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351. Flipping Puzzles
🕑 Added 2025-04-02 14:00:09 +0000 UTCThe whirlwind struck two fleeing stone people and struck them down. With them gone, only one tone remained. Ike drew in energy once more, but this time, prepared to cast the Prince’s spell with his hand. He didn’t need a wide area to deal with a single tone. Whatever was on the other end of it, he only needed to hit one of them.
Once more, a twister blew apart the dense fog. By now, the fog was starting to dissipate, between Ike’s efforts to absorb it, and the twisters he’d been firing into it. It was still dense enough to hide things at a distance, though—at least until the tornado slammed into it once more. The fog burst apart to reveal a stone tablet looming at the end of the area, with a small indent at its bottom for the air to whistle through.
Ike startled. Don’t think I want to destroy that! He pointed the staff at the tornado and pulled. The mana fell apart, dissipating into nothing.
“Neat! What’s that pillar thing?” Wisp asked, already charging in.
Staring at the crumpling tornado, Ike frowned. The Prince’s skill was meant to be a mental skill. Both Wisp and the ants had said… Well, no. Wisp said she knew someone who would know mental skills, and the ants were definitely mentally skilled, so I don’t doubt that they did know where mental skills were. As for the ants… did they ever tell me that this was a mental skill, or just something that would help me control the King?
Ike furrowed his brows. How much did the ants know? When they’d shown him the image of Brightbriar descending into the stone rose holding a body, hadn’t they said something about giving him a gift, he just had to figure it out?
They’d been around since before the System. They knew that the Prince was what he needed. Did they know what he was? Or rather… what he’d been? He shook his head, once again forcibly resetting his mindset. What existed before me, of which I am but a shard.
Maybe, if he’d been raised gently, or valued at any point in his life, he would have had a harder time accepting that truth. The King and the Prince could accept it after he absorbed them, but that had much more to do with them becoming a piece of Ike rather than their own ability to accept that. If nothing else, he was sure that the self-centered, egoistical King wouldn’t have been able to handle that truth, without Ike here to moderate his personality. The Prince’s natural laconic nature meant that he didn’t react strongly to anything, but Ike felt that if he forced the Prince to face that idea, the spoiled brat would probably reject it, too.
But Ike himself had no problem being a shard of someone greater. His whole life, he’d been a worker under his uncle, treated as a lesser piece for his uncle to control. If anything, he was only now starting to adapt to the idea of not belonging to someone else. To find out that he was actually a piece of a greater being… rather than tearing him apart, it was easy for him to swallow. At least the greater being seemed to mostly align with himself, and with Ike growing stronger, neither of which had been true for his uncle.
And just like he hadn’t given in to his uncle, neither did he plan on rolling over for that ‘greater being.’ He had a long history of resisting things that were supposedly far stronger than him, and coming out alive regardless. He wasn’t afraid to face down beings that were supposed to easily kill him and take them down. Whatever this greater being was, if it still existed in any meaningful form after all the pieces Brightbriar had taken out of it, he was confident in defeating it and making it part of himself, rather than submitting to become part of it. From the start, that had been his intent, and to this moment, it remained true. The King and the Prince were parts of him, now, and all the rest would submit, too. Even their original being, whatever it was.
All that to say that I should find some ants, and see how much they know. If the ants had pointed him at the Prince, knowing that the Prince would help him confront the truth and subsequently subdue the King, despite the Prince not truly possessing a mental skill, that suggested that the ants knew more about him than he himself knew about himself. He didn’t know that they’d help, given their generally mysterious disposition, but who knew? Maybe they’d be a little more forthcoming next time he spoke to them. After all, they’d given him a gift the first time, something he hadn’t comprehended at the time—but something which could have been deeply helpful to him, if he’d sat still and thought about it for once in his life. If he could get them to give him another mysterious gift, now that he knew its gifts were massively useful and generally secrets he didn’t yet know, that would be huge for him.
Though if it was as cryptic as the first ‘gift,’ he wasn’t completely sure he was mentally prepared to unwrap it.
As he contemplated his future, his possible status as some sort of other being, and the ants’ gifts, he walked toward the stone tablet. The fog continued to try to close in around him, but he’d blasted away too much of it, enough that the King’s scepter at a low power level was able to passively draw the fog into itself and keep the path clear. Wisp stood before the stone tablet, her hand on her hips, looking it up and down. Mag landed beside her, joining her in squinting at the tablet.
Ike came up behind the two of them. He nodded. “What does it say?”
“I dunno. I can’t read!” Wisp announced proudly.
Ike sighed. He looked at the tablet, only to find out that he, too, was illiterate. Or rather, the tablet was written in a language he couldn’t recognize. He consulted the King and the Prince, but neither of them recognized it, either. It was older than any of the three of them.
“Well, isn’t that something,” Ike said, putting his hands on his hips, too.
“Uh huh.”
“Yep.”
Wisp glanced at him. “You can’t read it either, can you.”
“You don’t know that.”
She chuckled, giving him a knowing look.
“…You might know that.”
“For those who have come this far, turn back…” Mag trailed off, then looked at the other two. They looked back at him.
“You can read that?” Ike asked at last.
Mag’s chest puffed up. A smug look spread across his face. “Oh-hoh-hoh, so neither of you can read, can you? Who’s the bird brain now? I’ll have you know, birds are actually highly intelligent—”
“Next time, I’m gonna pretend I can read it,” Wisp muttered to Ike, as Mag started his spiel.
Ike nodded back, already regretting not doing the same himself.
