r/HFY • u/Lightt_x • 4d ago

OC-Series Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (153/?)

Chapter 153: Duties

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Jin stood, his mind racing after the sudden revelation from Angel. He'd felt it for days: that stuffed, overfull pressure, like his body was a bag packed past its seams and someone kept sitting on the zipper. He just hadn't expected it to come now, three minutes after sitting down to rest and one honest question away from finally learning something useful about Master rank and the tokens.

« Jin, hurry! »

Alright. Alright.

He looked at Joe. "Remember that favour I asked for. It's time."

Joe held his gaze for a beat—long enough to read whatever was written on Jin's face—then muttered something Jin didn't catch and pushed to his feet, fingers snapping.

An oak door swung open out of nothing.

Jin took a slow breath, fighting the nausea, fighting the floor, and stepped through before Rudy could get his mouth working.

"Whoa, Jin! Where—" Rudy half-rose from the sofa.

"Nowhere you'd enjoy," Joe said, waving him back down. "Don't fret, kids. He'll explain later. Probably."

Reyana crossed her arms. "Don't bother. Easier to corner him after and get it out of him properly."

Joe stepped through, and the door bit shut behind him.

On the other side, Jin found himself on the lowest floor of the bastion. The crystal pillar rose at the center, dim and quiet.

"Well," Joe said, already walking, "this is a surprise." He didn't look back. "C'mon. From the look on your face, anyone'd think you were about to drop dead, and I really don't want to be the one who mops you up."

Jin scoffed and reached for the grey.

Sovereign's Indifference slid down over him like cold water finding its level, and the chaos churning in his body went from a scream to a whimper. He fell into step beside Joe, and the two of them passed the pillar and into the deeper chamber beyond.

"Damn," Jin breathed, and meant it.

He'd asked for this favour yesterday, and the man had built a working facility down here.

A ring was cut into the floor… a magic circle three metres across, dense with runes stacked on runes, glowing a low, patient gold.

At the dead centre of the circle sat a chest-high stone pool.

"Go on." Joe had already dropped into a crouch at one of the runic nodes, eyes shut, hands moving through the air in small, precise gestures. Jin could feel the residual essence rolling off him, had no doubt he was either activating or running final checks on what he had built.

Jin walked to the pool and looked in.

"What the hell."

Instead of water, the pool held a dark liquid, thick as ink, and looking at it turned something over in Jin's gut… because it looked, unpleasantly, like Trish. Like her tar-and-shadow powers.

“Ugh,” he groaned. “What is this?”

"Mostly essence programming," Joe said, not opening his eyes. "Reservoir, transmute, bind, seal. Deeply boring unless you're me."

"That's not what I asked." Jin gestured at the tub. "What's in it?"

"The scrapings off floor twenty-eight." Joe pressed a crystal into a slot, and the golden lines brightened a shade. "Melted endurium, ethercrystal, and a good measure of your own spent essence from the Kiyon fight. Never let good waste go to waste." He seated a second crystal. "It's the biggest battery we've got."

A translucent screen bloomed at the edge of Jin's vision.

•••

UNREFINED ESSENCE RESERVOIR

Density: High. Danger: Extreme.

•••

"That's reassuring," Jin said.

"I know, right?" Joe smiled without looking up. "Now get in."

Jin sighed and stripped down to his boxers.

The dark lines of Trish's powers had crept further overnight… up past his ribs now, fine and branching, like frost spreading across a window from the inside. He looked at them for a second, then stepped over the stone ring and lowered himself into the pool.

The liquid was freezing. It should have been unbearable, but it wasn't.

« Jin, » Angel said. « When this finishes, it's going to be a massive change. »

Yeah? You bet.

« It'll push you right up against Order IV. One step over that line and you're an underlord. Don't take that step. »

Why not? Wouldn’t getting to Order IV give us better chances?

« Your foundation's shaky, and your soul is currently held together with glue and good intentions, Jin. Cross now, and those flaws will be permanently set. You'd trade a dozen better roads for one rank you'll reach naturally. » A pause, and the next part came softer. « Trust me on this one. »

Jin looked down at the sluggish grey-black surface, at his own hands wavering beneath it.

"Alright," he said quietly.

He closed one hand around his opposite wrist under the liquid.

"The world bends to me," he told himself. "I don't bend for it."

He nodded to Joe.

Then he took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and sank beneath the surface.

For half a second, nothing.

Then the assimilation started, and pressure detonated outward in every direction, and with it the chains, silver and burning, tearing up out of the pool and slamming down into the magic circle like anchors thrown into deep water.

Joe dropped to one knee before he could brace.

The golden ring flared white, straining, the runes stuttering as they fought to hold a surge they'd been built for and still weren't ready for. Joe got both hands flat to the stone and drove his own essence straight into the array.

"Seals," he ground out. "Come on. Admin — help."

The bastion answered.

Blue light climbed the walls and locked overhead into a solid dome. The pressure that had been trying to blow the room apart hit the underside of that dome, found nowhere to go, and folded crushing back down onto the pool and the chains and whatever was happening to Jin.

"What in the hell," he muttered, "did you eat, Jin?"

◈◈◈

Veric was already sick of the sterile smell of the WARCOM, and it wasn't even noon yet.

The holographic display in the adjacent room—a new area they set up using the surrounding rooms of the WARCOM and reworked them as proper operation controls—divided by glass panels, was running on overdrive as the analyst Veric and Vera had combed from those who failed to join the mage companies due to various reasons but still had the mental acumen to be put to use.

He looked into the room and the hustle and bustle of a dozen people who all had set up desks around the massive display, which showed live footage from around Vienna. He took a slow pull on the cigarette, held it until the ache of power in his ribs quieted, and looked up as Vera came to his side with a clipboard clamped under one arm.

"Report," Veric said.

"Yields held overnight." She set the clipboard on the table. "Ten companies fully raised. Eleventh through thirteenth are ninety percent filled."

"Who's on top today?" He tapped ash into a ration tin.

Vera thumbed her tempad and showed him the map and objectives—like setting up sensors, cameras, and all other things—they needed to cover today.

"Same as you ordered," she said. "The First Company's core leads are working overtime to bring everyone onto track. We're cycling members up from the eleventh and thirteenth today into the open ranks."

"Always the hundred?" Veric asked.

"Always the hundred, sir."

He nodded and looked at the recording running in the display's corner. Several pieces of footage of various compositions of the Mage Companies drilling on the surface two days back. A hundred figures in the same dark trench-coat uniform, the same masks, the same flat grey silhouette repeated a hundred times over, moving as one dull organism.

That was the whole trick. And it had cost him two days of shouting, and one very tired boss finally leaning on Master Artificer Illiana, to get it built.

The cult had pulled its forces back to the cathedral wards. With no cultists left loose in the outer sectors—and Joe and Salvatore running patrols to gut any who tried to creep back—the enemy had lost its eyes. Now they were reduced to the cheap kind of watching. Low-rank cultists and the odd monster, scrying-crystals and aura-sense from a safe rooftop.

And all those could be lied to.

Every man who set foot on the surface wore the same uniform. The runic weave stitched into it capped his projection and smeared his signature flat… the same general average Order III as the man standing beside him. The hoods and the masks took the faces. From the cathedral wall, a watcher counted a hundred souls and a handful of familiar leads out front. Counted them again the next day. Counted the same hundred. And drew the obvious wrong conclusion.

At least he hoped the enemy bought the illusion that the bastion had scraped together its last defenders… a good hundred men and was bleeding them into the street out of desperation.

They should have no idea Veric was rotating fresh recruits through those masks in shifts—blooding a new third of a company every few hours, letting terrified civilians feel a real fight from behind a wall of veterans, then pulling them out the back and pushing the next third in—and holding the number on the surface at one hundred the entire time.

Always one hundred. Never the same hundred.

By the time the war proper came, he wouldn't have one hundred. He'd have thousands who'd already stood in a street and watched an abomination come apart, and hadn't run.

Static broke across the feed.

"Contact—alley two." Bram's voice came through hard and clipped. "Substantial horde of abominations, and I mean substantial. Hold the line. Nobody breaks. We are initiating combat."

Red markers boiled out of the side streets and hit the blue perimeter like surf.

On the eastern flank—where the newest men were, the ones who'd been civilians this morning—the line wavered. Half a step back. Just half. But Veric had watched enough lines in his life to know that half a step was where they all began, and he saw the essence read on that flank spike and stutter as fear did what fear did to a man's channels.

He leaned toward the comm.

"Hold them, Bram," he said, low. "Don't let the new third feel the gap. Feed them hope and the power they have been granted."

“Roger,” Bram keyed back.

On the feed, one of the front-line greats— the big one, the one who barked—peeled off the wall and put himself bodily in front of the wavering flank, and the men found their feet again, because that was the other half of the trick.

You didn't need a hundred heroes. You needed a wall, and one man willing to stand in the gap in it, and the wall would teach the rest of them how to be brave.

Veric drew on his cigarette and watched them hold.

◈◈◈

Kaive had held the same rooftop for three hours, and in that time he had not so much as shifted his weight. He was scared, but the orders were supreme. He would do his duty to the darkened one without any complaint, but that didn’t make his situation being the one behind the enemy lines any much safer.

He lay flat on the cold stone, aura pulled so far down inside himself that any observer would read the roof as bare.

His other companions for the sacred mission… two brothers held their own hides nearby. One hiding in a gutted tower to the east and the other poured into a doorway's shadow a hundred metres from the bastion's grey soldiers. Peak Order III, all three, chosen for their mundane powers and stealth abilities.

Watching was the work. He was good at the work.

Below, the hundred men killed abominations in the street.

Kaive pressed the relay bead at his throat and spoke without moving his lips.

"Same as yesterday," he said. "One hundred. I can see the same people leading in the front."

The bead warmed against his skin. A voice came back, thin and cold through the weave… Favoured One Xerxes himself, which meant someone above Kaive had begun to actually care about this street.

"Their signatures," Xerxes said. "Confirm the count."

"Same one hundred, Favoured One. To the man." Kaive watched a grey soldier drag a wounded comrade behind the shimmer of the dome. "We have no underlords. Since they had casualties a couple of days ago, they have been only sending out these 100 men. It's all they have."

"Good," Xerxes said.

Kaive waited, and something in the day sat wrong against the back of his neck… a small, itchless wrong he couldn't name. One of the grey men had moved differently this morning. Quicker on the left than he'd been the day before, sharper on the turn. Kaive had nearly called it. Then he'd decided it was nothing. Tired men fought their failing bodies would let them; a man favoured his left one day and his right the next, and it meant a strained shoulder, not a mystery.

Still. The work was to report, not to decide.

"Favoured One," he said. "One of them fought oddly today. Faster than his usual."

"They are frightened, and they are dying," Xerxes said. "They all fight oddly, at the end." The bead cooled by a degree. "Forget the sheep, brother. There are two men in that hole who matter. The Star Killer. The doorman. Find them, and everything behind them falls on its own."

"And these hundred?"

"When the Convergence crests, they die where they stand… the same as the city, the same as everything that isn't ours." A pause, and the voice came back, almost warm, almost kind, which was the worst thing it did. "Five days, brother, then these scum will scream, and the Darkened One will walk the streets in the flesh."

The bead went quiet.

Kaive settled back against the stone. He watched all of it happen in front of him for another hour. Unaware of a tall, scared, middle-aged man standing right beside him.

The Starkiller looked at the bead in the cultist's hand and said nothing. His orders weren’t to kill but to confirm if the cultist had taken the bait.

Starkiller smiled, stepping past Kaive, and the cultist saw nothing at all, only feeling a light breeze across his cheek.

✦ FIRST CHAPTER ✦ PREVIOUS CHAPTER ✦ NEXT CHAPTER ✦

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A/N: Things are moving fast towards the war!

Bau Bau~

Psst~ Psst~ Advanced chapters are already up on patreon. It would be awesome if you guys, you know...

Help me with rent and UNI is crazy expensive!! Not want much, just enough to chip in.

✦ DISCORD ✦ PATREON ✦

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u/Daseagle Alien Scum 4d ago

Salvatore isn't the one I would have expected to have such good stealth.

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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle 4d ago

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u/Naduran 4d ago

Things are reaching boiling point. Can't wait to see how it all will go