Chapter 47: The Trial Of Shadows

  In the helicopter some hours later, after having fuelled it to the top, they were on their way to the European continent once again. It had been a long week, yet right now as they disappeared beyond the horizon of the African coast, it all seemed like a blur.

  Erik couldn’t believe he’d returned to life only two and a half weeks ago. So much had happened in such a short time, Erik was nervous about what the next week would bring. If the invasion was escalating with Bronze-tier monsters, Erik and the rest were returning to Europe, risking discovery.

  The next little while was uncertain, and Erik was feeling the tension build inside him. It had been a while since he’d trained with the spirits in his mindscape as well, the situation with moving camp, finding other Remnants and being attacked by Hellbeasts giving little time to meditate.

  He had intended to get some well-deserved meditation done during their flight, but he felt a slight ache as he helped everyone with their luggage. Pressure from his magic mimicked the crystals and gemstones, pulling and pushing. What was weird about it was that he wasn’t supposed to have any gems left with such a strong link.

  He took a moment to sort them again before they left, and some had grown even weaker since the last time he’d checked them. Some were stronger.

  “Sunless Perseverance,” Jessie said, handing the black tourmaline back to Erik. “And Competence Possessor. Sounds more like a title than a name for that spirit or whatever you call it,” she said as she handed him a clear quartz.

  Erik had felt the pulls from these two the strongest, and they both had a stronger link now than Obelisk Covenant, or Licious, had when he absorbed her.

  “They’ve changed…or I have,” he said as he regarded them. “It’s stronger now.”

  “Are you sure you want to absorb more? It’s risky considering we just spent a week training the powers you already have,” Angela asked with a slight tinge of a warning hidden in her tone.

  “We need every advantage we can get. My power set is very basic, for better or worse, and I get the sense that won’t change much with all my majors absorbed. If you’re adamant about me not doing it, I’ll listen, but I think it’ll be okay,” Erik defended himself.

  “That’s true, his powers are basic as fu—”

  “Thanks, Jess,” he interrupted her with a monotone voice.

  “Let him do it; he’s just envious of Jessie. The sooner he fills them all out, the sooner he’ll run out of chances to get anything cooler than her,” Emma complained.

  “What!” Erik yelled with a high-pitched voice, his voice even cracking a bit.

  “Fine. As a thanks for torching Emma’s socks, I guess it’s safe enough,” Angela conceded.

  “You did what?” Emma screamed, Angela holding her back as she tried attacking Erik. Her arms thrashed in front of her, nearly hitting Angela.

  “I did no such thing! What the fuck, Angela?” he screamed, keeping his arms up in defence just in case the small scrapper got past Angela.

  “What I meant was you lighting a fire under her again! Stop screaming, both of you!” Angela screamed.

  “And you worded that like ‘torching her socks’? No one says that. That’s not a thing!” Emma complained, calming herself somewhat as she looked to be unsure whether to keep attacking Erik or if she needed to change her target to Angela. She was closer after all.

  “Yes, it is,” Angela argued. As Emma shook her head in the negative, Angela looked at all those around her, every one of them with a sorry expression on their face. “Oh…”

  “You rocked my socks, though,” Sophie whispered to Erik, who was seated next to her on this flight. Erik interpreted the joke as innocent and flirty, grinning at the pretty girl as if she had captured his attention for the first time.

  “You what?” asked Jessie, and Erik felt a familiar tingle in the air.

  “I should start the absorption now,” Erik fumbled with his words as Amir yelled over the radio:

  “No static, no lightning! We’re in a fucking helicopter!”

  The tingling stopped moments later.

  “I forgot about the radio,” Sophie whispered to Erik again with a devious grin directed at her sister.

  “Did you guys…?” Emma asked, moving her finger between Erik and Sophie.

  “No,”

  “Yes.”

  Both answers sounded as one. Sophie had answered in the affirmative, and Jessie’s eyes locked onto Erik’s reddening face.

  “When?” she asked.

  “We didn’t, I promise! We kissed!” he argued.

  “Oh… Good boy, then,” Jessie said, giving them both a smile.

  “Well, she kissed me, kind of,” Erik said, scratching his head.

  “Good girl!” Jessie said, giving her younger sister a wide, heartfelt smile. “And bad boy! Letting her take the initiative like that! And you call yourself a man,” Jessie teased, blowing raspberries at him as she finished talking.

  “I’ll do it right next time,” Erik sighed, as though someone had reprimanded him for not cleaning his room again.

  “So, there’s going to be a next time, eh?” Emma winked.

  Erik started absorbing the black tourmaline called Sunless Perseverance. Having removed his shirt, his Crest was visible for everyone, and for the first time he had an actual choice to make regarding which minor slot he’d put the gemstone in. Considering the name, he thought it fit more on the curved line stretching out from either Umbralux or Earthkeep.

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  ‘Sunless’ fit with the theme of Umbralux—similarly mentioning both light and dark, though indirectly. His Umbralux ability came from ‘Starless Brilliance’, a direct thematic play on words meaning the same.

  But then ‘Perseverance’ was more in line with his Earthkeep ability regarding the ability to persevere a hit or two. There might be an exciting combination that way.

  Of course he’d absorb it into the ‘Umbralux’ slot; who was he kidding?

  Even Jessie risked asking Angela to absorb one minor ability, but the women hadn’t finished their discussion when Erik entered his mindplace. The last he heard was Angela saying, “You absolute children”, and Erik went away.

  His world was just the way he left it, or at least he thought so at first. The spirits were nowhere to be found, as per usual when he was taking a trial, but something else had changed. He pondered what had changed for minutes but couldn’t figure it out.

  It was as if the air felt different. As there was no air, he wasn’t sure how that worked. When the shadows made from the white and black suns atop his world grew thick, Erik had no more time left to worry. His trial was starting, and it seemed like it would incorporate the twin suns—the manifestation of Brill.

  The shadows spread further and faster with every moment that passed. It took advantage of every crevice and uneven bump in Licious’ world-encompassing roots, soon turning even his sea pitch black. Erik worried this might alter his entire world for good, but that couldn’t be the case, could it? His sea was his magic. No spirit could change that. Could they?

  Next, Erik felt his will getting drawn out, forcing him to manifest his own body. He kept forgetting he didn’t need a body inside his tiny world, but this time he had been adamant about trying to remove the limitation he was placing on himself. Of course, the trial had other ideas.

  Erik’s body formed amid darkness thick as honey. He transformed his legs into a springy heel and flat feet and used the thickness of the shadows to keep them from enveloping him. The concept was fine, he thought, but in practice it could’ve worked better.

  He had no time to come up with a better imaginary animal’s feet as the darkness rose beneath him, forcing him higher still. When Erik crested his own world, a hundred metres from the centre layer where his Leviathan island lay, the shadows stopped rising. Instead, they started taking shape, though they had quite a bit to learn from Licious’ body-shaping. After forming, the result was only a black blob, sporting two arms and a suggestion of a nose.

  Erik bounced up and down with his part-feline, part-duck feet, atop the blobby figure’s head. It leaned back, and a hole even darker than its body opened and moved beneath Erik.

  The Titan jumped sideways, again being limited by the feet he’d made up, and stumbled. He fell, though not into the abyss that was its mouth. Instead, he fell into its body, where its cheek might’ve been. The darkness now enveloping him started to eat at his skin, dissolving it.

  It nipped at him, and unless it grew worse over time, he could handle a few minutes like this, but he still didn’t have any clue what he was supposed to do. He swam back up through the molasses, his feet now worth their energy cost in gold as they propelled him out of the blob.

  As he landed, its arm, coming from out of nowhere, slammed into him. Erik felt like he’d been crashed into by a waterfall made of thick chocolate sauce as the heavy shadows pushed him outside of his world. Despite not having gravity in the physical sense in his world, there was still an order to things, and after reaching his apex, he started falling back down again.

  The Titan had to go on the offensive. He’d tried this with most of his trials—waiting. He was too afraid to make a move before knowing what he was supposed to do. It had never worked. That said, half of his trials were about fighting in some way or form, and his first one with Sovereign was just a tug of war where he had to pull both sides into the centre where he was.

  Brill’s trial was the most imaginative, yet also the least fitting for Erik’s personality. He loved learning, finding patterns, using his mind—but he wasn’t much of a puzzler.

  He shot a few beams of ‘Flash’ into the blobby shape, but while he saw the beams penetrate it, it didn’t even seem to notice. Maybe if it had formed eyes he could blind—… The final beam he shot illuminated something inside the shadowform, but its details eluded him as the vantablack hole moved between him and the illuminated object.

  As he hurtled towards the pitch-black abyss, Erik was out of ideas. He had nothing to steer or slow his descent with! In just a few seconds, he’d fall straight into the maw, and he knew he’d lose at that point. He cursed his power set. Why didn’t he have any real mobility powers? If only he could fly.

  A last-ditch effort made Erik transform his hybrid feet back to normal, then to something else along with his hands. Having to change his limbs back to their basic, human form first before altering them again was an odd limitation, but not as detrimental as Jessie not being able to use her own spells on herself. Still, he hoped the limitation would disappear as the power either ranked or tiered up.

  All four limbs, at least the parts he could transform, changed to wings. He didn’t get a massive wingspan—his mass was limited, and he couldn’t take mass from other parts of his body—but at least he had four of them.

  Struggling for a long second with catching the imaginary ‘wind’ just right, Erik glided away from the abyss’ edge. He crashed into the nose of the blob, bouncing once before he landed with an audible splash and started sinking.

  He transformed his limbs back to normal and shot several more bursts of ‘Flash’, pinpointing the object it had illuminated. It lay near the form’s centre, but just off from it. Erik tried shooting it with another beam of light, but either the beams didn’t reach all the way down there, or they just sizzled away as they hit the object. Feeling his skin starting to melt away, Erik tried swimming down there. He realised the effort was futile, even if he had changed his feet back into the springy duck feet from earlier.

  As blood started oozing from the holes in his skin, mixing with the black molasses eating away at him, he had an idea. His feet turned back into their ducky shape. Moments later, he burst out of the darkness-blob, having formulated a plan in his head.

  As soon as he reached the surface of the shadowform, he bounced and bounced and bounced away from its head and maw. He felt it stir, its shadows making thick ripples as its arm hurtled towards the Remnant. The arm hit his back with the same force as before, and it launched Erik upward and away.

  Despite the loss of air in his lungs and the definitive breaking of bones, everything had gone according to plan. He turned in the air to look at the shadowy shape. As he figured it would, it turned to face him, its maw creeping to catch him. This time, Erik wouldn’t need to glide to get away from it—it wasn’t fast enough.

  As Erik reached his apex once more, he flipped, turning his head downward towards his adversary as he started his descent. Just then, a mass of stone and rocks hurtled towards him like volcanic debris from below, covering him in a thick, and most importantly, heavy armour.

  With the added mass, his descent gained momentum even faster than earlier, though the Titan had no chance of manoeuvring like this. He just needed to penetrate the surface before the maw moved below him.

  The descent was much quicker this time around, surprising even Erik with how much speed he gained over such a short time. It wouldn’t work like this in the real world, but maybe the lack of real physics and actual air resistance benefited him. He had no clue how it worked, but work it did.

  The stone-clad meteorite crashed into the massive shadow with a splat, and it took several more seconds before the thickness of the darkness ate away at his momentum. Before that happened, Erik released his Earthkeep and pushed away with his ducky feet. He shot a few beams of light to ensure he was heading in the right direction—his aim was true. Twenty seconds after falling through the surface, he reached the object.

  Up close, it seemed more like an egg than anything else. It formed an oval, speckled whitish grey. Then again, he wasn’t sure about that, as in this enveloping darkness, every colour light enough to see would look whitish.

  He placed his hands on the egg rather than attacking it, deviating from his initial, more aggressive, plan. In what seemed like an instant, the shell cracked, crumbled, and dissolved into the darkness eating away at Erik. From inside the egg, there was another shape… which dissolved as well.

  A maelstrom of darkness pulled Erik through the shadowform, tossing him out near its stomach brief seconds later. It felt like drowning. As he looked around, his world grew brighter once more, the shadows bubbling away.