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321. Go Get It
🕑 Added 2025-03-03 15:08:00 +0000 UTCWith no sighting of Palio, they smoothly exited the crevasse. Ike pointed the way across the grasslands, and they set off. In their white puppet robes, nothing stopped them. Puppets wandered by in the grasslands. At first, they were all human shaped, but the further they went, the less human they became. Huge giants loomed tall over them. Double-jointed puppets who swayed as they walked passed by in the distance. A puppet that looked like two puppets stacked on top of one another, conjoined hip-to-shoulders, wandered by. Buffalo lumbered through the grass, and among their number, a fat, broad-shouldered puppet lumbered with them. It turned its head to watch them, a strange intelligent glittering behind its eyes, then turned away.
“Are these the rejects?” Ike wondered aloud.
“Or maybe war-models that he doesn’t need for town maintenance,” Wisp guessed.
Mag circled high overhead, watching for any aggressive puppets. He flew on, tipping his wings so his white scales caught the sun.
“Could be,” Ike allowed. Were they all automatons, too? Or were they aware, and simply Brightbriar’s allies? There were people who liked war and battle. People who wouldn’t flinch from the idea of conquering land after land—in fact, people who would even sign up for it and rush in. Just because he thought the idea of being a puppet, and replacing everyone around him with puppets, was disgusting and morally reprehensible, didn’t mean everyone did. In the wide, wide world, in the six regions surrounding this one, surely there were at least a handful of people who agreed with Brightbriar.
“Either way, they’re creepy,” Wisp commented.
“As long as they leave us alone, it’s no problem,” Ike replied with a shrug.
“For now. What about when you fight Brightbriar? Do you think he won’t bring all these puppets out to fight?” Wisp pointed out.
“True… but what am I supposed to do about it? Should we smash them all now?”
“Why not?”
Ike shook his head. “I’d rather get control of King, then use them as fodder to figure out its abilities, rather than alert Brightbriar to where we are and what we’re doing. Once we have this skill, we’ll be able to flee if we need to. Right now, we’d have to stand our ground, and depending on how douchey Brightbriar is feeling, we might even end up in a race to get this skill.”
“As long as we smash them eventually,” Wisp said, shrugging. She nodded at Ike. “What’d the ants show you, anyways?”
“A bunch of memories. Not all theirs, I don’t think,” Ike replied.
“Yeah, they’re creepy little critters. Like to peer into the minds of the unshielded,” Wisp replied.
Unshielded? That term didn’t make him happy. “Like us?”
She shook her head. “Psychic skills are pretty weak. Our ambient mana will prevent anyone but someone of a massively higher Rank from casually reading our minds without us knowing, and each ant is usually Rank 1 or 2. They usually target mortals, or simply ride along with them.”
“Oh,” Ike muttered. He pointed. “I saw one memory that walked along this line, another a little further down, and then these… crystal arcs. It was almost like… um, a half-unfurled flower or a broken egg. Big chunks of crystal and slate, all but completely arcing over this area. There, the ants showed me a man in white, lowering a body into the center of the crystals.”
“Oooh, are we tomb raiding?” Wisp asked, excited.
“We might be,” Ike allowed. Still, there was one part that snagged in his mind, that he was struggling to process. “Do people put skills in tombs?”
“Some people do, as a display of wealth. Others… you know how the skills separate or even fall out when you die? Some humans consider that a part of your body, and bury their dead with their skill orbs.”
“What a waste.” The idea boggled Ike’s mind. All those skills, buried and unused? It was horribly impractical. Those people had honed their skills their whole life, maybe even created new skills, and then they were buried with them, and the skills were never seen again. Whether for wealth or for culture, it was a total loss.
Wisp shrugged. “Not everyone does that kinda thing. Plenty of humans pass down their skills, or, you know, just don’t drop any when they die. It’s not like everyone drops their skills. But the ones that do… well, when you think about it, aren’t tombs just neatly wrapped packages of goodies, waiting for someone to come along and suck the juices out?”
“I’m not sure about that last part, but I definitely agree with the first half of that statement,” Ike said, nodding.
“Did they give you any hint about what we’ll find there?”
He shrugged. “Something about a beast.”
“Wooooow, what a surprise,” Wisp muttered.
“Hey, that’s all I got.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Ike nodded at her. “You know, something’s been bothering me. The ants said they couldn’t get into Brightbriar’s territory, but then, didn’t one ride in on me?”
“Sure. And you didn’t get squished, did you?” Wisp pointed out.
He spread his hands, acknowledging her point. “But what if that ant had been squished? What would they have done to me?”
“Probably nothing.”
Ike arched a brow. “Really?”
She nodded. “Yeah, really. They’re pretty proud. Probably wouldn’t have admitted there was ever an ant on you, and simply asked you for your report. If they succeed at hiding an ant on you, and retrieve it back, that’s intimidating. If they fail, and it gets crushed, then it’s embarrassing to admit that they lost an ant and they’ll look weaker in your eyes, so they won’t.”
“That’s a complex way of thinking for a bug,” Ike said.
“Oh, now we’re pulling the bug card,” Wisp complained, rolling her eyes.
“That’s not—” Ike shook his head. She’s got a point, though. Why am I considering the ants lesser than me, when they’ve been a mage… mages? –magical for far longer than I have? Wisp has fully human intelligence despite starting off as a tiny spider. Not to mention, the ants have focused on honing their brains. They might even be far smarter than me.
Up ahead, the terrain turned mountainous. These weren’t the friendly, tree-covered soft lumps he was used to, but jagged, brutal, bare-stone mountains. They jutted up like teeth, like they wanted to eat the land itself. A narrow pass clefted through the two largest mountains, and Ike pointed. “We need to get through there.”
Mag dropped down from the sky. “We’re going that way?”
“What’s the problem?” Ike asked.
“I sense a powerful source of mana from that direction. I can’t see anything, but the mana itself chills me to my bones. I don’t want to fly any closer, for fear it might notice me.”
Ike cracked his knuckles. “Powerful mana source, you say.”
“Sounds like good eatin’,” Wisp agreed.
“You don’t understand. It’s terrifying. Like it will devour us all whole,” Mag tried to explain.
“Hey, if we can’t fight it, we’ll slip on by. It probably won’t mess with a puppet, right? It’s nothing to be afraid of,” Ike soothed him.
Mag looked uncertain, but shook his head and took to the sky again. “It’s your heads.”
Ike gazed up at the mountains, more serious this time. There wasn’t another way through. No other passes opened in the mountains, and to go around meant to circumvent the entire region—weeks, if not months. Going over was hardly a solution; the mountains stood taller than any he’d ever seen before, so high he could barely see the top. He didn’t want to try braving the heights, where there’d doubtless be dragons and other powerful territorial monsters, not to mention tough conditions and the long climb upward. If the thing in the pass proved truly insurmountable, he’d go elsewhere, but until then, he saw no reason to divert. Better to figure out what the problem was, than avoid it without ever knowing what form it took.
“Let’s go see what’s scaring our little bird so bad,” Ike said.
