Fortunes and Grief: Chapter 10

Alex slumped against the wall of his neighbour's home, heaving breaths as he watched men crawl over his home. Scaffolding supported the structure as the workers he hired extracted the weak logs and replaced them with new wood. He resisted the urges of getting up there himself, his left arm throbbing every time he thought about it.

His mother was retreating from the work site after she had given the working men a meal. She hurried along back to the neighbour's home, her face a ruddy red and a firm smile on her face. Alexios watched her as she went inside their temporary housing. He grimaced again at the price he had to pay for all of this.

Material was expensive at more than a gold coin, anything that required going out of the City and back in had a premium tag slapped on it. Workers were less so, the whole crew was only half a gold for three days' work. On top of that was paying the neighbours to accommodate them for the duration of the renovations. Overall, it was two gold in total, almost half his reward money for uncovering Bismark.

It was all worth it to see his mother's face filled with energy. 

He turned to regard his uncle as the man crouched beside him. The man for once wasn't knocked out by the vials, his eyes looking at the progress of the house.

A silence washed over them as they watched, both keen on letting the day pass slowly.

"All by yourself." His uncle's voice popped up. "You made Marla happy, she hasn't been like that since…"

"I got lucky and I would spend far more to make my mother comfortable." Alex felt a rush of energy every time he saw her fretting about. 

"You are a good son." His uncle hung his head and put his hand on his uninjured shoulder. "But be careful with who you mess with. All of this, she would burn it down if she lost you. Don't make my sister suffer like that."

Alexios bit his lips and thought about the danger he expected himself to be in. Fighting in the midst of a global calamity. Would his doubling power be strong enough to hold and push back god-slaying beasts?

He didn't know.

"I am not expecting to die anytime soon." Alex responded. "But I am not going to die without a fight."

His uncle laughed and patted his shoulder. The man lumbered up to his feet and made his way to the main street. He stopped at the cusp and turned his head back to Alex.

"Give them hell, whoever they are, that is what your father would have done." With that last remark, he left for his job.

Alex briefly thought over it and chuckled. Slowly getting up on his feet, he poked his head into the neighbour's kitchen and told his mom that he would be at Steve's. 

With that, he slowly walked through the flawless marble street. He kept his mana open for as long as possible between steps, trying to make entering that state as short as possible.

After all, there was only three days left until Miss Song would test him. She gave him a book about mana manipulation, but he wasn't about to forget every other concept. Training them all equally wouldn't lead him to having a critical weakness.

He rapped his knuckles against the door and saw Steve's mother opening the door. She welcomed him in and he settled her worries over his broken arm. Refusing her request for tea, he made his way to his friend's room.

"He has been locked in there for days now." His mother had explained while pulling on her long hair. "That Bismark girl, eh, monster thing made him sad."

"You got the whole story from him?" He asked.

"One of the guards got him back here and he told me about it." She said,

Alexios cracked his neck and knocked on the door of his only friend. He hadn't seen him since that harrowing night, but he thought the guy would be fine without him for a couple of days. He might have underestimated how much Steve loved that girl.

Hearing silence, Alexios pulled on the handle and tried to open it, only for it to look. Grumbling to himself, he crouched and peered through the keyhole. On the bed was a figure obscured by a blanket, it looked weird to hom, so he activated his mana sight and chuckled.

Steve had put his human scale wooden mannequin on the bed and covered it up. Scratching his chin that had a few hairs growing on it, he delved into himself and saw his mana self.

The bright ball of light at the centre of his being was radiant. The former dimness it had experienced when he had changed the aspects of the bronze mirror had disappeared. It seemed a small twinge brighter than before.

He had inspected his mana self in his free time and only then noticed how the mana inside formed a coherent concept of Alexios. The mana was aspect to him specifically and encapsulated everything about him, his whole story and history, character and dedication could be read from his mana with enough time and dedication.

This was what Miss Song had, hers was much more concentrated and spread throughout her body. And he couldn't glean her story from her mana because she encrypted it somehow. He had read the book she had given him in the spare moments between finding workers and sourcing materials, and it seemed like what he did with the bronze mirror was the most basic technique of mana manipulation. 

It was called Reinforcement, and it strengthened certain concepts in an object and weakened other concepts to achieve desirable results. This didn't change anything about the physical world, just altered what was already there.

With a metaphorical grunt, Alexios pushed his mana self to extend tendrils into the lock on the door. There were numerous concepts at play, and if he was a skilled manipulator he could have reduced the security and mechanism aspect of the lock and it would magically open up if he put any key inside. Those concepts were hidden behind other concepts like metal and wood, so he could only touch the surface concepts around the lock and weakened them.

He put his good shoulder against the door and rammed it. The old lock gave out and he busted through and into the room. 

"That was unnecessarily destructive, but damn it, it was satisfying." Alex grinned. The lock would be replaced anyways for a dozen coppers or so. And if Steve was in the room, he would have been terrified, which was priceless.

Unfortunately, his breaking and entering only brought the attention of Steve's mom. After giving her a silver for the trouble and assuring her that she should take it, she went back to whatever she was doing.

Hooking his head around the room, his brows furrowed. The room was too clean, the floor was empty of wood shavings and the little workshop desk Steve had fashioned himself was empty of any ongoing works of art. Travelling up to a shelf, he grabbed the newest addition to the army of figurines his friend carved.

This one was different, not of a person or an extinct species of animals like cats and dogs. It was Bismark, but twisted. There were multiple figurines of her before she transformed, and they looked incredibly detailed.

"He spent so much time on those ones, pushed through the night to make them perfect." A gruff voice sounded behind him. Looking over his shoulder, he spotted a familiar redhead looming over the door with his large frame. Steve's older brother was in the university uniform and on his back was a long wooden branch that still seemed alive with various flowers and leaves poking out.

"Hey Bob, what are you doing here?" Alexios asked. There was a dormitory section to the university, and most of the bottom rug students used those to give their family more space. 

"I heard what happened." Bob started walking over and picked up the twisted version of Bismark. "So this is what it looks like? Fascinating, the Swarm is always so wondrously macabre with its bioshaping."

"Why does everybody know about what happened?" Alex grumbled, it hasn't even been four days but everybody he met had apparently gotten the news. Even gossip isn't that fast.

"While you were cooped up in your house," Alex made to interrupt him to say that he was now going outside but the apprentice mage bulldozed through. "The whole city got turned upside down. Every important place has at least one mage keeping watch with a mirror at the entrance, and I am pretty sure there are some sectors going through every neighbourhood with a mirror."

"I didn't realise that it was that big." He muttered.

"It is the first time the Swarm entered the city in a decade, of course it would be big." Bob laughed.

"Why are they still using mirrors?" Alex scratches his chin, it seemed awfully primitive. "Aren't there better methods?"

"There are, but they are expensive and time consuming. There are mages that can pierce through illusions, but it takes a lot of time for each person." Bob put a hand on his shoulder. "Our enchantment department is already working overdrive to build better disillusionment mirrors."

"So do you know where Steve went?" Alexios asked.

"You're his friend, shouldn't you know this?" At that, Alex was a bit sheepish. "Ah whatever, who cares, he is up on the cherry hill."

"Thanks." Alex bid farewell to Bob and made his way to the solitary hill. Up his treck, he surpassed the residential build height limit and had an unfettered view of the landscape. In all directions was a sprawl of houses, some places travelled by humans and others utterly dead. The patches of stillness were numerous and they outnumbered the areas with liveliness.

Occasionally a building would be higher like the university and the building that he was helping construct. They were bright beacons of light. Just before the crest of the horizon though, one could see black void spires piercing through the azure sky. When light shines on them it is absorbed, and when Alex looked at the building with his mana sight he gasped.

Great streams of mana travelled through the exquisite marble streets, funnelling through a massive grid that ended up in the spires, where they disappeared and came out again as a geyser that connected to the shield covering the city.

The roads that were weirdly clean and immaculate were artificial leylines that funnelled mana from everyone into a central building, and if his guess is right, that building was the royal palace, home of Adam.

Cresting the hill, his observations of the megastructure was interrupted by the sound of a shovel digging through dirt. Under a cherry tree was a pile of dirt and a rectangular hole. 

Peering over the lip, he saw Steve wielding a shovel. The redhead was dirty and sweaty, and he could smell all of it metres away. To the side was a mannequin, like the one he used to hide his absence.

This one was extremely detailed and made of one solid piece of mahogany. He could see the eye lashes, the wrinkles, dimples and her eyes almost seemed to stare at him with mirth.

Bismark before she was a monster. In the form of a wooden statue, and his friend was going to bury her.

"Are you going to laugh at me?" Steve said, his voice shaking and his eyes tearing up.

"No." Alex sighed and extended his hand to his friend. Pulling him up was a chore with one hand but they managed it.

"Then why that expression on your face?" Steve began to drag the statue to the hole, Alex didn't help his time. 

"I don't understand why you're doing this." Steve murmured quietly, but his friend heard it nonetheless.

"You will understand when you find the one you love." Steve responded simply.

"Wasn't faking it?" Alex challenged. 

"She was real!" Steve shouted and stomped to Alex, his eyes boring into Alex's. "That monster took her skin, her character, who she was. But before that she was the happiest woman alive."

"Of course." Alex had a thousand refutations, but in this case logic wouldn't help. "Come, let us give our farewells and bury her."

The moments after were silent, Steve far more distraught than him. He didn't know Bismark very well, nor did he know when she was subverted, but he had experienced a different kind of loss.

With his crying friend leaning over his shoulder, they descended the hill and left the grave beneath the cherry tree.