The Restored: Chapter Forty-Nine

One month later…

Chiyo didn’t really understand exactly what had happened the last several days. She didn’t know why her mom had shoved them both into the closet, and why they’d had to be very, very quiet. She didn’t know why the city was wrecked, why all the buildings had fallen over, and why they’d had to leave their home underground for the too-bright streets somewhere else. 

Of course, she understood some things. She was only six, but that was old enough to hear when people talked about demons attacking. She didn’t see how demons were so bad – her dad used to have one, when he had still been around – but she did know that sometimes wild ones came through the lines under the city, emerging to cause chaos and damage. She figured this had to be like that, but really big. 

She understood that they had a new archmage. She’d heard his voice, only faintly, through the radio that their neighbor had. She hadn’t heard what he’d said, but he’d sounded very worn out, like her mom after a long day of work. She knew, mostly, what an Archmage was. They had five star-things, and they were really powerful mages. But today, as she was playing in the park with some of the other children in the city who had also had to be moved because of the evil demons, she got a chance to really see what it meant. 

The park was located a few miles away from one of the sections of the city that had collapsed, its building enchantments failing under the weight of the building itself. She didn’t know what exactly that meant, though she’d heard the words. She was on the monkey bars when she saw someone fly on a small metal platform up into the air, and paused to watch, 

During her life in the undercity, she’d never seen many people fly. The tunnels were, by definition, not exposed to large swathes of open sky. Since moving to this area, she’d seen it a few times, but not a whole lot. As far as she understood it, most people couldn’t fly even with magic, not since the sky roads – or whatever they had been called – had all been broken. 

She dropped from the monkey bars and started running toward the area where the mages were, her mom squawking and running after her. After a short run, they arrived at the metal fencing that had been put up around the construction zone, and she got a better look at the flying figure. 

He was old, about as old as her mom, and wearing a heavy black coat that had to be really hot under all of this sun. As she watched through the fence, she spotted that there were around a dozen different workers all scattered around on the ground – some of them wearing the uniforms of the city, some Elucidate Labs – including a woman with a metal foot, and some she didn’t recognize. That made her anticipation grow even larger. Several large crates were all scattered around, and had been stamped with a word she didn’t know. 

“Everyone ready?” the man in the sky called out, and Chiyo let out a gasp. That was the new archmage! She had only heard him once, but she was sure of it. As soon as the workers on the ground gave the all clear, the archmage raised his hand, and in a single casting of magic, re-wrote Chiyo’s world.

At his direction, the entire massive metal frame of the building began to tremble, then rose up into the air. 

The workers on the ground began to scurry around, mages restructuring the basement while others popped open the boxes, which were full of bubbling, vibrant green solutions. Others still lifted wands and staves, carving spells onto the metal frame that the archmage was holding aloft with seemingly no effort at all. 

When she eventually grew up, she’d learn that the feat wasn’t as effortlessly powerful as it had seemed to her six-year-old self. He had been cheating in a way, using a complex series of enchantments that his sister and friends had provided to help sustain the massive spellcraft without breaking his brain, using an impossibly rare familiar boon, and an experimental rune bond. 

Truthfully, it wouldn’t have mattered to her child self, and it didn’t even matter to her when she grew up. In that moment, she had seen a man raise an entire building by himself, and that was impressive, no matter how it was done. 

Because even back then, as her mother pulled her away from the fence, Chiyo knew that when she grew up, she was going to become a mage. 

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Hadiya paced up and down the walls of her laboratory, her stomach almost gnawing itself raw, her walk thrown off by the new prosthetic. She hadn’t enchanted it herself – she was an excellent mage, but she was no expert of intersecting enchantments with biology, and not even she could account for a field she’d never studied with raw talent at magic. 

But it wasn’t the prosthetic that was causing the issues with her stomach. That came from somewhere else entirely. 

In her last test with the miracle drop, she’d come close to killing herself, very nearly killed Bloody Eyes, and had killed multiple assistants. Since then, she’d thrown herself into her work, ignoring the weight on her conscience. In a way, the events of the attack had been good for that, allowing her to focus on anything else. 

Now, as she stepped into the cleaned-up lab, she felt like she was coming face to face with the ghosts of the coworkers she’d killed. That she had killed, and whose deaths Nexus had covered up. There were no actual ghosts, of course – the ward schemes in the building prevented the pesky annoyances from forming – but she still felt like she could see their outlines as she walked over to her new testing apparatus. 

Bloody Eyes smiled at her, the teeth barely peeking between strands of his long, lank hair. 

“So you really think that you’ll be able to stop it from killing us all this time?” he asked, chuckling, and Hadiya had to suppress a shudder of disgust.

“I’m certain,” she lied. “Let’s boot up the tests.” 

He nodded and bowed, then placed his hand in one of their experimental ritual circles. This one was the easiest test, essentially just a restructure of the Arenamaster’s original spellcraft to let it cleanly cut out soulstuff, rather than rip it out forcefully, and use it to fuel the demonic conversion ritual. Bloody Eyes winced slightly as the magic cut into his soul, and the meter they’d laid out increased by two units. 

Hadiya nodded approvingly, but couldn’t stop her stomach from doing another flip-flop while they waited for it to level out again. That test had been expected. It was the next two that were significantly more uncertain. She stepped forward and placed her own hand in one of the circles. The demon horns that she was using as a component fizzled, then dissolved, and she tensed as she felt a spike of pain. 

In that same instant, Bloody Eyes sent aura into the spell. This was going to be the biggest test – could they use one person’s soulstuff to convert someone else’s aura? If they could, then producing ambient aura at scale was… well, there were still problems, but it was possible. If not…

The meter ticked up three quarters of a unit, and Hadiya frowned. She’d expected there to either be minimal loss, or for it to fail entirely. Demons could consume soulstuff from anyone, after all, and while passing it from demon to demon was difficult, human to demon wasn’t. 

“Well, well, well,” Bloody Eyes said. “We’ll have to work on conversion. See about clarifying aura. That can be in our next round of tests.” 

Hadiya nodded distractedly, then placed her hand on the third pedestal, this one with an aura generator on it. It dispensed the same amount of activated aura that Bloody Eyes had put into the first two tests, and again Hadiya felt a stab in her spirit, worse this time, like picking at an already-opened scab. 

The meter ticked up half a unit, and Hadiya let out a long sigh of relief. 

“It works. We can do some tests around clarification and other processes later, but… it works.” 

She threw back her head and laughed. The process was far from perfect – the ritual would require a constant stream of demonic components, extracting soulstuff at a mass scale would be difficult, there were no spells to ethically store soulstuff, and the legal battle alone would be a pain.

But between this, her tattoos, and Axel’s hard-pushed plans to re-build the city in a self-sustaining model, rather than a model of growth, she might just be able to usher in the world she’d wished for her entire life.

A world where anyone could become a mage. 

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“I admit, I didn’t think you’d be interested in me,” Rhys said, a self-deprecating smile on his face. 

We were in one of the few restaurants that had managed to re-open in the wake of the demon attack: Sekou’s Noodle Bar. All said, the Undercity had been the least damaged out of the three layers of Elderglass, and Sekou’s Noodle Bar had the good fortune to be in one of the slices of the city that hadn’t had the power go out, and had then been defended by the Concrete Crown. I paused, noodles halfway to my mouth, then lowered them back down into the bowl. 

“Why?” I asked, genuinely confused. “You’re incredibly intelligent, you’ve got a passion for archeology that’s allowed you to explore multiple other countries, your knack for politics is a hundred times better than my own. Jessica likes you, so do Kelly and Jin.”

I thought Rhys blushed some at the compliments, but in the dim light of the noodle bar, it was hard to tell for sure. 

“Well, I’m… big.  You’re tall and work out a bunch, and you’re a combat mage. And I’m not, I can’t fight at all. And–” 

“First of all, I don’t really care about that,” I said with a shrug. “I like you for you, and that’s what’s most important. Second of all, I’m not a combat mage. I was once, but Mist died a long time ago. There are parts of him still in me, but that’s not who I am. Once everything settles down, I fully plan to go back to being an engineer.” 

Rhys chuckled, and I arched an eyebrow at him. 

“Nothing, I appreciate the compliment and the confirmation, it’s just… you’re telling me I’m intelligent, but you’re an engineer. Not only that, but you’re casually an engineer. It’s practically a side job to you.” 

“I resent that comment,” I said, pointing at him with my spoon. “It is not a side job. I practically walked through the Fallen Void to get my degree. It was harder than sundering a Throne.” 

Despite trying to keep my face serious, I wasn’t able to hold my composure, and I cracked, the laughter spilling out of me. Rhys started to laugh as well, and he relaxed back into his chair. 

“I’m glad to hear that you feel that way. But still, are you sure you have time for this? I mean, even if the position is temporary, you’ve got a lot of responsibilities.” 

“I do, but aura generators large enough to power a skyscraper are slow to grow. We’ve got housing and food mostly sorted – things are going to slow down from here.” 

“Not quite as romantic as something like ‘for you, I’ll always have time’, but infinitely more sensible,” Rhys smiled, and I shrugged. 

“What can I say? I’m an engineer at heart. Practicality’s baked into my brain.” 

“Speaking of baking, I don’t want to see you attempt to touch the oven again without my help,” Rhys said, mock-glaring at me. I held my hands up defensively. 

“Hey, I never claimed to be good at cooking, which everyone says is an art. People also say that baking is a science. I thought it would be fine! In my defense, bicarbonate is alkali…”