All-Chemical Spider #108
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[Totem collected!]
Category: Rare
Reward: +72h to your Time Bank
Redeem totem to receive reward? (Y/N)
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No.
The interface dissolved and Jake was already moving through the system on thought alone, pulling up the progress tab, scrolling through to what he was looking for.
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System Tools: Symbolic Extraction? Disabled.
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He enabled it.
"Register totem," he repeated.
The interface loaded -- and then broke.
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[Totem collected!]
Category: R̸̡͔͊a̸̢̛͓r̷̡̩̈e̶͎̓̔
R̵͓̼̓̀e̸͕̓w̶̘̟̐̃a̸̩͋r̷͕̰̄̎d̵͚̔:̵̨̨̿ ̶̻̊+̸̯͊7̶͙̏2̶͈̩͝h̶̠̰̾͝
[ALERT][ALERT]
⚠ ENERGY LEAK DETECTED
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The golden thread at his chest became a vortex.
It poured from him in a torrent that moved like living silk, chaotic and radiant, roping through the air in spirals that fed the Chronos Temporis in Constantine's grip, and the book drank every drop of it with the hunger of something that had been waiting centuries for a meal this size.
Constantine stood in the vortex's center with the book blazing gold in his hands, his hair driven back from his face, the light of it making something reckless and enormous out of his expression.
Jake's spider-sense went off the rails.
Something significant was leaving him -- he felt it in the way a man feels blood leaving a wound before he sees it, a deep structural subtraction -- and when the red alert fractured into pieces and a corner of the progress tab blinked through the broken interface, he turned his eyes to it before he could stop himself.
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Completion: 15.5%
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He watched it.
The number moved like blades cutting through standing water, slow and then not slow, and settled.
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Completion: 15.0%
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The coat pulled tight across his ribs. He pulled back against it and it held, and the circle's amber glow loaded brighter beneath his feet, and the thread at his chest poured on.
Something moved through his chest that had nothing of calm in it.
He threw his weight sideways, the coat's resistance spiking through every fiber as he swung his feet up toward the circle's inner edge, his hands driving outward against whatever the magic had thickened the air into, and the resistance came from nowhere and everywhere because there was no surface to it and no seam and no angle that his strength could find purchase on.
He swung again and the coat fibres strained along his shoulders, a sound like tearing woven into the attempt, and his fingers clawed at the fabric across his chest, the threads pulling apart at the lapels while the coat pulled back in all four directions.
Constantine looked up from the book.
"Getting desperate, are we?" The copper in his voice had gone warm with something that had no business being there.
Jake looked at him through the vortex and through the broken interface and through the thread bleeding from his sternum, and the words came out of him low and flat and gritted through his teeth.
"Break me free," he said. "Break me free right now."
His shoulders broadened, the coat's lapels tearing another centimetre, the circle's light stuttering under the load.
"Try to stay steady, will you?" Constantine said, his eyes on the pages. "I only need a bit more of your energy."
"I. Will. Kill. You."
The coat's fabric tore with each word.
Jake meant it. His fingers found a gap in the coat's fibers and they closed on it with everything his hands had, the mechanical fingers on one side and the possessed ones on the other, and the fabric screamed at both of them.
"No doubt you will try," Constantine tilted his head.
The progress tab blinked through the fracturing interface again.
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Completion: 15.0%
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He watched it count.
The number moved.
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Completion: 14.5%
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"Stop that." Jake's voice had dropped to something that was barely a voice at all. "Stop that and I'll break your neck with more mercy than you deserve."
Constantine's expression shifted. "Where are my manners."
He closed both hands into fists around the book's spine and rolled his shoulders, and the vortex surged.
The thread at Jake's chest went wide and the light coming off it turned every surface of the room gold, and the book blazed in Constantine's grip like something detonating in slow motion, and Constantine stood in the center of it all with his tie billowing and his face alight and looking every inch the thing his reputation said he wasn't.
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Completion: 13.5%
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"Why take a pint," Constantine said, the grin spreading, "when I could take everything you've got."
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Completion: 12.5%
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Jake's response wasn't words.
The thread tore loose from its arrangement and became something else entirely, thrashing out from his chest in every direction at once, gold and chaotic and pulling at everything in the room it could find, and it found the Chronos Temporis first and then Constantine's wrist and then the man himself, dragging him a foot across the floor before he braced.
The circle's geometry fractured.
The amber lines split from their anchor points and the chalk marks went dark and the coat seized in all four directions at once in a single violent tremor, and then the magic that had been holding everything in arrangement hit its limit simultaneously and released and the room came apart.
Jake hit the wall. Constantine hit the opposite one. The book hit the floor, its pages splaying.
Jake was already up, already moving, already across the floor with his hands at Constantine's throat and the vortex still dying around them in dying spirals of gold.
"Do you have any idea," he said, and his voice was something he barely recognized, "what you have done. What I went through just to--"
Constantine's free hand opened.
The wave took Jake off his feet and through the air and the wall caught him a second time with the full inventory of its surface.
"Got somewhere to be," Constantine said, and his voice had recovered itself entirely.
He opened the Chronos Temporis on his palm. The pages turned on their own, finding the spread, and the gold light that rose from them was different from what had been pouring out of Jake, and it moved toward Constantine rather than away from him, and then it moved through him.
The book opened wider.
"Good luck finding me," Constantine said, and the book swallowed him.
The pages snapped shut.
Jake covered the room in a single swing and landed on the book with both hands, his fingers driving into the cover's seam, pulling against the binding as the magic sealed the gap and his arms shook with the effort and the seam narrowed and narrowed and the gold light bled through the closing crack and turned his fingers warm.
"No," he said. "You coward. Come back -- come back right now--"
The gap was a centimetre.
A scrap of tan fabric pushed through it from the other side, worked toward the opening, and he let go of the left cover to grab it before the book sealed it in, his fingers closing on the worn fabric as the book snapped shut against his knuckles, and he stood in the wreckage of the room with the torn piece of trenchcoat in his fist and the book flat and dead on the floor between his feet.
"Constantine." His voice filled the room and found nothing to answer it. "You bastard. I will find you."
The gold threads that had been running through the air dissolved without sequence, unraveling from their anchor points and fading without drama, and the red alert at the edge of his vision contracted and went dark, and the interface settled into a single notification.
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System stabilizing after tremendous totemic energy loss.
Completion: 12.5%
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The book lay where it had fallen, its cover hanging from the spine in sections, the pages beneath it blank white from edge to edge. The magic had gone with him. What was left was paper and thread, its binding unraveling at the corners.
Jake stood over it.
Three point five percent. He held the number in his mouth and felt its weight and felt the suffering behind it.
Three point five percent gone.
His mechanical fingers pressed against the scrap of fabric in his fist, closing on it, the worn fibers compressing against the metal.
"Register totem," he said.
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[Totem collected!]
Category: Common
Reward: +12h to your Time Bank
Redeem totem to receive reward? (Y/N)
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"Redeem."
The scrap of trenchcoat flared in his palm -- a brief, copper-gold burn that fed into his hand and up his arm and settled somewhere behind his sternum -- and then it was gone, and his fist was empty, and the room was quiet.
He was already moving before the interface cleared.
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[Progress Tab]
Completion: 13%
Totems redeemed: 11
Time Bank: 05:15:034
Kill Milestone: 00:00:00
System Tools: Symbolic Extraction? Enabled.
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