Current Energy Level

184,945,980 units

Lukas stared at the screen prompt in mounting horror. His reserves hadn’t just gone down, they had come close to depletion, within a second of connecting with the bruise. Seventy-three percent, and that was only because he managed to pull out. Fuck! If he had been another second late, the bruise would’ve drained him dry.

“What’s— what’s wrong?” Tanya asked, worried.

Lukas breathed in and out, giving him a minute to study what had just happened while formulating a reply. “I just got my ass-kicked. That’s what happened. This thing just drained my power by seventy-three percent.”

“Is that a lot?” She asked.

Lukas gave her a wide-eyed look. “It’d take a svartalfar pillar several days to fill me up from scratch. Do the math.”

Her mouth snapped shut.

“Okay,” she said after a moment, “that’s a lot.”

Lukas ran his fingers through his hair. “Okay, at least we now know this is a no-go.”

“But it’s a well.”

“Yes, and it almost drained me dry. For fuck’s sake, I’ll probably die if I stick my hand in again.”

“But it was working, wasn’t it?” She countered, “the well opened.”

“Yes, enough to put a hand through. Not my entire body or yours. And it was open for like, half a second. Even if I could open it again, it’d be gone before either of us is totally in. I don’t know about you but I’m not in the mood to slice myself off into two dimensions. Thank you very much!”

Tanya crossed her arms. “I didn’t say that. I just…”

“It’s useless. I can’t even make another attempt without refueling myself, and there are no svartalfar pillars around.”

“Yes but maybe something else is.”

He turned to face her. “Something else?”

Tanya shrugged. “You told me you don’t know what triggers the energy-absorption. So why don’t you try out? It’s not like there’s anyone here to rat you out or anything.”

“.... point.”

Why hadn’t he considered that?

Show me everything on Capacitance.

CAPACITANCE

Absorption of Energy from the World to bolster Omphalos Reserves

VOLUNTARY

Currently Set to OFF

“Switch it on.”

Capacitance function Activated!

Identifying Nexus

Associating relevant Monster Prototypes

Finding ideal candidates…

A list of prototypes from his Array flashed before him.

Ideal Candidate identified

BYLESTYR

Nature

Fused Prototype

Soul Capacity

30000

Level-5 Alpha Condition denied Consciousness Shift.

Enacting…

Denied!

Enacting…

Denied!

Enacting…

Denied!

“This just keeps on giving, doesn’t it?” He scowled. Alpha Condition, the skill that made him the Prime Host, and ensured he maintained his sanity and rationality despite allowing Monster prototypes to take over, was resisting the process. That meant that forming a Nexus would require an original Monster mindset. One that was compatible with the borderland.

Like the Bylestyr.

Back when he had done something similar with the dranzithl, the Crypt had taken advantage of it and hacked into his anomaly system. Now, he was about to do something similar, only infinitely more dangerous. If this worked, he’d have access to the Awareness of the borderland and maybe beyond. If not, it’d be up to Tanya to get him out of the trance.

Should I do it? Last time I fucked up badly. But this time….

— Where is your sense of adventure? —

“Shut up, Inanna!” He snapped. Turning to Tanya, he said. “I’m about to try something suicidal and stupid. If it works, we’ll have a way out. If it doesn’t…” he paused, “something might happen.”

Tanya swallowed, and took several steps back, a familiar hostility returning to her stance. He couldn’t blame her. The last time he had poked his nose into another world’s matters, it had turned him into a raging berserker with too much power and too little sanity. This time, the stakes were even higher.

On the good side, he hadn’t butchered this world’s guardian. Or its equivalent. Whatever.

“Is this the only option?” She asked.

Damned good question.

Show me alternative options for Capacitance….

Insufficient Data

Yeah. That sums it up.

“No other alternative,” he said. “It's this way or the highway”

“Highway? What way is that?”

He sighed. This wasn’t the time to explain Earth-references. “Ignore.”

“Okay. Just telling you,” she warned, “unlike last time, I have no reason to hold back this time.”

He gave her a wolfish grin. “If things really go south, the last thing on your mind would be to hold back!”

And this time there would be no Inanna to help him. Come to think about it, had she helped the last time? Or had the connection broken after he had fallen unconscious?

Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath.

“Do it. Deactivate Alpha Condition.”

Alpha Condition Deactivated

Rewriting spiritual matrices…

Establishing Nexus…

Enacting Consciousness Shift.

…

…

…

Space splits.

Or is it his senses? They feel everywhere. He senses himself. His body. Human. Mortal. Or is it lostbelt Earth? Omphalos? Pyre of ██ ████████ █████—?

Memories. Events. Impressions. Self and foreign. A human. A lostbelt. Anomaly. Singularity. Real. Unreal. Earth. Fire. Ash—

Cracks appear. Cracks diffuse. Cracks get larger. Brighter. Cracks converge. Diverge. Shatter. Reform.

His mind devolves.

Instinct arises. Instincts of a human. Instincts of anomaly. Instincts from skills. Instincts of a Bylestyr.

There is no pain. The cognition of pain no longer matters. He is swallowed by injury. By his senses. By information. By Anomaly. By Power. By Mind. By—

He falls into a swirling maelstrom of pain.

He doesn’t know where he is.

He doesn’t know who he is.

He doesn’t know what it means.

It doesn’t matter.

He sees it now. Like a large integrated circuit. What is a circuit? How does it integrate? What is seeing? Information? Information assimilation? Where would that be? Why would that be? What does—

The complexities increase. They twist. They bend. They form shapes that shouldn’t exist. Shapes he knows have always existed. Three-dimensional. Ten-dimensional. Matrices. Lattices.

His vision narrows. What is vision?

The world expands.

He concentrates on the needless. Why? He knows he will split in half otherwise. How does he know?

Unnecessary.

The world is too big for this small body. The Spiritual Presence is too grand to be hidden within this shell.

Yet the world fits. The prototype exists in segregation. Yet the Presence stays hidden. Bound. Forged. Fused.

He is being repelled. He can’t be repelled.

He is reaching it. He can’t reach it.

He shouldn’t reach it. Not reaching it will be unforgivable.

He is reaching out.

He is reaching out.

He is REACHING OUT.

His eyes burn. His brain burns. His extends his arms and they extend and extend and exten—

“Ha—agh—gag!”

His eyes are focused now. Right and wrong. Black and red. Colorful and grayscale.

He is opening his eyes. He is human. He is Bylestyr. His perceptions blur. Dim and bright. Pitch-black darkness and blood-red. He is awake. He is hungry. Raw power enters his body. Power from Ley Lines. Power from Self.

It cloaks him. Unbridled. Chaos in flesh and blood. Rage without restraint. Force without balance.

An unholy roar emerges from his throat.

…

…

It was maddening.

It had been quite some time since he had felt the sensation of a foreign emotion gripping his mind. He had almost forgotten how it felt to allow an alien mind to exert its influence over his own body, have its own instincts prevail over his human intellect and rationality. Even when exercising consciousness shifts, the Level-5 Alpha Condition held the majority of the bestial impulses at bay, but now?

Lukas could feel the primal drives that were the bylestyr’s power. The need to hunt, to fight, to protect its territory and kill were surging through him. It took everything within him to not dash at Tanya in explosive rage the moment he rested his gaze on her. She was a predator, a destroyer of Creation. Anomaly Slayer. World Killer. She needed to be eliminated. The violence with which he would rip her to shreds would be utterly beautiful and intoxicating, the stark clarity with which he’d carry out his deed was impossible to gain with his human rationale. He did not feel fear. He was fire, and fear was for prey. Fear was for things he was about to burn, and he knew exactly what he needed to do.

Rip her throat.

Nexus Achieved

Registering…

Activating Capacitance…

The sudden arrival of the prompt acted like ice-cold water, cutting off the feral impulses growing within. Shaking his head, Lukas looked around, a mixture of disorientation and frustration rising within him, and he wasn’t sure which was which.

“Lukas?” asked Tanya, “Are you okay?”

He looked at her. As far as opponents went, Tanya was a danger. But he needed her help if he wanted a way out. If anything attacked him, he’d need her on his side. Once he didn’t, things might change.

Yes. He could go ahead with that option.

“Stop bothering me,” he said, sneering. Guided by raw instinct, he stretched his body, fire and lifeforce surging through them and saturating at his fingertips. He flexed his fingers a few times, and felt raw energy surge into him from the ground.

Capacitance Function Active

Reverse Shift Active

Energy Absorption

29%

And what a power it was. A storm engulfed his mind, tearing at his perceptions, flooding them with random images and smells and sensations. It was like standing on the mountain top while it was exploding with boiling, hot lava, only instead of just inflicting pain, every random grain was an experience— a memory— so disjoined and intense and rapid that there was nothing to hold on to.

Capacitance Function Active

Reverse Shift Active

Energy Absorption

47%

Every inch of his body protested painfully. He could feel blood pouring down his eyes and nose and lips. His skull felt like it was going to be crushed from all sides. The raw power roared like a feral wind, ravaging its way into him as endless tides of raw World energy were siphoned into his human shell.

Capacitance Function Active

Reverse Shift Active

Energy Absorption

71%

He debated. He’d soon be at full capacity and any more contact with the borderland would utterly fry him. Not unless he managed to drain it while being connected to the borderland. He would have to function like those pillars— drag the world’s power and use it against the world’s own laws to hold the Well open.

Making up his mind, he pushed his hands into the bruise and pulled.

Energy Drain Detected

Omphalos Reserves Draining

Capacitance Function Active

Reverse Shift Active

Establishing a bridge…

Everything was happening too fast. The world around him had become a big blur of motion and energy. Sounds tumbled one upon another so rapidly that it was impossible to pick out or identify any given portion of it. Lights were flashing so brightly that he was crying out in intensity. He thought he heard Tanya yelling in the background, but the only thing he had eyes for was the slowly opening Well that frothed and spat he forced it to enlarge until he could safely push something the size of his fist through it.

More..

Bridge established

Opening rift…

It hurt so fucking much.

Lukas screamed as his entire body was engulfed by an unyielding tide of energy. Fires roared within him, seeping from the pores of his bloodied, grimy skin as drops of white-hot liquid fire. His eyes burned and shriveled in his sockets, only to heal almost instantly and be burned again, and his hair caught fire. His entire body was flailing about and an enormous pressure was pressed down on his body, crushing him down onto the hard ground below. For a split-second, the little semblance of conscious thought that Lukas had left idly noted that dying was just as bad as he had imagined.

Something cracked from within him and Lukas knew the true definition of the word agony.

His eyes opened and he saw—

The Universe.

He saw the great ocean of mist, formless, shapeless and omnipresent. Spanning and expanding to infinity and beyond. A cosmic maelstrom from which stemmed Existence itself. He saw the celestial bodies, giant, floating worlds, submerged in the eternal ocean of raw power, swirling with a massive vortex in the middle, and in the center of that vortex, with its jaws open sat N██████ —

His world, his entire existence, was suddenly engulfed by a massive surge of something that ripped into his fragile psyche and implanted itself there. Pain itself lost all meaning as this enormous, mind-shattering sensation swept through every iota of his body. The very molecules that made him human shuddered and quaked as something otherworldly settled upon them, crafting a place within his body for itself. Tachypsychia? What good would elevated perception do if information was pouring into him a thousand times faster than what he could normally do?

He saw countless worlds. Worlds filled with nothing but flames, a swirling mass of bright crimson in its center. Worlds that radiated a curse so powerful that to even look at them blinded him. He saw the wastelands of frigid tundra, the green slopes, the world of light and mystery, and the twisting, contorting shapes of liquid metal beaten into shape under the light of the very stars—

Lukas didn't know how long this went on for as he lost meaning of time but it occurred to him at one point or another that this massively overwhelming presence that threatened to tear his mind and soul in half was very familiar.

In fact, it felt as if he had known it all his life…

Power. He thought. So much power. So much power. So much—

“LUKAS!” He heard Tanya scream in the background. It brought some semblance of focus back into him.

…

…

…

He must have blacked out. It was the only explanation he could think of.

Some people compared losing consciousness to falling asleep. It wasn’t like that at all. While there were many similarities between them to an outside observer, they were two fundamentally different states. For one, you didn’t dream when you fell unconscious like you did when sleeping. The mind didn’t create the brainwaves necessary to dream, so people had no memory of what passed from the moment they fell unconscious to the moment they woke up. For them, it was like no time had passed at all.

Which was why when he opened his eyes and found himself hurtling in a direction away from the bruise, he knew he must have blacked out. And while that knowledge was comforting in the sense that he wasn’t completely confused by his situation, it didn’t make things any less painful.

The boulder he struck erupted into splinters, the speed his body was hurled through it caused it to shatter upon contact before he blasted through it and seven other pieces that stood behind it. Lukas bounced against the terrain, creating several tin craters before crashing on a hillside, his body partially buried into the wall, tearing a trench through the entire way.

His skin was burnt all over, his bones fractured at multiple places and spikes of agony shooting up and down his spine. It hurt to see, it hurt to breathe, it hurt to do anything but lay still in that dust. Somehow managing to raise a hand up, he pulled himself out of the crater he had dug for himself, and carefully pushed himself back on his feet.

Only to fall down again.

Okay.What the hell happened?.

“Lukas!” Tanya shrieked as she came for him and held him. “Lukas! We’ve gotta get out of here! We’ve gotta get out of here fast.”

Nexus established

LEVEL-5 Alpha Condition Restored

Prime Host connected to AWARENESS

“We have to get out of here! Now!”

Wait! What? Get away? Why? He had finally gotten what he had aimed for. A connection to the borderland’s awareness. This wasn’t the time to let his chips down. This was the time to celebrate, for they’d finally be able to—

A tremor radiated through the air, and evaporated his thoughts.

“It is coming,” was all Tanya managed to say.

A scream pierced through the air. It didn’t really even register as a sound, the way a gunshot would. There was just this single, terrible power in the air, a sudden titanic blow of disorienting pressure, as if it were a physical thing rather than pure energy. Lukas’s limbs did not bend. The terrain beneath him cracked further, but he managed to withstand it.

The silence that followed lasted a brief second, before the world went red and howling, making him feel like he was standing in the heart of a sun. Everything around him disappeared, swept in a sea of crimson, leaving them surrounded in it. It parted around them like liquid fire, falling to either side of them as if they were holding back the tides of an ocean.

Or rather, it was Tanya that was holding it back.

A beam of pure light exploded out of the horizon, disappearing somewhere in the distant sky where even his gaze couldn’t reach. Then as if the sky itself had been cut, a tear trailed after the beam, as if it had punched through the very fabric of reality and sundered it, allowing him to catch a glimpse of what lay beyond. He could see lightning and green and blue mist, with iridescent ripples fading in and out of existence, as the boundaries of the world pulled itself back together.

His brain finished rebooting and Lukas realized just what had Tanya so freaked out.

The land around them… was gone. Half the terrain for miles on end had shattered, sinking beneath the layer of crimson purgatory.

“Whatever you did,” said Tanya, in a strained voice, “it made something very, very angry.”

Oh yeah.

That.

The anomaly’s guardian had been the sludge. This borderland’s guardian on the other hand…

Lukas swallowed.

“And it is coming,” she finished.

The world suddenly went silent, as if reality had taken a deep breath and held it. There was a low quiver in the terrain beneath his feet, a hideous pressure in the air, and then, from further north, a column of red-white energy, pure power, hammered in their direction and slew across it a path of utter ruin.

Every single mountain, hill and plateau in its way shattered like a toy.

“If I die while saving your ass,” she said, her voice feeling strangely airy, “I’m never forgiving you.”

Then he heard it.

“Ice is my soul.”

Her words resonated with something deep within him, and her eyes turned glacial white.

“Everfrost!”