floods her.

“Before that, can you tell me a little more about everything,” Eshya says, shivering. “I still feel like an alien, like everything I’m doing here is just an act.”

“Yep, yep.” Vii nods quickly, landing on the couch beside Eshya and pulling her back into the chair. “We’ll talk and do things together and all sorts of things, but right now, let’s talk about what we’ve been through. All the memories that aren’t sticking right.”

My own attention wanes as I refocus on the battles surrounding me. I dance through the swamp, slaughtering the beasts that wash in with the ocean waves and even as another titanic flood washes toward me, I stand still and welcome it.

Feeding mana into my skin, I press against the flood, but it’s barely enough to slow the water. Annihilation swirls to life from my sweat glands breaking up the magic that drives the tide, and from there it’s a simple matter of deflecting the claws and jaws snapping at me.

I dance, I swim, I fly, and I eat. Stealing eyes the whole while, clearing my vision more the longer the battle lasts.

Even with the marine swarm returning every few minutes, there are few monsters with talents that I can draw from. My nails can only steal the essence of magics that I can use, for now, that’s only fire and force since my annihilation needs no support from this adaption.

While I wait for such beasts to be washed ashore, I feast on their mana to fuel my continuing slaughter.

Why am I working so hard to gain energy just to spend it on collecting more energy? My upper limit on mana is still the same as when the battle began, but also not quite.

There are three stages of crystallisation and I’ve borrowed experience from Unity. I know just what it should look like, feel like, and how it should be weaved into my flesh. More than that, I know multiple means of compressing it.

The ordinary means of increasing the density of crystallisation from the first to the second stage requires holding onto my mana and compressing it in a process not unlike how I convert it in the first place. Usually, the process requires a concentrated effort of years to see any progress.

It’s not entirely unlike forming physical crystals, it takes intense pressure and lots of time. As a human of the modern era, I’m not satisfied with that process and would rather my diamonds come out of the oven a little bit faster.

In this case, there is a means of converting mana directly into a crystalised state. It’s meant to be used when a person has achieved the second stage already, but I see no reason I can’t do it now.

Even though I have (appropriated) experience I can only press a small fraction of my mana into the new second stage of crystallisation. The more complex formation is difficult to maintain while the mana spins around inside me.

The power locked inside the small seed of second-stage crystal feels at odds with the rest of me, a grain of sand grating at my heart. It grows slowly, pulling in more power. It takes little focus to get it growing now that it’s started, but it may still take some time to fully develop.

Finding nothing more to be gained from meditating on my mana form, I return my attention to the slaughter that I mindlessly commit on the bloody red swamplands of the new world.

I guide my hair to deflect a stabbing limb and slice it off with a hand and a spell. My repulsive skin adaption wards against a spray of either acid or poison and I summon a sharpened spear of force to pierce through its head.

It doesn’t stop the beast, but a follow-up does see it finished.

A thousand writhing limbs wrap around me and it’s too much for me to handle with my newer Skills. I burst through, enhancing my body with all my more practised Skills and magics, adding only a nudge of force magic to push me through.

I whip my hair about to cut down the limbs as they try to strike at my exposed back. Throwing aside the warring limbs, I tear at them to gather the juicy mana inside.

I burn mana faster than I ever have before while weaving through the mass of warring flesh. Occasionally I burn bright, spending most of my condensed power and clearing out a section of land with wide-reaching limbs of dark ash. The corpses that scatter over the earth become the one place of peace and calm in the whole raging storm that covers the coast.

I use the last of my stored spells to kill the scavengers that gather here foolishly thinking that it’s safe here. Spending and restoring the magic I store in my bones has helped me to learn how to organise their placement. It’s like storing things in a closet or building up a Tetris screen, it’s important to stack it away neatly.

The magic that is born from my ‘Annihilation Heart’ is the most efficient, utilising my talent boost to the highest possible degree. I still can’t store the stronger spells away, but I’ll have to consider that in further adaptions.

I occasionally burn through my blood, turning it into mana just to practice the process, though I never grow so desperate as to need the function during this conflict.

I throw myself into the air with a blast of force, looking for another hot zone that I can use to my advantage.

Landing at the foot of a massive, armoured crustacean, I move in powerful bursts and strike hard with my hands and fists. Most of my physical adaptions were used to enhance this fighting style that I developed with Eshya’s help.

My muscles are layered in pockets of space and given reaction times that shouldn’t be possible by ordinary physics, I can respond to an unseen attack before it’s even thrown my way because of my wide range of sight.

Breaking through the thick armour, I give myself space by repelling the bests flesh with my skin adaption while tearing it apart with targeted bolts of annihilation. It’s easy to make the magic spread out in a net when hitting the target, but targeting an organ, or piercing a shield, is difficult.

When it’s done there is another that comes right after. More meat on the table.

A mass of spikes flies toward me, I slow them down and deflect them using my repellent skin. It’s not powerful enough on its own but those that pierce through are deflected by mana shields in my hands and hair.

I breathe on instinct, but I hardly need it, with the mana that I’m drawing from this war I can feed my ‘mana drive’ adaption as long as I need. It fuels my body even while my lungs can’t work and keeps my body running even when my heart is unable to pump blood.

I’ve yet to break through in any new magics, but fire, force, and annihilation work well in concert to control the flow of violence around me. I tear through the battlefield making death out of life and drawing on the resources that are momentarily released from their deaths.

Like experience in a videogame, I grow stronger by killing things. The resources that they spent their lives gathering is released into the world, it’s like cracking open a treasure chest but a bit more bloody.

Why would the world be this way?

It’s pointless to ask.

What can I do to reshape this reality, and how?

Adler is already considering it, and I need to spend more time thinking it through.

Scavengers gather to follow me around as I tear the world apart, smarter creatures that hang at a distance and hide when I turn my weapons their direction. They feed on the corpses that I leave unfinished, leaches that grow from the death that I weave.

As I smash through the battlefield, I refine my ‘combat awareness’ Skill to the point where I can no longer gain anything from lessons stolen from the minds of others. There is still more I can do to alter it for my own ends, especially as I develop further.

I carve a path to a massive whale beached on the shore. Its warm body speaks of a talent that might feed my fire magics, and I see no reason to let it be given to the tree that stands over us.

I gather the dusted ash born of my annihilation, condensing it all into the shape of claws that hover around the back of my hands. I know that there is so much more I can do with this Skill, but it still feels too alien to form anything but a few transient shapes such as claws.

The ash is wrapped in my mana and magic, making it easy to carve through the whale all the way into its heart. I press my fist into the glowing organ, the heat burning my hands even as I guard against it. My nail, one to the left of the one that contains my force magic, absorbs the fire and condenses the concept into something inside. I steal the very talent from the beast to bastardise it for my own use.

“I can hardly tell you apart from the scraps carried on the waves,” the voice rings in my head, spoken through the endless space between the tree and I, though its puppet has wandered nearer.

“Is that so?” I ask, stepping out of the carcass and consuming all the mana I can, condensing it tighter and tighter inside. “Then you want to war with me?”

She is silent for a time, observing me closely with her whirling blue orbs. There are only a few reasons that I can fathom why she would come down to meet me here. She wants to kill me, conscript me, or she’s come to see me as a being worthy of respect.

“I do not want war. You do not seem to be lying about your propensity for extreme violence and recovery. I do not believe that you could kill me, but fighting you would cost me greatly for no great gain.

“There are ways in which we can come to an accord,” she says, and I can already feel the headache forming in the back of my head. “You wish to see this world under your thumb? Then you will find conflict with many others, powers greater than myself.”

“People that you want to see toppled?” I ask.

“We compete, but we do not fight,” she says. “If I respect your people and their claims of sovereignty, then I would direct you toward those whose downfall would benefit us both.”

I don’t need to ask any questions to know what she gains from this association. Roots are already prying out of the earth around me, crushing the scattered remains and turning them to fuel for the massive tree.

I cannot consume, or use, all that I kill.

“I have an empire to feed,” I say. “I don’t usually leave behind so much slop.”

Still, for today, such an alliance wouldn’t be terrible.

“This is just a small taste of what this world has to offer,” she says waving her arms wide to show the slaughter behind her.

A battlefield of blood, pain, and suffering.

A table covered in rich, high-calorie foods.

It’s all perspective.

“We’ll need to find a way of marking my people,” I say. So they don’t end up part of the meal. “I may take some of the locals for myself as well. If you can agree to that, we can make a deal.”

She smiles, and as pretty as it is on her wooden lips, and as attractive as her alien body is, there is a cool distance to her that warns me away. We are still in competition, but for now, we are working side by side to overthrow others who stand ahead of us both.

Eventually, she will turn on me, but in what ways I’m not yet sure.

How powerful will I need to be for her to bow of her own will? How far will I need to go before she truly respects me?

“I’ll be back tomorrow and we can discuss our next conquests,” I say. “Oh, and there are others who came with me, but who aren’t from my empire. They are of their own factions, and powerful in their own ways. They might come here to bother you, and I do not take responsibility for them in any way.”

“Mark your people, little princess. I’ll leave them be, my pets will leave them unharmed as well, but we will not protect them for you.” The avatar of the great tree reaches out a hand, touching my skin and winding her magics into mine and twisting them into new shapes and currents.

It’s similar to how I mark people to borrow their eyes, but different. It’s a trace that’s left behind and glows in my sight. Something both there and not, real and not, and unwinding it would be challenging even though I know all the right Skills that should be able to make it simple.

“I will know your pets with that mark,” she says, walking back toward her main body and leaving me here by the ruined carcass of the whale.

Our borders are now reasonably secure, it’s time to return home.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Stats and Skills

~Mana Form:

Current mana crystallisation:

-0.4% at 78,231 (Stage 2)

-99.6% at 60,892 (Stage 1)

Current mana volume: 30,304 / 30,304 shards

Mana volume at Stage 1 crystallisation (Max. mana volume):

Kyra: 30,271 shards

Kyra’s armour: 20,777 shards

Kyra’s throne: 1,109,298 shards

~Forms

Mana Canon

-Annihilation Heart (Adapted)

-Blood Fuel (Adapted)

-Bone Magic Storage (Adapted)

-Nail Shifters (Adapted)

Dancer

-Flash Nerves (Adapted)

-Quick Perception Mind (Adapted)

-Burst Reflex Muscles (Adapted)

-Layered Space Muscles (Adapted)

Turtle

-Rebinding Tissue (Adapted)

-Catalyst Sweat Glands (Adapted)

-Repulsive Skin (Adapted)

-Prehensile hair (Adapted)

-Fatty Tissue Blood Storage (Adapted)

Investigator

-Wide eyes (Adapted)

-Wide ears (Adapted)

-Sharp nose (Adapted)

Misc.

-Clean bowels (Adapted)

-Mana Drive (Adapted)

~Favourited Skills:

Magic:

-Annihilation Magic (Customised)

-Fire Magic (Functional)

-Space magic (Broken)

-Force magic (Functional)

-Ice magic (Broken)

-Wind magic (Broken)

Movement:

-Hand-to-hand casting (Mastered)

-Mana surge movement (Customised)

-Stealth (Functional)

Senses:

-Eyes of an Empire (Customised)

-Combat Awareness (Mastered)

-Watchmen (Functional)

-Hidden bug (Mastered)

-De-tagging (Mastered)

-Anti-stealth sight (Mastered)

Special:

-Spirit Transformation (Broken)

-Conformity (Broken)

-Training mana form (Functional)