The Third Step: Chapter Eighteen

“Is that all?” Kene asked, and Dusk she made a sound like the wind in the trees as she agreed it was. It had been mainly targeting shipments due to them having food, and in her realm she could get her hands on plenty of it. Not to mention, there weren’t that many land based predators in her realm, so it would actually be good to get a few in order to help balance the population of winter heart deer and other prey creatures, so they didn’t over-breed and eat her realm apart. 

I blinked, wondering how Dusk had been able to tell the kludde was female, then asked if she planned to keep the kludde around. Dusk responded that she wasn’t sure if she’d would remain within her long term, or just until we could relocate it past the cordon, but either way, it would be useful, and she wanted to get some foxes now, as well as maybe a handful of coyotes. 

I sighed, wishing that we had that discussion before she’d given her mobile gate to Edgar. We could have hopped to my dad’s bakery, Seven Leage Stepped out to Kene’s village, then grabbed some foxes and made our way back via the stone. 

“I am looking forward to going past the cordon, mostly,” Hannah said, manifesting next to us. “Getting to see so many trees through your eyes is interesting, but that’ll be out in the wilds. Crysite is so high north and so cold, being able to see a more temperate region should be interesting.” 

“It should be,” I agreed. “But I’m surprised you want to see it. There’s more likely to be combat and wild undead out there.” 

“I don’t like combat, but I’m not quite as bothered by it as I once was. I don’t think anyone could experience the desolant attack and not get a little inured to combat.” 

“That’s fair,” I considered. “You know, with how clear you are, I’m not sure I agree with Orykson’s postulation that ghosts are fundamentally stuck. You’ve shown not just an ability to –”

Kene coughed and spoke up. 

“Babe, as interesting as philosophy is, we’re also standing out in the middle of the forest, a mile away from the nearest town where we were eating. Do you want to go ahead and grab Kludde’s Weight, and then we can head back?” 

“No, no. I’ll let the kludde get used to Dusk’s realm to let it calm down first. For now, we can head back to town and finish up our food and drinks, though there’s a good chance the cafe is going to have cleared them out. They don’t exactly have a ton of free table space.”

We headed back, with Hannah and I discussing the potential layers of sapience between ghosts, and the difference between clearly extant sapience versus the possibility that something could become sapient. It was quite an enriching conversation, especially considering some of the potential counterpoints – after all, nearly any animal in the world could theoretically become sapient, either through natural treasures, spellbonds, or intentional actions of a powerful enough mind mage. We didn’t come to any conclusions, but that wasn’t the point. 

Once I got back to the cafe, Hannah returned to a more dormant state, something akin to sleep, while Kene and I returned to our date, getting some new drinks and finishing our meal, then reported to the grumpy old man who seemed to be some sort of village leader. 

“Hmph. I don’t trust you’ve kept it actually away, just because you locked it in some spatial prison.” 

“Don’t call my sister’s demiplane a prison,” I said, frowning and crossing my arms at him. “You don’t have the right to pass judgement on her.” 

He squinted at me, then rolled his eyes. 

“Children. At least you used a demiplane and didn’t just try to teleport it away. If we don’t get more attacks in the next two weeks, then I’ll sign off on your paperwork and say you were a good little boy and did your job.” 

I gritted my teeth, staring at him, then shook my head. A bit of cash would be nice, but at the end of the day, it didn’t matter, not really. I gave the man a bright, overly cheerful smile, and spoke in a saccharine sweet voice.

“Don’t bother. In two weeks, I’ll be long gone, and you’ll be free to continue judging people for innate parts of themselves they cannot control without any fear of having to grow as a person!”

With that, I vanished, teleporting away. I wasn’t sure what it was about his condescending tone and treatment of Dusk that had gotten to me so deeply, but I found myself rather irritable as I met up with Kene and Meadow, and we spent a while discussing the route we were going to take to the cordon. 

Once Dusk reported that the kludde had eaten some fish and settled down, I opened a portal and stepped inside. The kludde was lazing about in the spring section of Dusk, and I approached from the summer side, slowly. It stared at me, a touch wary, and I took a seat on the grass, my back to a large tree as I studied it. 

Slowly, carefully, I extended my mana senses out in the direction of the large, dog-like creature. I tried to lean on my life and death magic, my beast magic, and project thoughts of calmness. For a second, the kludde pushed me back, and I let it, just sitting there contentedly. 

Slowly but surely, the beast seemed to realize I was truly just curious, not meaning any harm, and allowed me to sweep over it with my mana senses. 

The first gate spells were fairly rote. There was the mud ring that I’d seen before, as well as a sensory spell that vaguely reminded me of Ed’s own, with elements of the Analyze Lunar spell I’d seen Liz sketch a few times. There were spells to enhance the physical senses too, somewhat like my Vampiric Senses, though tuned to the specific biology of a kludde, and there was a surprisingly large and potent harvesting spell that I thought could draw power from mud, water, and earth. None of it was especially impressive, but it was neat.

The second gate was more interesting, as it related to the burning blue ball of not-quite fire over its head. There was a vast knot of spellwork worming through it, incredibly dense, and after a bit of examination, I thought that kludde might be using a second gate spell to form a manifestation of its magic that acted as something of an area to project spells from, an amplifier, and something to help regeneration. It was too broad to be exceptionally powerful at any of those… At first. 

Part of the reason I had such a hard time reading the magic was that after the kludde advanced to third gate, it had transformed the manifestation into a beast core, or at least something like it. It was intimately linked to the kludde’s spirit and body, and it seemed to serve the usual purpose of a beast core in helping store more power and convert it into the spirit quicker, but also seemed directly linked into the second gate spell, massively enhancing all of the effects.

It was frankly a beautiful bit of magic and evolution, and I had to tip my hat to whatever quirk of nature had helped to produce it. 

This kludde was only early third gate, which was part of how it had been so easy to subdue, but I studied the three spells that it had with fierce intensity. 

The first, of course, was Kludde’s Weight, the very spell I was after. It was a strange shaped spell, with parts that resembled enhance spells, analyze spells, some of what I’d seen of Ed’s magic, and portions of the strange bunny soulsight.

Compared to the elegant, perfectly sculpted piece of evolutionary magiobiology that the full gate spell was, Kludde’s Weight was a hot mess, but I’d felt how effective it could be, so I dutifully copied it down on paper. 

The other two spells weren’t quite as messy as Kludde’s Weight, and I dismissed the first one almost immediately. It was another mud spell, one that was designed to make mud… more mud. It was somewhat hard to describe, but I got the general vibe of the spell. It helped over-pack the energy in mud with concentrated mana, making it more potent. Only, given the complex magic of the kludde, it wasn’t just enhancing the telluric and lunar components, but everything. Even the motion of the mud was enhanced by empowering bits of physical mana. Strange and complex, but not especially useful to me. 

The last of its current spells was an interesting one, and it actually made me pause for a moment, because I didn’t understand it. I eventually realized that it was designed to directly channel power from… somewhere… into the kludde, and it almost looked like it channeled power from a kludde and into the kludde. A few moments later, I realized that it was a sensory spell, but not one that I was able to really understand.

It wasn’t like any of my analyze spells, apart from the fact it interfaced with the senses, nor was it like any of the beast spells I’d seen, or vampiric senses. The closest thing I could compare it to was the Kludde’s own mud sensory spell, with a handful of tiny elements of my own full-gate spells. It might be some sort of enhancement, focusing the mana senses through the kludde's own full gate? That would at least help explain how it had matched my own senses for a short while, despite being lower gate.

I didn’t plan to take it, since there was too much utility in Kludde’s Weight to give it up, but I wondered if it would be possible to learn anything from it, or even construct a version I could hold in my mana-garden, preferably at fourth gate. My mana-garden was getting really full. I had ten spells in my third gate spatial mana alone. Then again, formatting spells up or down a gate was usually incredibly hard, taking spell engineers lifetimes of work to manage.

Well, at least I may be able to figure out what it did. I tossed the kludde an apple before walking into the desert section of Dusk, manipulating my mana into the Kludde’s spell, then channeled my beastgate mana into it. 

The sand around me exploded.  

The Kludde’s Weight spell transformed my mana senses into a tangible sort of pressure, and when I wasn’t directing my mana senses, they just sort of hung around me limply. Now, that limp sphere smashed down into the sands, pressuring them down. They compacted, but they also sought out the path of least resistance, shifting to the side and kicking into the air rather than grow close. 

I extended my senses out around me, and sand continued to be kicked up, blasting into the air in every direction. I cast my suite of sensory spells, and the cloud of sand and grit erupted even larger than before. A piece of glass, left over from when I’d been testing my Mantle Dragonfyre, shattered into pieces. Unlike the sand, which could easily fly out in other directions, the shards of glass were slowly, gradually, crushed down into the sands, spilling out around me. 

I turned my attention onto the largest chunk of glass, about the size of a watermelon, and swept my senses down onto it. The sands around me settled slowly as the pressure was taken off of them, but the glass was shoved down, cracking and crumbling as it struggled to push all of the sand out of the way and accommodate the pressure. It was definitely more intense than when I spread my senses over an area, but just like how there was a limit on how much detail I got, even when I focused on a single object, the amount of pressure pouring onto the glass wasn’t as much as if the entire area had been compressed into a single dot.

Buttttt… it was still enough to cause the glass to explode. 

Unlike before, when I’d been spreading my mana senses over an entire area, this time, the glass shards were able to escape the pressure by going through the sand, and slightly off kilter, and they flung out everywhere. One slammed into me, leaving a long gash on my leg, the blood rushing down my leg. 

I sighed, cast Starfish Regeneration, and went to go get some new, unbloodied clothes.