78

The Smell of Rain IV

Rian could only guess what the actual hell was happening right now. He had a feeling that no one here, even the GMs, knew for sure. But it looked as if Pitune had pulled temporal energy from parallel versions of himself. Every possible version. Until nothing was left for them, and everything else had flowed into him across infinite temporal channels.

“That’s right,” Pitune’s voice thundered, even reappearing as System text. “Your Power, your Endurance—they all belong to me.”

The GMs’ bodies withered. In an instant, they were all nightmarish husks of skin and bones as if the blood and water in their bodies had evaporated.

Pitune’s body, in return, expanded. He’d gained the physique of a bodybuilder and was twice his previous size. His muscles had ballooned to such an uncanny degree that Rian would’ve found it comical if he weren’t feeling waves of energy pushing himself slightly backward across the arena floor.

“Yes!” Pitune shouted. “More! Give me more!” An information window appeared in front of him. He was checking his stats. “I’ll take your Perception. And your Resolve, too.”

Rian noted the System commands weren’t affecting himself. He was still in Pitune’s party. GM Silver’s rollback hadn’t affected that. And the System seemed to be treating these effects as debuffs to everyone in the area.

Or almost everyone. Among the withered GMs, there was still one Vessel who hadn’t completely succumbed: it was the Admin, only partially kneeling beneath the weight of Pitune’s words. GM Silver’s body had thinned, but it looked like it still had some Strength left in it.

“Ah,” Pitune sighed, gazing off into nothing. “I can see everyth—” He trailed off. “What? My Perception’s over ten thousand. Why can’t I see the rest of Miracia?”

“Because the Penumbra’s closed off from everything,” GM Silver said, standing now. “I don’t have time for this.”

“You,” Pitune said, pointing a finger at him. “Die.”

The space around GM Silver fractured. But nothing else happened.

“So you know how to write a quantum code injection,” GM Silver said. “Guess I’ll have to patch that later.” He sighed. “We finally cracked through the barrier around this place, and you just had to get in the way. Did Yindra lure you here?”

Pitune punched the air to his right, his fist breaking space, and he pulled an ornate hammer from a parallel universe. It was engulfed in heat haze, mirror images of itself vibrating around it.

“Bypass level cap: enabled. Pitune's level set to max.”

Rian could feel the power in the air, space itself stretching taut as if about to break. Then a whirlwind erupted around Pitune, and his level shot from 40 to 100 in an instant.

“Pitune's Agility and Power set to max. Gain level 4 keyword: Hellfire.”

The hammer erupted into white flames, a torch that reached the clouds. Pitune swung, fire trailing the hammer like a comet the size of a skyscraper, and the blow struck GM Silver as if there was no space between them.

The sound was a million hammers hitting at once. The impact exploded half the arena floor, blasting Rian with a shock wave that knocked him over. It echoed for miles. The hundreds of mirror shards in the sky scattered, followed by the clouds dispersing. The entire plateau shifted as if it was about to collapse beneath them.

GM Silver merely walked through the dust and falling rubble toward Pitune. “I need to know before I ban you. Did Yindra or her servants lead you here?”

“Why won’t you die?”

“I’m the Admin. I can’t die to my own System. Now answer the question.”

Pitune let out a short laugh. Then he dropped the hammer and reached to grasp something with both hands. GM Silver stopped walking as if he’d run into a wall. He glanced up, surprised.

The space around him distorted. He was encased in a sphere of light, condensing as it shrunk. The sphere collapsed in on him until he was only a point of fading light.

Nothing remained. Both Rian and Pitune stared at the spot where GM Silver had been.

“Hah!” Pitune guffawed. “He was right. I didn’t need to kill him. Disable GM: Player Warp.” He dusted his hands, then started turning toward the black tower in the distance. “Now, for that wish…” He glanced down at Rian as if just remembering that he was there. “Ah, that Vessel of yours. It’s a hybrid? A Loyalist fusion, eh?”

The way Pitune was looking at him, Rian’s fight-or-flight kicked in. He felt like he was staring into the maw of a lion. An angelic, eight-winged lion.

“Wait, you can see it too, can’t you? The System.” Pitune chuckled. “You even broke the level cap. Nice exploit you found.”

“I’m like this for a reason,” Rian said. “Because of a pledge I made. I didn’t exploit anything.”

“Sure you didn’t.” Pitune folded his wings and gracefully descended onto the remains of the arena floor. “We’re not so different, you and I. I knew it back in Nostdal.”

“No, I don’t think I have a god complex like you. And I’m not a hacker.”

Pitune shrugged. “Well, good for you, but it doesn’t matter if you played fair or not, in the end. What you’re doing is still cheating, to them. They’d have banned you all the same, eventually. Anyway, wanna come along? I’m gonna wish for infinite wishes from Yindra and rewrite this world.” He waved his hand as if envisioning something. “It’s gonna be, like, a total paradise from now on.”

Rian stood his ground. “Just for you, you mean.”

“Oh, don’t be like that, you goody-two-shoes. You’re—” Pitune blinked. “Wait, did I miss something? When did you become an intern for them?”

Rian started sweating, realizing what was about to happen. He glanced aside, looking for a spot to Fast Travel away. Movement drew his sight back to Pitune, whose expression was detached and even a little disappointed as he reached toward Rian from a distance.

In between them, Ossyra reappeared.

Facing away from Rian, she unraveled her blindfold like a ribbon, pulling it off with one hand.

A sense of power hit the air like the weight of several universes coming to a point, balancing evenly against each other, pressing out all the air between them.

Rian could feel it: the focal point was directly upon Pitune, who gasped like he was being crushed. He staggered, trembling. He did nothing else as if frozen in place.

“Rian,” Ossyra said. “Do it.”

Her voice had changed. It was lighter, but at the same time exhausted. Weakened.

“Do what?” Rian said. “I can’t kill—”

“It’s what I showed you before,” she said. “Sense the flow of energy, the System. Use the System fragment that was in Corvis to take control of—” She coughed, the sound wet and ragged. She hunched slightly but remained facing away.

Rian didn’t hesitate. If Ossyra was sacrificing her life to block an attack, he had to make it count. He closed his eyes, entered Meditation, and sensed the temporal energy surrounding him.

But he still wasn’t sure what she meant for him to do. Nothing he did could harm this guy.

Then, deep within Meditation, he saw it: an insight into the nature of his being. The duality of his Vessel. The novai could draw temporal energy into themselves. That was also the force that drove the System itself, and if he aligned himself properly, distributed that energy correctly into the portions of the System that his human side could touch…

He felt it ratchet up, his alignment with this universe solidifying itself. It wasn’t the same feeling as with levels—those felt incremental, like small crystallizations building upon one another. These were entire leaps like he was an electron jumping into a higher orbital.

These were ranks.

Your System Permissions have been changed to: “Rank 3 (Junior)”!

Your System Permissions have been changed to: “Rank 2 (Senior)”!

You have learned GM: Ban Player!

It felt ugly, like he was mismatched with his body, even more so than the moments after he’d merged with Corvis. Power was leaking from him already, the flow reversing itself. The System was rejecting him.

“Command: ban Pitune,” Rian said. By the time he spoke, his permissions had already dropped to rank three, but he still had access to the skill for just long enough.

The look on Pitune’s face was sheer madness, like he’d lost his mind.

He vanished from the Penumbra.

“Pitune” has been permanently banned.

System anomaly detected. Your System Permissions have been changed to: “Rank 4 (Intern)”!

GM: Ban Player has been disabled.

Ossyra dropped to her knees, out of breath.

Rian hurried up to her. He hadn’t noticed until now, but the color of her robes had changed. Instead of crimson, they were soft blue.

Ossyra looked back at him and smiled. With the blindfold off, she looked like someone else entirely.

“Sorry, Rian,” she said, smiling sadly. “We’ll meet again soon.”

Rian stopped, and stood there, despair sinking his mind into a dark pit. He’d already been through this once before, the full-body shock of seeing her here in this world. But now his reaction was nothing but horror, denial.

It was his mom.

No, it can’t be her, unless—

“What’s going on?” he said. “You’re…you’re like me. You’re half novai. You fused with a Loyalist?”

“Yes,” she said, breathing heavily. “Ossyra was once my companion. It’s been so long since then. Since I befriended her. We merged ourselves. You already know what it takes. Level four companionship.” She was losing her breath. “I’m sorry. I can’t stay much longer.”

Even as a human-novai, she was still bound to the rules of the System. She was dying from blocking Pitune’s attack against Rian.

Did that mean…Rian himself was subject to those rules as well?

He stepped close, reached out to touch her shoulder, but his hand passed through. Just a hologram. Like an image reflecting from another universe.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not dying. Well, the other me isn’t, at least.” She closed her eyes, seemed to collect herself for a moment. “We…used a different method than you did, in the merger. There are two of me, bound to each other. I’m sure you understand how it works already. Parallel selves. But I can switch between them using the blindfold, let Ossyra control the other.”

Amid the relief of knowing she wasn’t about to actually die, at the back of Rian’s mind was the thought: did that mean Corvis was still around? Was it possible to find a parallel version of him? Or was it still impossible in the way that Rian couldn’t interact with his parallel selves outside of Mirage skills?

“What about the rule in the System?” he said. “The Loyalist pact. Can I not protect other off-worlders?”

“You can. Your merger works differently than mine. Once the Ossyra side of me is dead, I’ll be free from it, too.” Mom struggled against a coughing fit, clutched her chest. “The blindfold. Bring it here.”

Rian picked it up for her, placed it in her hand.

“My other self,” she said, “is at the top of the tower. I’ve had Yindra locked down, all this time. To keep her from escaping.”

“How did you even get up there in the first place?”

“I lucked out. The Observer has the most powerful ability in all of Miriad. It’s something that even the GMs haven’t figured out how to replicate yet. The ability to completely negate temporal energy.” She smiled weakly. Her teeth were coated with blood. “I walked right through the Penumbra. Through the temporal barrier around this place. Nothing could stop me. Until—”

She coughed, covered her mouth, but Rian could see the blood between her fingers. She glanced at the black tower eclipsing the sun. Her voice trembled, but she only spoke faster. “Get up there, Rian. We’ll sort this all out. There’s still one other person with the Mark left. Yindra is bound by the System to create a path to herself for the victor.” Blood rolled from the edge of her mouth. “Rian. You’re almost there. You have to win.”

She brought her blindfold up and wrapped it around her head.

Then she jolted as if she’d suddenly woken up. The color of her robes had instantly changed back to crimson. Her jaw loosened. When she spoke, her voice was the Loyalist’s.

“Ugh,” Ossyra said, grimacing. “Did she really just—”

She fell backward, her body turning to dust before she hit the ground. Even her robes disintegrated to nothing.

Reflexively, Rian reached out for her. But she was already gone.

He sat there, caught his breath, and listened to the silence of the Penumbra.

Poor Ossyra, he thought. It almost seemed cruel the way she’d died, swapped back into her body at just the final moment before the System killed her. Maybe it was his conscience, or maybe it was the Corvis side of him, but he felt compelled to take a moment to grieve for her, even despite the news that his mom was here after all.

The sound of warping space drew his thoughts short.

“Almost a clever trick,” someone said. “But you forgot to close the temporal channel. Now you’re…”

Rian stood up, turned around.

Standing in front of him was GM Silver.