A Jaded Life

The biggest problem with the plan to take out the Shattered in town and investigate what made them special was that we needed to know where they actually hid. Currently, we only knew that they could rapidly appear in the streets, on rooftops and within buildings, with the assumption that they had some sort of large-scale tunnel network under the streets, maybe an expansion of the existing sewer system or something along those lines. But that was all an assumption and relying on it could easily come to bite us in the ass of our ass-umption. It would be quite troublesome if the Shattered had some way to escape the attack or, even worse, attack the point from which we were attacking in large numbers.

If they evaded, possibly by simply moving into a different part of their tunnel system, nothing about the current status quo would change but if they attacked us we would likely face disaster. Their levels were high enough to be dangerous and with a sufficient number, the situation would go from troublesome to utterly deadly in a matter of moments. Not something I was willing to take a chance on, not without extensive preparations and precautions.

So, more information was needed, information I couldn’t easily get my hands on. My usual method would be to either sneak in, which they made merely impossible thanks to their tremor sense, or to use scrying constructs to investigate more. Sadly, the Shattered could, somehow, use physical attacks with their claws to disrupt my constructs, even if they were only made from shadows. How that worked, I had no idea but my best guess was that something about my method of creating the constructs gave them a faint coporality, for lack of a better word, that could be disrupted. Or their claws had an innate disruption effect, capable of shredding magical constructs or a dozen other possibilities we could imagine and many more we couldn’t. Either way, they could, and readily had, destroyed my constructs, rendering my preferred options moot.

To make matters worse, I wasn’t really sure I could test things as I normally would have. The Shattered had already demonstrated excellent adaptability, meaning they might very well come up with counter-measures against my preferred magical tricks if they saw them, in the worst case, if they saw them only once. Sure, there were some things that couldn’t be easily adapted against, mainly in the brute-force department, but trying to brute-force an entire colony of Shattered wasn’t really an approach I was willing to take. No, if I wanted to deal with their entire number, I had to be smart about it.

The most obvious experiment, given that the Shattered had largely ceased to react to our attempts to draw them out was to use the humanoid scrying construct I had made from Ice and have it walk into town. Either the Shattered would be drawn out and we might be able to nab one or two more, or I could use it to find the openings of their lair, giving us additional information. Alternatively, I wanted to see if they kept reacting to my incoporeal scrying constructs, if they did, Lia would hopefully be able to grab one, if not, again, more information.

Another idea I had in mind was to see if they could react to my presence if I was within the Realm of Shadows and stayed there. Normally, the realm wasn’t really useful for scouting as distances could twist and morph, depending on your position, just like shadows did, but if I merely wanted to find out how many openings into their tunnels the Shattered had and their rough locations, it should be sufficient. Assuming, of course, that they couldn’t just reach into the shadows and drag me out, but I doubted that their capabilities were that evolved.

Sadly, given that I wanted to try moving through the shadows I had to perform the test myself. While Lia could reach into the shadows, her abilities to move through them were severely limited, to the point that she could barely Shadow Step a dozen metres, to say nothing of the extended exploration I had in mind.

If I made sure to do my shadow scouting right after using the humanoid construct, the Shattered would hopefully consider any tremors to be a repeat of the attempt with the construct, giving me additional leeway in my actions. But if not, I would step away the moment I noticed a Shattered approaching. Maybe I should also wrap myself into the armour of Ice I had previously experimented with, sure, it took a lot of Astral Power but I wasn’t planning to fight, I wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t be caught in a trap and taken out before I could react. Sure, it was unlikely that they could get me in the shadows but better to be over-prepared than dead.

Another thing I could try was to see if I could maybe use different constructs to scry. Maybe I could make something smaller, a shadow version of a mouse or something even smaller, though the difficulty might be movement. I wasn’t quite certain just how the shape of a shadow construct influenced its ability to be moved by my magic, so I might be able to make something so small that the Shattered would have difficulty finding it, something the size of a fly maybe. If that worked, I might be able to spy on them with ease.

Alternatively, with my two constructs made from Ice, I had proven, if only to myself, that I wasn’t limited to constructs made from shadows. Sure, my other primary affinity, Blood, wasn’t really suitable to make constructs, but I might have some success if I decided to experiment with pure air constructs, or maybe water. If it rained, I might be able to use the rain as a medium for my Water Magic, giving me some fairly interesting options, but that was a bit conditional and highly experimental. Not that the experimental status was a bad thing, having my Titanic Ambition active made things a lot easier.

Luna, too, had brought up an intriguing possibility, though not one I could use to find out more about the Shattered and their lair directly but to investigate what made them more intelligent. It was possible, maybe even likely, that the Shattered’s intelligence was influenced by the Astral River or, in a less likely event, that their intelligence had influenced the river due to their presence. Their possible influence would be based on their number and their affinities to the different magical elements, as well as their actual intelligence, which made the idea fairly intriguing in and of itself. And, the biggest advantage this avenue of investigation had was that it was nearly risk-free. The possibility that the Shattered could strike into the Astral River was minuscule to the point of near impossibility.

Given the security of that last option, it was the one I decided to try first. If I could get the information I wanted to find without risking life and limb, I wasn’t about to hesitate. By now, I had a comfortable throne sitting in our lair, mostly because I regularly used it while anchoring myself into the scrying constructs and the throne helped with that. Maybe part of the effect was psychological in nature, something about feeling like a ruler or master while sitting on it and controlling a ‘subject’ but given the runes I had carved into it, there were some tangible, magical benefits, too. One of which was a boost to my presence within the Astral River, increasing the amount of Astral Power I passively regenerated while sitting on it. Normally, that was merely a neat benefit but now, it would help anchor my Mind to my Body while I explored some nearby strands of the Astral River.

After warning the others, I let myself fade into the River, allowing its streams to take me along after making sure that these strands were flowing towards the town. Not that I could readily link locations on the physical plane and their counterparts within the Astral River but thanks to the vague, distant pull of the forming Nexus we had been following for quite some time, I had a rough reference frame. Thanks to that, I could roughly navigate within the Astral, though it still wasn’t easy.

It was strange, speed and direction within the Astral River weren’t always as I would expect and despite the fairly short distance between town and our lair, it took me almost an hour of patiently navigating some of the smaller strands, mentally crawling towards town.

To make matters worse, the closer I got, the thinner the strands got, to the point that I could barely traverse them, partially due to their minuscule size and partially because of the incredible pressure the power within was under. I had never experienced anything like this, to the point that I soon had to give up on this particular attempt, though, even as I started to make my way back towards my body, I began to wonder if this particular oddity might actually be the answer to the question regarding the large number of Shattered. Maybe not a useful answer, but an answer nonetheless.