“So,” Mari’Kha began as she scrunched up her face and conjured a few light projections depicting what she was talking about, starting with the wrinkled and charred husk that had formed the bulk of the horde that Leon and Tiraeses had been fighting in the city, “this one is a husk.  They’re basically just the tattered remains of the people in the cities who were sacrificed to the devils.  I think.  They’re summoned by the ballbags who watch over the crystals in the cities, and they don’t leave corpses when they die, soooo…  I don’t really know what they are, and only heard like fourth or fifth-hand about them from my father.”

“They struggle to reflect Strong Ashagon’s blessings on their own,” Tiraeses said.  “Do they have some hidden capabilities they haven’t yet displayed?”

“None that I ever saw,” Mari replied.  “Then again, I only ever saw the fuckers when fighting with other Ultians, but I heard some stories of others who had harder times with them.  Though… I kinda think that those guys were fighting husks summoned by… this fucking thing.”

Mari switched her projected image to the creature with a circular body, a dozen heads and as many pairs of arms, and scars filled with eyes covering its ‘main’ body.

“Watchers,” she identified.  “They can summon husks on their own, but they tend to prefer fucking with our heads.  Worst thing is that they don’t use illusions.  They’re strong enough with darkness magic to fiercely defend themselves, but they’re more designed for subterfuge and to knock people off their game.  And I do mean ‘designed’ if what I’ve heard is accurate.  That arrogant bi… er, ‘guest’, or whatever, the blond one…”

“Queen Larkoina,” Leon offered.

“Yeah.  Her.  I once overheard her saying something about the watchers being created by the devils to keep an eye on the cultists.  I’ve got no damn clue if that’s real, but that’s what I heard, hand to the gods.”

“I believe you,” Leon replied with a friendly smile, though at least a part of the expression was due to the relative ease with which he could pronounce azurian.

Mari smiled back.  “How did you find that thing, by the by?  My squad of Ultians had a ton of problems finding and destroying them.”

Leon frowned and shrugged.  “Its invisibility was rudimentary.  Usually with darkness-based creatures, they can hide in shadows, but that can be detected.  This one decided to try and become properly invisible, but it was close enough that I noticed where it wasn’t.  Everything around it was filled with magic power.”

“It was that fucking easy?” Mari said, looking aghast.

“I wouldn’t say easy,” Leon replied.  “Don’t forget that I’m a tenth-tier mage.  My senses are sharp.”

“If you say so…” Mari replied with a frown of her own.

“Why don’t we continue, unless Melitor, Lord of Memory, has taken any further knowledge of these creatures from you,” Tiraeses interjected.

“I remember it just fine, guy,” Mari shot back.  “Old Melitor hasn’t taken shit from me.”

“You wouldn’t know if he had,” Tiraeses coolly replied.

“Mari’Kha,” Leon sternly said, drawing the young woman’s attention.  “This is not you holding your tongue.”

Mari scowled but dropped the issue, to Leon’s relief.

“I’m done with the watchers,” she said a little testily.  “There’s a bunch more, though.  Every city has some new horror to show us.  Those flying things that attacked you while the horde was rampaging through the area were new to me.”

Leon recalled the perpetually bleeding creatures with eyes in their wounds and darkness for wings that had attacked them and had to suppress a shudder.  They weren’t particularly strong, but they were just viscerally awful—especially the way the eyes in the bleeding wounds kept moving around, as if the creature wasn’t in control over them, unlike the watcher.

Mari continued to explain what she knew about the various monsters she fought against during the push the Kingdom of the Blue Sky made, running through quite a few dark monstrosities, few of whom Leon recognized.  Even Xaphan and the Thunderbird, who were quietly listening in on the conversation, had little to add to shine any light on these creatures.

[A Primal Devil makes new creatures according to its current situation,] Xaphan said.  [There isn’t much planning to it—or so I was told by the Prince of Flame.  They make whatever they can from what they have to accomplish their tasks.]

Leon filed that information away and continued listening to Mari’s explanations, though there wasn’t much he could use aside from familiarizing himself with what he might potentially see later.  As far as he could tell, his lightning would remain effective on all these creatures should they reappear as Mari had last seen them.

When she was finished, Leon nodded back to where the focus had been near where they were resting.  “When we first faced that watcher, I heard… voices.  I’d thought that they may have just been the watcher until I heard them again when dealing with the focus.”

“Yeah, fuck those things,” Mari stated.  “Most of them whisper like that.  I can’t say anything for sure, but I did hear a rumor that the husks inside them aren’t actually husks.  That they’re still the people they used to be, only trapped inside and tortured for years without end, and that’s what caused the curse!”

[Not too far off,] Xaphan said with some amusement.  [The torture is incidental.  Channeling the power of the plane through them to the Primal Devil is the point.  They’re still alive—the power passes through them, into their soul realms, and then through a connection forged between them and the Devil.  The process, as you can imagine, isn’t pleasant.]

Leon had to suppress another shudder.  Before he could ask anything new, he felt a flicker of power far above, and when he glanced upward, he sensed that the darkness permeating the environment was starting to clear up, if only slightly.  A lighting bolt had flashed through the black clouds above, and a moment after it drew Leon’s attention, the accompanying thunder resounded through the city.

He grinned, but the power he could sense about to come down wasn’t one they wanted to get caught up in.  It was going to rain, but rain from those black clouds was going to be dreadfully polluted.

“Let’s find someplace we can get shelter,” he said.  “The weather’s turning, and I don’t think we want to get caught up in it…”

---

‘This place must’ve been spectacular in its day,’ Leon thought as he poked around the place he and his small team had holed up in.

It was a large temple close to the center of the city, not far even by mortal standards from where the focus had stood.  It was perhaps the most intact building in the entire city, which made a degree of sense given that Tiraeses had explained that it was meant to be the city’s central place for worship and would’ve had a much greater degree of care put into its construction than other buildings.

The temple as it stood when Leon and his team ducked under its eaves was a round, drum-shaped building with a peristyle running around its length.  The temple’s façade consisted of travertine and white marble, though it was almost all gone, crumbled or dissolved away, leaving only the brick and concrete skeleton of the temple remaining.

But while much of the stone façade was now gone,  the murals on the walls beneath the eaves held up by the peristyle were vivid depictions of the many, many gods of the Arkhnavian pantheon, most of whom Leon hadn’t even heard Tiraeses invoke yet.  The roof of the eaves, likewise, was made of enchanted bronze that still shone in the spots where it hadn’t yet been tarnished by the city’s darkness pollution.

Unfortunately, most of the temple’s interior had collapsed, but beneath the eaves, they still found more than enough shelter that when black drops of thick, viscous water began to plunge from the sky, Leon’s team remained dry and unaffected.  Given the way many of the drops sizzled and seemed to flash with power to Leon’s magic senses, he figured it was best that they didn’t take their shelter for granted.

While they waited for the rain to stop, Mari, after ensuring that her Ulta suit had been properly secured beneath the temple’s eaves, elaborated on her account of how the Kingdom of the Blue Sky conducted its campaign.  She ran through the logistics of the operation, such as how many soldiers the army had—more than fifty-thousand, essentially amounting to all that the Blue Sky had left, plus another hundred thousand from the Red Sky.  Of that army, fully ten thousand were Ultians.  When Leon asked about the name, she explained that Ulta was where the suits were first invented, so the first pilots were Ultians.  Eventually, the name became more strongly associated with the suit pilots than the place.

After that little bit of explanation, she continued with her explanation of the campaign, going almost day by day.  More than a dozen major cities, and hundreds of other settlements of varying size, had been ‘liberated’.  She explained how morale had soared after the first few successful battles, but then it fell as casualties mounted and the darkness in the environment never seemed to drop appreciably.  Morale finally nearly broke before their last assault when scouts reported that the garrisons left behind in the liberated settlements were overwhelmed, either by cultists or simply by the darkness constantly pressing in.

“It gets worse the closer we get to the center of the plane,” she explained.  “All of this darkness.  It closes in on your mind like a vice, pressing in and squeezing until your head feels like a hillkar that’s about to pop.”

Those they left behind in garrisons that weren’t killed by cultists or the monsters they summoned, had torn each other apart.  Mari couldn’t explain exactly why, having not been there.

The Blue Sky’s campaign only continued to that last battle because the two tenth-tier mages pushed them into doing so.  And in that final battle outside of the Kingdom’s former capital, the army was broken.  Mari saw her father die and ran in the only safe-seeming direction.  The King, the Prince, and both tenth-tier mages she presumed were dead, though she hadn’t seen any of it happen.

From there, Mari just ran, her Ulta suit the only thing that kept her alive—that, and her intense caution.  She avoided all major settlements as she retreated from the Mandian Lands.  Leon and Tiraeses, she claimed, were the first people she’d encountered since that battle.

“That suit of yours is incredible, to allow you to get so far in such hostile conditions,” Leon said with a pointed smile.

Mari, from the dour mood their discussion had placed her in, suddenly lit up.

“Isn’t it?!” she gushed.  “It’s me and my dad’s pride and joy!”

“Mind if I take a look at it?” Leon asked.  “I study enchanting when I can find the time, and I’ll fully admit to being fascinated by your suit.”

“Yes, yes, yes!” Mari eagerly responded as she shot to her feet, grabbed Leon’s arm, and practically pulled him over to the Ulta suit.

She then launched into a much livelier and more energetic explanation of how her suit worked, complete with taking a few panels off to give Leon a better look at the machine’s internals.

In short, it was a fascinating piece of magical engineering that Leon knew Nestor would drool to get a hold of, if the man were only capable of drooling.  The engine powering the thing was remarkably compact, allowing the torso to house the suit’s pilot.  So compact was it that Leon thought that it could easily show up some of what the Raven Tribe could come up with—though he fully admitted that they were more geared toward larger magical constructs like arks than smaller things like the Ulta suit.  Building the MALLs would help, but those were only made practical by the addition of thunder wood to their designs.

“How are you able to get this thing to move at all?” Leon asked in admiration.  “The engine’s so small, yet it shouldn’t even be able to walk, let alone fly!”

“My dad’s a… he was a genius,” Mari began enthusiastically before her tone turned much darker.

Leon laid a hand on her shoulder in solidarity, and a moment later, she was back to what he thought was her usual bubbly self.

She explained that the Ulta suit was able to function for a number of reasons, not the least of which because it ran on power supplied by the pilot as well as large magical batteries located in the suit’s shoulders.  Magic could be supplied from the outside by other mages, but for the most part, the suit was able to absorb magic power from the environment and store it for later use.  This meant that when not in use, the suit was usually curled up as it was now to conserve power and continue to absorb magic from all around it.

Once she explained that, Leon’s jaw hit the floor.  He, Xaphan, and the Thunderbird all exclaimed at the same time, “WHAT?!”

Mari almost jumped backward from the force of Leon’s shock.

Before she could even ask him to clarify, he asked, “You’re telling me this suit can take in the power from all around us and use it to charge its batteries?!”

“Uh… yes?” Mari confirmed, sounding a little defensive and confused.

That confusion was dispelled as Leon clarified, “The magic that’s been fouled by the power of a Primal Devil?!”

She blinked in understanding, then grinned and said, “Yep, Lele!  Ya should see this!”  She then popped open the shoulder plates to give him a better look at the filter enchantments and the batteries themselves stored within.

Leon almost went cross-eyed at the complex filter enchantments he saw.  They made even the magic engine look fairly simple.  Still, that they were able to ‘purify’ and use the power of a Primal Devil was…

Well, it was shocking until Leon located several ancient runes buried deep in the filters.  Given their similarities to the runes he and Tiraeses were using to ward themselves from the worst of the Devil’s power, he figured these runes did something similar.

“Brilliant,” he whispered.  “And not just for its use of Primal Devil power.”

“I know, right?” Mari gleefully agreed.

“I only have one small criticism,” Leon continued as a look of grave seriousness passed over his face, giving Mari pause.  “The gems used for the batteries are inadequate.”

“What d’ya mean?” she asked, sounding a little offended.  “I used the largest and clearest sapphires anyone’s ever seen on this gods-forsaken plane!  There are no better power storage mediums!  My dad told me so!”

Leon smirked.  “Your father was a brilliant man if all of this was designed by him,” he said.  “But I have something he never did.”  With an almost theatrical flourish, he produced a fist-sized storm crystal and tossed it to Mari.  It was less than half the size of the sapphires stored in the suit’s shoulders.  “That thing by itself would hold more than ten times the amount of power that these sapphires will.  Now imagine what a storm crystal of comparable size could do…”

“Storm… crystal…” Mari whispered as she turned the crystal over in her hands, her eyes growing wider as she studied its every gleaming facet.

“And that’s not all,” Leon continued as he conjured a sliver of thunder wood.  “If you’re able to integrate this, you might not even have to stop to charge your batteries.”

Mari’s eyes nearly bugged out of her skull when they landed upon the thunder wood.

“I… need to study these,” she declared before turning away from Leon with the thunder wood and storm crystal in hand.  She sat down next to the Ulta suit and conjured a stack of blank paper to jot down some notes as she studied these new materials.

“I still have a couple questions—” Leon began before Mari conjured and tossed him another thick stack of paper, which he quickly realized was essentially the schematics for her Ulta suit.

With childlike glee, he began tearing into the schematics, scanning every page, memorizing every little detail.  And his heart sank as he read further.  The enchantments in the suit could be potentially reproduced given enough time, but the materials listed and their properties weren’t familiar to him, not to mention the suit seemed rather light on control enchantments, having surprisingly few placed in the cockpit.

When he asked Mari about this, she seemed a little reluctant to tear herself away from what Leon had just given her, but she told him all she knew about the materials and how to actually pilot the suit.

The materials amounted to a lightweight metal that she didn’t know how to make that lowered the weight of the suit enough that the small engine could power it, overcoming the weight-to-power ratio that had prevented the Ravens from making something like the MALLs until Leon came to them with thunder wood.

As for controlling the suit…

“It’s this,” Mari said as she indicated the neckpiece with the black crystal on the back she wore.  “It connects to the matching crystally thing in the suit, and I can pilot the suit like it’s my own body.  Kinda.”

“You’ve got to be messing with me,” Leon said in disbelief.

“Nope,” Mari said with a proud smile.  “Look in the last section, it lays it all out.”

Leon immediately flipped to the relevant pages and began scanning.

“It’s not perfect,” Mari conceded, “otherwise there wouldn’t be a need for other controls in the cockpit.  But as it is, it makes piloting the suit easier than snacking on roast jorgaff.”  She rubbed her stomach with a hungry look on her face for emphasis.  As she spoke, Tiraeses came over, their spirited conversation having drawn his attention.

“It uses devilish magic,” the monk growled in annoyance as he peered over Leon’s shoulder.

“It uses what it needs to, old man,” Mari said.  “It works and it’s safe.  These suits are what allowed the Blue Sky to survive for so long.”

“By Mandious, Lord of All in Heaven, standard Ulta suits don’t use this devilish magic!” Tiraeses cried out.

“And they’re inferior for it,” Mari stated with a defiant look.

“This looks safe,” Leon said as his eyes flitted from one rune to the next.

[It’s more than safe,] the Thunderbird whispered in awe.  [It’s revolutionary!  I’ve never seen a good mind-to-enchantment interface like this before!  Leon, you have to get this to Nestor!]

[I was thinking the exact same thing,] Leon said.

His eyes flickered between Mari and Tiraeses as his mind came to a simple conclusion.  Mari—or at least, her knowledge—had to make it back to Aeterna.  He wasn’t going to kidnap her, but if he had to throw a mountain of treasure and an even bigger mountain of concubines at her to get her to lend his Kingdom her skills, then he’d do so.

The things the giants could do with something like this… let alone what powerful mages might be able to do…

The possibilities had him salivating.

And then his eyes slid past the two and fell back upon the city.  The rain was clearing up, but pools of thick, inky water remained behind.  They wouldn’t present much of a problem to any of them, but simply looking at the city drove the point of the predicament home.

None of this would matter if they weren’t able to find a way off Arkhnavi.  They had to reach Tell Kirin as soon as they could.

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