The Way Ahead - Chapter 127: Black the Heart

“What have you done, you monster?” Rillah demanded, magic flaring around her as she interposed herself between Edwin and the boy, “Release Yathal this instant and what did you do with Kyni?”

Edwin backed away slowly from the doorway, unwilling to get between the furious mage and the… puppet? The puppet that was Yathal being controlled by Niall.

An idle part of Edwin studied the Skill that was dominating the young boy, a tightly-woven Skill suppressing the normal set of Skills Yathal had and providing some kind of control? He’d need a closer look to be sure, and this wasn’t the time for that. At the very least, he could tell it was an active effect. Niall wasn’t able to passively steer his victims, it was more involved than that.

Edwin felt… almost a little guilty, that he wasn’t feeling particularly mad about Yathal being controlled by Niall. They’d been traveling together for half a year or more, but he’d never really gotten to know the boy or his dog. They’d always been happy off doing their own thing, and…

Really not the time to reminisce about why I’m totally justified, honestly, for not reaching out, he scolded himself. Once this was over, he’d have a serious comb-through of his brain and figure out what was wrong with him, but that was later.

Right now, he needed to separate Yathal and Rillah before anything unfortunate happened. He wasn’t worried about Rillah hurting Yathal, of course, but he didn’t know if Niall was able to spread his infection through his thralls, and if he was then he had to keep Yathal from touching Rillah at all costs.

Even as he had the thought, the boy lunged at Rillah as she drew a bit too close, barely managing to brush his own fingers against Rillah’s hand.

The change was immediate. Yathal slumped to the floor, breathing softly and steadily, but seemingly asleep as Niall left him. When Edwin looked closely, he could spot the signature red tint of Niall’s infection, but there was also an angry red vein lying dormant in the boy’s arm.

Meanwhile, Rillah recoiled and Edwin was able to spot the worst- the blood-red Skill of Niall’s control grappling with and trying to command her. She was putting up a valiant fight, a storm of Mana and Stamina trying and succeeding at holding the Skill at bay. She was still losing ground, her hand twitching out of her control and veritably glowing red to Skillful Assessment.

Then Rillah’s body blinked white, her Cleanse Self resetting everything in her body to a basic state and chasing away the direct control Skill.

Edwin breathed a sigh of relief, only to have it catch in his throat. Her hand was still pink, Niall’s infection having set in already.

“You didn’t get it all,” he warned, “You have some of his blood in you. Can you Cleanse yourself again?”

“What?”

“You’re infected. Get rid of it.”

Rillah’s eyes widened in recognition, and in a blink of an eye, her entire body lit up like a strobe light, pulsing Cleanse Self presumably as fast as she could manage. Every use pushed Niall back further and further, until only a hint of pink clung to her very fingertip. Then, it was gone.

“See? Nothing to worry about.”

“Out.” Tara jumped into the conversation, her sword still dripping with Niall’s blood now aimed at Rillah all-too-close for comfort. “You were infected, you can’t be trusted.”

“No, no. Tara, it’s alright, I can see that she fought it off.”

“And how certain are you of that?”

“I… think decently so? I don’t know how to prove it to you, but I can see the Skill? It’s tricky because I’m pretty sure the infection is intentionally meant to be hard to spot, but it quite literally colors everything the person does. Of course, I can’t literally see inside her, but she doesn’t look like how Yathal did.”

“You seem fairly self-confident in this fact. But the price of you being incorrect is too high. Is she necessary for you to end the plague?”

“No,” Edwin admitted, then amended his statement, “I don’t know. I don’t know what I need. But…”

“Edwin, if you don’t need me, I can run and hide.”

“If you want to leave, then you can leave.”

“Edwin, that’s not…”

“Leave! I can’t stand all of you constantly pestering me, it makes it impossible to think! If you don’t have any ideas or any way to help then yeah! Shoo!”

Rillah reached out her hand in protest, then her breath caught in her throat. While they argued, Niall had apparently seized control over the first guy he’d puppeted once more, and the man’s arm was firmly clasped around Rillah’s shoulder. Her eyes widened as Edwin watched the infection spread through her arm and reach her chest in a heartbeat. Once more, her body flashed white, but the angry red energy overpowered the cleansing Skill. Before Edwin could do anything, another body was on the floor and Rillah was stretching oddly as Niall got used to his newest body.

“Well this is certainly different, but I think I could get used to it.”

That… that was his fault. If he hadn’t distracted Rillah, then she would still be alright. He was right to try and send her away, why didn’t she leave? She should have left, then she wouldn’t be… infected. She’d be safe, she’d be…

Edwin wanted to fall to his knees, but held it together. Instead, an overwhelming sense of rage broke free of his emotional containment, and before Niall could do anything to defile the body of his friend any more, Rillah took a faceful of maximum-strength sleeping potion and collapsed to the ground, on top of the man who’d infected her.

You could have heard a pin drop, and Edwin shrank away from the stunned looks Inion and Tara were giving him.

“I, uh. I…” he stammered. He needed to get them away, so that he couldn’t endanger them. Both started to speak over one another, but Edwin cut them both off first.

“Get out. I need space.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Inion protested.

“Yeah, well that’s what she said, and look at what happened to her now!”

“Edwin, I’m not..”

“I don’t need you! LEAVE!” he commanded, and Inion’s eyes went wide. Before Edwin could properly parse what he’d done differently, she was just… gone, without a trace.

Squelch.

“You stop too!” Edwin snapped at Tara, “I need to focus, and I can’t do that while you’re stabbing him every other minute. Can’t you go clear the streets or something? Initiate some kind of lockdown? Put Niall in a box, to basically the same end as cutting off his head every minute?”

Tara paused.

“Could you have just put him in a box all this time?”

“It did not occur to me to use my Skills in such a manner, however it ought to be possible.”

Silver flickered around Niall’s body, and his headless corpse was suddenly contained in a box too small for him to regenerate fully in. Tara reached over and grabbed it, hefting it onto her shoulder before walking out the door and yelling something infused with a Skill- Edwin didn’t listen, waiting for her to leave. The shouting faded soon enough, and left Edwin alone with his thoughts… and the unconscious bodies of his companions… and one random guy.

Still, it was finally, finally, blessed silence. It was just him now, and that was all that he needed.

Once he’d used Unbound Tether to properly arrange them in a semi-comfortable manner and locked each of them to something heavy via an apparatite shackle, he sat in silence for quite some time, trying to collect himself. Why couldn’t he work better under this kind of pressure? It was too nebulous to properly hyperfocus on, and that meant his brain went everywhere instead.

“Kyni?” Yathal woke up, breaking the silence, and looked around, “Kyni, where are you?”

“He’s not here,” Edwin sighed, “You came in without him.”

“What?” he leaped up, and Edwin had to use Unbound Tether to pin the boy against the far wall.

“Stay over there, buddy. What do you know about what happened?”

“Uh… some guy came to the cart, and then… a blur. I think Kyni was hurt! Just… Uhh. By the corner! Um. You have to help him!”

“I can’t…” Edwin steeled himself. No, he could do this. He had to. He needed to do something right.

It had taken quite a bit of time to properly track down where Kynigos was, and Edwin might have almost completely overlooked him as just another street dog, curled up against a building in an alleyway, if not for Yathal and Outsider’s Almanac. At least Tara had apparently seemingly instituted some kind of lockdown, as the streets were mostly empty.

In any case, Kynigos looked really rough. Patches of the dog’s fur were falling out, and his lips were raised, frozen in a snarl as Edwin approached. He could tell even from a distance that the dog wasn’t doing well, but without contact and a sweep of Anatomy, he wouldn’t be able to determine why.

As he approached, Kyni barked at him and lunged weakly, the dog’s eyes clouded, but his legs gave out as he tried to rise, sending the once-noble dog crashing to the ground and kicking up a cloud of loose fur into the air.

“Hey, hey. It’s alright,” he tried to reassure Kynigos, and Edwin’s voice seemed at least moderately calming as the pup whined pitifully as he allowed Edwin to approach, “I’m going to see if I can’t help.”

Infused Anatomy, he activated as he gently stroked the mangy fur on Kynigos’ back. The Skill returned a fairly detailed report on what was going on inside of the dog’s body, and Edwin winced.

Poison. And not a weak one, either. He couldn’t notice any of Niall’s Skill present within the pup’s body, and Edwin partially hoped it was because the man couldn’t spread to animals. It wouldn’t be that much of a difference, but it was better than nothing. It meant that whatever he learned from this experience would probably be limited, but… he couldn’t do nothing.

He scooped up the dog and flew back to his workstation as fast as he could.

“Such a pathetic weakling. Just like you, really,” Yathal’s voice came, and Edwin glared at the body-snatcher. “So much power, yet he utterly refuses to actually use any of it. Not when I yell, or hit him, or feed him poison. He just takes it all like the scrap of rag that he is. It’s pathetic, just like you.”

“You aren’t being clever,” Edwin spat back mockingly. “Oh, I’m controlling your friend, don’t hurt me you’re just hurting them. Who’s really the weak one?”

He wasn’t able to mimic Niall’s voice, but he did put as much sarcasm into his response as possible.

“Where did all this nonsense about the strong and the weak even come from? Last I remember, you just wanted to make life and get yourself a cool class.”

“Oh, but that’s still the case! If I had my way I’d be off somewhere just tinkering with my lab like I was before you came and screwed it all up! But when you came, I saw that if I ever wanted the chance to properly run my experiments, I had to be strong enough to make sure nobody could ruin me! You taught me that, it’s only fair I show you what I’ve learned!”

“Oh come off it,” Edwin rolled his eyes, “You said you grew up with bandits, there was no way you didn’t see the ‘might makes right’ way before I stumbled into your lair.”

“Oh but of course I did. You simply produced a new angle to the formula than I had considered- the strength to actually do what you can do.”

Edwin stared at the bandit blankly, trying to feed Niall’s statement through Polyglot in such a way the output actually made sense.

He failed.

Whatever, he had a job to do.

He didn’t know enough about poisons to figure out what was causing the issue without alchemically analyzing it, and Anatomy didn’t help much beyond the rudimentary diagnosis of ‘poison’ he’d already gotten, the Skill focusing primarily on symptoms. Fur loss, fatigue, cell death, a weakening of the immune system, and… a magic dampener? He really needed to get a closer look.

Edwin carefully summoned an apparatite container and, using Anatomy, collected a tiny measure of blood by cutting into Kynigos’ flank with a hint of Alchemical Dismantling, sealing up the wound afterwards with a drop of healing potion.

A quick Alchemical Analysis confirmed that the sample of blood he was dealing with still contained the poison that Kynigos was fighting against. Good.

With the vial in-hand, Edwin fed in a thin strand of mana into it and activated Refining. Unlike Niall’s blood, Kynigos’ wasn’t sentient and so put up no resistance as he isolated the toxin permeating it. Interestingly, it didn’t seem to be an actual physical substance, which honestly made the whole process a lot easier.

It was some kind of Skill, definitely similar in some ways to the current plague they were dealing with, to the point that Edwin suspected it might have been a previous evolution of that very power. As he got an up-close look at what it was doing, Edwin realized he was slightly wrong- instead of being a full poison, it was more of a draining effect, the Skill feasting on Health and Stamina directly to strengthen itself.

That would explain the symptoms- he’d noticed the exact opposite effects in the wake of gaining Health, after all. It also meant he needed to act relatively quickly, before low Health turned terminal.

Okay, he could work with this, and it might even help him when he moved to dealing with the full plague. All he needed to do was twist the draining effect to be self-sabotaging. By tweaking the effect to, instead of consuming Health, consumed the Skill?

Yeah, he liked that.

He finished Refining the bit of blood he had into raw ‘toxin,’ then carefully fed that through a series of filters both magical and alchemical until it hit the form he wanted. Talsanenris acted as fuel for the antitoxin as well as blocking its direct desire for ‘life,’ and a bit of carefully directed Refined Firevine burned out the safeguards the Skill had in place to avoid cannibalizing itself. Then, the most important part: Molai and Synbaline in a very particular ratio modeled after Edwin’s own Mana-blocker, added to ensure his potion would not attack Health.

It was still risky. There was distinctly a chance that his changes didn’t protect Kynigos in the slightest but just unleashed a new deadly threat to the dog’s life. Edwin just… didn’t know what else he could do. Healing potions weren’t doing enough, he needed to do something, anything to try and save the life of his companion.

With bated breath, he summoned an apparatite syringe and injected the potion into Kynigos.

At first, it worked fantastically.

Edwin could keep track of the potion thanks to a combination of Ritual Intuition and Anatomy, but now that he knew what to look for, he could even see Niall’s skill be utterly consumed by the antitoxin. Edwin pulled out one of his strongest Health potions and began dribbling the liquid directly into Kyni’s bloodstream. He felt his heart beat faster and faster as Kynigos’ breathing steadied, Health returned to his limbs, and he unsteadily sat up, though Edwin held down the dog’s back leg to keep his potion syringe in place.

Then, the antitoxin finished consuming the original Skill, and as he feared, it didn’t stop. Instead, much to Edwin’s horror, the newly empowered it turned back to Kynigos’ Attributes and even Skills. Edwin grabbed a molai solution to try and contain it, but the new potion was already running out of control, and overpowered the dampener before Edwin could so much as pull out an extra health potion. He twisted his mana into a basic talsanenris potion and tried feeding that into the dog’s body, but to no avail as the antitoxin just devoured that as well.

Kynigos gave a long, shuddering breath and collapsed.

No. Nononono. No!

Edwin tried to Identify Kynigos. No response beyond ‘fur.’ He Infused Anatomy once again, trying to peer inside his body, but got nothing back.

“Kynigos? Kynigos!” Edwin frantically shook the dog’s body, trying to wake him up, hoping that he was actually alright, that he was just mistaken about having… having…

“Edwin? Kyni? What’s… what’s going on?” Edwin tensed at hearing Yathal’s voice, but it was wholly devoid of the normal mocking tilt that Niall’s possession usually carried with it, “Why does my Skill feel so cold?”

“I’m sorry, but I… I…” Edwin couldn’t speak. He’d… he’d failed.

“No! NO! What did you do! What did you-” Yathal’s voice broke, grief rushing in as he collapsed utterly. He let out a wordless cry of grief before

“Poor little Edwin, too weak to save the people he cares for. This is your fault, you know. If you actually had an Alchemy skill level worth a damn, or if you’d just stuck your nose somewhere else where it belonged then the precious little dog would still be alive,” Niall’s taunting was all the more haunting as Yathal’s breaking voice was forced to perform devoid of all grief.

“Shut up, Niall. You… you did this. Not me. I did my best.”

“But it wasn’t good enough. Now run along, little adventurer. You’re too weak.”

Yathal’s voice broke with a sob and he threw himself against his restraints, trying to get free. Edwin couldn’t stand it much longer, and he released the apparatite holding the kid in place. What was even the point? He wasn’t heartless enough to keep them separated.

“Yathal, I-”

“Go away!” He draped himself over the body of his former best friend, “This- your faul’. If you, if you hadn’… I hate you!”

Edwin fought back the emotions. He could… contain Niall’s insults for all that they hit close to home. The man was an enemy, he was trying to throw Edwin off-balance. But he was also possibly more impartial than his actual friends, as…

No. No, Edwin. Focus. Shove the emotions in a box, shove that box in another box and pile them somewhere to deal with later.

Yathal’s too-young voice, sobbing over the body of his former friend? That was… that was a bit, a bit harder to- harder to ignore.

It’s my fault. I can’t do it. If I was better, Kyni would be alive. If I wasn’t involved, Kyni would be alive, if I could do anything….

Edwin ran.

He ran far and fast, Unbound Tether pushing him out of town and into the wilderness, just so he could get space. He barely even watched where he headed, only really coming back to himself in a pile of burned rubble out in the middle of nowhere, head in his hands.

He wasn’t able to do this. He was a single person, in too far over his head and against people who knew things way more than him, who had their lives together and far, far better at this than he was. He simply did not know what he was doing. He saw that with the dwarves, with Niall, with Panastalis and the bacteria there, even with Sheraith. A part of him whispered that he had won in all of those situations, that he had managed to scrape together enough grit and determination and knowledge to overcome his obstacles every single time, but that just wasn’t true. The dwarves he’d had a helping hand from karma or something, Niall he’d only won because of Lefi, only the open-mindedness of the guildmaster meant he’d left any kind of lasting impact in Panastalis, and with Sheraith it was Rillah and her teachings about magic that gave him the tools needed to make his mana accumulator. He wasn’t able to do this, not when he had nobody to help, nobody who knew what was happening. He was, when it came down to it, a failure who always needed help yet never could sustain the kind of help he actually needed. Even Inion, who was the closest he’d gotten in so long to an actual friend… “I’m sorry, Rillah. I’m sorry, Yathal,” he whispered to himself, blinking away tears. “I couldn’t do it. I knew I couldn’t do it, and then I failed. I’m just not… I’m just not good enough.”

He didn’t know the first thing about how to start killing Niall, he was no closer to a solution than a day ago, a week ago, a year ago. He wasn’t qualified for this! He was just some random person who’d fallen out of the sky and now he was responsible for saving everyone?

Why? Why, by whatever god, administrator, or power that had dropped him onto Joriah, did he have to do this on his own?

He wiped away the tears, mad at… something. Himself, the world, the System, Niall, whoever and whatever he could be. He’d had… fine, they were friends by most reasonable metric. He enjoyed their presence, they tolerated his, and it was stupid of him to ever really hold out for more. Besides, if he managed to somehow beat Niall, maybe he would finally be worthy of being their friend? He needed something, and he wasn’t going to let that stupid ‘I don’t need friends’ mentality ever get in his way ever again. At a bare minimum, he refused to turn into Bob.

But wanting friends was only the first step, he also needed to earn their friendship. And to do that, he needed to free them from Niall’s grasp. And for that, well….

Normally, Edwin tried to suppress the ‘original idea’ impulses that his Alchemy skill gave him, leaning instead on the mastery of technique it granted him. After all, it wasn’t properly proven information, and while the hunches could be useful for figuring out potential avenues of research, it was far from properly scientific information. There was also a part of him which whispered that it wasn’t really him doing the work, just the stupid magical System giving him all the answers, but he didn’t have the luxury of that at this point. Using it wouldn’t automatically invalidate his efforts to prove himself, he felt, but it would make it harder.

But desperation didn’t quite allow for such niceties, did it? He needed to use every resource he had at his disposal, and right now that included unreliable Skill hunches.

So, he thought, What makes Niall’s Skill tick?

It’s a correspondence, Alchemy whispered back. They’re linked by virtue of being completely identical both physically and magically, a sort of metaphorical entanglement that allows the blood to serve as a conduit and backup simultaneously.

Well, that certainly was a lot to unpack, and the scientist in him was still protesting that he couldn’t just run with a hunch. But at the same time he wasn’t really a scientist, not anymore, nor really ever. Scientists were pillars of community. They worked together to attack a problem no matter how insurmountable, be it a plague, war, or annoying math problem. But he was all on his own, now more than ever. He wasn’t a scientist.

But he was an alchemist. Not a great one, he couldn’t spin moonlight into thread or crystallize the breath of life. But he did have one thing that he was certain that Niall couldn’t match.

Alchemy: Level 102

He may not have been a scientist. He didn’t study the laws of reality with enough rigor for that or have the support network required. But alchemists worked alone, and he was very good at that.

But the main difference between a scientist was that a scientist just sought to understand how the world worked. An alchemist tried to break it.

And it was time he did just that.