Just a Bystander - Chapter 151

It quickly became clear that the Demiurge had a very simple philosophy when it came to training Caden in thaumaturgy, which was to push him to the brink to force adaptation or face painful failure.

Now that Caden perfectly understood the theory of how to quickly and efficiently dismantle most conventional sequences, the Demiurge tested him sorely in the actual use of that theory in combat. And as Caldwell had noted, dismantaling sequences as an academic exercise was one thing, but doing so consistently and rapidly in the midst of pitched battle was an altogether more demanding exercise. Knowing how to do it was the first step. Now, Caden was being put through his paces so that his technique was, to use Ambrose’s terms, ‘combat-worthy’.

Confined to the tower where he could be attacked from any direction, Caden was forced to unravel wave after wave of shield-piercers. It didn’t help that his attention had to be split between unravelling sequences and maintaining his barrier, because the Demiurge was still keeping up a consistent barrage of heavy arcanic bolts. At first, that barrage was still coming from a point of origin centred above the Demiurge, and so Caden had unravelled it in an attempted to buy himself some more mental bandwidth. Caldwell had chuckled merrily and commended him, then proceeded to use the arena shield itself as the point of origin for his barrage, so Caden was now literally being blasted from all sides intermittently, and there was nothing he could do about it. There might have been a way to deal with the arena shields, but he couldn’t spare the time to figure it out while unravelling shield-piercers.

Like the barrage, the shield-piercers were also coming from all directions, but Caldwell was also manifesting them at various distances so that the first one to appear wasn’t necessarily the one that Caden ought to unravel first. Some spawned right next to his barrier, while others appeared at the farthest reaches. Caden had to spot them, then rapidly prioritise which one to unravel first based on their distance to him and their activation times.

He managed to last all of thirty seconds before he slipped, and a shield-piercer went right through his left shoulder. The shock of pain was almost enough to make him drop the rest of his barrier, but he managed to shore it up so he didn’t get beaten down by the heavy arcanic bolts. But even as he stopped to assess the damage, he saw the Demiurge tap his staff once, and Caden felt the wound close up, though his shoulder still ached a little.

“Take a breath. Then we’re continuing,” Caldwell called up, his amplified voice cutting through the noise of the barrage of heavy bolts that was still going on, though the shield-piercers had stopped for now.

Caden’s mouth was a grim slash as he gathered himself, fortified his shields, and tried to clear his mind. The pain in his shoulder was a slight distraction, but he forced himself to tune it out. A moment later, the shield-piercers started manifesting all over the arena again.

All sense of the passage of time slipped away. Caden’s world was reduced to different points of focus as his attention leaped from one thing to another, his mind flashing from sequence to sequence as he skimmed the edge of oblivion and the arcanic sea, keeping the contact as light as possible — just enough so he could perform unravellings, and not immersing himself entirely because it would be too overwhelming for him. With his shields, he managed to catch the backwash of arcana if he was too slow in unravelling sequences, but every now and then his attention would slip as he failed to notice a shield-piercer in time, or fail to unravel it quite the right way, and the sharp pain of having his body pierced would remind him that he was a creature of flesh and blood, not just a disembodied mind of focused intent.

Dimly, he registered the Demiurge’s staff tapping on the floor, it’s sharp crack heralding a wave of healing arcana that would close his wounds and dull the pain a little. His arcanic sense peripherally noted that the sequence the Demiurge was using to do this was the same one the augera had given him to use on Ambrose — the one that could practically bring people back from the brink of death. So that meant that if he wanted to, the Demiurge could remove the sensation of pain as well, but was choosing not to.

Despite the cruelty of the method, Caden found himself leaning into the training with a kind of savage glee. He could tell he was getting better, even though progress came with pain. The Demiurge was matching the difficulty of the training to the pace of Caden’s improvement, so even as he became more adept and swift in his unravellings, he was still getting pierced on a regular basis.

Then, a new sequence blossomed, this time centred right beneath Caden. His heart skipped a beat as he recognised it — the detonative sequence that had been used against Caden and his friends as they fled Devon’s home in Geldor. The same one that Caden had broken apart so badly the first time he performed an unravelling that it had exploded and caused more damage than the original sequence.

He froze for a second. The seed of arcana in the sequence grew as the various glyphs started taking effect, amplifying the field and increasing the density of the arcana. The transmutation of energy was already underway by the time Caden shook himself out of his stupor and snuffed the point of origin.

He knew it was too late to save himself from the inevitable backwash. Instinctively, he reached out to the gathered arcana, and just before the glyphs of the sequence broke apart and released it in an undirected blast, he plugged it into a sequence of his own.

Black lightning snaked out of Caden’s hands and smashed into the arena wall. They turned red almost instantly, signalling that the sequence was dealing fatal amounts of damage. Cracks appeared, radiating out of the point of impact and covering the entire dome. He didn’t know if he was imagining it, but the cracks seemed a lot deeper than the time when Kevan had used it.

“Well done!” Caldwell’s voice carried over the sound of crackling energy as the last of the lightning dissipated. The barrage of heavy arcanic bolts and shield-piercers stopped as he dismissed his shield and pointed at the crater in the arena barrier. “Very impressive! That was almost a perfect transfer of arcana from the original sequence.”

“I didn’t break the arena, did I?” Caden asked worriedly, looking at the deep cracks across the entirety of the barrier.

“Of course not. But going by the cracks, you might want to be careful about doing this indoors. It’s enough to bring the whole thing down on you,” Caldwell said cheerfully. “Well, I think that’s enough for one night. Come down here and let’s go over some things.”

Caldwell tapped his staff once more, and this time Caden felt all the residual pain from the places where he had been pierced fade away. However, even though his body felt perfectly fine, a fog of exhaustion hung over his mind. He felt a little numb as he bolstered his limbs with arcana and leaped from platform to platform until he came to stand next to Caldwell.

“Have we made progress?” Caldwell asked, leaning on his staff and regarding Caden with a gleam in his eye.

Caden nodded.

“How much progress?”

“Wouldn’t you be able to give a more accurate assessment?” Caden asked, a little taken aback.

Caldwell shrugged. “Maybe. Humour me. What do you think you’ve managed to learn from our session tonight?”

Caden took a moment to think it through. “I learned that the point-of-origin glyphs in a sequence are the easiest and safest spot to hit to unravel them. And right at the end there, I figured out how to deal with the backwash of arcana if I’m a bit late to unravelling a sequence and it’s had time to transmute the arcana into a more dangerous form.”

“A little more detail, please. How do you deal with the backwash?”

“I seize the gathered arcana and use it in a sequence of my own devising.”

“Do you plan to shoot black lightning every time you fail to unravel a sequence promptly?” Caldwell asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Er, no. In theory, I can use any sequence. I just kinda panicked at the end, and I was thinking about stopping the barrage of bolts coming from the arena shield, so that’s what came to mind,” Caden replied sheepishly.

“Mm. You should test that theory tomorrow night,” Caldwell said seriously. “What else have you learned?”

“Nothing new in particular, I think?” Caden bit his lip in uncertainty. “I got in a lot of practice for unravelling sequences. I’m a lot faster and more accurate now.”

“And how did that happen?” Caldwell pressed. “Towards the end, you were sometimes unravelling three sequences almost simultaneously, even though their points of origin were all in different directions. How did you get to that point, when you couldn’t properly do even one when we first started?”

“Three?” Caden gaped at him.

“Yes. I’m very pleased with your progress, but it’ll be a bit of a waste if you don’t even know what you did right,” Caldwell said, frowning a little. “Think. How did you do it? What else did you learn?”

Caden looked up at the tower where he had been standing. When he pictured himself there, his mind did not provide the view of the arena and its platforms and walls. Instead, what came to mind was how he had become nothing more than a core of consciousness in a nebulous space where all that mattered was arcana and intent.

“I… found a… sort of point, or space, between the arcanic sea and oblivion,” Caden said slowly, going over what he had done with a more critical eye, trying to articulate exactly what had been done while he was working out of instinct. “So I could still work with the foundations of the glyphs and unravel them, but I wasn’t caught up in the alienness of oblivion. And there… distance doesn’t matter, or it matters differently. So I don’t have to look anywhere to know when sequences are spawning. I… I sense them, and know where they are, because that’s how things work in oblivion.”

Caldwell nodded, satisfied. “Pay more attention to what you’re doing, Caden. Arcanophany relies on a highly developed awareness of things. Your ability to phase tells me that you know quite a bit about how auric-ambient-flares work, and about the dimensions of the mind and reality. To use a mundane analogy, you have eyes. Furthermore, being sighted is one of your face aspects. It’s time to use those eyes, Caden. Open them more, and don’t just look and see. Notice. I’ll see you in the Vault at ten in the morning.”

With that, Caldwell turned on his heel, waving his staff in a wide arc as he did so. Caden felt the Demiurge’s hold of the ambient arcana fade away, and at the same time, the arena’s conjured environment melted away, along with the barriers.

As soon as the Demiurge had gone, Caden’s first thought was about how he wanted to talk to Devon, or Jerric, or Ambrose, about what he had just learned. After all, they had spent so many hours in this very arena, working and learning together during their Double Thau sessions. It felt like he could just turn to the usual spot they occupied in the stands, and they would be right there. But this was immediately followed by the realisation that they were perhaps even now facing a wild augera out there, if that was what Prophecy intended. Caden lingered in the empty arena, suddenly keenly aware how alone he was.

The training session with the Demiurge only lasted an hour, but Caden didn’t believe the evidence of his eyes when he looked at his watch. It had felt like a subjective eternity, and he after everything that he had been through since coming to the Academy, he wondered if there was some sort of manipulation of time involved. The wellspring-ocean-core certainly seemed capable of warping reality that much, and Caden could easily imagine something like that being possible if you had a network of augera at your beck and call. Still, it was too fantastical to expect that the Demiurge was doing all that just to train Caden, so he put it out of his mind for now. He had to go back to the dormitory and get some well-deserved rest.

Caden took one last look at the empty arena, and turned away from the ghostly memories of his friends.