What We Do to Survive

The moment I finally made a decision, the doubts tickling the corners of my mind receded. Good idea or bad, reckless or not, I had made a choice and now was simply time to get it done. Sure I wasn’t going to be stupid about it, if the Outsider woke up and proved itself to be both hostile and dangerous, I was going to get out of here with utmost haste. Until then though, there was no room for such self-destructive thoughts. I had a goal, it was time to get to work.

I considered my options. I had four magic-disrupting collars on my person, two of the advanced self-propelling models I’d designed and two far simpler models I’d made earlier in the year. It was a flip of a coin if those would be effective, and the older models might actually be more useful in this particular scenario. I had designed them before I’d gotten a good look at an elf’s internal magics and had been working under the assumption that there may be some crucial differences between them and humans. Thus, those collars worked on a much more general principle of mana-disruption than what I’d made more recently. Depending on how unusual the Outsider’s abilities might be, the more recent ways I had come up with for preventing mana manipulation might prove ineffective.

I also had a number of vials filled with various magically conductive fluids, mostly blood and milk from my cattle, but also alchemically-neutral oil and life-attuned water I’d gathered from the supply typically used to water Avalon’s greenhouses. That wasn’t much to work with, but it would hopefully be enough. It helped that I was rather confident with my skill at transmutation magic. Getting most mundane materials was simply a matter of first transmuting some random debris into something simple like a block of pure nickel and then transmuting that into whatever shape and substance I needed.

After weighing several potential choices, I decided that safe and simple was probably best. The simplest option was probably to try and kill it and just collect the corpse for study. If I moved to a safe distance first, I could take my time and prepare something thoroughly lethal to hit it with. I wasn’t familiar enough with the Death spell form to cast something like Command Die, one of the most practical ways of assassinating an opponent sleeping without any wards up, but a barrage of fourth-circle force lances wasn’t something most people could walk off.

That, I decided pretty quickly, was a terrible option. It was very simple, but the complete opposite of safe. If the creature proved to be immune to force-based damage, and I was familiar with a number of such creatures, I would be in trouble very quickly. I also didn’t really know what I needed to aim for, could the creature survive without a head? A heart? Perhaps it kept its vital organs in one of its limbs, or simply didn’t have any such organs to begin with. Even if I succeeded in killing it, I risked destroying too much of its body to get anything valuable from it.

I similarly discarded a number of other plans, such as trying to suffocate it, burn it, lock it in a cage, or a number of other increasingly convoluted ideas. Eventually, I concluded that I was overcomplicating things. After all, I already knew a spell that was almost perfectly appropriate for the situation, even if this was a somewhat unconventional way of using it.

I got to work immediately, there was no time to waste. If the creature woke up before I was ready, I would have both wasted time and resources, and left myself in a rather precarious position. Hopefully it was a deep sleeper.

Leaving the spectral eye to keep an eye on the potential Outsider, I moved over to the section of roof directly over where it slept and began to clean up the dead leaves and other bits of grime that had built up on the old warehouse’s roof. I did my best to limit how much magic I was using and kept a steady flow of mana into my illusions, there was no telling what sort of senses the creature might have and a large flare of mana might wake it up at an inopportune moment.

Once I was done with that, I took several measurements and took a brief detour to a neighboring roof where I transmuted several roof tiles into a large, mostly flat sheet of copper. The roof of the building was neither completely flat, nor made of a particularly good material for drawing a ritual circle.

Getting the large sheet back into position took some work, but my circulation made me physically strong enough that I could manage it without much effort. I just hoped no one had seen the large metal sheet floating through the air without anything visibly carrying it, that would be a very awkward way for things to go wrong.

One ‘fun’ feature of ritual magic was that, as long as you accounted for it, elevation didn’t tend to be particularly important. It didn’t matter if the target was standing right inside the circle or some distance above or beneath it, the magic would work either way. According to my professor, this feature was most commonly exploited in traps and warding.

For instance, Clarient’s Mom’s throne had once been protected by a powerful isolation-field that had defied the understanding of many ward experts. After the fall of their queendom, it was discovered that the field hadn’t been a ward at all, but rather a ritual maintained in a tiny ritual room buried miles under the palace itself. It hadn’t saved her in the end, of course, but it was still a very clever bit of magic.

In this case, it meant that I could lay out the ritual in relative safety on the roof, decreasing the chance that I might wake up my target before I was done with my work. The roof was also mostly flat and free of inconvenient walls and furniture, which further simplified drawing out a large ritual circle.

I worked as quickly as I could, thankful for the long hours of experience I’d gained in drawing out ritual circles over the past few months. I had to be fast but meticulous, a difficult combination but a necessity given my limited available materials and the need to finish before it woke up.

As it was, I had already watered down my small supply of blood and milk more than I was fully comfortable with in order to have enough liquid to draw out the entire array. I could not afford to waste any of the resulting pinkish-white water with amateurish mistakes. In general, ritual magic and cutting corners went together the way practicing destructive spells and the Avalon library, namely very poorly with a high chance of a messy, painful death thrown in. I was pretty sure my control was good enough to compensate for it in this instance, but there was no need to make things harder than they needed to be.

Setting everything up took nearly a full hour despite my best efforts, and I spent the entire time furtively checking up on the thankfully still out of it creature. In hindsight I probably wasted a not-inconsiderable amount of time doing that, time that could have been better spent drawing out the necessary runes on my copper sheet, but I weary enough of the Outsider that every time I looked away a pang of fear shot through my chest. I was so very close to it after all. If it woke up, felt me moving around above it… I could be in a lot of trouble very quickly.

I stood up with a soft groan and stretched. I wasn’t physically sore like a mundane man would have been after an hour of kneeling on hard metal, my circulations had taken care of that, but it still wasn’t a particularly pleasant way to do things. I should get Rea a nice rug or something, she spent so much time on her knees and it––

Not the time. My mana was getting worryingly low but I didn’t want to risk waiting for it to regenerate. It would have to be enough. I regretfully dropped most of my defensive and concealing spells, leaving only the simplest and least costly ones active. It was another risk, I felt very exposed standing up here without the cover of invisibility, but not having enough mana to finish my ritual would be even more dangerous.

Mana poured out of my hands in two long, narrow streams. Moving in opposite directions, the two streams began to settle into the still-wet runes I’d drawn across the roof. It was not my preferred method of charging a ritual circle, but for today it would have to do. My usual method was both simpler and more effective, but it required a secondary containment circle around the ritual, one that I hadn’t been able to prepare here. This was slower and much more costly in terms of focus, but it was manageable and I just needed to get it done.

My heart skipped a beat when I took a momentary break to glance through my projected eye and saw the creature stir in its sleep. I almost panicked when its head turned to face the eye, but it didn’t seem like it was actually waking up. Still, I redoubled my efforts.

‘What if it didn’t work?’ an insidious voice whispered inside my head, ‘It’s an Outsider, a creature capable of acts that defy the conventions of magic. It could be completely immune.’

I firmly told that voice to shut up. It was going to work.

The creature stirred again, and the odd rise and fall of its chest stilled completely. The slow pulsing of its unmistakable aura vanished as though it had never existed in the first place. The heavy coat it was wearing shifted, revealing a slender, pale arm wearing a glove of greenish leather.

I kept casting. This was going to work.

The circle was nearly fully charged and I began to cast the complex, fourth-circle spell that would finalize the ritual’s effect. It wasn’t a spell I had cast often, only a few times while I’d been preparing to execute the ritual the first time around and never since then, and I had to manually weave my mana into the complex fourth-dimensional array of spell forms.

The creature shifted again and I nearly lost control when I saw what was really hiding under that thick clothing. The coat was open at the front, revealing a shifting mass of grayish-white tendrils that writhed and twisted under its torso. It had eyes there, far too many eyes, and… and it was looking right at me. Staring. Staring at the eye floating silently in the corner of the room. Invisible, intangible, fazed partially into the stone wall, but not hidden enough.

The creature stood up almost faster than I could perceive, not so much rising to its feet as forming feet directly underneath its torso. Its arm lashed towards the eye, extending out from the sleeve of its jacket and slamming into the wall where my eye was hidden.

The eye dashed backwards as fast as I could make it move, narrowly avoiding the strike. Nails like knives cut through the tips of the gloves and dug deeply into the stone. The eye slid smoothly back into the room and once again had to immediately recoil away from a jab.

Still, it showed me everything I needed to know. Despite attacking the eye, the creature’s main body hadn’t moved. The spell forming between my outstretched arms snapped into place and mana flared.

The creature noticed something at the very last moment, in the single instant between the completion of the spell and the ritual taking effect. It tried to bolt, but even its inhumanly fast movement could not save it. Between one instant and the next, everything within the circle simply froze in place.

I watched with bated breath as the creature’s twisted body toppled over onto the ground. Its arm, which had extended partially outside the space affected by my stasis spell, wriggled once, nails collapsing back into the glove, then fell still.

I watched it for another moment, then finally let out the breath I’d been holding. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. It worked. Of course it worked. There had never been any doubt.

I took a deep breath and suddenly realized that I had fallen to my knees. Strange, I didn’t remember doing anything like that. I took another deep breath. Now to figure out how to get that… thing back home. Did it really have to extend its arm like that? The sleeping body had been so nice and compact, but this was going to be annoying.