Chapter 24

Reaper is a Theurgic Hybrid Adventurer Class. They worship or follow the teachings of a death god, or the Eternal of Death, the Dead One. Their primary goal is to maintain the balance between life and death, slaying any Restless Dead they encounter and paying respect to any Blightlings they meet. Reapers can conjure weapons of pure bone, manipulate the soul of an enemy to cripple or harm them or grant life essence to a friend to heal them from grievous wounds. In truly dire times, a Reaper can even draw upon the willing spirits of the dead to raise skeletal allies for a short period.

As the AV cab started to pick up speed, I stared at the Ceangar. Teefa had dropped the Ethran accent she spoke with when she had first dropped us off. “Teefa, do you have a business deal with Miss. Navor? Is that why you're always to one to get us?”

“You could say that. I’m a member of the Aegis Order. A Clockwork Eye Mastlok, to be precise.”

Clockwork Eye Mastloks were members of both the Sect of the Sightless Eye and the Sect of the Burning Hand. I had done some in-depth research into the various types of Mastloks. Clockwork Eye Mastloks were an absolute terror when it came to out-of-combat work. Clockwork Eyes regularly built listening devices and hidden cameras while in the field and devised traps that could look like anything. 

“Wait, what?!” I partially cried with a squeak in my voice. “You’re a member of The Order?” I asked in a quieter but still panicked tone.

“Quit your squawking and hold on tight. We’ve already got a tail.” Teefa snapped at me. Before I could sit down, she jerked the wheel hard to the left and shoved it as far forwards as it would go. This sent the AV veering hard to the left and straight down into a plummeting nosedive. At the speed we were going, I was driven into the back seats hard enough to knock the wind from my lungs.

Looking to either side, I found Nennel and Ferris already buckled into their seat but didn’t look much better than I felt. I braised one foot on either front seat and pushed myself into the center seat as I reached for the safety belt. I had only pulled the strap halfway across my body when Teefa altered our trajectory again. We pulled out of the nosedive to fly just above the aerial vehicle traffic lanes, zipping down the street flanked by sixty-foot tall roofs and builds that climbed even higher. I clicked shut my safety belt before looking through the rear cab window.

I scanned the distance behind us and spotted three AVs coming in from a higher altitude with Regulator emergency lights flashing. In a panic, I flung open my bag and dug through it, looking for anything useful. I had prepared for close-quarters underground combat, not vehicle combat, let alone high-speed aerial combat.

While I dug through my bag, I asked, “Teefa, did you rig this thing with any defensive measures?”

“I’ve got a few toys, but they won’t work unless they get closer. And I’d rather not let them get that close if I can help it. Also, please don’t bleed in my cab. I hate getting out bloodstains.”

“Got it…” I started as a comment toward her initial answer. Then I realized the rest of what she said and asked “Wait, what?” Only then did I remember the carved furrows in my face.

“Here, hold still.” Ferris said as he leaned in, having one hand over my wounds while he held a black and silver coin in his other hand. The coin dissolved into motes of gray-green light, and his hand glowed with the same light. I felt my wounds seal shut. The sensation of healing magic was like having thousands of angry ants crawling beneath your skin. I did my best to ignore the itching, tingling, and burning feeling of the process.

As soon as Ferris lowered his hand, I went back to digging through my bag while I spoke to the Elf. “Alright, Fer’. I need details. Now. Give me the most information in the fewest sentences. I need to know if you have anything we can work with.

Ferris angled closer toward me as he explained. “I’m a Reaper. Picked up the class two days after Nennel was almost scrapped. I’ve been stopping by the Temple of The Dead One almost daily for training and study. I’m only Mythril Novitiate rank now.”

I stopped my digging to slowly turn my head to Ferris. Nennel leaned forward to stare at him past me. “Reaper.” I said, dumbfounded.

“Mythril? Already?” Nennel asked, just as shocked as I was.

“Uh…Yeah?” was all Ferris said.

I shook my head free of the astonishment. I could freak out about the revelation later. I went back to my bag while I asked Ferris, “So I take it that your earring is your focus?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. What abilities have you trained in?”

“I can form small bone weapons, launch a group of small bone shards, release a banshee cry, pull someone back from dying, and fuse someone’s skeleton if I can touch them.” Ferris listed off. He looked embarrassed for some reason, but I didn’t care.

“Fuse someone’s skeleton?!” Nel said in horror.

I ignored my sister and pressed on to my next question. “What are those coins?”

“Oh.” Ferris broke free of his embarrassment. “The temple’s High Reaper gave them to me after he heard I was going into the Undercity. Each one holds a single use of a Reaper ability that I don’t have access to yet.”

The cab made a hard to the right, forcing the three of us to lean to the left. Teefa then put us into another nose dive for a few seconds, dodging other AVs as we plummeted. The cab pulled up just before hitting the ground traffic and took another hard turn down an alley.

”So that was how you stopped the stigmaguant?” I asked, unphased by the vehicle acrobatics. While those stunts were truly impressive, we needed to focus to see what we could do.

“Yeah. That was Soul Snare. Before that, I used one to conjure a bone weapon as if I were an Elite-ranked Reaper. The one I just used on you was Soul Chalice.”

“Do you have anything that we can use right now?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. I only have a few left, and only one of them is an offensive ability. I requested mostly support and defensive ability coins.” Ferris reached into his pocket and pulled out four coins made from silver and black metal. Upon closer inspection, each of them had a weighing scale holding a skull and a heart on one side and some symbol on the other side, denoting the ability. I didn’t recognize a single symbol. “I have one each for Soul Suppress, Bone Thorn Rupture, Proliferate Life, and Crypt Cradle.”

The cab took another sharp turn before starting a gradual climb while still traveling at a dangerous speed.

“Give me a rundown for each.”

“Well, Soul Suppress puts a spiritual weight on a target for a short period. Unless they can break free, they have a harder time landing hits. Bone Thorn Rupture does just what the name says. I pick one target within fifty feet, and their skeleton sprouts thorns like a rose. It’s only a guess, but I’m pretty sure it hurts like drake teeth and normally causes a spell caster concentrating on a spell to lose their focus. But while the thorns deal some serious damage, they break down almost immediately.”

“Good to know. What about Proliferate Life and Crypt Cradle?”

“Proliferate Life is an insanely powerful multi-target healing ability. It can affect up to five people at once if they are within fifteen feet of me. It also grants anyone healed a short-term physical enhancement. The enhancement isn’t anything like you were just using, but it’s still useful. And Crypt Cradle is my pocket ace. It summons a ghostly mausoleum-like thing. It’s only about fifteen feet big, and anything can pass through the walls. But anyone within the space that I identify as a friend is granted a pretty nice healing effect as long as you stay inside. And anyone I identify as an enemy in the space has to put up with a necrosis effect.”

“Wow.” I muttered. My brows climbed as Ferris explained the last two abilities. But then I went back to digging through my bag while I thought of some way I could use those abilities.

“Frag it, Fer’! You’re a support powerhouse.” Nel said with a proud grin on her face. I glanced sideways at Ferris to find my friend blushing.

As I picked up two small devices from the bottom of my bag, I got an idea. Without looking up from my bag, I asked Ferris one simple question. “Fer’, you need to see the target for them to be affected by the thorn one, right?

“Yeah. Why?”

I felt a devious grin grow on my face as my plan solidified. With fast fingers, I released my safety belt to lean forward to talk to Teefa. “I’m going to need you to drop our speed gradually.”

“What?!” The Ceangar snapped. Her U-shaped pupils narrowed as she glared at me. “No. I am not taking orders from a kid. Terra needs me to get you all out of this and not get into more danger.”

So I told her my plan. When I was done, she eyed me sideways. “And you’re sure that’ll work?”

I pointed my eyes up as I thought about the odds. “I’ll give it a… 60/40 chance in our favor.” As I said the odds, I tipped my hand back and forth is a ‘so-so’ gesture.

Teefa took in a long breath through closed teeth. “Well, it’s better than anything I’ve got. So sure.”

“Awesome. If you could crack the doors, I’ll get to work.” With those words, I dropped back into my seat and set to work. I was about to jerry-rig not one but three dangerous tricks on the fly, and I had less than five minutes to make it all happen.

With quick instructions from our driver, I moved one of the floor mats beneath Nennel and myself. I cracked a hidden panel with a just-as-hidden trigger, then unlocked a tank of pressurized smoke and pulled it free. I figured Teefa would have a smoke screen deployment system installed, given her role in the Order. Next, I took two spare shirts from my bag. I blocked the release vent as far back as I could. With practiced motions, I ejected my Secorus Gas disk storage device and thumbed out each of the two-inch-wide disks. After the disks were free, I handed them over to Nennel and told her to turn all the timer dials as far to the left as they would go. While she did that, I pulled from my bag a squeeze tube of rapid-dry rubber sealant and gave the thorough coating around the shirts I had clogging the smoke release path. As soon as I finished that task, a minute and a half had passed, so I doubled my pace as I loaded the armed disks right in front of the blockage. Even as I loaded the last disk, I was already reaching for the smoke tank to install it. Once I locked the hidden panel into place, I ran a bead of sealant around the perimeter of the panel to ensure it was airtight.

Next, I double-checked how many Gas Cap-Shells I had left and of what elements. Frantically, I taped an Oleum Gas Cap-Shell and a Dark Gas Cap-Shell to a Fire Gas Cap-Shell. The Oleum Gas and Dark Cap-shells were marked with a very bright X on their trigger buttons, so I knew they were the ones I wanted. I sealed off the left and right gas nozzles on the Fire Cap-shell with the same sealant tube I had already used. With that slap-shod combo done, I hand it to Ferris, along with a classic flint lighter. I instructed him what to do before setting to work on the past crafting nightmare project.

Trying not to panic, I asked Teefa to turn up the speed a bit to slow our pursuers’ encroachment. I was going to need more time to finish this gambit. I wrench the Red Brazier free from the underside of my bag. The flat box bright red box was big enough to provide a standard-size campfire when activated. But I was about to do something very stupid. I thumbed open the six latches that locked the ignition source to the power supply. After I pulled off the top portion of the Red Brazier, I yanked out the powering fire crystal cluster before I forced the top four panels of the Brazier to slide open. I set the cluster-sized crystal in the center of the burner, followed by throwing every single Fire Myst Crystal I had. After thirty seconds, I had a combination of twenty-five fire crystals. The large majority of the crystals were fragment or shard-sized, with the only exception being three cluster-sized. But the size of a crystal didn’t show just how much power it held.

With all the crystals nestled into the top of the Red Brazier, I sealed it back up and mounted the last breach charge to the bottom of the device. I handed the murder brick to Nennel and told her to be careful. 

I said, “Start phase one.”, as I took the lighter and murder stick from Ferris. With nervous steps, I stepped up to the open door on the left. I grasped the door frame with a terrified grip as I turned to Teefa. “Please keep the ride stable. I really don’t want to fall to my death.”

“Can do.” Teefa responded.

I took a slow breath before even more slowly climbing out of the AV to stand on the trunk. I used my Pacer Shoes grip function to keep stable. With knees bent to resist the wind, I checked the distance to our pursuing Regulators. The lead AV was about fifteen feet from the cab.

“This is a Regulator law-enforcement squad. We demand you land and submit for questioning and arrest. If you continue to resist, we will use lethal force.” Came a male voice through a speaker system. The voice was calm but clearly tinged with anger and a note of hostility.

I bit my cheek as I activated the dimensional measurements program on my therra and ran through the formula I needed. I was dimly aware of the Regulator on the speaker barking commands for me to enter the vehicle, followed by threats. But I ignored the demands to ensure that my gamble was as likely to work as possible. With the lighter clenched in my right hand, I forced myself to relax that index finger to draw a line of blood across the back of my neck. I couldn’t show that I was a Myst-Blooded because that would only make me even more identifiable. I had no doubt that they already had pictures of me because I was the only visible passenger of the cab. I would need to take steps moving forward to reduce just how identifiable I was. Without question, I knew that after I took my planned actions, whether they worked or not, I was going to shoot to the top of their wanted lists.

I had never really used any Chaos Myst because, honestly, the element scared me. The ability to alter probability and chance with raw magic. If I screwed up guiding and polarizing the element, the worst case could come true. I tried to keep a tight grip on my paranoia, but Thallos fed it, and Chaos Myst was an element that could make nightmares come true. Being hit by a falling meteor. The ground under me gave way to drop me hundreds of feet down. A stray bullet catching me in the chest or head. Even in that situation I was in, the thought of the cab crashing or a Regulator AV having a malfunction and shooting me with a round large enough to make my organs mist could technically happen. But I needed a bit of luck to help me get the job done, and I had to take that chance if it meant that Nennel and Ferris could get to safety. I knew that the more Chaos Myst used, the greater the swing of controlling chance, but the results could always be something other than intended. I also needed to keep in mind the backswing effects of using the element.

Let me give those of you not familiar with myst cost a quick rundown to explain that gamble I was taking. Each element has a cost beyond just the vells of myst used to cast a spell. Fire Myst takes a small portion of your body heat, Earth Myst takes a small amount of the minerals in your blood, and so on.  While I could ignore those costs for any other elements because I was paying a literal blood toll,  Chaos Myst was different. The cost of using Chaos came after the initial casting and the effects of whatever luck-altering spell you used. It’s cost was your luck. After you alter chance to better your odds or worsen someone else's, your luck would swing towards the negative in an amount proportional to how much you altered chance.  So if you used Chaos to win a hand of cards or make someone trip, then after you might stub your toe or trip yourself. I’m sure you can imagine what would happen if you used enough of this element to win the lottery. How would you feel about a frozen turkey falling from a plane passing overhead to crush your chest cavity? 

The cut I drew was deep enough to get me enough blood to make some slight changes to chance, and I could only hope that it would be enough. I felt the blood on the back of my neck vanish, and I moved to the next step. Following the result of my calculations, I set the delay on the Dark and Secorus Gas Cap-Shells for the needed time before I triggered the Fire Cap-Shell while in my hand. With two streams of red myst jetting from the shell, I brought up my lighter and ignited the dangerously flammable and unstable gas. The moment the flame got within even a few inches of the jets, flames burst into existence with an intense heat.

I forced myself to hold on to my device until I felt the thing pull with enough force to fly to where I needed it. The lashing flames ruined my shirt and got my chest a bit burned before I released it, but that was a problem for later. The so-called ‘murder stick’ didn’t need to hit any of the AVs behind us. It just had to get within range to release the actual trap. The trap was three-fold. Simultaneously, the Oleum Gas and darkness would release into a thick cloud that would span the width of the path we flew down. Both Cap-Shells were marked with those red Xs because I had made them extra potent, and I didn’t want to use them when Nennel and Ferris were in the area of effect.

The Dark Cap-shell would release a cloud of shadow and darkness so thick it would blind the Regulators. That should cause them to panic. Because that Cap-Shell was extra potent, the darkness would reach even farther and block most forms of magic vision.

The Oleum Gas was a threat in its own right. While it would obscure vision with a gray-green-brown vapor, it was corrosive. Oleum Gas was the hybrid elemental combination of applying the devouring aspect of Fire to the element of Air. Standard Oleum Gas was a danger, dissolving organic material that was exposed to it for too long. But just like Myst Acid, the strength of the element could be tailored by the caster for various uses. The gas was often used to clean stone and metal surfaces, remove hard water stains, and even flush out waste disposal systems. It was also standard knowledge that the element could be weaponized if the intensity was boosted. And by the gods above and below did I boost the ever-living hells out of the gas in the small canister. I had doubled with Kharmor to twin-cast the element with extra Fire Myst. We had to perform the process slowly because the gas compression chamber Kharmor and I had splurged on to convert gases into a liquid form was only a foot tall and half as wide. But we packed in an amount of gas into that little gadget to cover almost thirty feet and eat through most materials caught in it.

A twinned trail of black and gray-green gas flowed behind my slab-shod device, leading straight toward the center vehicle behind us. I knew my calculations were perfectly on the coins when the flames passed through the nozzles to cause the Cap-Shell of Fire Myst to detonate with enough force to release a clap of sound like a gunshot.

That explosion broke the other two Cap-Shells, releasing all of that gas in a single massive wave. I could hear the confused shouts from the Regulators, even from where I stood on the back of the cab. I couldn’t help but let out a cackle that sounded more than a little Kassidan touched. Maybe the Titan of Madness had touched my brain, given the things I had just crafted and was using on law enforcement without heed for the fallout.

I called out to Teefa and Ferris to ready phase two only a few moments before the Regulators cleared the cloud. The armored vehicles looked better than I had hoped they would turn out, but the goal was met. The armor plating on the VAs was partly corroded, the paint was almost completely gone, and pockmarks were visible on every metal surface. That was good. The fact that the AVs to my left and the center had damage as if they had collided with each other was also a pleasant bonus. But the critical detail was the blackout glass coating was mostly gone. The chemical coating made the windshields one way to prevent targets from seeing what was going on inside and to prevent remote-reaction targeted-casting spells.

“Trigger cloud shock!” I shouted to Teefa. I had come up with the title on impulse as a signal for our driver to know what to do. I also thought it sounded cool at the time, which was a personal bonus.

By that point, my Secorus disks had definitely triggered, and all of that conductive gas was confined in an air-tight pipe, building pressure. If my plot worked out, it would burst the seal made by my shirt and rush out in a cone wave.

There was a loud pop from the rear of the cab, and suddenly, a wave of gas rushed out. I had to time my next trick perfectly and act fast. Secorus Gas was heavier than air and would drop after it lost its momentum. Just as I had hoped, the Regulators picked up the pace once they realized the cab wasn’t turning. My understanding of sapient thought trains and logic was sketchy at best, but I hoped that the Regs would think that we were gambling on losing them in the smokescreen and assume that we were out of tricks. The Reg AVs on the left and right sides closed the distance, their engines designed with more power than almost any civilian vehicle. They had only gotten to within ten feet of us when the next trick released.

If I had planned right, they would attempt to push through, thinking it was just another smokescreen. Before they could learn their mistake, I released all of my Shock Bites into the cloud. I knew my puny spike weapons wouldn’t even scratch their armor, but that wasn’t the plan. In mid-flight, all four spikes expanded, spreading into four-limbed blossoms with arcing voltage. The moment the Shock Bites touched that conductive cloud, lightning ran wild through the thick fog.

The goal of this phase was two-fold: taking one path, the other, or both. The Regulators should panic at the sight of the arcing electricity and either fall back or push harder to leave the cloud. That was Path A, and falling back or closing in would work for me. The less likely Path B was a hope that between the acid cloud and the high voltage, it would short out a system in at least one of the AVs. As it turned out, both possibilities of Path A were the result. The AV on my left side, the side Ferris was on, had closed the distance and looked to be arming the vehicle’s forward weapons. The AV on my right had fallen back a bit.

“Ferris! Spikey bits!” I shouted to my Elven friend. That call sign was far less cool sounding, but he got the message. The Quint leaned out his door, holding the interior of the cab with one hand and pointing a coin at the pursuing Regs with his other hand. Ferris flicked the coin into the air, and while it completely missed the AV, that wasn’t the goal. The spell coin vanished in a puff of magic, and I could hear the driver scream in bloody agony as the AV veered off course and crashed. I only caught a glimpse of the result of the spell, but that fraction of a second would haunt me for months to come. That Regulator AV went into a tailspin before slamming against a building, at which point I lost sight of it.

When I turned to the VA on the right that had fallen back, upon closer inspection, my Path B plan of shorting out the vehicle turned out to be partly successful. The AV was limping along, one of its four propulsion devices on the underside, and one of its rear jet thrusters looked to be totally out of commission. Unfortunately, the disabled propulsion was on the right, and the disabled thruster was on the left. So, the AV kept a stable, if shakey, balance.

“Nel! Hand me phase 3!”

Nennel’s hands reached out of the cab, holding my murder box. With a firm grip and very careful footing, I took the box, already hating myself for what came next. I used my therra to gauge the distance from me to each of the Reg AVs, each of their speeds, my speed, and the weight of my device. Carefully, I stowed the box under one arm before I deactivated the grip function of my left Pacer shoe. The moment I released the effect, I half spun from the loss of stability. I cursed with all the colors of a master’s paint pallet as I corrected my stance and angle.

The center AV was only gaining ground while the other was falling farther behind. With the angle plotted, I armed the timer on the breach charge on the bottom of the Red Brazier with a countdown delay to include my launch method. My plan was to blast the lead Reg AV out of the sky and outrun the other. Things did not go according to plan.

I set the top of my left shoe against the trunk door of the cab and adjusted my angle. With my right hand inside my shoe, I used my left hand to brace the box against the bottom of my shoe. I tried not to think of the meat slurry I would turn into that would rain down on everyone below if I had planned wrong.

Obviously, since I am telling the story, I didn’t get turned into extra chunky soup. But the result wasn’t much better. I triggered the shoe on my hand to release a kinetic burst at just the right angle for the detonation to take out the thrusters on the lead AV. As the bright red box flew through the air, the impossible happened.

A chain ending in a dagger flew from the driver window of the lead AV and knocked the murder box off course. The box spun off to explode between the trailing AV and the neighboring building.

Before I give you the result of that disaster, let me explain something. For those of you who don’t understand how Myst Crystals work, I’ll make this simple. The size of the crystal means crap-all for everything but what it fits into. A bigger crystal does not hold more Vells than a smaller one. When it comes to the power of a crystal, only two things matter: potency and quality. I do my best to only purchase higher-quality crystals so the myst bleed off is minimal, but what I had just done totally ignored the concept of Myst Loss Rate. What mattered here was the potency of the crystals, and I always got crystals of moderate potency or higher. For the Undercity excursion, I had only brought crystals of greater or grand potency. I needed to make sure that I had the most available energy to keep things powered or make the biggest booms. And by Ravnerra’s bosom, that was the biggest boom. That was forty-eight Vells for each of the weaker crystals and eighty on the high end. With one Vell of Fire producing the equivalents of a match flame, and thirty crystals in total… I’ll let the readers do that horrifying math.

That little box exploded twelve feet from the trailing AV. The detonation threw that vehicle not only off course but into the far buildings across the way with enough force to embed the hood into the wall. The AV was completely scorched black, smoking, and slightly melted. The building in the area of the detonation was not nearly as lucky. I had screwed up. I had screwed up big time.

The walls of buildings closest to the blast were melted slag; metal, synthcrete, and all. I could hear the screams of panic and terror from the buildings until the cab took a hard turn down another street. I was trying to process what I had just done. My math had been off. Way off. Before the horror could sink in, I was shocked back to the present when four serpentine blurs rushed toward me. I couldn’t have reacted in time to dodge those attacks, but I was lucky, by only the loosest definition of the word ‘lucky’.

There was the sound of tearing metal; a sound just like when the stigmaguant had emerged. My first thought was just how much I hated that noise. The sound of tearing metal wasn’t just uncomfortable. It was a warning of something truly terrible about to happen. That thought hadn’t even been fully processed when I was almost thrown from the cab.

Whatever attack had just hit our AV was putting it into a spiraling decent I knew was going to end in a crash. Just like the first Regulator AV we dropped, we were sent into a tailspin. As I lost the shoe on my hand, I knew I was about to get into a brawl with only one shoe. Then, my already terrible day got worse when I saw my bag fly out of one of the open doors. Fighting with one shoe, a ruined shirt, no more gadgets, no myst crystals, and likely against an immensely powerful enemy.

I couldn’t help but wonder if that little bit of Chaos Myst had just screwed me over on a scale that would make Gods and Titans laugh.