Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0139

Chapter 139

Five days after the handshake, Tala fulfilled her part of the deal.

The method didn’t arrive in book form. It arrived in fragments, and each fragment arrived differently. A parchment of skin that didn’t belong to any animal in this world, handed to her by a hooded figure who refused to cross the mansion gate. Three hours of shared trance in the back of her shop, with Tala serving as a bridge to a memory that wasn’t hers. A set of diagrams burned at the edges, rescued from a vault that, according to her, had been under a lake in Bohemia since before Bohemia existed. Erick didn’t ask how much it had cost. She told him anyway, in calculated doses, making clear the weight of each door she had to open. Two demon lords demanding payment for old favors. A third who demanded an item from her personal collection as payment. Each piece of information came wrapped in a silent reminder: the favor he owed was accruing interest even before it was collected.

Morgana took thirty-one hours to digest the material. What came out on the other side of the processing didn’t look like magic. It looked like an engineering manual written by someone who hated the reader: more than nine thousand pages of arcane syntax, words of power decomposed into phonetic components, channeling geometries with tolerances measured in fractions of a millimeter. Erick spent the next four days inside the capsule, subjective time stretched to the limit of what his mind could bear, copying that entire structure into himself until he could reconstruct it with his eyes closed, backwards, under any condition Morgana invented to sabotage him.

On the fifth night, he summoned Tala.

And now, in the center of the arcane study room, the runes floated before him.

These weren’t engravings. There was no stylus, no conductive compound, no surface. Each rune was an autonomous construct of pure, dense, condensed mana, woven into the air by the gestures of her fingers and held together by sheer willpower. The energy came from reserves linked to her elemental, and this gave them color: a deep, vibrant orange that pulsed slowly like a breathing ember. The creature trapped in her soul had grown. The last battles, the last deaths avoided by ever-smaller margins, had accelerated a symbiosis that Morgana had designed to last years. Today the boundary between the two was almost theoretical. Erick was the flesh, the mold. The elemental was the fire that the mold contained.

His hands had been working non-stop for three hours.

Fingers traced in the void, and where the fingers passed, the mana obeyed, bending at angles that ordinary geometry would refuse to accept. Each rune required seventeen strokes. Each stroke needed to be executed at a specific cadence, with a specific density, mentally intoned with the corresponding word of power at the exact moment of completion. Making a mistake in any variable didn’t produce a defective rune. It produced nothing: the entire structure collapsed into sparks, and three minutes of work evaporated without ceremony.

He made eleven mistakes in the first fifty. After the hundredth, something settled. His hands found the memory, the mana found the path, and the process ceased to be conscious translation and became fluency. Now the runes were born complete, one after the other, detaching themselves from the tips of his fingers and rising to join their sisters, occupying positions in a constellation that slowly grew around the room.

Tala was watching.

She was three steps away from him, in her usual dark dress, her arms loosely crossed beneath her bust, and she hadn’t said anything for quite some time. That, in itself, would have been noteworthy. Tala didn’t know how to be silent. Silence was a currency she spent avariciously, always exchanged for a provocation, a question with a false undertone, a comment designed to gauge the other person’s reaction. But there, in that white room that insisted on not looking like a magic laboratory, she had simply forgotten how to perform.

The white eyes followed every feature.

She knew that school. Arcane manipulation through words of power, channeled into free-sustaining runic matrices. An ancient art, brutally inefficient, abandoned by virtually every circle she had frequented over the centuries precisely because the cost was obscene. Each of those constructs drank mana like a condemned man drinks water. The few masters she had seen master the technique treated each rune as a small ritual, an investment to be planned, executed, and protected. The most talented of them, an insufferable albino who died in a stupid bet in Prague, could sustain seven at the same time. Seven. And he boasted about it in three languages.

She stopped counting the boy’s when they exceeded five hundred.

And what bothered her, what fascinated her, what kept her eyes fixed on those hands, wasn’t the number. It was the rate. She was watching a mind work, produce, create at a speed she hadn’t witnessed in centuries. Not since the great names, those that became chapter titles in grimoires that today are worth cities. And those took entire lives to get where they got. The boy had received the method five days ago.

There was something almost indecent about watching it. An excitement she didn’t feel often enough to remember how to manage, coursing up her spine like old wine. Growth. That’s what she saw. Raw, undiluted growth, magic improving before her eyes in real time, and Tala discovered she missed feeling that.

“That’s impressive.”

The phrase slipped out before she could say it, which hadn’t happened in a long time. Erick didn’t take his eyes off the drawing in progress, but the corner of his mouth registered the comment.

“If it were any other mage,” she continued, uncrossing her arms and taking a step toward the constellation, “they wouldn’t produce even the tenth rune before it dried up. If it were me, with all the good will in the world, I might reach the thirtieth before considering the effort a personal insult.” Her white eyes scanned the ceiling of the room, where the orange rows spun in slow, concentric orbits, and she recalculated just for the pleasure of arriving at the same absurd result. “You just passed the six hundredth. The amount of mana embedded in each of them shouldn’t be sustainable for anything that breathes. And there you are, breaking my predictions with that face of someone assembling furniture.”

The six hundred and one rune slipped from his fingers and rose to its place.

“Boy, you really know how to impress me.”

“I’ll take note of the compliment.” His voice was slightly hoarse from the effort, but his tone retained its usual lightness. “I’ll need it soon, when my pride is on the ground along with the rest of me.”

He smiled as he sweated, and the smile was genuine, a rare thing in recent days. Because Tala was right about everything, except for the part she couldn’t see. His new constitution gave him a physical stamina that made work marathons a footnote. But what that room was demanding of him wasn’t physical. It was an effort of another kind, mental, spiritual, something for which he didn’t yet have the calibrated vocabulary. He felt the reserves linked to his soul dwindling. Gradually, measurably, rune after rune, like a tank with a hole exactly the size of his ambition.

He had never felt this before. Not in the most intense rituals, not on days of arcane forging, not on the night he poured everything he had into something that laughed while being beaten. His reserves had always been the item on the spreadsheet he didn’t need to check. And now they were truly running out, for the first time, and there was an irony there that he filed away to laugh about later, when he had energy left for luxuries.

Could that really be called easy? He decided it wasn’t. And he continued.

The following hours compacted into a hypnotic routine. Line, cadence, word, rune. Line, cadence, word, rune. Sweat trickled from his temple to his jaw, from his jaw to his collar, and at some point his shirt gave up pretending to be dry. The orbits around the room thickened until the ceiling became a low sky of geometric embers, and the orange light tinged everything: the white countertops, the translucent panels, his greenish skin, her dark dress, her white eyes that didn’t miss a single gesture.

Sometime after seven hundred, Tala broke her silence again.

“You know what I find curious?” She had settled on the edge of a counter, legs crossed, chin resting on the back of her hand, the posture of someone watching an opera whose ending she knows and yet doesn’t want to miss an act. “You could have done this alone. Locked down here, without witnesses, without an audience. That’s your pattern, from what I’ve been able to map out. And yet you insisted on including me in the negotiation. To watch the whole process, from the first stroke to the flush. Why?”

“You charged that as part of the payment.”

“I charged because you offered me the space to charge, darling. Those are different things.” His white eyes narrowed slightly, amused. “A man who hides entire wings of his own house behind smiles doesn’t let a creature like me into his most important room by accident.”

The seven hundred and forty-three rune rose to its place. Erick let the question linger for the time of two more strokes before answering.

“Three reasons.” The voice came out paused from the effort, but firm. “First, the practical one: if something went wrong in the middle of the process, there’s no one in this hemisphere more qualified to improvise a restraint than you. Call it an insurance policy with excellent taste in dresses.”

“Flattering. And false in that regard. That was the reason you invented later.”

“Secondly,” he continued, neither confirming nor denying, “your creditors. Two demon lords and a collector relinquished centuries-old secrets because you asked. Sooner or later, one of them will want to know what happened to the knowledge. I prefer the answer to come from an eyewitness with your credibility rather than letting their imagination fill in the gaps. A demon lord’s imagination tends toward the catastrophic.”

Tala nodded, conceding the point. It was true, and it was the kind of truth that most mortals took decades to learn to calculate.

“And the third one?”

His hands didn’t stop. But his eyes, for the first time in hours, shifted from the ongoing line and met hers across the orange constellation.

“The third point is that a job well done deserves an audience to match. And the list of people on this planet capable of understanding what they are seeing here tonight can be counted on one hand. With fingers to spare.”

For a moment, Tala said nothing. Then he laughed, low and genuine, a sound that held more centuries than her face admitted.

“Vanity.” She savored the word like candy. “Finally, a flaw. I was starting to feel uncomfortable.”

“Enjoy it. I don’t plan on showing another one anytime soon.”

Seven hundred. Eight hundred. Nine hundred.

On the thousandth rune, Erick’s fingers completed the last stroke, the word of power closed the circuit, and the final construct rose to occupy the only remaining gap in the constellation.

And he fell to his knees.

It wasn’t theatrical. It was accounting: his legs presented the invoice, and he had no funds. The impact of his knees on the floor echoed dryly through the room, his hands rested on his thighs, and for a few seconds his world was reduced to the act of breathing. Sweat dripped from his chin at regular intervals. His mana reserves, that internal ocean he had learned to treat as infinite, were scraping the bottom. He could feel the bottom. Feeling the bottom was a new and profoundly unpleasant experience.

He slowly exhaled from his lungs.

“Done.”

Tala approached. Her heels crossed the room unhurriedly, and her hand landed on his shoulder with a weight that was not one of consolation. It was one of recognition, the gesture of an artisan before the work of another.

“Really,” she said, and there wasn’t even a hint of mockery in her voice, “you’re impressive.”

Erick took another deep breath and stood up. His legs obeyed firmly, without trembling. His arcane reserves might be hanging by a thread, but the strength of his body was another matter, paid for by another coffer, and that one was still full. He rolled his shoulders, stretched his numb fingers, and raised his eyes to the result of almost seven hours of work.

A thousand runes swirled around the room in slow, incandescent, patient orbits. Awaiting a command.

“You have little time.” Tala took a step back, and the evaluator returned to her spectator position. “Free-standing constructs have no anchors. They will begin to crumble at the edges in less than an hour, and the first ones you created will fall first. If you want them all alive at the time of the discharge, you need to continue now.”

Erick nodded.

In the center of the room, the target awaited. A sphere weighing approximately five kilograms floated a meter off the ground, suspended in a cradle of magnetic fields that the Engineer had designed despite continuous and formal protest. Five kilograms. Almost a hundred times the mass of the test sphere that had withstood all his flames without bothering to soften. The prize of the night, the first relevant fraction of the dozens of kilograms that lay dormant in the main vault, chosen to prove that the method was worth what it was costing.

A low hum announced the arrival of the robot server, which crossed the room on silent casters carrying a tray with a single corked glass vial. Erick picked up the vial, examined the liquid against the light of the runes out of pure protocol habit, and pulled the cork off with his teeth.

“What is that?” Tala tilted her head.

“Refueling.” He drank half of it in one gulp and made the appropriate grimace. The taste was still like licking a copper pipe. “A variation of an old formula. Potent, and corrosive enough that the original version came with a list of side effects in three columns.”

“And the current one?”

“The current one would only work on someone who wasn’t exactly human anymore.” He finished the rest of the bottle. “Fortunately, I know a candidate.”

The effect arrived before he returned the vial to the tray. A vibration rose from his stomach to his chest, from his chest to the very depths of his soul, and the reserves began to fill. Slowly. Frustratingly slowly, because the problem with possessing an inner ocean is that no amount of rain ever seems enough. But he didn’t need the ocean full. He needed what was necessary for the second phase, and what was necessary was arriving, liter by liter, while the thousand runes swirled above his head, burning away the deadline.

He closed his eyes for ten seconds. He did the calculation. He opened them.

“Perhaps you’d like to step away,” he said, without looking back.

“I’ll decide the distance myself, darling.”

“As you prefer.” He flexed his fingers. “It was a courtesy.”

And it began.

The first rune descended at the touch of his raised hand, and upon contact he released both currents simultaneously: the arcane energy from his reserves and the elemental energy of the creature fused to his body, intertwined in a single thread that traversed the construct from end to end. The rune drank in, and its orange color turned white. He touched the second. The third. His hands moved faster and faster, finding the runes in the air like a conductor finds the instruments of an orchestra, and each touch lit up another white point in the constellation.

Then he started spinning his hands around.

The pulses spun around each other in a continuous circular motion, and the entire constellation responded. A thousand runes abandoned their lazy orbits and accelerated, first in a carousel, then in a whirlwind, streaking the room in trails of light like shooting stars circling a miniature planet. The air began to hum. The room’s panels registered peaks and gave up complaining. The white light spun so fast that the individual runes vanished, leaving only continuous rings of fire crisscrossing diagonally, and in the eye of this hurricane, Erick, his arms in motion, sweat drying on his skin from the rising heat, his face illuminated from below like that of a man leaning over the mouth of a furnace.

He closed both hands in a cupped shape.

He pointed to the sphere.

And the runes obeyed.

The first one detached itself from the ring and embedded itself in the metal with a crackling sound like an ember dipped in water, burning its geometry onto the silvery surface. The second struck half a millimeter to the side. The third, the fourth, the tenth, the fiftieth, an uninterrupted sequence of precise impacts, each rune finding its exact position in the mosaic that the method demanded, marking and burning, marking and burning, and the sphere began to glow.

Tala watched the mosaic come together when she understood, half a second too late, the scale of what was to come.

The glow didn’t just grow. The glow exploded. The light jumped from intense to unbearable between blinks, and the heat came along with it, a solid wall of temperature expanding from the center of the room as if a sun were rising inside, between the white countertops. She conjured the shield by reflex, a convex lens of purple energy materialized before her body, and the world turned to pressure.

The wave threw her backward. Her heels dragged furrows on the polished floor, the shield groaned at frequencies she felt in her teeth, and Tala poured centuries of practice into reinforcing it while the glare banished all shadows from the room, including her own, which shouldn’t have been possible and was noted for future reference. It was like standing before an atomic bomb polite enough not to finish the job. The heat found the cracks. It always does. Tongues of temperature traced the edges of the shield and bit where they reached, and she felt the fabric of her dress give way, burn, dissolve into ashes that the thermal gale swept away.

She thought, with genuine irritation, that she liked that dress.

She reinforced the shield once more, preparing the next layer for the moment the first one failed. And then, at the exact moment her math told her that real damage was a matter of seconds, everything stopped.

The heat ceased. It did not diminish. It ceased, like a cut-off sound, and the light began to recede upon itself.

Tala lowered her shield just enough to look over the edge. And she activated her arcane vision.

The spell ignited behind her eyes, and she saw the world as she had for centuries, the veins of mana coursing beneath the skin of reality. Only this version showed more. It was her spell, yes, but modified, recalibrated by Erick weeks ago during one of his monthly visits, with additional spectra that the original version never contemplated. Thermal energy now had color. Light had flow.

And they were both getting drunk.

The heat that bathed the room, that ocean of temperature capable of melting the entire block, flowed in spiraling rivers toward Erick and condensed into his body, sucked through his skin like water through dry sand. The light did the same, dragged in currents visible only to her eyes, funneling into that mold of flesh that contained a fire. The brightness of the room wasn’t fading. It was being harvested.

Of course. Tala’s mouth curved slowly. Metal didn’t reject magic, it digested magic, and every digestive process produces excess. Any other method would spill that excess into the room until only a crater remained. The boy had simply included himself in the circuit. The plate, the oven, and the drain, all in the same person.

She waited, the shield dissolving into purple shreds, as the minutes ticked by and the rivers of energy thinned. The light faded until it became the usual twilight of a laboratory. The remaining heat in the air descended, degree by degree, collected until the last breath into his body. When the process was complete, the room was at its exact previous temperature, as if nothing had happened, except for the grooves in the floor, the smell of ozone, and the state of her wardrobe.

Tala approached.

Erick turned around, and whatever he was about to say died in his throat.

Tala’s dress had lost the argument against the heat. The top had been reduced to a strip of charred fabric covering the strictly non-negotiable, the neckline transformed into a theoretical concept, shoulders and waist and a generous expanse of pale skin completely exposed. The bottom had fared no better: all that remained was a scrap of fabric that protected modesty by a technical margin and nothing more. She was disheveled by the shockwave, marked by soot on one shoulder, and utterly, visibly indifferent to it all.

Erick’s face flushed. He was grateful, not for the first time, for the greenish tint of his own skin, which masked that kind of reaction better than any poker training.

“Come on,” said Tala, passing by him as if passing through a vestibule, “let’s see the result of our project.”

She didn’t bother to cover anything. She did, however, sway her hips in just the right way as she passed, and Erick lost two full seconds of processing time before regaining his focus. He followed her to the magnetic crib.

The sphere floated in the same place, above the Engineer’s structure, intact.

No marks. None of the thousand geometries burned into the surface minutes ago. No alteration in color, brightness, or form. To any ordinary instrument, to any ordinary eye, it was the same indifferent silver object as always, and an unsuspecting observer would conclude that seven hours of work and an entire reserve of mana had bought absolutely nothing.

Tala smiled as she looked at her.

It worked out.

“I never imagined,” she said slowly, leaning over the cradle, “that an enchantment could so drastically alter the properties of a metal so hostile to magic.”

Erick stopped right behind her. Close. His shadow covered her entirely, their bodies separated by a distance that a sigh would close, and neither of them made any move about it.

“Truly impressive,” he said.

And it was. He felt the difference from there, without needing to touch it. The hole. That’s how he described, in internal reports, the metal’s signature to the arcane senses: a dead point in the fabric of the world, a zone where energy arrived and simply ceased to have a voice. The hole no longer existed. In its place, there was presence. The sphere responded to his senses as his own creations did: the magnetic cradle, Morgana’s constructs, the flames in the palm of his hand. Receptive. Almost inviting.

“And to think we could modify a structure like that,” he murmured.

He raised his hand above the cradle and channeled a thread of arcane energy, as thin as the first one he had tested days before in the small sphere. On that occasion, the thread had needed an engraved rune to hold onto, and the rune had lasted forty-three seconds before being digested line by line. This time there was no rune. There was no stylus, no compound, nothing between his intention and the metal.

The sphere rose from the cradle.

Without hesitation, without trembling, without the swaying of a sail in the wind that had preceded the fall in the first test. Five kilograms of metal rose cleanly into the air and remained there, obedient, rotating slowly on the axis he chose, at the speed he chose. Erick moved two fingers and the sphere traced an eight in the air. He closed his hand and it stopped, motionless like a completed thought. He counted the seconds out of protocol, and stopped counting when it passed three hundred, because there was no decay to measure. The energy was not being consumed by the metal. The energy was the metal, and commanding it cost as little as commanding the flame itself.

“Permanent,” Tala said beside him. It wasn’t a question.

“Permanent.” He returned the sphere to its cradle with a gesture. “Which opens the queue for real tests. Conductivity of the hybrid structure. Behavior under recording of complete circuits. Load limits.” His eyes scanned the silvery surface, and behind them Tala could almost hear the queue of triggered projects advancing one position. “But that starts tomorrow. Tonight was about a single question, and it has just been answered.”

They had not conquered the metal’s appetite. That had been the method’s first conclusion, the reason for all the failures cataloged in centuries of attempts: the appetite could not be conquered, blocked, or deceived. So the method did not fight. The method fed. A thousand conduits pouring arcane energy in perfect synchronicity, saturating the structure faster than it could digest it, flooding each atom to the point of overflow and beyond, until the energy ceased to be food and became tissue. The sphere before them no longer contained an enchantment. It was the enchantment. A hybrid structure, atoms coated in arcane energy intertwined with matter, and that energy carried a specific, unmistakable signature of his.

Tala reached out and let her fingers hover a hair’s breadth above the surface, without touching. To her senses, the change was even more eloquent. The peculiar silence that the material imposed on her magic, that dead zone she had felt in the first sphere days before, had been replaced by something that almost purred.

And beneath the smile, her mind was at work.

She had come prepared for a promising experiment and an instructive failure, the standard outcome of any first attempt with a method of that age and complexity. Instead, she had witnessed a clean, first-time execution on a large scale by a practitioner with months of formal study. The implications unfolded on their own. Dozens of pounds of that material lay dormant in some safe in that house, and the owner now possessed the key to transforming every gram into something the world lacked the vocabulary to classify. The favor he owed her, that blank check signed with a handshake, had just multiplied in value before her eyes. And, in a deeper compartment, behind the layers of satisfaction, a discreet, old note recorded that perhaps, just perhaps, she should begin to wonder more seriously what exactly she was helping to grow.

She filed the note away with the others. Worry was a wine that improved with age.

“And what do you intend to do with it?”

She turned as she asked, and the maneuver left her facing him within the same shadow, her face raised, her white eyes searching his with the naked interest that was, at heart, the most honest thing she had to offer.

Erick looked at his would-be mentor. The title never quite fit. She didn’t teach, she charged for everything, and every gift came with a hook. But there she was, at the end of a night that redefined what was possible, her dress in ashes and her eyes ablaze with the awe of someone who wouldn’t trade that place for any other in the world. Something between partner, creditor, and accomplice, without a contract that could account for the mix.

He smiled.

“Something impressive.”