Victor of Tucson

Book 9: Chapter 23: Schemers

When Victor’s blood ignited with the hot, boiling fury of the volcano, rationality fled his mind. He vaguely remembered screaming at Chamberlain Thorn with a voice powerful enough to shatter marble, but he had no memory of casting Wake the Earth. Unfortunately, when his mind was enraged by Volcanic Fury, it seemed to fixate on that one ability among all his others. It was almost like the spirit of the great, sleeping gods of the earth wanted to use him as a conduit for their depthless, frustrated malice.

There was no telling how much destruction he might have wrought if he’d finished with Thorn and turned his madness against the city. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, depending on whom you asked, he’d been in the middle of an enormous marble and granite structure, standing on the ground floor, with a vast edifice over his head and half a dozen subterranean levels below. As he pummeled Thorn, and the world shook, the ground gave way, and even for a burgeoning titan engorged on the fury of the mountain, thousands of tons of stone was enough to dampen his rampage.

When he came back to himself, Victor was in the dark, and his hand was clenched around the cold, dead flesh of Thorn’s neck. Dust and soot were thick in the air, and, bit by bit, he began to notice small details—jumbles of broken stone, the hiss of gasses venting from subterranean outlets, and the soft, almost comforting glow of magma, burbling as it cooled. Victor’s first panicked thought was of Lifedrinker, but she was there, close at hand, with her dark edge buried in a massive granite slab.

With a grunt, he stood to retrieve her, and that was when he realized he had a System message waiting for him:

***Congratulations! You have achieved level 73 Berserker of Unstoppable Momentum and gained 9 strength, 14 vitality, 9 agility, and 9 dexterity.***

Had he already claimed his Energy from Thorn, then? Was that what had, ultimately, broken him out of his rage? Victor looked around the dim space and saw that above his head was nothing but broken, jumbled stone slabs and that another such slab pinned Thorn’s legs to the ground. Piles of broken stone were everywhere, and he had vague, foggy memories of throwing them off himself. He wondered if he’d been buried or injured by the collapse. He supposed he’d never know; he healed too quickly while enraged, and if the influx of Energy from Thorn had been enough to level him, then it would have healed any lingering wounds, too.

His little chamber beneath the rubble was only about a dozen giant-sized paces across, and he figured he’d need to start digging if he was going to get out of there. Victor touched Lifedrinker’s haft, sending her into storage, and then he summoned a sharp knife into his hand, turning to Thorn’s corpse. “If you’re going to cause this much damn trouble, I’m taking your pinché heart.”

While he worked, Victor’s mind wandered to worrisome topics. Had he killed any innocents in his rampage? Had the damage he’d done to the palace killed anyone? He hoped not—people on Ruhn were generally well into their iron ranks, and the folks in the palace were usually higher than average. Surely, most of them could get away while the ground shook. Surely, there were enough guards and high-level nobles around to help any children.

“Right?” he asked the sticky, cold organ as he pulled it from Thorn’s chest. The heart wasn’t able to reassure him, so Victor sent it into storage. Looking around, he saw other, partially buried corpses, but they were members of the royal guard, no doubt the men and women who’d come with Thorn and died before the collapse.

He was looking up, contemplating his best route of egress, when, with a faint tinkling of chimes, he heard Queen Kynna’s voice as though she stood close by, pitching her voice for just his ears, “Victor, my scryers have located you in the wreckage. Soon, the Earth Elementalists will have you free. Thank you for slaying Thorn, my champion. Thanks to you and the brave efforts of guardswoman Bryn, my son is safe, and a coup has been thwarted. Please stay safe where you are; it will be more than an hour before the Elementalists have cleared the way.”

Victor tried speaking back to her, “Um, okay. Was anyone hurt in the, uh, battle?” Could he play the destruction off as simply the side effects of his struggle with Thorn? Whether he could or not, it didn’t seem the queen could hear him. No further message was forthcoming. He found a relatively flat hunk of marble and sat down, contemplating his situation.

His thoughts started with how he felt; he didn’t like it. Objectively, he supposed he should feel good. He’d saved Kynna and Bryn in the garden and stopped and killed Thorn. He’d even gained a level in the process. Wasn’t that good? Why, then, did he feel like he’d gotten too drunk and done something terrible? Why did he feel guilty? He knew the answer; he’d lost himself to the rage again, and, as good as it felt in the moment when he was smashing and destroying and killing, it felt awful in retrospect.

What it boiled down to was that Victor didn’t like having control taken from him, even if it was his own magic doing it. He hadn’t liked it when his original Berserk made him that way, and he didn’t like it when Volcanic Fury did it. “Why then, pendejo, did you choose a new class that gives you yet another way to lose control?” He chuckled, shaking his head as he gathered saliva in his mouth to spit, trying to rid himself of some of the dust that had caked his airways.

He could hear distant rumbling and scraping and figured it was the queen’s Elementalists working to move the wreckage of the palace. He wondered how far up they were. How many underground passages and galleries had he and Thorn fallen through? Thinking of Thorn reminded him of the man’s heart, and Victor decided he might as well do something productive while he waited. He dug the cold, sticky organ from his storage ring and contemplated it.

Thorn had been a steel seeker. A cowardly one, but a steel seeker, nonetheless. He’d had a powerful affinity for ice or something similar; would that hinder Victor’s ability to absorb the Energy? He was anything but cold, after all. “Pendejo,” he cursed again, gathering more spit. “That loser could have beaten Obert or Qi Pot. Why didn’t he?”

He supposed there were a few good explanations. Thorn might have been a coward, only willing to fight when he’d been caught in the act of orchestrating a coup. Maybe he’d been afraid that, after beating one of the “backwater champions,” as he’d labeled them, a more powerful kingdom would come calling. “Or maybe the piece of shit was working for someone else.” Victor wondered about that—would it be so strange for the great houses to have agents spread out through the lesser kingdoms?

The heart didn’t appeal to him in its cold, clotted state, and Victor was tempted to summon his camp stove and cook it up. Something in his gut said that would be wrong, though; perhaps part of his “ritual” was to eat the hearts raw. So, holding his breath and trying not to think about what he was doing, Victor tore a massive hunk of the heart off with his teeth and began to chomp it down.

The meat was cold. At first, he’d thought it was just that Thorn’s body had cooled, and the heart had lost its vibrant heat. He soon realized it was more than that; it wasn’t that the heart wasn’t warm—it was cold, like meat taken from a freezer and barely out of the rock-hard stage. What was more, as Victor swallowed his first bite, he could feel the coldness spread through his belly and into the surrounding flesh. As he chomped off another bite, he wondered if he was making a mistake.

Victor didn’t take small bites, but Thorn had been a giant—a man of nearly the same stature as himself when he wasn’t enraged. Despite its coldness, the heart didn't taste bad once Victor’s saliva loosened up the blood. That fact encouraged Victor that he, hopefully, wasn’t making a foolish mistake by consuming flesh that was clearly attuned to an affinity he didn’t share. The frigid feeling spread through his body as he ate, and he could feel the tendrils of that icy Energy seeping into his Core space. When he gazed inward, he saw those tendrils of blue, frosty Energy rebuffed by the heat of his Spirit core. ?

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

He wasn’t left guessing about what would happen to him for long. As the Energy infused his flesh to the point where he passed beyond cold to numb, System messages began to scroll into his field of view:

***Congratulations! You have gained a new affinity: Blue Ice.***

***Warning! Incompatible Core: Spirit Cores cannot have an elemental affinity.***

***Compatible Breath Core Found: Elder Class. Reapplying acquired affinity.***

***Congratulations! You have gained a new Breath Core affinity: Blue Ice.***

***Applying Energy gains to Breath Core.***

***Congratulations! Your Breath Core has gained three ranks: Improved 9.***

Victor read the messages and felt a swelling of frigid Energy in his chest. He nearly panicked, fearing his magma-attuned Energy would be overwhelmed, but the spike in “blue ice” Energy reached a crescendo and then faded, leaving him feeling almost normal, if not a little…cooler. He turned his gaze inward, studying the space where his Breath Core lay.

Swirling, almost lazily, his ball of angry, magma-attuned Energy traversed the space in direct opposition to a ball of frigid-looking, deep blue, icy Energy. Victor knew from the System messages that it was called “blue ice,” but he had no idea what that meant other than it was cold even to look at. The two orbs of opposing power circled his Breath Core space, almost like they were squaring off, sizing each other up. It was amusing to watch, but Victor hoped he hadn’t created something untenable in his Breath Core.

As the sounds of stone grinding and shifting grew closer, he decided to experiment a little. Standing and facing toward the center of his little cave of crushed marble, he opened the pathways to his Breath Core, inhaled deeply, and, just as he’d learned to do so many months ago back in the Untamed Marches, he exhaled a plume of fiery, magma-attuned Energy. It wasn’t nearly as impressive as when he was under the influence of his Volcanic Fury spell, but the stream of liquid fire was significantly broader and stretched further than when he’d first acquired his Breath Core.

As the hot, molten rock smoked and sizzled, he looked into his Breath Core again and saw that both Energy orbs were reduced. Was his Energy cap the same for both attunements? Looking at his Status sheet to confirm, he saw:

Breath Core Energy: 1780/2800

He’d gained three hundred maximum Energy from his Core’s new ranks, but his total was a singular value; he didn’t have different tallies for the two Energy types. “So, how do I breathe blue ice?”

He opened his pathways again, took a deep breath, and this time, instead of firing off his breath by reflex, he looked inward to his Breath Core space, and using his will, he pulled a strand of the icy blue Energy into his pathway before exhaling. Just as he’d hoped, a plume of frosty, crackling air erupted from his mouth, coating the sheet of still-smoldering magma and freezing it over. More than that, he could hear the stones beneath the sheet of frosty ice cracking as the frigid substance bit deeply into them.

“Now that’s badass!” Victor slapped his hands together, then looked at his Breath Core Energy levels again:

Breath Core Energy: 770/2800

He was rather happy to see that his Breath Core’s Energy wasn’t being split by the two affinities but rather that he had a total sum of Energy that he could use as he wished, much the way his Epic-tier Spirit Core worked. The thought made him wonder if that meant his Breath Core was well-constructed and wouldn’t need tweaking before he advanced to epic tier and beyond. He also wondered if he’d be able to enhance his Breath Core cultivation by adding a source for the strange “blue ice” Energy.

He must have spent more time thinking and experimenting than he thought because a great clatter of crashing stone interrupted him, and a stream of light shone down into his dusty, smoky space. “Duke Sandoval?” a strident woman’s voice called, and he shielded his eyes to peer upward where a large woman wearing honest-to-God brown corduroy overalls stood in the hazy opening, peering back at him.

“That’s me!”

“Are you well?”

Victor chuckled and began hopping up the broken stones toward the opening. “That’s likely a matter of opinion. Some would say no.”

The woman peered up at him and took in the clean, undamaged appearance of his clothes—Victor had long since sent his armor into hiding. “Ancient Gods! How’d you survive this catastrophe?”

Victor brushed his hands together, wishing his skin could similarly clean itself, and shrugged. “I’m tough and lucky, I guess.” He wasn’t sure he should claim responsibility for the “catastrophe.” Was the queen spinning a different tale? Still, his guilt tweaked his guts, and he blurted, “Was anyone else hurt?”

“Aye, plenty! Still, the gods must favor Gloria, for none are reported dead save those traitors what caused this disaster! Her Majesty says you had a hand in that, milord, so you have the thanks of me and mine. Imagine! Trying to kill such a wonderful woman as Queen Kynna Dar! And her poor son! Such an innocent lad! I’m beside myself!” She shook her head and sighed, then pointed further upward toward another, brighter light. “I should stop my rambling, sir. Head on up—I’ve made steps there in the larger stones. Take your time; we’ve folks waiting to tend to you.”

“And you?”

“I’ll clean this mess up as much as I can. Her Majesty is eager to have Thorn’s body so’s she can search for evidence of his accomplices. You, um, didn’t take his rings or—”

“Nah. They’re all there.” Victor waved and started climbing. It was true; the woman had basically built a staircase out of the rubble with comfortable, grooved steps seemingly molded into the marble. He wasn’t sure how he felt about Kynna blaming Thorn for the destruction, but he supposed a person could make the argument that this was all the traitor’s fault. If Thorn hadn’t attacked Kynna, Victor wouldn’t have had to fight him. It wasn’t like Victor had wanted to use his Volcanic Fury; he’d needed it to break the former chamberlain’s ice spell.

The cheers of guards and more Elementalists broke him from his introspection, and he smiled as he emerged from a massive pit into the dusty, broken remnants of the central portion of Kynna’s palace. He was glad to see that the four wings were mostly intact, visible over the rubble and that the grounds and gardens seemed relatively whole. For once, he was happy that his power wasn’t truly the equivalent of a great volcano.

He waved to the folks hard at work clearing away the mess, then caught sight of Kynna, still surrounded by her Queen’s Guard. She was waving him over from atop a partially broken staircase. Victor jogged over, nodding and waving to every soldier and worker he passed; all stared at him with a mixture of adoration and awe. Some cheered, some shouted his name, and some simply stared, dumbstruck by his presence.

When he mounted the steps and stood before Kynna, he knelt, biting back a quip about how easy it was to impress her people. Before he could speak, asking something inane like how she was or saying something lame like he was glad her son was all right, she grasped his shoulder and pulled him to his feet. “You’ve saved our nation, Victor. I’ll not have you kneel this day.”

Victor looked around at the dusty, bloody faces of the Queen’s Guard and asked, “Is Bryn—”

“She’s well. I insisted she see a physician. She suffered a head wound while rescuing my son, but Leyna here says that she’ll be fine.” The queen glanced at one of her guardians. “Yes?”

Standing there in a battered silvery breastplate tooled with enameled yellow roses, the woman nodded quickly and, in a hoarse, breathy voice, responded, “Aye, My Queen. The physician said she’d be right as rain in no time.”

Queen Kynna, her hand still on Victor’s shoulder, smiled and gently squeezed. “You see, Champion? Your loyal guardswoman is well, my betrayer is dead, and my son is safe.” She gestured to the wreckage of her palace. “This will be made whole again, given time. In the meantime, I’d like to travel with you to Iron Mountain.” She reached up to tap her crown, encompassing herself, Victor, and all of her remaining Queen’s Guard in her blue dome of privacy.

“Something more?” Victor prompted.

“I’m quite sure Thorn wasn’t acting alone. I believe he was…prodded to act. I’ve reconsidered my ancestor’s proposal, Victor, and I believe it’s time that we speak in earnest about the next steps. If the nations of Ruhn want to scheme against me, plot my demise, and threaten my child, then I believe it’s high time we gave them a reason to fear us.”

“Us?”

“Well, Victor, after hearing the tale of your performance in the garden and seeing how you stood up to Thorn, I must admit that I’ve gained a…new perspective with regard to you challenging more dangerous champions.” She turned back to the wreckage. “Still, it’s a pity Thorn’s schemes brought down the palace, don’t you think? The word going around the city is that my new champion was nearly killed by the man. He might have emerged victorious if he hadn’t brought the palace down on himself.”

As she turned back to him and winked, Victor grinned and nodded. “Yeah, he was a real mean bastard, that Thorn. Lucky for me, a giant chunk of granite fell on his head.”