Chapter 437: Magical Formula

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*

The boss of the fiftieth wave would not have looked out of place haunting the halls of some crumbling citadel. A knight clad in rust-eaten plate trudged across the sand, dragging an oversized claymore in his wake. Through the narrow slit of his visor, two crimson glimmers burned with hatred. Those eyes were neither human nor truly alive. With a groan fit for the end of days, the haunted swordmaster’s armor lurched into a charge.

Its limited ability to breathe rendered it invisible to Breath. Electing to tap into another part of his arsenal, Priam guided his aether into the ocular meridians. His left eye went as black as interstellar void. Hecate New Moon stirred awake. Let’s call it HNM. Otherwise it’s a mouthful.

Though the nature of the mythological mutation had eluded him for a long time, Priam now understood it for what it was—a curse. A potent one, its activation wounding caster and target alike. Yet another reason to unlock [Curse Resistance]. Immunity to one’s own attack felt wise.

From his shadowed eye unfurled a wave of darkness. It pulsed outward, expanding until it formed a sphere fifty meters in radius where color itself had been exiled. Reality drained to black and white, like an old reel of silent film. Priam also noted the absence of sound. Even though he was its creator, the atmosphere was bleak. Oppressive.

Within the now-monochrome arena, the boss froze. Through aether sight, Priam watched spectral chains materialize across each piece of equipment. If the armor was an exoskeleton and the ghost its muscles, then these magical bindings were the tendons.

A delicacy for HNM. While one facet of the curse petrified the ghost into nothing more than a sitting duck, another gorged itself on magic with gusto. That did not surprise Priam.

According to Sna, a curse needed to satisfy two conditions to be recognized as such: it had to be selfish and mutable. In other words, when two curses met, the stronger devoured the weaker—and rather than weakening, grew fiercer, adopting traits of the one it consumed.

A tear of blood slid down Priam’s cheek. He paid it no mind, too absorbed in observing HNM’s ravenous appetite. His curse corroded the enemy faster and faster, and within seconds, the first ligament snapped. The armor dropped its claymore. Its gauntlet had detached, dragging the sword down with it.

That marked the beginning of the end. Tendons and ghostly fibers unraveled, and without their binding, the armor collapsed like a house of cards. The helmet rolled to Priam’s feet. He stopped it with his heel, then crushed the metal shell like an empty can before stepping toward the breastplate. Inside cowered the helpless ghost—a mollusk in its shell.

Priam had no shortage of ways to destroy it. Instead, he chose to tame the beast he had just saddled. HNM was a double-edged weapon; could Chimera serve as a glove?

The Talent was difficult to grasp, but Priam forced it to prod his left eye. The curse bucked like a wild stallion. Its intensity surged, and the Juggernaut growled, clutching his throbbing socket.

Around him, the world shuddered as if reality itself sought to flee a forbidden power. Aether streamed into other dimensions, leaving the arena empty of energy and Concepts. The environment became mundane. Sickly. Its inhabitants as well. While his meta endurance fought to shield his meridians, Priam watched the phantom disintegrate, then vanish entirely.

Stifling a groan, he closed his eye and tried to dismiss the power. HNM refused. The curse behaved like a black hole, siphoning his aether through his optical meridians faster and faster. In anyone else, the pathways would have ruptured, aborting the spiral before it worsened—but the Juggernaut was resilient. Sometimes too much for his own good.

Lvl Up: [Adaptive Golden Meridians] lvl 37
META (Focus) +3
META (Endurance) +6

Sensing that the aether highway had just widened, the curse pulled harder still. Whites faded to gray, blacks became wells of devouring night. At the center of it all, Priam felt trapped in the maw of an abomination.

The Juggernaut hurled his entire being into the struggle. His will crashed against Hecate’s, his meta attributes battling for dominance over his own aether.

A hundred heartbeats later, he wrenched back control.

Panting, Priam dropped to his knees. Brushing a hand over his face, he found a streak of black blood painting him like a demon.

“A wild power. You shouldn’t use it until you’ve mastered it,” whispered a voice borne on the wind.

Priam shrugged at the warning.

“How else am I supposed to improve?” he replied, opening his functioning eye. Around him lay a dozen heaps of sand and several centaur corpses. In the time it had taken him to wrestle down his own power, eight waves had come and gone. The enemies had died on their spawn. “Wild, but potent. I’ll break it in.”

*

Breath smothered the waves that followed. Rabid rats and werebears collapsed before they could mount any resistance, and Priam had to wait until the seventieth wave to face a foe capable of defending itself. An imp—a bat-winged, fairy-sized creature—glowered at him with eyes burning with hatred. Breath pressed upon it with the full weight of Priam’s attributes, yet the fiend withstood the oppression. Its black chest, streaked with red, inflated with painful effort, but it could breathe.

[Heroic Identification] pierced the enemy’s status. Reading its stats, Priam realized his meta authority was only barely higher than its meta endurance. Enough to hinder, not enough to kill.

“For a Concept to apply directly, the caster’s meta authority must exceed the target’s meta endurance,” he concluded. “But then… what role does charisma play?”

Bechar waited for the fight to end before answering. During the break, he called out from the stands.

“Meta endurance plus the difference between the charismas, minus meta authority. That’s the formula you’re looking for.”

“So simple?” Priam asked, lying on the ground and massaging his left orbit. Despite his high vitality, his vision remained blurred. The curse had left a scar his regeneration couldn’t quite erase.

“So simple. Well, there is one critical point: charisma is only factored in when at least one of the two parties possesses a skill, Talent, Aura, bloodline, Merit, or Concept that makes use of it. That is why the siren resisted you.”

“The sum of her meta endurance and her charisma exceeded my meta authority alone.”

“Exactly.”

“And that changed when I activated my Heroic Aura. My own charisma entered the equation—and tipped the scales.”

“Just so.”

“Rather straightforward.”

Bechar burst out laughing. “On paper. In reality, a legendary Skill might multiply your charisma or your meta authority, just as a resistance can amplify the effectiveness of meta endurance. But give it a few decades of training, and you will feel such things in your bones!”

Priam snorted. All of this reminded him of school. As a child, his physics teachers had given him simple formulas to model the world. Then, year after year, they introduced complications: frames of reference, friction, special relativity, quantum physics… By the end, even a basic velocity calculation could turn into a nightmare.

Now, for the love of magic, Priam was willing to do his homework.

*

Supervisor of the Colosseum or not, Béchar could not spectate waves above eighty. While waiting for Priam, he had therefore retreated to his den to watch the latest available shows. As a perk of being a civil servant of the System, he enjoyed access to every channel imaginable. While Béchar liked to boast that he watched documentaries at accelerated speed—the bare minimum for anyone with a high vivacity—in truth, he was merely catching up on Lust Games. A reality show as hot as it was brain-rotting, yet one Béchar considered his guilty pleasure. Next to the contestants, he felt smart.

“And one must fill the coming century somehow,” he sighed, sinking into his armchair. Linking his HUD to the universal network, he unpaused his latest episode.

A knock.

“Can’t a guy be alone?!”

It wasn’t an invitation, and yet the doors to his office swung open. The changeling felt a flicker of annoyance when he saw Kazuki Arashi step inside. The giant had no idea, but he had just reminded Béchar that not all were equal before the System. A Duke was allowed to visit a Colosseum supervisor at his convenience. A Prince could slap him. A King could kill him. Academician schools still tore each other apart trying to explain the origin of such privileges, but Béchar had his own theory.

From inequality rose injustice. In the Seven’s universe, everyone knew someone who had died for no greater crime than displeasing a noble. And while the majority chose to grovel in the hope of surviving, a small percentage decided to rise, convinced that only power could defend them. Those were the kind of individuals the System wanted. Hard times forge hard folk, don’t they?

“Sir Béchar.”

Jerked back to the present, the changeling paused his episode and rose to welcome his guest. “Just Béchar. I’ve spent too much time in mud and shit to deserve a Sir. Please, have a seat.”

Kazuki shook his head. “I would rather work on my balance.”

Béchar refrained from judging a hoplite who could kill him twelve ways in a twelfth of a second.

“What may I do for you?” he asked with a polite smile.

“The waves of the Colosseum have not changed, despite my being Tier 1. That fact was acknowledged, for I gained no reward from defeating wave ninety. I want authorization to launch a run corresponding to my Tier.”

Béchar’s ears twitched before he remembered the human equivalent. He pursed his lips.

“I would have liked to help you, but it’s impossible. This Colosseum will only become Tier 1 during the second Reunion. If humanity earns that right.”

“…”

Béchar had always found the silence of people capable of effortlessly beheading him somewhat oppressive. Priam was almost a buddy, but the changeling did not know Kazuki. Fear pushed him to keep talking. “Every infrastructure has a Tier. That is why powerhouses gather in capitals: to benefit from buildings of their own Tier. That, and the fact that cities with enough ambient aether quality to support them are rare—”

“Is there a list of rewards for Tier 1 waves?” Kazuki interrupted.

Béchar tapped the side of his head. “It’s all in here. What are you looking for?”

“A resurrection Token.” A pause. “As well as any item capable of finding someone within a Sector.”

“For the second, that’s easy: a minor wish should give you coordinates. Same wave as Tier 0: forty five. Of course, it’s a one-time location, not continuous tracking. If the person moves before you arrive, you may miss them. As for the Token… How did the person you wish to resurrect die?”

“Mastery IV wielded by a Transcendent.”

“Ah.” Béchar grimaced. “That will require a Tier 4 Token. So a run of the same Tier.”

What he did not say, but both understood, was that one needed access to a Tier 4 Colosseum to launch such a run… and above all, one had to be a Transcendent. That title demanded respect for a reason. Reaching that rank required centuries and a mountain of resources. Being a prodigy was a given: Tribulations had culled the weak since Tier 0. Béchar knew that Elysium was a land of wonders, and Kazuki a prodigy in the same league as Priam, but even then, a speedrun would take decades. If he’s lucky. The more he rushes, the more likely he’s to stumble.

Because the hoplite was a friend of Priam, Béchar decided to offer some advice.

“Not every dream ought to be pursued. For your sake as much as hers.”

Kazuki might as well have been wearing a mask, for he displayed no expression. “What do you mean?”

“Suppose you resurrect her in twenty years. Neither you nor the world will be the same… and she will not have changed. Is that truly a gift? Sometimes, one must learn to let go. To cherish and protect what—and who—remains.”

A spear materialized in Kazuki’s hand. For an instant, Béchar thought he was about to be skewered, but the hoplite merely used it as a cane to rise.

“When humans marry, they vow ‘till death do us part.’ Amongst the Hoplites, we speak of eternity. Beside that, what is a decade or a century?” he asked as he headed for the door. “Thank you for the information.”

*

Direct link to chap 438