Chapter 15 Inner Battle.
Sam P.O.V.
BANG!
The entire Mindscape shudders violently. The tranquility of my Zen garden is shattered.
"Mind, prepare to cast a defense on the Mindscape. The more it gets damaged, the dumber we get in the real world."
"I will limit the damage to this quarter. This is the best we can do," Mind—my darker, logical self—responds instantly, his hands already weaving intricate patterns in the air.
"Thanks."
"Stop with the mushy business with me. I don't want you to butter me up!"
"Just think about that time that we watched the animes with the clones and A.I. You are me, and I will treat you with dignity, for my sake and yours."
BANG!
"I'm not an A.I.!! But you got a point...."
CRACK!
"Ouch!" x2
I get a splitting headache, a sharp lance of pain driving through my skull, as the shaking door bursts off its hinges. The threshold splinters into light particles.
A gigantic eyeball, made out of swirling stars and a black hole as the pupil, looks into my mind. It is vast, ancient, and terrifying.
"HAAAAAAAAAAAARRRG!!!!" x2
We scream in unison. No defense can be set up against this fucked up shit. Just being stared at, causes both my selves to bloat with a powerful pressure, threatening to pop us like balloons.
Tentacles, blacker than the void, invade my Mindscape. They slither through the shattered doorway, sucking everything that they come in contact with. The bamboo forest withers; the ground cracks.
Suddenly, a ball of energy comes from the outside—a lifeline thrown into the abyss. It goes straight for me.
It enters my body, and at last, I can finally move. The paralysis breaks, but it will not last.
For the first time, I instinctively use the Fire Chains, from my own memories and instincts, not just copying Marcus.
They burst from my chest, wrapping around the intruding tentacles and preventing them from going further. The effect is surprisingly strong!
(Is it because of the ball of light Barabas sent, or because this ability comes from real life experience now?)
I look at Mind. We nod to each other.
Mind starts writing stuff in the air, calculations and formulas appearing in glowing neon blue. My mental power gets drained rapidly, but I feel the chains use a different power inside me to sustain themselves. There are many other types of energies I can detect now, too... traces of the laws I absorbed.
I got Barabas's experience from the outside, so I know I am in a literal egg, not just in my head...
My Mindscape seems to expand. The walls seem to fix themselves since I received the ball of energy.
My, or Mind's hands, become faster and faster, until I see only a blur of motion. Good thing I learned the mechanics of computers, in my past life.
This all reminds me of the first processor. They looked like a bunch of cheese cutters, crisscrossed, stacked on top of each other, with iron rings here and there in between. The ferrites (iron rings) are the ancestors of the digital logic gates. (Check it out if you love tech and computers; it's fascinating stuff.)
There is a big cube of information being set up in mid-air. Mind's hand gestures move the cube here and there, zoom in and out, writing more stuff, building a construct of pure math, power and will.
Meanwhile, I look at that thing, as it tries to break free from my chains. Lucky enough, the mass of tentacles covers the entire hole. I don't see the eye anymore, but I can feel its gaze burning me, even through its own limbs.
(This thing... I never saw anything like that. Does it really come from my mind? Or is it something from the Void outside? Something from other dimensions?)
"How much power can you put in that?" I yell, straining against the pull.
"As much as we can!"
"Do you think I should use both powers I feel?"
"Ok, but I suspect we got it wrong, well, partially wrong. Our power is divided into multiple energies. Like vital, mental, and soul. These are the ones we can use now. But don't use any vital energy and not more than one-third of soul power. We could die from this, for all I know."
"What is the 'spell' you chose?"
He looks at me with a wicked smile, adjusting his conjured glasses, like he was ment to have those. I frown, worried.
"Cough... Let me work here. Less talking, more holding. Chop chop. Hehehe."
(Fuck.)
I just stop caring and loosen my thoughts, just enough so I won't lose my grip on the monster but giving Mind the bandwidth he needs. Mind's speed increases again. He conjures thicker square glasses to look even more nerdy.... Sigh... This is totally me....
The ball of energy Barabas sent is almost depleted.
Once he's done, the construct hums with terrifying power.
"Body, come here! We need to focus on our power right now. You supply, I regulate. Let the chains go. Once the spell gets loose, protect us from the impact!"
"Roger!"
Once I let the chains go, the tentacles resume their feast, surging forward.
We power up the spell.
One by one, all the writings and numbers light up and position themselves in a geometric form. I try not to be distracted, but Mind just amazed me.
He built a laser. An extremely complex, atomic laser cannon.
The material is replaced by mind power. The thing charges up.
ZZZoooom!
A white beam blasts the monster.
The tentacles get shredded as the beam passes through, unimpeded.
Then we see the eye again. The pressure prevents me from putting a barrier up and I was distracted. Lucky for us, Mind set one up already. Hehehe.
The beam seems to slow down the closer it gets to the eye, as space is compressed around the entity. (This is an optical illusion caused by the perspective. If space is compressed at such levels, the thing that travels in the compressed space, travels at the same speed as local time passes. So, the person outside this perspective sees it slow down.)
"Will it work?"
"Just watch. This is our Mindscape. With enough power, we can do whatever we want. This is a spiritual battle, in fact..."
Once the beam gets close enough to the eye, it starts to rotate and enter the black hole pupil. The light starts to orbit around the giant pupil. Slowly, it gets to the center and accelerates more and more.
"Anytime now..."
The beam goes so fast it looks like a bright white halo around the pupil. Then:
Bam-Zooom!
A not-so-big bang occurs. The laser changes color, splits like a frag grenade, and blasts a bunch of small holes right through the massive head and everything around it.
The thing didn't even scream. It probably never expected that. Me neither.... Losing the eye, maybe, but killing it?!
"Hehehe... I doubt it is dead, even with that." Mind chuckles darkly.
The holes in my wall close up fast. Just before they close completely, a waterfall of dark, acid blood falls through. I quickly make a basin and a barrier for it and the still-wiggling and twitching tentacle remains, that were left behind, and it seems very corrosive.
"The laser we shot sent packs of particles, arranged in a special fashion, enabled to go at the speed of light without losing integrity first. Normally, it would be useless. Even the light we see doesn't go at the theoretical speed of light. But once it reached his 'black hole', the laws and speed limits 'broke' due to ultra-high gravity and time-space compression. The particle packs reached the speed of light, and the information got released."
Mind taps his temple.
"Since time doesn't exist relative to the rest of the universe, at those speeds, only that giant eyeball could affect it, due to the immense power it has. I arranged the particles so that once they meet their counterparts, Antimatter, because time 'stopped', they act like a program, or a machine, creating another blast with the antimatter in tow, to fuel the explosion. Thus the change in color and the 100-megaton blast that passed right through the giant head!"
"I bet it never thought those laws exist in the first place. Only a weak civilization, like the one Earth, needed that much theoretical information, to feel powerful..."
"Let's call it a Quantum Beam Spell. Of course, it's useless without a black hole to fire at."
"You are something else, Mind..."
"Nhaa. I'm just the 'smarter' you. Well, our time ratio is not the same, so I have your intelligence with more time, and less restriction to use it. This is the potential that we wasted on Earth, playing video games."
"If I understand correctly, my brain is processing so fast, that time bends in our perspective?"
"Not exactly. You, Body, are bound to... well, the body. So, your time perspective doesn't change. Since I'm in your mind, I'm unbound to the rules outside. But we have the same soul."
"There should be a third personality somewhere. This is speculation, but we are mind and body... there should be soul, or subconscious. Maybe it's not complete yet."
"Ok, ok, enough blabber. Now how do we get out of here?"
"Go to sleep."
I look at him with a raised eyebrow.
"What a pain, having to explain things to myself... sigh"
"Get used to it. It will be your job, among many others..."
"Yes, yes... What I mean is, we depend on the outside now. Just like the ball of energy earlier that came from Barabas. So, focus on your connection to our body until someone uses a defibrillator. XD"
"You're kidding!"
"Not one bit."
"Wait! Garry!!!"
"Hey! You're not that dumb..." Mind nods to himself, while Body huffs...
Tenka's P.O.V.
Tonight, the air is thick with unease. I creep out of the tent and go check on Sam. The Egg is now unprotected, glowing faintly in the moonlight, and it scares me.
(Barabas opens one heavy eyelid and closes it back, keeping watch.)
At the site, I pass my hand on the surface of the stone sphere. It feels like hardened snake skin, rough, cold, and unnatural. I feel a vibration inside the egg.
"Sam!"
(I'm excited. Is he coming out?!)
Bam!
A fragment breaks off and falls on the ground. I pick it up, but once I rise back up, I see black stuff, an oily, viscous ichor, that reeks of rot, coming out of the opening.
"Not again! Nooo!"
I touch the egg again, trying to wipe the black ooze away. This time, I can hear a low-pitched roar in my head. It's so loud I can't help but stumble in retreat, clutching my ears.
(In my panic, I don't realize the shell fragment I picked up, melted and entered my palm, like it belonged there, more concerned about what happens in the egg.)
"Barabas!!!!"
The whole drowsy gang, quickly gathers around, roused by my screams.
"Look!"
Barabas notices the black stuff oozing from the crack.
Barb: ("You can use energy perception, right?")
"Just for a second the last time, and my brain ached."
Barb: ("A second should be fine by now, with your growth... Check it out.")
I do what he said, blinking away the tears that threaten to fall.
I switch my vision.
There is a crack in space, right there over the egg, with tentacles coming out of it. They constrict the egg and try to absorb it.
"WHAT IS THIS?!!"
My wrath explodes, but I don't know what to do. This thing is out of my reach; it exists on a layer of reality, that I can barely see. I touched the egg earlier... did I let it in? Is it my fault?!
Barabas sends a small ball of energy, but this time it gets consumed by the tentacles before it even reaches the egg, but I can tell the tentacles sensed it.
Suddenly, a silver light emerges from the egg, unimpeded by the black tentacles, and enters Barabas's skull. He just stays there in a stupor, with a blank look in his eyes.
Barabas's P.O.V.
That light hit me in the forehead, and then I get transported along with it, inside my Mindscape.
I'm back in my seat in the green field. The tea is hot. Gary sings. Wait...
"Gary!!!?"
He gets down from the umbrella and pecks a cookie.
"Hahaha, good to see you in one piece, if this is what we could call a piece... What happened?"
"Chippers."
He spends some time telling me about what happened inside Sam's Mindscape. From Gary's encounter with death, how he lost his body, and became a spirit, reappearing in Sam's mind, the changes in there, and the final mental invasion, by the Void entity.
We spend at least an hour talking, but In real time, it's only been a few seconds. He then tells me how to save Sam. The beast attacking the mind is something I know nothing about.
I blink, and I'm outside again. I transmit my thoughts to Tenka urgently.
Barb: ("That thing is attracted by something in his Mindscape. He's safe for now, but I don't know for how long. There is a hole in his mind, too.")
She looks at her hand and realizes she lost something. Now, there is a tattoo on her palm, just like the kaleidoscopic colored shell. She tells me about the egg shell she picked up, just realizing the shell fused with her.
Gary shoots out of my third eye, a beam of silver light, and enters her palm. She closes her eyes, as the tattoo shrinks, and moves up her arm, under her skin, until it settles between her eyebrows.
She has a beautiful mark there now. It looks like an eye, made by two curved bird wings, with a Fibonacci proportional spiral, as the center.
The tentacles sense food nearby, having lost their prime target inside the egg. All of them let the egg go and aim for Tenka.
I grab her by the back of her tunic and run. This seems almost useless as the invisible limbs pursue us, so I use all my power to throw her forward.
I look at Salaba, who is standing frozen.
"ROAR!"
SLAM!
I get smashed on the floor, and raised in the air by an invisible force. You can see the constricting shape on my fur. The tentacles drag me away, toward the space cracks.
I let them drag me in. I am old. I have lived my life... But...
But just before the tear closes, I shoot my soul out like a little red star, just like Gary did, but mine is silvery-red, toward Tenka. It enters between her eyebrows, too, joining the bird mark.
My body is gone. But the King's soul lives on.
Salaba P.O.V.
My mind turned blank for a week now. I didn't say much. I don't understand what all this is.
What is he? What are we becoming?
I can't even care for Tenka properly, because of the way I treated her before. I never treated her badly, but we have no attachments, except for our common love for Sam. But now, he's not here. It was so pleasant.... until all this happened. Sigh.
I wake up from my thoughts because of Barabas.
He violently starts to pull Tenka and flings her like a broken doll, toward me. Then he stops, looks at me, and roars loudly. I feel no threat from it. It sounds like a command.
Run.
And I don't care, crazy bear...
I'm already running to her. She is still flying in an arc that is going to crash on the floor.
Luckily, Sam personally trained me. He said I'm the tallest, so I need to be fast, nimble, and stable.
It's tougher to get there, for a tall person like me, due to the center of gravity, but I pushed myself. Only Tenka should be faster than me, with all our power.
I catch her mid-air and wince a bit, because of my tender shoulder, then look at the bear.
He is mid-air and can't even move an inch, squeezed by an invisible thing, while he is being pulled into nothingness.
(What the hell is this, again?!)
I don't need to understand, as my legs are already running. Taki and Eldo run and fly before me, and lead me away as fast as we can.
Tenka lost consciousness when she received Barabas's last action, the strange red ball of light, that shot onto her forehead.
We run until the forest swallows us, leaving the silent egg and the empty space where the bear used to be behind.
I swallow my tears...