Keron
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Chapter 166 - The Labour
🕑 Added 2025-03-24 18:00:04 +0000 UTCEmily wraps her arms in runes of orange and silver, pulling the ball of metal apart with twisted threads of colour wrapped around her fingers, forming it into a twisted lattice with several slots carved out to fit mana crystals. Then, she produces a pen-sized carving blade and fills it with mana, etching runes into the arcing limbs of the creation.
Her squad don’t interrupt her, quietly stripping chunks of meat from one of the beast carcasses and turning over the sands to cover the rest.
Emily finishes her engravings as the final, half-harvested corpse is buried. She slots a fist-sized, unrefined greater wind crystal into the centre of the metal construct before fixing two normal wind and two normal earths to the sides.
The folds of metal spin to life, curling over each other in a twisting maelstrom that holds the orb afloat. A thin film of mana seeps from the hovering construct, wrapping around the squad.
“Impressive,” Pretty Boy whistles, gazing at the enchanted orb. “What does it cover against?”
“It’s a general anti-detection ward. It should allow us to move through most detection spells I know using wind or earth without any signs of distortion unless we’re within sight of a third circle mage. It’s a little weaker against other elements. It doesn’t do anything about sight though,” Emily replies, pulling sand-coloured cloaks lined with fine embroidered runes and tossing them to her squad mates. “These should help with that.”
Everyone slips on a robe and gives her an appreciative nod before they continue under the setting sun.
Emily keeps a tether of mana attached to her ward, pulling it along while watching the horizon through her eyes in the sky.
At night, she doesn’t bother setting up the barrier disc, and she’s forced to switch out a wind and earth crystal by the dawn of the next day.
As they trek through the desert, Emily spots several groups of beasts that she leads her squad around. Three days in, she spots a dug-out pit, covered by a tarp, with several soldiers keeping watch.
She leads her squad in, crawling through a shallow trough in the sand, slipping past the watch without being spotted as they head deeper into Denros’ territory, following a map in Emily’s mind.
“When do these plants bloom?” Sandman asks as they huddle together in a small pit he and Emily carved into the desert sands, hunkered down under the moonlit sky.
“Midnight on the first day of the ninth month,” Emily replies.
“That’s tomorrow!” Ice Petal exclaims with surprise, turning over on her bedroll where she was restlessly struggling to get to sleep.
“And we should see the oasis by midday, and arrive by evening. We’re perfectly on time.”
The young mage calms at her reassuring confidence, the stress of the earlier encounter with the Denrosi scouts finally slipping away.
Emily returns to her meditation unaffected by Pretty Boy’s incessant turning of one of the pistols in his lap as he stares up at the few sparkling stars sitting high above, moving his mana to a rhythmic beat.
***
The next day, Emily’s prediction proves correct when she spots a sturdy grey wall looming on the horizon as the sun sits in the centre of the sky.
“We’re starting our final approach now,” she calmly informs her squad. “Keep slow and steady until we’re closer. We’ll set up near the wall and wait for nightfall. I have further measures to get us in unseen.”
“Understood,” each member mutters in sync with a firm resolution in their tones.
They creep forward, sliding over the dunes and keeping low as Emily recalls her birds, not risking them getting too close to the outpost. They finally halt their approach as they slip into a sunken depression a few hundred metres from the reinforced stone wall wrapping the oasis, hiding beneath their cloaks with the floating ward hovering inches from the sand between them.
“How are we getting in then?” Whistler asks, pointing at the ward with her chin. “You said that thing does nothing against sight, right?”
“That’s right, but these do,” Emily says, pulling five vials of a swirling grey concoction from her belt. “This is a personal creation: the Brew of Imperception. It should allow us to walk right up to the wall unseen.”
Everyone looks at the potions with keen interest.
“You won’t be able to use mana to get over the wall without weakening the effect, but I have rappelling gear. We’ll stop at the base of the wall, and I’ll take you over one by one. Pretty Boy, you’ll go with me first, and we’ll take out any guards close to our crossing point. Then we make a break for the main reservoir. We take out anyone with a sight line on it and take the fruit before heading back the way we came.”
She scans her squad mates’ faces, checking for understanding before she finishes.
“If all goes well, we’ll get in and out without anyone sending up the alarm.”
A series of nods follows as everyone takes a vial from her, holding them to their chests as they wait calmly for midnight to approach.
Silence fills the air, with only the faint sounds of movement and muttered conversations drifting over the looming walls as the sun drops over the horizon and a glistening full moon appears.
Emily springs into motion, pushing herself up and popping the cork from her potion. Her squad mates copy her, and they all down the shimmering liquid as one, vanishing from Emily’s sight.
She detaches one of her Claw’s blades and unspools the cable binding it, tossing it out for her invisible allies to grab hold of. The moment she feels a tug on the wire, Emily sees several faint humanoid outlines blur through her perception. She turns and leads them towards the wall without batting an eye.
Their approach goes unnoticed, and they freeze at the base, where the smooth metal panels slide into the sand below. Emily takes a step away from the wall and fires the hook from her climbing gear up to catch over the lip.
A set of hands find her arm, and immediately Pretty Boy blinks into existence beside her. Emily nods to him silently, clasping her hand around his wrist and charging the electrical motor at her waist with machina. It hisses as they’re yanked up and carried to the top of the wall in a single, sudden motion.
Emily grabs the sharp lip of the wall and slings Pretty Boy over before slipping over and into a roll as she detaches the climbing hook. Looking around, she counts four guards nearby, two on either side of them.
She bolts to the right, trusting Pretty Boy to have her back as she pops up beside the two robed men staring out into the desert with rifles resting at their hips, slashing out with her Claws and ripping their throats out.
The bodies hit the floor in sync with two soft thuds, and Emily turns to see the other guards slump to their knees, each with a short sword skewered through their heads, sticking out of their mouths. The blades vanish as Pretty Boy withdraws his swords, so Emily looks away, picking a spot to mount the climbing hook before swinging herself back over the edge and dropping down to collect the others.
She meets Ice Petal’s waiting hands at the base of the wall and takes her up, followed by Whistler, with Sandman taking up the rear.
When she finally settles back on top of the wall and Sandman leaves her grip, she approaches the inner edge and glances down towards the roof of a plain stone building below.
“Clear out a path quietly,” Emily whispers just loud enough for her squad to hear before leaning forward and pushing off.
She cuts silently through the air, landing on the nearby roof and rolling, skidding to her feet and dashing towards the edge without looking back.
She vaults over a small chimney and drops to the packed sand below, landing beside an empty window cut into the wall of the cooking hut. A quick glance inside tells her it’s clear of enemies, so Emily turns and races towards the centre of the oasis.
She passes more stone huts set up for cooking, storage, and sleeping, but doesn’t find a single person. An uncomfortable twisting settles in her gut, but Emily clears her mind with a burst of machina and keeps going, raising a hand to brush The Clock’s pouch.
She skids to a halt as she steps out from behind a sleeping hut to see a few robed mages sitting together around a campfire, holding skewers of roasting meat with their magical foci nowhere in sight and a beautiful, glowing oasis at their backs.
They’re too relaxed to be expecting us.
The nagging in her gut remains, but Emily breathes a small sigh as she stalks forward, slashing out and rending two heads from their shoulders. The last mage blinks in shock as blood splatters across his cheeks, but a blade slides through his neck before Emily has a chance to move.
She sees Ice Petal’s form briefly quiver behind him before fading again, and gives an unseen, approving nod.
They step past the fresh bodies, stepping up to the edge of the depressed bank towards the pool of water below that oozes thick mana that clings to Emily’s skin like condensation to a glass. There are three tall, twisted bushes in the centre of the water, covered in pale blue, feather-like flowers, with several vibrant green lily pads dotted in the water around them.
Emily scans the lip of the depression, spotting three other groups of mages with their backs turned to the plants. One of the groups is gathered around a large stone structure covered in runes, each of them pressing their hands to a pillar and chanting with their eyes shut, while another is eating food, and the third has already been killed by Sandman.
Emily pulls the Whisper from her bag and aims towards the group controlling the array.
A few quiet clicks, and four more mages drop dead.
One of the last living mages happens to turn away from her food as her comrades fall in a silent burst of gore. She cries out in shock, immediately drawing her companions’ full attention.
Emily clicks her tongue before punching out the woman’s vocal cords with a bullet and turning the barrel of her rifle on the others. One of them manages to get a barrier of earth to rise before her next shot lands, but the machina-charged impact dents the soft rock, and the next shot lands in the same spot a fraction of a second later, shattering the protection and allowing a third lead-filled projectile to punch a hole through another mage.
More rocks rise to fill the hole in the barrier, but Emily tilts her gun, sliding the magazine out and driving one filled with enchanted bullets into place instead. Her next shot bores a hole through the barrier in one go, and a follow-up drops the barrier mage to the floor unmoving.
The second the barrier falls, another bullet shatters the last mage’s skull, dispersing the ball of fire gathered above his staff, waiting to be thrown.
Emily lowers the Whisper with a small frown, slinging it over her shoulder and cycling her machina to quickly purge the brew of imperception from her system.
“Gather up,” she calls softly.
Ice Petal’s form flickers behind her, but Emily holds up a hand to stop her.
“Stay hidden for now. It looks clear, but let us make sure there are no stragglers before you expose yourself.”
The young mercenary nods before fading from sight again as Whistler and Sandman appear on either side of Emily, flickering with the glow of their circulating mana, breaking the effects of the potion.
“I’m here,” Pretty Boy says, briefly appearing in the corner of Emily’s eye.
“Good.” Emily nods, turning down the bank and stepping out. “We grab the fruit the moment midnight strikes, then run.”
She slides down the slope, feeling the thick mana building up on her skin as she approaches the water, forming into a slick layer of visible moisture. The instinct nagging in her gut starts screaming at her.
Emily frowns as she hits the flat ground and slides to a halt beside the water’s edge, her left hand drifting towards The Clock’s pouch as the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
Whistler and Sandman slide in to join her a moment later, but, just as they hit flat sand, they slow to a crawl in Emily’s perception as the core scanning for perceived danger throws her into full assistive processing. The core fully engages her spatial senses as her body starts moving, throwing her hand out to intercept the invisible blade being driven towards her throat.
A cold, sharp point slides through Emily’s palm, and the knife plunges through her wrist into her forearm, sending a sharp lance of pain to her head.
Without a flinch, she disables her pain perception and closes her grip on the hand holding the knife. She fires a machina-charged Claw that closes the gap between them in the blink of an eye and sinks several inches into the surprisingly tough leather armour around Pretty Boy’s chest.
He coughs out a spattering of blood, but before the droplets hit Emily, she feels a dangerous magical pulse building up on the traitor’s back.
She instinctively tries to move her mana to conjure protections but finds her power slow to act. Her right hand, the one not skewered on a blade, drops towards her belt, but she’s too slow.
I should’ve had spells prepared.
A thin film of glistening protective mana seeps from Emily’s core, too late, as Pretty Boy detonates. A churning wave of turbulent water erupts, super-charged by the ambient mana density, sweeping away squad Cold.
Sandman barely has enough time to form a layer of rock on his skin, and Whistler shatters a small brown crystal on the thumb of her glove, covering herself in a thin brown film.
Emily is smashed against the bank, her protective layer shattering as the backlash causes a spike of pain, despite her inactive receptors, as mana flows backwards through her veins.
Fuck!
The world spins.
She barely has time to process the sickening lack of feeling in her left arm when she hears a faint call.
“-mily!”
Her head starts to clear, but as she tries to move her right hand to reset time, Emily makes the chilling realisation that they aren’t calling with concern but fear.
She has full feeling in her right hand. But, when she tries to move it, it feels as if she were plunged a thousand leagues below the ocean, crushed beneath an unbearable pressure that holds her rooted in place.
She blinks away the dots in her vision in panic, moving her eyes down as her head refuses to move. Her eyes scan over the visible parts of her crumpled body, inspecting the luminescent blue sheen of water coating her. She tries to push her slow-moving mana out of her body, to use Blink to teleport away, but finds it trapped beneath the glowing second skin.
This was a fucking trap.
The cry for help falls silent, and Emily releases a slow breath before shutting her eyes.
She tries to suppress the sense of panicked helplessness that threatens to overwhelm her emotional dampening, suddenly aware of the pressure of the feelings she has successfully ignored for so long.
She senses the dense mana flooding towards the centre of the oasis, building up in a horrifyingly familiar manner.
She sends a powerful wave of machina through her body, feeling every crack and crevice, tracing the lines of torn flesh that used to be her left bicep, and cleansing every trace of foreign influence she finds. The crackling energy flickers out, brushing against The Clock fruitlessly.
I should have made a way to activate it without moving…
Her cortex buzzes, cycling machina faster and faster to increase her processing. Emily crushes her fleeting regret and focuses on the water around her, feeling its cold, damp touch and its faint, ever-present flow.
Her mind drifts back to The Abyss, to its crushing pressure and its haunting depth.
Mana bubbles from her magic circles, cycling through her body with a faint whisper of connection to the raw water mana clinging to her skin.
Emily’s attention narrows on the connection, a spark of inspiration catching alight as her mana leaks from her skin, melding with the watery prison surrounding her and adding to its mass. She tries to pull on the mana after it leaves her body, but her hold is too weak, and she fails to shift even an inch of water.
Her mana reserves drop as more and more mana flows into the prison holding her in place. Just before she hits exhaustion, with just over one thousand points left in her system window, Emily tints the last of her mana with trusty steel, reinforcing her body to the maximum as blue light erupts from the oasis.
The blistering light fills Emily’s vision as a thundering resonance in the surrounding mana shakes her to her core.
Then, everything goes black.
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
The rat finally rears it's head.
How many of you already guessed it was coming?
I feel kind of bad leaving it here, but... okay, I lied. I'm an evil frog and your suffering brings me immense joy!!! (aka there's way too much content to put in one chapter and this is a perfect scene transition)
Till next chapter!
Comments
Kermit
No, The Clock resists any external influences, even hers! (for now...)
Wargen
Thanks for the chapter! Can Emily not control her watch with her Machina?
Kermit
That's fair, it's kinda of half of what I was trying to do intentionally, but possibly not too well (this is my first time writing anything like this so cut me some slack xD). Even when she was frozen by the Patriarch, a mage 3 circles above her at the time, she was able to break free enough to move to activate The Clock. Then, as you said, she never had another moment where she actually had consequences that she could actively change in the moment. She had a specific method in mind for how she was going to do instant Clock activation (which we see soon!), but it was a plan for the future and never took priority because it didn't seem important (and required spending more time on her mechanical development which took a backseat in focus to magic in The Dome) Anyway, the first "arc" of her time in The Done was meant to be a massive boost to her pride, where everyone around her fed into her ego and led to her getting complacent after her sudden apathy made it even harder for her to care about "unimportant" people around her. Hope you keep enjoying tho, I'll try my best to portray her intelligence well and if all else fails... Big magic and guns go boom and numbers go up?
IJustWannaRead
Ngl, seems like an uncharacteristic mistake at this point…she has always been so methodical and prepared for any possibility…I knew not having remote clock access would bite her in the ass many chapters ago, and yet she, who is way smarter than me, never thought of it? Didn’t once think that perhaps being able to manually press a button to save her life wouldn’t always be possible? Seems a bit contrived…gonna edit to add here some general thoughts on why I think this is just kinda bad: you have made her too perfect. Emily hasn’t made a single costly mistake that doesn’t get reset and is directly fixable by her…like ever. Her father dying is technically her fault, but she had no way of knowing and no power to stop it, after that her sister dies, but again, she had no way of getting back in time anyway. Other than that, she has been basically perfect…gets out no deaths, always advancing…she’s kind of a Mary sue (which is fine, I like OP MC), and this mistake feels forced in my opinion. That clock is her strongest weapon, and she’s never built anything around it for activation purposes. And of course she’s the mc, so even if she gets nerfed for a bit from this, in the end she will probably come out stronger and with a remote click activation (which she should have anyway), just kind of feels out of character at this point. Also, am loving the story so far, just thought I’d share my thoughts. This is her first very avoidable mistake with actual (probably) consequences in what feels like the entire story that I can remember (please correct if wrong), and having it be quite frankly such a dumb one with such a smart, op mc makes it seem a little plot driven to me. My point isn’t that she shouldn’t make mistakes, it’s that so far she has made what feels like zero to me. Sorry if this sounds harsh that’s not my intention, I really like this story and am looking forward to next chapter and seeing how she gets out.
