Chapter 20: Tattoo Parlor (Pt.1)

  For a long moment, no one breathed around the fight arena.

  The silence around the crater was broken only by Beithin’s wet coughs, his soft laughter, and the faint crackle of settling rock in the crater surrounding them both. Dozens of eyes stared down at the two men, the earth-born Cresselian gasping in the ruin, and Alex standing over him with his aura fading, one fist still smoldering with residual purple-black aether.

  Alex saw all the mercenaries around them watching with shocked expressions. They didn’t have the look of men and women watching another brawl. It was the look of predators realizing another, even bigger, predator had just stepped into the den.

  Murmurs broke the stillness first. Alex heard a clearing of someone’s throat. A hissed curse. A half-choked “...fuck me.” Fear rippled across their faces, tempered with awe. Some leaned back, others clutched weapons as if by instinct. Then, from somewhere in the crowd, a single cheer split the air. A nervous, uncertain sound, yet it was enough.

  Like a dam bursting, others followed. Applause, hollers, a rough cheer that built into a roar. Some clapped their fists against their armor, others stomped the ground. Excitement and reverence tangled with fear, but it spread all the same. Alex, the strange human with fire in his veins, had done what few could imagine, he’d broken Beithin.

  At the crater’s edge a young man shoved forward, a human, wiry but broad in the shoulders, late twenties at most. His dark hair was tied back, his jaw squared, and his nose a bit too small for his face. Alex recognized him as the second-in-command of Beithin’s squad.

  He dropped down carefully, boots crunching on the cracked stone, and crouched by Beithin’s side. From his belt, he pulled a thick vial of potion, the liquid inside glowing a soft ruby hue. Without a word, he pressed it to Beithin’s lips.

  The Cresselian drank deep, grimacing as the magic took hold and begin resetting his insides. Blood at his chin was carefully wiped away by the younger man’s sleeve. His chest rose easier, his eyes clearing as the healing began to mend shattered ribs and bruised flesh.

  The human wrapped one arm under Beithin’s and pulled him slowly upright, the larger man leaning heavy against him. Beithin’s jaw was tight, but his eyes never left Alex, assessing him, his spirit still not entirely defeated.

  The cheers still thundered, echoing across the caravan camp.

  And Alex? He simply exhaled, shaking out his aching hand as he stepped back, letting Beithin stand. A healing potion of his own appeared from his bracelet, and Alex drank down the contents, feeling the ache in his arm and side begin to ease.

  The roar of the mercenaries still thundered when Beithin raised one bruised, bloodied hand for silence. His second hand steadied him by grabbing his lieutenant’s shoulder, but the Cresselian’s spine straightened as though he carried a mountain on his back and refused to let it bend.

  His words carried well, strong and even, despite his bruised insides. “The deal… is honored.”

  A groan rippled through the mercenaries around them. Some spat into the dirt, others cursed under their breath, but none dared challenge it. Beithin’s word was stone, and stone did not break—unless it was Alex punching it.

  His lips tugged into a smile, faint but real. He stepped forward, extending his hand. Beithin clasped it in a grip like firm granite, and for a moment they locked eyes, warrior to warrior. Not as enemies, nor quite as friends, but with an understanding forged only in the crucible of violence.

  When they broke apart, Alex walked to the cloth on the ground and collected the reagents he’d fought for, sliding them carefully into his bracelet’s storage. He left behind a pouch of gold and a few smaller items from his own stock, a fair trade, which he paid without complaint.

  Then he turned, heading through the dispersing circle back to his friends. Ghrukk and his squad were waiting, the Ork bellowing a laugh that nearly shook the air apart. Doran gave Alex a short nod, huffing through his thickened beard, which Alex took as a dwarven indication of respect. Rynel and Sarson clapped his shoulder as he passed, with Selka merely flashing smile. But Myrae eyed him wearily.

  “Ha! You’ve got more fire than I thought, little human! Broke him like a dry log, you did!” The Ork shouted. The others from Ghrukk’s squad added their own rough praise. Alex waved it off, shaking his head.

  “It wasn’t a clean win. Neither of us threw out any serious offensive spells, besides each of our augmentor boosts. If we had both used all our arsenals had to offer, the outcome could’ve been different.”

  Allie stepped closer, brushing her braid back over her shoulder, eyes narrowing at him. “Different doesn’t mean he'd have done better. You won. Don’t downplay it.”

  “I’ll still take the win,” Alex admitted, lips twitching, “but I know better than to believe it proves everything.” He crouched by the wagon and began setting down the newly traded reagents and items he had earned from the fight.. “Anyway… with this, I can start working on the enchantments for you guys. [Lattice Spiral] should help when you hit your next thresholds.”

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  Allie crouched beside him. “Then I’ll help. I can do mixing, stabilizing, whatever you need. You won’t get rid of me that easy.”

  Alex nodded, grateful. His eyes lingered on the items laid out before him, already sorting, already planning. Soon the work would begin again.

  ***

  The sunlight of the day had burned low and the caravan had stopped its travel to rest for the night by the time Alex spread another cloth beside Allie, this one not for trade but for work. Ink pots clinked softly, reagents clattered into bowls, the sharp scent of crushed herbs and alchemical solutions mixed with the smoke of the campfire, a bitter tang on the back of the tongue.

  Allie leaned over a mortar, grinding carefully with practiced hands. She measured powders into one of many glass vials and then dripped in basilisk bile, the liquid fizzing and hissing as it darkened into a usable glyph-ink base. Her eyes narrowed as she worked, and Alex subtly watched as the healer’s precision shifted seamlessly into alchemical discipline.

  “Keep it thin,” Alex murmured, barely looking up as he fitted a set of styluses beside him. “If it clots, the channels won’t hold.”

  She snorted softly. “I know, Alex. I’m not new to this.”

  Nearby, Eric had corralled the rest of the worldstriders, squatting on the other side of the fire with a scrap of parchment in hand. “Alright,” he said firmly, “Alex needs your gathering techniques written out, not just described. If you can’t sketch a technique diagram and pattern, trace the flow of aether on the page and describe what you see or feel when you use it..”

  One by one, the others complied. Devon hunched, drawing careful spirals of a fractal web he’d scavenged from a battlefield corpse in Terraxum. Garret doodled a clumsy loop that looked more like a coiled snake than a technique, his grin sheepish. Holly’s was sharp and swirly, a tornado of lines darting inward toward her core. Henry, quiet as always, made simple concentric curves, an efficient pattern that Alex thought matched him perfectly. Everyone seemed to have moved on from the [Condensing Spiral] technique.

  Even Alex had changed his own. The original Condensing Spiral was gone, reshaped into something tightly layered, with multiple braids of energy that Obby and Sylvaris had helped him refine. He glanced at the others’ work, committing them to memory. Each upgrade had to be unique, tailored to them. If he mismatched his designs, the entire lattice would fail.

  All the while, his left hand kept working. The bracer at his wrist sat unlatched, its channels exposed like veins of silver metal. He drew in another collection of glyphs and lines on the leather, a couple inches above the last one. It hissed and fizzled, but Alex made no mistake during the process. Once it was finished, he slid in the third aether gem, an Adept-Tier gem, glowing faintly with a muted inner light. It clicked into the glyph socket with a satisfying snap, the bracer’s lines flaring briefly as it adjusted to the new circuit.

  Alex exhaled slowly. The extra reservoir the gem would provide him wasn’t huge, not compared to a true mage’s core, but for him it was a lifeline. A patch on the empty gap of his shallow energy pool.

  Not enough, but better than nothing. He thought grimly.

  A ripple ran through his vision as a wave of silvery force that his [Aether Sight] recognized as air aether. He closed the leather flap of his bracer just as Holly sat down next to him on the ground, lacing her arms with his and pulling him close.

  “Hey you,” Alex smiled, looking to find Holly staring up at him with a nervous expression on her face. “What’s up?”

  “That last fight, the way you acted was… different.” Holly said. “You always seemed to enjoy hunting and fighting, I’ve noticed that. But, this was different somehow. The way you were laughing, and the beating you were giving Beithin…” She bit her lip, looking away from him.

  “Mmmm,” Alex understood what she was saying, the change in him that he had shown in that fight, it was abrupt to some degree. He wasn’t exactly sure what had happened at the time, as he still had felt like himself, but there was no denying that he had acted differently, especially if Holly saw it as well.

  He didn’t understand it back then, but he had enough time to think about it during the day and while prepping for the enchantment work. “I think the pain and suffering keeps me grounded.” He eventually said.

  She did a double take at that. “What? The pain?”

  “Yeah,” he nodded. “My martial style is a bit different than others. Kate’s flames don’t hurt her, and your wind doesn’t restrict you. But the [Demon Asura Style], even when I use it correctly, its aura also eats at me too. Takes bites at the aether inside me, chewing on my muscles and bones like acidic teeth.” He looked down at his hands, flexing his fingers, remembering how he had felt when he first activated the martial style with Sylvaris’ guidance.

  “One; that’s sounds horrible, why would you use that? Two; what does that have to do with your fight against Beithin?”

  “Because its powerful. It doesn’t give me extra flashy movements or fire trails like Kate’s. And it doesn’t redirect impacts like Beithin’s, doesn’t let me create large area impact through my aether like Eric’s.” He shook his head, letting his hands drop down on his knees once again. “Yet, I fought an army of undead by myself, with nearly no rest at all. I can harness the strength of an Asura’s fist and have it strike with me against my foes. It turns my injuries into strength, to get revenge for every wound they inflict on me… It’s in another league from what I can find.”

  He sighed before taking in a large shaky breath. “But it can also overtake me. I’ve almost done it before, gave in to the glee of carnage, bloodshed, and wrath. It can turn me into a sadistic fighting demon. But I learned to control that part, until now. When I opened my meridian, I chose a boost that increases my body’s resiliency to aether and other magic. That effect drastically lowered the power of the martial style’s corrosive aura on my body.”

  “Again, how does that make you do… that?” She pressed him.

  “Because with the pain and pressure gone, I don’t think my mind had anything to anchor on to when I fought. I think the whole point of the style is to use the pain from the brutality of battle to keep me sane. I didn’t have that same pain, so I lost focus, and I let myself give in to the demon once more. It was a lot, not a full fall, but its peaked through. That’s what I felt, that’s what you saw…”

  Holly nodded, understanding dawning on her face. She laid her head on his shoulder, squeezing his arms tightly against herself. “Okay, I get that. So now you know, you can watch out for that next time so you don’t lose yourself… so I don’t lose you.”

  “Actually, I think that problem is solved, in the short term at least.” He said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Instead of explaining it, Alex brought up his most recent System Notification and showed it to her.