Buttopia
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Chapter 20: Core Creation?
🕑 Added 2024-11-22 14:03:17 +0000 UTCThe refined soul mana plates turned out to be incredibly easy to work with. Thankfully, Mel had lent me several tools in order to fabricate my design. All he had asked for in return was to see exactly what I was making before we brought it down for the experiment, which is how we ended up in my room only hours before I planned to find Elody and get started on this.
“Interesting. So these little doohickeys let you change where the energy is going?” Mel asked, pointing to the little black boxes that the wires were attached to. The boxes were holding the switching mechanisms with a secondary wire below that fed from underneath, which would also attach into my core. In theory, this would only require minute amounts of energy and should be easily changeable. In practice, I had no idea. I was working on total unknowns, and without a core of my own, I didn’t know how it actually felt to push mana down across a real channel, let alone an artificial one.
“Hopefully, yes. This would all work with electricity at least, I’m sure of that, and I believe it’ll work the same with mana, but we won’t know until the experiment is over whether or not they can handle the levels we have to push through them,” I explained. The fear was still there, but at this point, it was nearly entirely just a fear of failure, as that meant Earth was doomed. I’d come to terms with the concept of my own death at any moment, which was certainly not something I would’ve thought possible before.
An appendage protruded from Mel’s form, pointing at the circuity, and fired a small blast of energy before I could stop him. It ran through the open circuits, dissipating once it hit an open switch. I reached out to touch the wiring, still cool to the touch. They had handled that amount of mana just fine, at least, though I wished he had warned me ahead of time. “Please tell me if you’re going to do anything like that in the future. We could have better prepared an experiment; that said, it does seem to have worked entirely fine. How much energy do you hit it with?” I asked.
“Plenty, well, maybe not plenty. It won’t come anywhere near what you are going to hit it with, but if that much had gone wrong, I was planning to put a stop to all of this. I don’t need any more pointless deaths on my conscience,” Mel explained. That was the second time I had heard him reference some horrors of his past, and while it was piquing my curiosity, I wasn’t without empathy about it either. Since he hadn’t elaborated, I certainly wasn’t going to push it; those were his stories to tell when and if he wanted to.
“I guess all that’s left is getting the brothers and bringing this down to Elody. The sooner we get this over with, the longer I have to figure out how far I can push it myself,” I said. It was only partially a lie. That benefit was real, but the thing currently driving me the most was the anxiety of the wait, and I’d rather not spend another sleepless night on this.
“Yep, sure is. I’ll go get ‘em. You get your little contraption down to Elody. See you in a bit,” Mel said as he left the room. With nothing left to distract me from my fate, I carefully packed away the components and took the elevator to the bottom of the archives. Was death even the same here? Did any of their magic allow for something like resurrection? I was once again left wondering if I’d ever have all the answers I sought.
“Dave, here already, are you?” I heard Elody’s voice from around a corner before I saw her.
“It turned out to be easier than I expected to get the materials into the forms I wanted. Mel is grabbing Cecile and Elicec so that we can get started,” I said, rounding the corner and spotting her lounging in a chair with a giant dusty book in her hands.
“Wonderful, then I suppose we should get you set up in the other room while we wait. Follow me,” she said, standing up from her chair and gently placing the book on the table in front of her.
“So, if I understand the experiments correctly, I’ll need to lay on the table with my artificial core sockets laid out on my chest around where I intend to form my core. I’ll set the switches up so that each wire pathway is traced by the external energy flow without a backflow. That should bind the entire system to my core. Now, the hope is that it doesn’t ignite my newly forming core and that I’ll be able to push whatever residual energy is left out through all my mana channels,” I explained, trying to drive away the anxiety with my prattle.
“Then there’s nothing to worry about. You’ve got it all figured out,” Elody said, looking over from the corner she was in. While I was talking, she had been placing some sort of warding in each of the corners. I assumed it was to better protect anything outside should this whole thing go nuclear.
“Yeah, except for the part where I have no idea what it intrinsically feels like to use mana or a mana channel, so I’m going to have to learn that part on the fly. Your vote of confidence would also go a little further if you weren’t shielding the room,” I said, worried the last part had come out with more snark than I meant. She was here to help me. None of this was her doing, but before I could apologize, she spoke first.
“Dave, I know you’re scared, and that’s okay. I do believe this will succeed, but I still plan for the worst case,” Elody explained, making me feel even guiltier about my tone.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like an ass there, and it’s not a fear exactly, well, not a fear for my safety. I kind of got over that fear after the first few days of not having died in the attack on Earth. The fear now is entirely about failing and not being able to save the people left behind,” I explained, hoping she understood because I didn’t think I had it in me to explain it again at the moment.
“So, I hear it’s time for all of us to see which hell wants us the most!” Cecile’s booming voice announced the presence of both himself and his brother, and as depressing as his statement may have been, I was glad for the interruption of the previous topic.
“I wouldn’t be so quick to choose an afterlife if I was you. Now get yer ass over there and help Dave onto the table,” Mel ordered the brothers as his floating form came into view beside them.
“Come on, Dave, get up on the table; we’ll help get this weird thing laid out once you’re up there,” Cecile said, his brother’s head busy studying the circuity I had unpacked.
I took my shirt off and placed it in my System storage before I acquiesced. I wasn’t sure that I needed to do this on my bare chest, strictly speaking, but I didn’t think the shirt would survive if I didn’t, and I saw no reason to waste a perfectly good shirt. “Alright, I need you to lay this all out along my chest, with that bigger metal circle around where my core should form. There’s a sketch on the chair over there on how to place the wiring and where to put the other circles and switch boxes.”
“Cecile, let me look at the diagram before you do anything, please,” Elicec said, gently scolding his brother for jumping into it without checking anything. A small laugh escaped me. The absurdism of the situation had started to set in finally. I was trying to build a circuit to graft more magic into my body with the help of people who have no idea what circuits are, people I’ve only known a few months at that.
“Dave, I want you to listen to me. This is real important. When you feel that energy touch your soul, you have to push it into a new spot. It’s gonna hurt like hell, probably worse than I can imagine considering what yer doing, and I know how to do it the normal way, but you have to do it. It’s going to feel like time is standing still as the pain spreads out due to yer mana channels coming to life in your body for the first time. Yer gonna have to fight through that, too. Once anything touches yer soul, there ain’t anything we can do to help, so ya gotta do what I said no matter what happens,” Mel explained this all to me in a calm voice, but the clear sense of fear underneath it killed my previous amusement of the situation. This was all too real, and it was about to start.
“Understood, probably, maybe, well, I understand the words you said. Whether or not I’ll get the meaning once everything starts is yet to be seen, but I promise I’ll try my best, and I deeply appreciate the help, Mel.” While I said this, the brothers were carefully laying out my wiring design across my chest, all of the strange, refined soul mana that was about to become part of me. All I could really think about it at the moment was how cold it felt against my bare skin.
“We should tie Dave to the table. I’ve got the energy transfer process ready and experience prepared as well, but I’m worried the initial jolt might cause him to move out of the effective zone,” Elody said. I wasn’t against it; I had even considered the possibility myself, but as I did a lot of the early planning without imagining how exactly this would go, the idea of somehow manacling myself to a wall or table had quickly been abandoned.
“Do it. Whatever is needed to keep our chances highest, I say we do,” I said. I wasn’t sure that I would just accept any of Cecile’s ideas, but I was willing to hear them out and let others comment on them; the rest though, I was entirely on board with their advice at this moment.
“Relax, I want to make sure I get these tight without hurting ya,” Mel said. He followed his instructions by producing a large coil of what looked like twine. While I initially thought to consider something stronger, the moment material bound my left arm, I understood this wasn’t just common twine.
“Alright, my brother and I have this all aligned correctly,” Elicec said. I tried to move my head to glance down, but the binding made that impossible. I would just have to trust them.
“Yeah, he’s pretty well tied here,” Mel added and I very much agreed on that one.
“Good, I’m going to handle the energy flow from the orb end. Mel, it’ll be up to you to keep it flowing into Dave on that end. Cecile Elicec, you need to keep the mechanism Dave designed in place and the moment the core forms get that final ring directly around it. We are starting in three.” I took a deep breath as Elody started the countdown.
“Two.” I felt my anxiety spiking. I was wrong. I wasn’t over the fear of my own death. I had just managed to ignore it until now when it felt incredibly imminent.
“One.” Afraid or not, it was too late to do anything about it as I felt the energy hit me before my eyes registered the change in the light.
That feeling deep inside me that I had been assuming was my soul, I was sure now. The pain I felt tearing through it was beyond my ability to rationalize. I managed to fight through agony to remember Mel’s words. I had to somehow move the energy, and I had to do it now, as I could feel something deep inside me on the verge of tearing. I just instinctively knew if that happened, I was dead. I flexed the thing, trying to compress it and force the energy out. My body rebelled, but I ignored it and used the pain as a focus. If I felt more pain at doing something, I decided that meant it was the right thing to do.
I squeezed hard on my soul, wringing out all the new energy and collecting it somewhere behind my rib cage near my heart. It seemed like the right spot. My thoughts were getting harder to process, but I refused to let go of my soul. I was going to do this no matter what it took out of me. As I clamped down even harder on my soul, I felt new lines of pain flash out, burning themselves across my body, starting from the spot where I was containing the energy. My mana channels were forming. That meant I had the core working, and that meant this was all about to get much more painful.
That thought hit what felt like milliseconds before a new mind-numbing level of pain crashed across every fiber of my being. There was no thinking anymore. All I could do now was let the energy flow and hope I had managed to create a stable core. Any dreams I had had about being able to guide the energy were long since gone as the eternity of pain continued.
Finally, I felt the overwhelming pain recede, and it was replaced by a new, much less severe one. There was a searing pain on my chest. It felt like I had been branded. I could no longer remember what that meant. I wasn’t even sure why I was here anymore. My thoughts barely had any coherence left to them. Was I dying?
