The temper didn't give a shit about any of that, and kept doing its thing, compounding the wound as the newly formed flesh was additionally damaged, his body now barely keeping together. Through sheer force of will, he kept still as that step of the tempering finished and his eyes began.
The pain here was not as bad as he feared, but joined with flashes of confusing, disorienting light that grated against his soul and will. He'd tried not to look at his soul this entire process, at the several wounds it had opened up, the various tears and injuries it had previously healed, now glowing red gashes, and fresh nicks upon the surface of the small sphere turning it mottled and uneven.
Several times, Axl could barely keep himself upright, almost passing out at the combined pain and tissue damage he'd self-inflicted. The twelfth step of seventeen was all he'd be able to manage, he realized, the next one on his lungs and gills would kill him in the very first surge of pain, if not the stabbing itself, given one of those organs was now a barely held together mess of scar tissue.
He looked around, and back at Moxlin, glad that at least his gambit worked, the Mana in the air a still, dense mist, seamless with her body even, its layers and currents of opposing Mana attunements a regular, orderly flow. Beautiful even. Not a bad way to die, he thought, even as he deeply regretted failing Terrania. It was a long shot anyhow, better luck with the next grunt.
A system message interrupted his addled fatalism.
>>Quest: Body tempering to metal
>>Update: Sharing 13th step of Fleshmith Bokal's F-Grade untethered temper (lungs and gills) with Moxlin available.
>>Reward: Diminished accordingly, boosted by Geas of the Weak.
>>Sharing accepted by Moxlin.
>>Accept: Yes/No?
Axl chuckled, enjoying the sensation even as it further assaulted his body. He’d not even thought this was possible, but somehow Moxlin got the Deep System to help out this way, a mirror to how he asked her to teach him glyphistry in Nox’s tunnels. I guess we're in this together, little buddy.
He accepted, hoping that Moxlin would be able to take even a single step of the obscenely taxing tempering. Oddly, he didn't feel afraid for her, feeling that she could take it, as she'd gotten much stronger than when they first met after his first real fight as a cultivator.
The needling of his eyes ended, and soon they stabbed at his neck and lungs. The pain was muted, however, even as Axl could still feel the metallic Mana surging into his organs. Looking at Moxlin, he could see that her entire body was coated in the fine needles, but she was still and composed.
Sitting back up, Axl corrected his posture and relaxed his body and mind. Slowly, his Vitality was rallying to fix the numerous injuries that had been accumulating on his body, focusing on his severed gills. He thought of using another potion, or boosting Vitality with [Mana Shroud], but as he carefully observed his body, he noticed the Vitality was doing a better job than he could, the spread-out healing more comprehensive than his focused blundering could force.
So he simply observed, letting his body heal through the surges of barely noticeable pain and relief. After a good hour or so, the pain started to come back in more intensity, Moxlin's attention lapsed, and he gladly took it, as if accepting a burden to be shared. Soon, he felt the pain lessen as Moxlin took more to herself, and soon a second cycle was formed atop the first.
Each pang and relief of pain was overlaid on a larger cycle of Moxlin or Axl accepting more or less of the suffering, and somehow, even the stillness Axl's mind needed to suffer through seemed less difficult to bear, seeded from that single memory of meeting Moxlin for the first time and their hurried attempt to get him to learn glyphic alchemy.
Little details popped up he'd never before dwelled on before, like how they shared food over a minimal warming stone, with her idly bickering about how elves had no taste for roasted insect shells. Or how she would nestle against his neck when they slept outdoors in the vale, her fuzzy body oftentimes too warm to be comfortable. Several times, he returned to the memory of him waking up after the glyphic quest, realizing she had saved his life, the burns on her body from the hastily assembled healing potion painful to his soul. But that pain was different than the sharp losses of his life, at once even more grueling but with an inner core of puzzling contentment.
He felt the end of his cycle of tempering, his body, mind and soul refreshed. Still, he was glad it was over, not wanting Moxlin to have to endure even more difficulties than she already had with her own ascension. Axl felt a pang of shame in the second of true relief between cycles of tempering, that he had to burden her with his overreached bullshit, that he almost got both of them killed over this.
The next organ to be tempered was the heart, and the pain of needles moving in concert with its beating was a new flavor of mind-blanking agony. The cycle of pain and relief didn't even sync up with the heartbeat, causing an insufferable syncopation between the two that made it impossible to set any rhythm. The entire cycle was spent simply enduring as pain randomly spiked and ebbed, Axl's mind and soul not really given any time or ability to do more than reel at the random jostling.
Next, the nerves were targeted, and the surges of pain were joined by feelings of intense heat or cold, grating touch, or even ecstatic pleasure. This took a while to get used to, but the regular ebb and flow let Axl lower himself to a balanced stillness, the horrific, grating memories of his past now interspersed with ones he cherished, the weight of one partially offset by the lightness of the other.
He barely noticed as the nerve tempering ended and his spine began, maintaining his stability even as the surging conflicting sensations redoubled on themselves. He was still, his body hanging on, even as his neck had started to bleed again where his gills once were, then his legs from all the walking he'd done.
Focusing slightly on his Vitality, Axl noticed the bleeding wasn't too bad and that he likely would survive the blood loss as his self-healing Attribute took care of the damage well enough. All he could do was return to his stillness, to the flowing cycles in his mind between pain and relief, the drifting memories to in turn assault and restore his will and soul.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
The final cycle had him rather worried, since it would target his brain, and he was unsure what novel universe of horror that would bring. But he kept his stillness through the brief respite, and as he felt the stabs of needles piercing his skull, he deepened his focus, bracing himself.
The surge of metallic Mana was substantial, far more than with other organs, but it was a clinical observation, as if happening elsewhere, its ebb surprisingly smooth. Then another surge, again with no pain, nothing.
Axl resisted the urge to laugh aloud. There are no pain receptors on the brain, right, you slitting fucker? The hammer in his soulspace returned a sullen shrug. Not wanting to jinx it, Axl focused himself back to his measured stillness, letting the memories sift through his mind.
Without the cycles of pain and release to buttress them, they were substantially more intense, almost unbearably so. If left fully unchecked, they would speed up, rapidly jumping from one to another, eventually settling on a spiraling morass of painful horror that was difficult to extricate from.
Instead, Axl found that it was better to let his mind focus more on details. How Cas Kaltan used her hands when she talked, each little inflection clear even through the bulky plate, every conversation a painting against the lunar vacuum. How Sprout would bite her nails when struggling against a difficult problem set, probing, little bites that never did more than make her nails jagged and uneven.
These memories unearthed details that almost broke his stillness entirely, however. Like the realization that Sprout was making a fundamental mistake in her calculus that he'd not caught. If he'd seen that before, would she have tested better and earned a higher step around the Pit? Would she not have died?
That realization ushered in a descent into Sprout's death, and when he was himself tossed into the Pit, the pain of his broken leg was nothing compared to the agony of later seeing a tuft of her hair snagged against a disabled console's controls. He cursed the additional clarity his memories had—likely a side-effect of his much higher Intelligence and Wisdom—because now he could make out the dried blood against the hair, the details of how its frayed ends swayed violently in the course vent’s currents. She was alive when that hair was ripped out of her scalp.
With difficulty, Axl regained his balance, letting the memories keep sifting, ready for surprising revelations he didn't want or need, but simply took them in and let them happen, without thinking about them too much. Details went from being a solution to being a trap, and he found he had to gingerly switch from cycles of hyperfixation on a memory's minutiae to letting them flow faster, each a different form of pain or relief.
He hoped this would feel quick, but the brain tempering felt interminable compared to all the others, and Axl even resorted to checking his Terrania quest to confirm that, in fact, it wasn’t days and days and days long, but barely two hours since it started.
He even turned to check on Moxlin, hoping for some emergency on her end, but if anything, she seemed even more stable than before, the Mana in the air a slow, measured slurry fully in her control.
The memories resumed, their repetition its own form of agony, the big ones going from things Axl barely ever thought about to open wounds slashed at again and again and again. Slowly circling around the memory he'd been trying to avoid, an inevitable conclusion he'd long figured out but avoided like an empty wound. He tried retreating, tried even bringing up the fiery fury of his rage against the Vikam, even at the risk of further aligning himself with fire, but the destructive element had no bearing in this tempering. Eventually, it happened.
He stood over Cas Kaltan, her thick commander’s plate broken open, to the far side of the mangled corpses of the rest of his unit. He didn't need enhanced Attributes to realize the obvious, to look at the pattern of the injuries or anything that complex. His banner commander used a massive war axe that blazed with a Mana-sharpened edge, and the rest of the unit was utterly pulverized by the weapon. Axl's left hand was coated in the vacuum-dried remains of her blood, his plate armor not even touched.
Whatever mental attack the Vikam used, it targeted him as well, and the banner commander just let him kill her. Or maybe he got in a lucky hit? But no, he'd known from the short weeks they fought together that she was the real deal, properly trained and leveled as a careered soldier, and he didn't even finish boot camp. He knew in his bones that she'd fought off her deranged bannermen as the only one who resisted the attack and let herself die so he could live. Maybe it was just a moment of hesitation, not a full, willing sacrifice. He killed her.
Axl almost had to quit the tempering, quit being in that damn room, walk away from it all and die, a numbness setting in his will. So tired, and at the same time, howling in pain and guilt. He knew, but at the same time, fully realized it was worse than he could have imagined.
And the memories slid into the few of Cas Kaltan from the war, dragging blood and his failure over everything. How she would lead the banner into storytelling about their lives in the long marches between battles, her stories of Mare Serenitatis, the lunar capital, seemed like a magical wonderland of prosperity and joy from her telling. As our numbers dwindled, she would walk alongside me and tell me the details of their orders, her tactical mind brilliant even as she was a gentle teacher. When we became only six, they would sleep back-to-back, each of the unit paired up for safety, but she chose him, their heavy plate armor familiar against each other.
He'd never even seen her face. Only her ruined flesh from the chest wound that she died of.
The memories continued their torment, every step he took as a soldier back in Luna now tainted in the blood of his banner commander, every passing joy and victory an accusation. Killed the first Vikam when figuring out how to apply [Mana Absorb] to bullets? Cas Kaltan is dead at your hand. Killed one of the elite, bringing your deathcount to nine? Cas Kaltan is dead at your hand. Completed Terrania's urgent quest? Cas Kaltan is dead at your hand. She is dead because of you, Axl. She's the one who should be here.
One thing kept him going, even at the depths of his self-inflicted punishment. That no matter how much he was at fault here, the Vikam were ultimately to blame. A flare of righteous vengeance would stay his path, keep him in the room. Whenever the weight was too much, the misery all encompassing, a single number burning bright in his mind above all else.
Nine.
Eventually, it was done, and the needles retracted.
Axl got some notifications, but he ignored them, simply willed the healing potion on his flask nucleus to activate. He then fell back, looking up at the meandering glyphic patterns of the array above. He wanted to just fall asleep, pass out, anything, but he was oddly energized, his attention annoyingly sharp.
Since unconsciousness wasn't an option, he turned his body and looked up at Moxlin, who sat still at the room's center. The Mana all around was gone, the room's aggressive neutrality returned, so Axl could easily see the burning torch that was Moxlin's new Mana with even a gentle activation of [Mana Shroud].
Noticing he was awake, Moxlin raised a forepaw and wildly waved at him, the gesture feeling a reassuring new memory, not overdrafted and sharp.
"You done with your tempering?" Moxlin asked, her voice fundamentally more solid than before.
"Yeah," Axl replied, sitting back up. "I'm… Sorry." He was deflated, his mind numb as the image of dead and ruined Cas Kaltan kept interrupting him, stabbing him in the chest.
"Oh yeah, you should feel so bad for saving my life," she did a jerk-off motion with two forelimbs. "Fixing my botched lineage upgrade is just installment number one, buster. Just wait until you see the interest rate!"
Axl forced a smile. "I'll keep that in mind when I decide on the rent you owe me for living in my house."
But he wanted to say I killed her, and I don’t deserve to be here. And in his gut, the burning anger at the Vikam receded, leaving only a smoldering guilt and sorrow behind.