Chapter 16

“The majority of species encountered across the universe have thus far been relatively similar. Offshoots from some common progenitor perhaps, or simply a matter of the same evolutionary niche being filled in a similar way. Yet there are of course exceptions to every rule. The Ghol species of the eastern arm for instance. A sentient species born not of carbon, but silicate, with environmental demands to match.”

—The Others, Karth Veilbohr

His stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with the heavy metals lining it. Two days before the tournament started. There was no way that he’d be ready. He’d done no training. All his physical conditioning had been knocked back by weeks. All of the studying that he’d planned to do of his opponents with Bael’s assistance. All of the new spells he was going to learn and cast using the mana-storing gauntlet, which he still hadn’t repaired. He didn’t even know if he could cast a spell without falling over, let alone fight.

With a spike of anxiety, he reached for his mana, and sent it shooting through his body into his stomach, seizing ahold of the metal and minerals that he’d been imbibing with every meal and painfully started to drag it into his system. As it moved began to infuse it into his body with one great agonizing effort that left him slick with sweat and panting. It spread out from his stomach, the parts of it he wanted infused into the lining of that organ lingering, and the rest rushing out through his blood, spreading along his veins until he could feel the alien materials everywhere, from the tingling tips of his toes to the dully aching top of his head.

He let out a laugh, without meaning to. Without any of his usual caution and restraint. It echoed back to him in his empty room. He blinked as sparkles fluttered across his vision, crystalline shards bonding to his nerves, or flecks of metal drifting in the liquid of his eye. He was committed now. He’d done it. There was no second guessing, no time to doubt. Two days to get fighting fit.

Tremors still ran through his body as he rose from the bed, but they had nothing to do with exhaustion now. Parts of every system in his body were being infused with the cocktail of metals and other rare materials that had been in the supplement packets, and there would be more, even more unusual material to come. His channels should have been aching and exhausted after everything that he’d put his body through, but as metal bonded to flesh and the initial spells of the embodiment did their work, they were reinforced. A process that itched like crazy, as if he had a million tiny splinters of moving metal wedged into every crevice inside him. 

But again that was probably just because he did. 

Nerves dulled alarmingly and then brutally reasserted themselves. A hollow space began to form at the back of his skull, ever so slightly shifting his brain as he made room for the new one he was going to plant in there when his paradigm was complete. 

Infusing the materials would take time as they prepared his body for the second half of the new embodiment. But Sylvas had rediscovered his razor-sharp focus again now that time was ticking away, and his paradigm was something that he could go on working on without any delay at all. The only thing slowing the construction of his secondary mind was his own slow process of copying details over from one to the other, fragmenting himself and infusing those fragments into the new mind before dragging them back out to reincorporate into him. 

The new mind wouldn’t be able to fragment itself, but it would have access to any fragments he created. It wouldn’t be in control, but it would be able to manage the different fragments for him when required. That was pretty much secondary to his main goal for the Second Thoughts paradigm, as he’d been calling it in his notes. It would take in all of the sensory data he had no time to sift through, and it would purify it down into things he could use. It would take the patterns that he could see during fights and translate them into predictions. Maybe even record the specific spell-forms so that he could start countering magic the way that Bael did.

Two days wouldn’t be enough for him to complete either of the two parts of his new circle, but that didn’t mean they would be completely useless until then. The changes to his body would improve his durability thanks to the materials had been integrated, but his new mind wouldn’t kick in until he was ready. It would only be the combination of the two of them, working in harmony and harmonizing with all of his other circles, that would push him further along the path of ascension towards his final circle. 

Back during Hell Week, the instructors had been concerned at the way his various circles seemed to blend into each other, with one relying on the other to function. It was a risk that many of them didn’t have the stomach to tolerate. Sylvas disagreed and had decided it was better to completely lean into the integration. His goal was to ultimately make all five of his circles into a single cohesive entity, with his hollow heart at the center of it all, drawing in mana without effort.

He let it start drawing in mana now. Shuddering as the raw power of the universe washed over him and through his channels to fill his core once more. It was compressed and condensed as it entered him, tightening in around the emptiness in his center. Distantly he felt the echo again, the strange sensation of some power just outside of his reach, but he didn’t go chasing off after it today, not when the immediate future needed his full and undivided attention. This was not normal mana cycling, it was his own unique way of drawing it in, and now, he was going to start changing it once again. The smile on his face had become a rictus of pain as he strained against the flow of magic as it flooded into him, washing over him and around him. The freshly healed channels in his body burned.

“Aren’t you meant to be resting, Stanzbuhr?”

He almost jumped entirely off the bed. The door to his room hung open, and he could make out Bael and a few others standing outside, awkward and polite while Kaya had wandered right in and poked him in the cheek. It took a moment for him to rise back out of the morass of misery that he’d flung himself into, blinking. The others were all here, which meant their training for the day was over, which meant he’d lost yet another day, just working on his new embodiment. “Have you ever heard of knocking?”

She raised her hand from where it had been poking his face, clenched it into a fist, and rapped it on his forehead. Then she spoke in a half shout, like he was going deaf, “aren’t you meant to be resting, Stanzbuhr?!”

Despite everything, he had to restrain a chuckle. “I’ve run out of time to rest.”

“Aye, they’ve rugged us on the schedule again.” Kaya had the good grace to look uncomfortable about it, at least. “Figured they were done waiting for you to wake up.”

“Excuse me, do you mind if we come in?” Bael called from the doorway.

“Of course, the more the merrier. These aren’t private quarters that people aren’t meant to just wander into whenever they feel like it, after all.”

Sylvas should have known better than to try and embarrass Kaya. She was physically incapable of experiencing shame, so far as he could tell.

She leaned in closer still, until he could feel her breath on his face. “You feeling alright, Sigil? You look… weird.”

“Being brutalized by a swarm of Eidolons and healed back from the brink of death hasn’t left me as beautiful as I was before?”

“Nah, you’re still ugly as a grakghust’s rear end, but you look… shiny?”

“Dwarves do sweat, I assume?”

“Course we do, you can smell that for yourself.” She said proudly lifting her arms. “But you aren’t wet shiny, you’re glittery.”

Sylvas cast a despairing look across to the others, but they were all peering at him with interest too now. Gharia bobbed her head. “There is a little…um, sparkle. I like it.”

Sylvas had no intention of giving away any details of his new embodiment to the people who were soon to be his competitors. “Huh, I guess it must be an something from the treatments coming to a head. The medic told me most of my skin had to be regrown.” 

He then shrugged and changed the subject. “Can I ask what I’ve done to earn so many visitors?”

“Figured you’d need to eat, even if you were snoozing all day.” Ironeyes had unfortunately adopted at least some portion of Kaya’s attitude after spending too much time with her.

To his surprise, Sylvas was hungry. Ravenously hungry after days of feeling so sick to his stomach that he had to brute force nutrients down. “I could eat.”

The journey down to the dining hall was not arduous, he was not shaking or exhausted by the time that it was done. He was in pain, because some parts of his body were no longer working the way that they had at the start of the day, but he could block that pain out the same way he could shut down his gravity sense. The staff tried to serve him a normal meal, and he hung back to ask for the addition of his special supplement pack. There was, once again, resistance from them, but eventually he just reached past and took the packs from where they lay behind the counter. It was too late to stop now.

He mixed in two sachets instead of the one he’d been consuming, then after remember his vomiting episode, poured on a third one. He had only one more day before the tournament, a day he’d have to spend repairing his equipment and testing out his ability to cast. He did not have time to take things slow. He did not have time to take things easy. Danger was a part of the job.

Sitting with his friends, he arrived in the midst of a story about Kaya’s one on one training with Instructor Sagran. One in which it sounded a lot like she may have actually ended up on an anvil at one point, if the translation spell wasn’t making a metaphorical statement literal.

“So the hammer is coming down and I—” She glanced at Sylvas plate and wrinkled her nose. “Smells awful.”

He quipped back quickly to distract her. “You’ve smelled worse.”

She responded with a rude gesture and went back to her story. As he swallowed down the powdered crystal and metal this time, his stomach didn’t lurch and try to reject them. With the embodiment spell now coursing through him, they were absorbed into his system just as readily as any other nutrient. Protein would build his muscles, and these metals would in turn build themselves on top. Starting from the deepest parts of him and working their way out.

Hopefully I can figure out something to do about the taste though, Sylvas thought idly. He might not have been technically poisoning himself to death as a result of his new diet anymore, but with every mouthful he took, he was starting to wish he had been.