Mage Tank

Chapter 261: A Tale as Old as Hep

A plume of smoke escaped Hep’s nostrils, curling up into a cloud near the ceiling high above us. “Thank you for your moderation, Gold,” he said. “We will revisit each question in detail.”

The other Rulers seemed amicable to Hep’s suggestion, and what followed was two hours of compelling narrative exposition, provided with cunning clarity, eloquent oration, and premium levels of emotional appeal.

I let Etja do the talking, of course. Despite my aptitude for dramaturgy, I couldn’t hold a candle to our resident mage when it came to performance. So, Etja answered all three questions from the Rulers in much greater detail while regaling the Dragons with an abbreviated recounting of our exploits. She moved seamlessly between our encounter with Orexis in the Ravvenblaq mountains, to our investigation into unlocking the next System phase, onto the deals we made with Avarice where we’d been enigmatically guided towards the Dragons, and finally to the whole debacle with Hysteria, including their ultimate demise.

I envied how she was able to put it all so succinctly without missing anything important. A skill that I would never learn, for lack of trying.

“Hmmm,” Violet rumbled. “Soul damage is not enough to kill an avatar,” he said. “If it were, we’d have exterminated them ages ago. Avarice likely played the larger part, but the soul damage was important enough for the System to take note.”

“Dare we ask the price of her methods?” said Silver. “If it is replicable, Avarice may be willing to trade.”

“Unless it threatens her as well,” said Cerulean. “She will more likely insist that her talon pierce the flesh, and we will be relegated to being couriers once more.”

More smoke rose from Hep. “I would gladly ferry avatars to their deaths, rather than to their prisons.”

I took this opportunity to interject. “It sounds like we’re all of similar minds regarding the avatars,” I said. “We’ve told you what we know today with no expectation of reciprocation. However, every scrap of knowledge we gather concerning the avatars brings all of us closer to their end. As such–”

“Right,” I said. “We told you some useful shit about the avatars, so it’d be cool of you to tell us some useful shit in return. Then, when we learn more useful shit down the road, we can meet again and compare notes.”

Hep’s eyes rolled to Varrin. “Is this closer to how he normally sounds?”

“He normally includes more profanity, but yes,” said Varrin. Hep chuckled and his eyes rolled back to me.

“We know a lot of ‘useful shit’ about the avatars,” said Hep. “Too much to say in one sitting, and somehow all of it seems less than what you’ve just told us. We are old, even for Dragons, and never once have we seen an avatar die. That isn’t to say we haven’t found other ways to ‘handle’ them, but all of our methods have proven to be too slow.

“I was young when the Delves were discovered during my generation,” Hep continued. “Barely two centuries, and I took to their power like all the other flies around the System’s corpse. Strength that would have taken me millenia to cultivate was driven into my soul in a matter of decades. It was intoxicating, as I’m sure you all know. But I was overly reliant on their gifts, and soon realized that there were barriers that I could not overcome, even with the advantages of my heritage. I nearly died in my twenty-fifth Delve, and afterward I returned to my den to gather strength from the molten lakes below the surface.

“I did my own thing for a few thousand years. The Delves reshaped the world as I watched, and each time I awoke from a nap some new wonder had taken over and transformed mortal society. Despite this, once I entered adulthood, my heritage and Levels made me a pinnacle creature. The little races couldn’t stand against me, Levels or not, and I was someone who Dragons ten times my own age would hesitate to challenge. I had no reason to risk myself in more Delves, so I didn’t. Not in phase one anyway.

“During one of my longer sleeps I was awoken by the phase two notification. The rewards were tempting and I felt myself prepared to continue my journey through the Delves. It took time for me to adjust to mortal civilization but I eventually found a party that didn’t ask too many questions about where I’d come from or why I didn’t know half the shit I should have known.”

I ignored the eyes of my party members on me as I listened to Hep speak.

“I made it to Level 30, and that’s when the first avatars began to appear. A conclave was called, and for the first time in living memory nearly every flight sent representatives to discuss the matter. I was far from ancient, but my strength was respected, and very few Dragons knew the Delves as I did. For these reasons I was invited to the conclave, although I did not know why my experience with the Delves mattered at the time.

“You see, most Dragons didn’t care about the Delves. You had to be young to undergo Creation; else the System would reject you. You had to fight through most Delves in humanoid form, which a lot of haughty bastards outright refused to do back then. My people were also superstitious, believing the Delves corrupted the soul, and the promise of immortality didn’t matter much since we were fucking Dragons. It was seen as a novelty at best and a destructive addiction at worst. Over time it became a taboo, but I’d already become a threat by the time that nonsense had completely taken over, so I was tolerated, and among Dragons I was as close to a Delving expert as it got.

“The details aren’t important, but at the time one of the Rulers was on a kind of crusade against Delvers and the System. I don’t remember why and I doubt he could have told you why himself. I think he just saw it as a threat to his dominance. He liked to go out and destroy Delves whenever he could, kill all the Delvers he found, take anything shiny–classic pillage and plunder type stuff. Well, one day he was on his way to do just that when he ran into a pair of avatars. A pair that your group is apparently familiar with.

“This was out in some minor kingdom that no one cared much about other than for the fact it provided a sizable amount of grain to the neighboring countries. Some conversation was had between the Ruler and your favorite twin gods, which naturally resulted in a fight when Orexis and Anesis didn’t roll over and do whatever dumb shit the Ruler wanted. After that fight, no one cared much about that kingdom anymore because it was gone. They sure cared about the food shortages, though.

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“Anyway, the Ruler died. I can’t really explain to you how ludicrous that sounded to any of us at the time, and it was a big part of why the conclave was called. The Ruler had been able to send along some messages describing the conversation, which had somehow convinced him that the System was responsible for creating the avatars in the first place. Orexis was stealing Delve technology to try and help him and his sister finish their ascension or something. It sounded weak to me.

“As a result, the remaining Rulers used every trick in their very thick books to scry the shit out of my soul. Since I had the most exposure to the Delves, I had the best connection with the System. We didn’t get the whole picture right then, but over time we figured out the basics of what was going on, which is more or less what you all know now. People ascend, an avatar comes back down, and the world gets fucked.

“Realizing the threat, the Dragons decided to go to war. This is not a thing that happens, and there are good reasons why this does not happen, primarily because once that war ends there’s nothing left of whatever was being fought over. Regardless, it was either wait for the world to burn, or burn it down ourselves and try to take the avatars and the System with us. You can guess how that turned out.

“While we were busy dying, the Delvers kept advancing the System. Mortals didn’t believe anything we had to say, which was a reasonable reaction since we were busy murdering just about everybody. Phase three unlocked, the avatars grew stronger, Dragons were driven to near extinction, and some of the Delvers just barely managed to make it to the ascension. By that point I’d returned to a few miles below the surface to recover from getting my jaw ripped off. The next time I woke up, there were no new wonders to see. Only a barren wasteland.

“I searched for a few decades, looking for survivors. I eventually found Cerulean here, one of the few other Dragons who’d explored the Delves. She’d clung to life by being too mean for any of the avatars to bother with. Some other Dragons survived, but I didn’t find that out until much later. As for the avatars themselves, there was no sign of them, and all the little races had been wiped out. The ones who hadn’t fallen to the avatars had simply perished from starvation or exposure. Cerulean and I went back to sleep and waited to see if the world would recover. We didn’t have much hope, but if nothing came to wake us, then ever eternal our rest should become.”

Hep took a deep breath, the air in the large room shifting. He blew out another puff of smoke.

“Funny thing about the System,” he said, “is that it’s not just the end of the world. It’s the beginning of it as well.”

I glanced at Cerulean to find the Ruler looking at Hep with a mix of emotions. While their relationship appeared to border on hostile, there was so much history there that I had no idea how to gauge it.

“I do not know how long we slept,” said Hep. “When we awoke, we discovered the world was covered in new forests, plains, jungles, and all manner of living environments. There were mundane creatures along with magical beasts, albeit none too powerful. It seemed a miraculous recovery at first, but then Cerulean realized these biomes were too perfect, too bounded. Upon investigation, we realized that they had been constructed as much as they’d been born.

“Over the centuries we explored this budding world. We discovered Delves with the sole purpose of housing the building blocks of life, the ‘code’ to create new organisms in the wake of a disaster. This did not seem to be the System’s original purpose, but System entities are capable of rapidly breeding creatures from little more than inert matter and complex instructions. For some reason, the System sought to correct the annihilation brought on by the ascension and its unintended consequences.

“We were faced with a choice. Ignore the Delves and hope the ascension was never again pursued, or seek to destroy the System itself. Given that the combined might of our entire race had failed to accomplish the latter, we decided to bide our time and protect the Delves from discovery. There were no sentient races aside from ourselves that we’d found, and we also feared that interacting with the System would inadvertently activate it once more.

“We also sought out the avatars and discovered a small number of them in a dormant state, but could do nothing to destroy or banish them. It was as though they were incontestable truths of the world, eternal in a way nothing else could ever be. We spent vastly more time in this ‘new’ world than the one we were born into. Eventually, all of what came before seemed like a dream.

“We did our best to safeguard the Delves, but the System worked against us. Creation Delves can appear nearly anywhere, with many of them existing in realms beyond our reach. Eventually mortal civilizations rose again. We Dragons were few, we sleep for ever longer periods as we age, and the world–at that time–was large. The cycle inevitably began anew.

“Rather than travel the road of destruction, as our families had, Cerulean and I worked to integrate new whelps with Delver society. We distributed information on the avatars and their birth, much as you are doing now. However, once the System opens the first Creation Delve, the heavens are pierced, and no power can stop the avatars from waking. Still, we worked with that generation to raise Delvers more powerful than had ever walked in our time, and we used what we knew of avatars to develop ways to oppose them.

“Violet and Silver were born of that group. We created hunting parties to seek out specific avatars and attack them where we believed them to be weak. We trapped Thrall in a contained dimensional realm, slew all of Ardor’s followers and buried her beneath the sea. Early victories emboldened us, but while the avatars are single minded, this does not mean they are not adaptable. They also do not care what measures they must take to achieve their goals.

“The center of civilization during that generation was known as Ramka. It was a city that spanned nearly an entire continent, on the opposite side of the planet from Arzia. Cerulean and I had initially worked with their republic to oppose the avatars, but our methods were not decisive enough. Like so many of the mortal races, the Ramkans were cursed with short-sightedness and ignored our counsel. In their desperation, they created terrible weapons, fusions of magic and technology that could sunder reality, and when we opposed this, they decided to exile us from their lands. And because of our guidance, they were powerful enough to do so.

“The avatars, of course, used their weapons against them. A city of billions had all the mana in their bodies ejected. All mana storage in the nation detonated, from the hoards of mana chips to the power sources in every piece of magical equipment. All Delves within a quarter mile of the surface went into overload, every device or organism that keeps mana contained within itself lost control. The resulting eruption lingers to this day, rendering half of this planet uninhabitable to any but the most potent mana fiends.

“We then returned to the cycle of desperation. The remaining Delvers pressed forward towards ascension, seeing it as their only path to escape, no longer concerned with ‘winning’ against the avatars. Of course, ascension only helps those precious few who follow the path set out for them by the System, and who have the talent and will to carry it out. We Dragons had long ago decided that we had no desire to partake in the System’s ultimate rewards, and so none of us ever pushed beyond Level 30.

“Fortunately, Silver proved to be a talented dimensionalist, and we escaped the end of the world by withdrawing to one of her pocket realms. This was much safer than hiding deep below the ground, and many of our kind were not equipped for such a life in any event. Even so, many of our number were once more lost. Again, we slumbered, and again, we waited to see what became of the world.”