I'm sorry for starting yet another story.
It's...I wouldn't say I can't help it, because I've gone a long time without starting a single new story, but...well, Adroitness and Finesse...Akari's story in general has just my interest, to the point writing it is a bit of a slog. I'm not yet really off of my writing break but I decided screw it, I'm going to write this story, just because...I want to, really.
Now, Chipped Surface is going to be a Dungeon Core story. What that means is...well, if you know already then ta-da, if you don't then give this chapter a read and see what ya think. I do hope you enjoy, even if I have to take a few...creative liberties with the source material in order to pull off what I wanted.
I sincerely hope you enjoy the chapter, and please, if you did, please leave a review saying so. You know all those YouTubers who ask you to leave a like or a comment or whatnot? They don't do it just because it helps their content, they do it because the feeling you get when you hear someone say they really enjoyed your work is...breathtaking.
I'll stop rambling...sawwy.
Chapter 1
It happened in an instant.
There was no build-up, no spine-tingling sensation that she was about to die. One moment she was just jogging through the forest, minding her own business, and the next, she was...here. An abyss was as apt a description as she could give, because nothing could truly explain what it was like not being able to see, hear, smell, taste or touch a single thing. Pure sensory deprivation, where even thinking was a nigh-impossible task. She had no way to measure time, or record how many times...well, nothing happened anyway so there was nothing to go off.
She had absolutely no idea where she was, or what had happened to her. As she cast her mind back, she idly realized she couldn't even remember what she was doing before she was in that forest. But what drew her attention was that as she realized that fact, no sense of fear came across her. She couldn't even recall what the sensation felt like, and upon that realization, she tried and failed to cast her blunted mind back in time to before that forest. With each attempt, she was met with the same empty void she was now residing within.
Try as she might, she couldn't recall...well, anything. Her name was lost, what she was good at was gone to the wind, it seemed one of the few things she retained was the language she used to visualize her thoughts, as well as the adamant sense of self that told her she was a she, that she had been alive, and that she would survive this...somehow. Tentatively, she tried to strain herself, though with her position as being effectively new-born in terms of doing anything all she succeeded in was wasting her own time, not that she knew how long she spent trying in vain to stretch her own mind.
Deciding on a different approach, she attempted to relax herself, to not think, not really do anything, and immediately snapped herself to attention again when she felt something. It was like the void had begun to encroach on her, and...she felt something. She wasn't sure what it was, perhaps it was fear, but whatever it was, she didn't like it one bit, immediately reversing her mental state and trying to push the void away.
This time however, perhaps by expansion and contraction, she managed to, for lack of a better word, push the void away from what she felt was her. As soon as she stopped pushing, the void immediately retook what she could feel was the space she had pushed it away from, stopping at the edge of what she perceived as her. It was all very bizarre, and a feeling she didn't know she had reared its head, a sense of wanting to know more, to...experiment was the right word, to test and...and to learn the limits of the void.
She repeated her actions dozens of times over, each time letting the void encroach upon her slightly before bringing her will to bear and forcing the void back. After she broke the first hundred times she had forced herself upon the void, she slowed and allowed the environment to settle. She had no idea what she was doing, or whether it had taken absolutely any effect on the void, but it felt...something within her felt something...good at doing something.
Taking a brief break from her actions, she tried to ascertain whether she had actually done anything, and though it'd require more attention paid and time spent, it did seem like she could think more clearly, ideas and words coming to mind faster than before. Emboldened by this, she continued her actions, each time allowing the void a certain measure of encroachment before pushing it back as harshly as she could, then immediately re-entering her relaxed state and allowing the void to rush back in.
She had learned early on that when she immediately began relaxing, the void would rush back quickly to the border of her, and then would move slowly through her, as though it had crossed from running in the... in air to running in honey, as her mind supplied when she tried to think about the correct scenarios. But as she tested this further, she learned that it also seemed to stymie her own growth.
If she remained focused, the void encroached slowly until it reached her, where it would then stop. That meant her space had longer to grow. Briefly, she stopped to consider what she was doing, not knowing if perhaps she was actually inside of a safe cocoon, and that outside would immediately end her existence, but decided that if it were so, at least she would die doing something.
Besides, if something had set this up to protect her, surely it'd also have a way to tell her she was being protected...right? Maybe she was wrong and was going to die for doing this, but that mattered little compared to her new feeling of wanting out of this void. The next time she relaxed, she let the void seep a little further in, then mustered all her mental willpower and pushed as strongly as she could.
With the faded feeling of snapping elastic echoing across her mind, the void broke. She reeled a moment as her mind recovered from the backlash of being suddenly free to expand, what she perceived as her filling the space the void used to inhabit, and possibly beyond, she wasn't sure how far the void even reached. She hit walls in all sides almost simultaneously, but these felt different. Where the void was just empty and endless, these were more...rooted. As she focused, finally able to truly think without the void attempting to encroach upon her mind and muffling her mind, she could feel the walls themselves had...almost a history.
Her sense of self had filled the entire room, and with it, she could feel the few small objects that she had crossed over. With a snap, her mind mentally mapped them out, quickly ascertaining that there was a desk, chair, a vial with a cork in the top of it, and various other detritus across the desk. Beside it stood a bookshelf, the shelves lined with dozens if not hundreds of books. Taking a moment to focus, she added to her mental map, walling herself in but with an indent in one wall, presumably a door from the feel of the handle.
Attempting something new, she mentally tried to impose her will on the handle, willing it to be pushed downwards, and pouring her focus into the action. After her mind started to hurt from the strain, she gave up. Evidently that wasn't something she could do, or at least to yet. Instead, she turned her attention inwards. Now that she was free of the void and in what seemed to be a physical room, she wanted to see about getting vision. Right now she was only able to feel, she had no other senses.
She knew sight was something she used to have, and it sounded useful, since her mind informed her that it was pretty much the most used sense for information gathering. Since she only had pure information to go off, she spent...well, time was still something she needed a way to measure, but that could come later. It still felt like it took a very long time before she was able to 'see', and the room she saw was very lacklustre.
The walls were plain, featureless and utterly smooth stone, with a metal door blocking the entrance. Next, she turned her attention to the desk, spotting immediately a parchment laid flat against the desk. She had felt it, but didn't know what it was. For all she knew it was a chopping board. It had dark ink scrawled across it. Well, scrawled was the wrong word, since the writing was, to her knowledge, impeccable. Mentally nudging herself, her viewpoint shifted to hover above the parchment, mere centimetres from the material. Mildly...mildly surprised was the feeling she had just felt, as she mentally pulled herself up and away from the writing, allowing her to read it.
"Assignment:
Activate Soul Crystal.
Assignee: Attendant Magistrate Kelvaden
Assigner: High Magistrate A'vaden
Note: Don't mess this one up Kel, I had to pull strings to get you another Soul Crystal. My neck is on the line if the Stratum were to hear that I gave you a second shot at your little theory."
The information was not exactly useful to her, aside from drawing her focus to the centre of the room. There was a stone pedestal there, and atop it, presumably the aforementioned Soul Crystal. As she looked upon it, somehow she knew she was looking at herself. The Crystal was white, with a red light shining from within. Somehow, the sight of what her mind had now ascribed as her made her feel fiercely protective, wanting to just hide herself away from whatever remained outside of that door.
Instead of opening it or doing as her instinct told her and hiding, she turned her attention towards the bookshelf. The door was made of metal, so it was quite possible that she just wasn't strong enough to push the handle down. Focusing on one red-backed book in particular, she pictured it shifting on the shelf. Only a little, she was just trying to figure out if she could even move it.
Surprising herself slightly, the book only needed a small amount of focus before it was rocked backwards, thumping back down when she stopped focusing. Encouraged by this, she tried to lift it up, and while it took a little more focus, the book swiftly found itself hovering in the air a few centimetres above the wooden shelf it was sat atop. She then pictured it moving off the shelf and towards the desk, only for the book to immediately hit the wooden shelf again, leading her to frown.
Just the act of changing the picture in her mind was enough to break the tentative force she was applying. She noted that the sound was entirely vacant, but she figured giving herself the ability to hear could come later. Taste was unnecessary as far as she could tell, but being able to smell could also potentially be useful for detecting anything odorous nearby.
Another picture in her mind and a considerable amount of focus eventually saw the book raise up, pull away from the shelf, shift to the side towards the desk, then slowly lower down and land atop the desk, falling to the side with a noiseless bang. Shifting her view above the book, she focused on the lettering, and felt another feeling well up inside of her, best ascribed to as satisfaction.
The book was titled 'Soul Weaving - Advanced Edition - Book 3' and so she assumed and hoped the less advanced editions and books were also available for her to peruse. Flicking open the first few pages, she began skimming them, but immediately saw that the contents were, as the book said, advanced, far too much for her to even comprehend, so instead she closed the book then shunted it to the side of the desk.
Drawing another book from the bookshelf, she saw it was another advanced book, and after skimming the first few pages placed it beside the first. This pattern continued a few times, until finally she found another Soul Weaving Book, this one was Book 2 of the advanced editions, and so after viewing that, she then placed it atop book 3. When she could understand them, as long as the books were placed in order, she would be able to go straight down the pile reading them and devour their contents.
She began going across the entire large bookshelf, extracting book, skimming their first few pages then either creating new piles or adding them to old ones. She was able to recall with surprising efficiency which books were piled where, and so it only good a negligent action for her to send the book to its location. After experiencing what her mind told her was boredom, she decided to take a break from organizing the books, and instead go a different route.
Now, up until this moment, she had been one by one moving the books, but what if she could run them across her vision almost like an assembly line of books? With that in mind, she began focusing on another book, raising it up and then moving it in front of her, holding it in mid-air a few centimetres above the desk. She glanced at the title, then without letting it fall, she began attempting to send it towards the correct pile.
The book fell onto the desk at the change in mental picture at least two-dozen times before she managed to send it correctly, landing delicately atop the selected pile. With that achieved, she drew another book across, viewing it then attempting to send it towards a new spot on the desk, though she found herself experiencing another feeling when the book thudded down to the floor.
It seemed she still had to practice.
With a silent thud, she closed one book, lifting it off the desk and placing it delicately back on the bookshelf.
She had emptied the entire shelf, and while a few books were missing here and there, she was hopeful that the ones she did have access to would help her. Assumptions led her to believe that whatever 'Keldaven' had done to her, from what she'd seen of the books and the note, had been an experiment of some kind, and so would have the necessary books for reference when conducting their experiment.
That was the theory at least. The first book she had read was about Soul Crystals, since the parchment had told her that what she now seemed to inhabit was one such thing. It was a single edition, or at least seemed to be since no other Soul Crystal-related book was on the bookshelf and it had no notation about a second book, nor did it close off early.
The book told her mostly about how they were formed, what they could be used for, how to correctly or incorrectly use them, their dangers, that sort of academic thing, and she lapped the information up quickly. Nothing in there made any real mention to what she wanted to know though, which was what she actually was, what had happened to her, what she could do, not anything of that nature.
So, with a little focus, having gotten far better at manipulating the objects within her space, she lifted a fresh book into place and began reading it. Her possibly-newfound ability letting her idly flick through each page as she digested the information within. That particular book was about Runic Circles, which led her to perform another examination of the room. There was nothing to suggest that kind of thing was inside of the room, but maybe it was just invisible to her? Whatever the case was, it sounded interesting, and so she read through that one. Some of the terminology went over her head, so when that book was finished, she picked out a book that at least seemed like it also explained the terminology.
She was in a room seemingly of someone at least good at magic and what they did, so there was no handy beginner's guide to magic lying around, nor anything similar, which would have helped her immensely, since she finished the last book feeling like several dozen of the terms had entirely different meanings to what she was assuming. Never-the-less, she pressed on, reading through each and every single of the numerous books, each one neatly being ordered as she placed them back on the shelf for easy access, cataloguing them mentally as she did so.
Several times, she challenged herself to pick out a book without observing them directly, and while she failed a few times, the rest of them she managed to select the right book. She took it a step further by trying to recall specific pages as well, but that was where her limit seemed to be, as she rarely was able to recall that exact information. Still, it was good to be able to immediately go back to an old book and skim through it to cross-reference terminology she didn't understand, then use the contexts of the two books to better identify the meaning of the word.
Using this crude cross-referencing system, she fleshed out her vocabulary, occasionally returning to old books and quickly leafing through the pages to re-find terminology she couldn't understand, then laying those down in their own pile so she could then add any others she found there and go through them at the same time, increasing the chance that she would get an accurate guess as to what the word meant.
While she did this, she also was having a mental debate with herself about opening the door. She didn't know what was on the other side, and a part of her wanted to just stay cooped up. But another part, the larger part, wanted to go out there, to explore and roam and discover things. But then that smaller side reminded her that opening that door could have any sort of consequences...just like how breaching the void could have had innumerable bad endings for her.
That silenced her own debate, as she made her mind up to finish the last of the current row of books she was reading, cross-reference the books she had already set aside, then attempt to open the door again. As she read more, she started trying to split her attention, just to practice her abilities. With half of her attention, she focused on the book she was reading, but with the rest she attempted to lift another book. Nothing fancy, just movement, but if she started to neglect her reading she would go all the way back to the start of that page or even before, and reset the position of the book.
Her intent was to be able to multi-task, since this would allow her to perform, well, multiple tasks at once, which would come in incredibly handy. It took her reading through three entire books before she was even able to lift the book up whilst reading, and another two before she could do it seamlessly, without starving her reading attention. She kept at it though, moving the book around whilst she also read books, before graduating herself by managing to lift a book, move it to the shelf, place it down, then grab that same book and replace it in the original position on the desk without losing her focus on her reading, nor dropping the book.
It took a considerable amount of effort to do so, but she succeeded in doing it, and continued to move books around whilst she finished the last two books off, even attempting and subsequently failing to move two at once separately, something that would require more practice. But alas, the time had come. The door had been taunting her with its presence, her ability to feel entirely blunted by the door and leaving her unable to feel what was outside.
But now, she was going to fix that. With her improved focus and ability to move objects, she stared at the handle for a moment before focusing on it, picturing the handle being turned down and then pulled, pouring her focus into that singular action. A few moments of pressure, and the door shuddered as the handle suddenly and forcibly slammed downwards, rust falling out of the mechanism.
Maybe a sense of hearing would be for the best, since that seemed like it would have been loud. Regardless, she continued onwards, pulling on the handle for a few moments. When that didn't work, she attempted to push the door, to the same result. The handle was definitely fully depressed, so that wasn't the issue. Waiting a moment as she puzzled it out, she attempted to pull the door again, this time with more focus imparted into the action.
When the door refused to budge, she felt a new feeling, one of irritation, well up inside of her. She focused as firmly as her mind was able on pulling the door handle inwards. That...was maybe a bad idea, as the entire door was pulled straight out of the frame it was inlaid within, flying across the room to slam against the far wall. She had hastily slammed at the bottom of the door with her mind, causing the door to cartwheel over her crystal and not impact it or the pedestal, fearing something terrible would occur if she was hit by that. The door itself had flown straight through where her view was, and she noted no ill effects to that, which was useful knowledge.
As the door fell down to the floor, she felt her sense of self expand out of the door, out into the open. Worried, she tried to stop herself expanding, accidentally and innately being able to recoil her own self back to being only a few feet outside of the door. Tentatively, she pushed her view out of the room and into what she now saw as a corridor, with the same plain featureless walls her room had possessed. Slowly, she released her stranglehold upon herself, allowing her...her area to expand.
The Crystal was what was truly her, so she needed a new name for what she deemed as a part of herself, and so she just named it her area until she could make a better name, if ever. As she expanded, she felt a niggling itch telling her that something here was very, very wrong, but she couldn't place it. There were maybe a dozen doors on either side of the corridor, each one the same metal that her door was made from.
Stopping at one, she focused on the door itself, pulling upon it and surprising herself when, with far more ease, the door flew across the corridor and slammed into the opposite wall. As she peered at the door frame, she realized that she was an idiot and had been pulling a door meant to be pushed. The stone itself around the door was cracked and broken in places as well, so perhaps there was some kind of magical lock that also needed to be undone, since the doors themselves didn't have a visible lock. Around the edges of the other doors were small protrusions of stone, lending credence to that theory.
She entered the room she had opened, looking around. It looked pretty similar to the room she inhabited, the same bookshelf, desk and whatnot. What was missing was the pedestal in the middle. Instead there was a bed in the corner, as well as what looked like a toilet of some kind, though there was no plumbing, no mess and nothing to indicate it had actually been used. There was a kitchen of sorts, small knives, implements and other various cooking detritus across the countertop. Beside that was a fire-fueled stove, though entirely barren.
Turning her attention to the bookshelf and the desk, she saw no note or selected book on the desk and so began viewing each book on the shelf, striking gold a few times with much more novice-level books, including one about runes, which in the first few pages clarified a vast proportion of the runic circles books she had already read, answering questions she had gotten from reading whilst lacking information.
She stopped herself before she could get drawn into reading more, though made sure that upon exiting the room she placed the door in front of the room side-ways on, a way to catalogue the rooms she would deem useful. The next room she searched was much like the others, except lacking anything useful, aside from a single, simple item, a large wooden clock.
Immediately she began moving that to her room, that way she could keep track of time and know how long it took her to perform certain actions. But instead of doing it directly, she pictured the entire route the clock needed to take to reach her room, then stayed within the room and mentally willed it to go there. When she didn't immediately hear the bang of the clock hitting the ground, she let herself relax just a little, keeping her focus up but without being so tense.
After a full minute of focusing, she decided it had to have reached the destination by now and stopped focusing and picturing the clock. With no loud noise forthcoming, she slipt her vision away from that room, crossing the corridor and entering her own room, looking to the side of the desk and seeing the clock stood in the position she had designated.
Deciding to attempt something new, she recalled the books she had left in the other room in their own neat piles on the desk, mentally willing one of them to float out of that room, across the corridor and into this room then sit on the desk in the appropriate pile, watching the clock while she did this. Twelve seconds passed by before the book slid into view, hovering lazily through the air and coming to a stop atop the correct pile of books.
With that theory done, she began testing her information recall, trying to pick specific books from another room entirely and bring them into the room she was inhabiting, and only made a mistake once. So she wasn't perfect, but only making a single mistake was definitely not a bad thing. She spent some time moving all the books from the other room to her own, then returned her focus outside, expanding to the end of the corridor and checking every room one after another.
She couldn't find a way to remove the stone lip holding the doors in place, no way for her to activate anything hidden there to free the door from the stone lock. There had to be a way to move the stone, the doors needed to be opened after all, but unless she was missing something obvious, she couldn't see a normal way to open any of the doors. Then again, she had been inside of one, so maybe they were meant to be unopenable in certain circumstances, like a magical experiment gone wrong?
It didn't matter though, and she could spend time puzzling that out later. Reaching one end of the corridor, she looked one way, then the other. The entire place was so...perfect. The walls had no bumps, or divots, or even a change in colouration. They were exacted and pristine, and entirely confusing. The two routes were equally identical, so she decided to check the other route before making a decision.
As her vision turned the corner, she immediately laid eyes on a blemish upon the just as perfect corridor, a pile of bones. Cautiously, she approached, noting that the bones were wrapped up in robes that still looked perfect, not even a speck of dust or dirt marring them. Viewing closer, she saw a small pendant around the spine of the deceased, focusing on it and lifting it up.
She noted a thin metal bulge on the side of the pendant, and mentally pressed it open, immediately reeling back in surprise when several dozen assorted items, books, glass vials and other objects fell out of seemingly nothing and hit the floor. Those objects had...had just come out of a pendant. As she realized that fact, she felt something cold turn over inside of herself, the unerring feeling of having missed something exceptionally worrying. Drifting backwards into the corridor, she looked at each door, then with an entirely uncaring force she smashed through the nearest door, sweeping her gaze around then exiting the room, her entire sense of self seemingly trying to reject what she was seeing.
The rooms...they didn't fit. Each room was...it was wider than the space it should have been taking up. She was an idiot for not noticing sooner, but it wasn't like she'd been looking for that sort of thing anyway. She smashed down the next door along, then moved herself back as far as she could in the corridor, comparing the spaces, before shifting left and right and viewing more closely just now...how impossible the rooms were. She drifted inside of one, staring closely at the wall. As much as she wanted to try to smash her way through, that felt a step too far for her. If these rooms were really doing something impossible, trying to break that would probably end up causing a major issue for her. She pulled the pendant back to her, frowning when it did nothing any more. An idea then crept into her head.
What if she used the skeleton she had seen as a puppet? As she attempted it though, almost immediately, her plan fell apart. The skeleton was totally clean of flesh and any sort of regular matter, so each individual bone has fallen away from the others. If she wanted to have a physical presence, she'd have to be able to individually control every single bone, moving them all in concert. Since she couldn't even more two books, that seemed like a hefty task, at least until she actually attempted and succeeded in moving the two bones.
Confused, she made one bend whilst holding the other in place, then made them both move to cross over each other. She spent a moment staring at the bones before returning to her room at a quick pace and attempting to move two of her books. The reactions went about throwing her more for a loop, as only a single book had lifted, the second was incapable of being moved. She cut her focus, then realized exactly why she could only move one book when it slammed into the desk.
They were vastly heavier than bones.
Sooo, that's Chapter 1.
I...don't have much to say other than I sincerely hope you enjoyed this. Next chapter will see more exploration, exploitation and education, I promise! Till them...ta-ta!
