Chapter Thirty-Five #2
For all that, the woman didn’t seem disturbed. She crossed her legs and sat down with her back against Vester’s. Her wings pressed to either side of him, and it was like someone giving him a hug with the back of their arms, all elbows. But it wasn’t unpleasant.
Just… different.
Li Ra made her first guess, so Reve moved them down the tunnel they’d just marked. Vester felt a connection to the illusion he’d left behind and closed his eyes. I wonder if I can use this new awareness from Trickster’s Domain to track our movement?
Now that he realized he could feel the illusion he’d created, Vester had to ask himself why he couldn’t sense the passive illusions covering everything—which was when he realized he could.
That’s where I’ve been getting the feedback to let me alter reality from, he thought.
I should have thought of that sooner! My magic is covering everything around me for miles.
I must have been passively censoring it out because I wasn’t intelligent enough to really understand what I was registering.
He paused, a frown crossing his lips. Or my wisdom wasn’t high enough for me to parse these sensations. I might not have been perceptive enough to pick up on this before my race changed. But if I can feel my entire domain…
Unlike trying to warp reality, Vester found he could experiment with this new discovery without draining all his mana. Unfortunately, whatever he was doing still put a strain on his body. The farther out from where he sat he tried to examine, the worse his head pounded.
He felt a tingle in his nose and ears and suspected he’d come close to bleeding again. He didn’t want to worry his Party. Vester also didn’t want to risk accidentally killing himself while Li Ra was counting on him to mark their path.
But with this new discovery, he was determined to master the skill he’d gained.
He withdrew his awareness to a hundred feet or so and it felt like a vivid hallucination behind his eyelids.
He didn’t have words to describe how he was seeing things; it was like he’d gained an entirely new method of perception.
It’s like I’m seeing without eyes, he mused. Is this how people with aphantasia feel when they try to picture an apple? There’s no mental image, and yet I know I’m looking at an apple. So strange…
He couldn’t get a good read on the things moving around them, except for their general mass and the way they interacted with the environment. Fights that took place became blurs of distortion that resolved whenever one of the creatures vanished.
I’m betting my wisdom needs to be even higher for me to get greater detail.
The walls around us feel solid, but there’s a kind of fuzzy mush coating them.
I bet that’s the coral and those tentacle things.
I’m not picking out the individual plants, so it’s just a blurry fur on the walls… but I can tell where the openings are.
He took a second to concentrate and created an illusion of the tunnel network he could perceive in front of where he knew Li Ra was sitting. Conversation around him stopped, and Vester sensed the oni turn to stare at him.
“What is this?” she asked in a quiet voice. “Vester, are you creating a tiny illusion of the labyrinth?”
“Figuring out my perception,” he admitted, though he was surprised how much effort it took to talk, sense things, project the illusion for Li Ra, and keep the two torches he’d created burning. His brain felt… thin. “Kind of takes a lot of concentration though.”
“Right,” Li said, not arguing. “Okay, then don’t talk. Just keep doing that… and don’t kill yourself.”
“Especially that part,” Krysta added. “I hate when you die!” The pair fell silent and went back to what they were doing, and aside from the occasional direction to Reve, the bubble remained quiet.
Vester fell deeper into his trance while he adjusted to his new power. He didn’t try to retain the information he was parsing—he just transferred it to the illusion in front of Li Ra. It was shockingly meditative, and so long as he didn’t push to extend his range much, he didn’t suffer for it.
Gradually, Vester expanded his awareness to about three hundred feet in every direction. That was the point where his head began throbbing, so he withdrew his mind fifty feet or so and found he could comfortably maintain it.
Without considering it, he started adding tiny glowing lights where he sensed movement. Suddenly, Vester realized he’d basically recreated a mini map from a video game, motion sensor included.
Which was when the silence ended.
Judging by the vague conversations he caught between Li Ra and Krysta, the oni was planning some very energetic methods of rewarding him for what he was doing, and he had no complaints about that.
They’d have to raincheck until they weren’t floating in a cursed water park, but he was glad to be able to help.
Still, Krysta leaned over to him, kissed his cheek, and whispered “Good job” in a voice that made his pulse rise.
Hours later, they bobbed to the surface of a pool in a vast cavern and Vester found himself staring at a dragon made of interlocking bones and hatred. Then the beast opened its jaws and flames erupted.