Chapter 55: Frozen First

-Alexander POV-

The South Pole was…an endless expanse of snow and little else.

Go figure.

But that’s not to say it was empty. With my senses I could feel the millions of bacteria in the water below us, extremophiles who had adapted to this arctic niche. Krill fluttered about in the oceans, subsisting on tiny phytoplankton and being fed on by larger fauna in turn.

I couldn’t feel the seafloor from where I was, but I already knew it would be densely populated and diverse, unlike the white desert that lay before me.

Alas, I had yet to see any penguins. Much sad.

Though that was probably in no small part because of the excited samurai trying desperately to create the largest snowball ever constructed. He had been rolling that sucker along for nearly an hour now, only pausing to stop whenever the mass fell apart under its own weight – at which point he would beg for me to fix it.

Which had happened five times now, by the way.

“Ah! Alexander! It broke again!”

Make that six times.

“You know I could just levitate that for you,” I repeat myself – already knowing what Renji’s answer would be, yet still hoping he would give in.

“Nah, that would be cheating.” Renji’s voice was upbeat as his snowball reassembled under his vigilant gaze. He examined every particulate as I painstakingly used my eldritch control over matter to accomplish every five year old’s greatest dream.

Creating the largest snowball ever.

It wasn’t as big as me, only coming up to my chest in height, but it dwarfed Renji himself.

“We should have been there an hour ago,” I grumbled despite not feeling quite as upset as I sounded.

Renji simply snorted, and began rolling his prized possession of frozen water towards the horizon again. “That piece of flat land you found isn’t going anywhere, now could you maybe help me roll it? With your hands?”

Renji’s last words are punctuated with a slight groan of frustration as the ball veers off the straight line he had been expecting it to go. Yeah, while he was more than strong enough to move the frozen mass he didn’t have the fine control needed to have the best control over it. That and the uneven ground.

I feel my lips curl into a playful smirk.

“Oh? But Renji! That would be cheating!” I attempt to use my best scandalised tone of voice, but couldn’t help letting out a slight giggle at the end.

The raised middle finger I get in return doesn’t help to stop the laughter, either.

Eventually my laughter fades with the wind as I continue to watch him attempt to carefully manoeuvre his prize in a straight line.

“Okay,” I say as I snap my fingers, “How about this instead?”

At my gesture the rock and snow beneath my feet twist and morph. The stone gaining grooves as carved wood emerges from the ground, before curling into the form of an elaborate and enormous sleigh.

“You can use this to push it, no cheating required.”

Renji’s groans in relief, visibly slumping against the white sphere of snow. Then, before he can chide me on the non-existent ethics of snowball moving, I hoist the ball up onto the sleigh with my powers, earning a horrified look of dismay from Renji as he clambers over to make sure I hadn’t damaged his creation.

I ignored the fussing going on in the background, continuing onward – even as I mused on what path to take going forwards.

I had three charges. Two were from the remaking of Hyderabad while another had been gained on my way here. What I build here would be used as my base going forwards, and while I could remake it later doing so would cost precious time I could be dedicating to my plans of killing the entity and freeing this world from the Shard’s clutches.

The landscape around me made me think of DesertPunk, but while that would be fitting would that really help me? Such a branch of technology would likely revolve around scavenged and ad-hoc machinery.

No, it wouldn’t help here. I needed something more advanced, something the entities wouldn’t see coming.

Magic was the obvious answer to that. It was something I had used to great effect in Jinzhou, yet the thought left me uneasy. Shards thrived on the study of phenomena and adding it to their arsenal, would they do the same with magic?

Yet how could I not seek to know more about one of the few weapons that might be effective against an entity in my arsenal? Even if I didn’t use the knowledge I gained in my construction of the base, I still needed to know. No more running away and pondering on what ifs.

AetherPunk Level 1 – The use of high fantasy themes to create wonders. Magical airships, wards that defend sanctuaries, aether powered artifacts and more are yours to grasp.

I breathed, pure potential filling me.

No, it had already been there, I could simply feel it now. Rivers of energy flowed outwards from my core, the bleeding ocean of gold that filled me was leaking into the world and subtly adding to it. It was thick and viscous close to me, yet grew more and more diffuse the further away I was.

I could see the difference between this and SilkPunk. The latter had been based around the manipulation of mana through stories, poetry, art and more. All of which shared a single trait, it was indirect. It relied on Magic’s own properties to respond to such manipulations, yet with AetherPunk it was different. This was direct manipulation. Less powerful and versatile because of it, perhaps, but more precise.

My mind whirred, already my mind was breaking down new principles. Ancient pentagrammic equations informing me of the density of the surrounding mana and the wonders I could build with it.

I looked to Renji, still patting down his snowball and occasionally sending the odd disgruntled look my way. His core, too, was a furnace of arcane power. Magic flowed from him, just like it did with me.

The same, I realised, was likely true for the Paragons as well.

A cold realisation came over me then. If I hadn’t created the Paragons would the magical protections I had weaved through Jinzhou remain after I departed? The idea that the people I had saved were so close to losing their protections if not for a unknown synergy between my projects was not a comforting one.

I shook the idea off.

Now that I could feel the mana with my senses I could also feel the way it manipulated the physical world. The motes of mana were etched deep into the world, somehow existing on a more fundamental level than everything else around them. So if the mana was manipulated? The world followed in kind.

Yet the answer was disheartening. Magic wasn’t something native to this reality, it was an invasive force that I had brought with me. The ambient mana levels in most parts of the world were zero, not even fit to power the lowliest of cantrips.

I could seek to spread it, but that had it’s own problems. The more exposure to magic the world had, the more likely it was for the Shards to figure it out. Even the barest understanding could still catapult them to heights previously never imagined.

Which would not be a good thing.

Yet, if I didn’t spread it then magic would be of no use in the final battle. One of my best tools left to rust and wither.

Then there was the other problem. If magic was truly something not native to this reality, what would be the effects of bringing it to this one? I had only been here for a little over a month, who knew what the long term effects were?

And what about the one who had placed me here? Before I could content myself with vague notions of being a personality implant from the original shard, some accident that gained too much control. But now?

What if I was a trojan horse? Placed here simply to do more harm at the whim of some unknowable entity, one potentially worse than Scion?

It was a catch-22, a bunch of bullshit that ensured I may well be fucked regardless of what I chose.

I hated it. What was with this shitty world and impossible choices?

My breath quickened.

Could I even trust my power? My technology?

I looked towards Renji, who glanced back – his eyes crinkled in a small smile as he dragged the sleigh behind him. He was whistling something, some random tune he had heard on the radio. I felt something in my gut unclench.

No. No, that simply wasn’t a productive line of thought. If I had been placed here, powers and all, for some malicious purpose then I was fucked regardless. I needed to focus my efforts on possibilities that weren’t so grim. I needed to believe victory was possible in order for it to become so.

My breathing slowed, as I began calming down. I wasn’t going to spiral, not with Renji here.

Yet a thought tickled behind my eyes. A fleeting possibility that offered both endless opportunities and endless ruin.

“Hey Renji?”

The Red haired samurai stopped in his tracks to turn and look at me.

“Yeah?”

When we get to our destination I have something I want to run by you. A potential risk.”

Renji’s eyes narrowed, head begin to swivel subtly – looking for threats.

“Not that kind of threat,” I chuckled – drawing a slight blush of embarrassment to Renji’s cheeks.

“It had to do with a strategy against our enemy.”

My friend’s mouth parts in an expression of realisation, and he nods as his walking resumes – no longer casually meandering but setting a brisk pace.

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“-and that’s the problem I’m having.”

I had, once more, established a barrier to ward off precognition to the best of my ability, something that had only been improved by my newfound magical acumen. Renji had listened silently throughout my talk, only occasionally breaking that silence to ask me a few questions.

“Quite the pickle, so what’s this potential solution you mentioned?”

I hesitated.

My solution, the potential doorway towards salvation or damnation, was something I needed to articulate clearly, and I found myself struggling with it.

“The problem with magic,” I began, “is that it’s a force from outside this universe, potentially outside this multiverse. The effects of it’s introduction could be anything. It could be mutagenic, cataclysmic or even a doorway for some eldritch abomination. I don’t know, which is the problem.”

Renji nodded, having already heard this part but allowing me to repeat myself to get everything straight in my head.

“AetherPunk isn’t of much help when it comes to understanding what magic is. It only shows me how to use it. So, I was thinking, what if I used my next specialty on something that might give me knowledge on such things?”

“Which sounds dangerous.”

“Which is dangerous,” I corrected. “A specialty like that would have to be something that focuses on things outside of reality. I’ve never heard of a Punk specialty like that, so I’ll also be finding out whether my power can wholesale make new Punk specialities.”

It was an audacious plan, one that straddled the line between brilliance and idiocy. There were many, many, things that could go wrong with this plan, but at this point I might be willing to risk it.

The technology I possessed was measly in comparison to the Shards.

My matter manipulation was likely crude in comparison to their true capabilities.

Magic, my one advantage, may be a hidden trap.

As things stand I didn’t even have enough to make the beginnings of a plan, that was how unstable my foundations were.

“Okay.”

I blinked.

“Okay?”

“Yeah, do it.”

What? My mind grinds to a halt as I struggle to find an answer to what had come out of my friend’s mouth.

“Renji, I’m not sure you understand. I’m talking about calling up a Lovecraftian specialty. This may very well end the world. Or worse.” My words, when they eventually manifest, are an outpouring of confusion. Did he not get it?

Actually, now that I thought about it, Renji may genuinely not know what the term ‘Lovecraftian’ even means, I certainly can’t imagine Renji enjoying those types of books with his ‘humanity fuck yeah’ attitude.

Ah, Lovecraftian means-“ I go to explain, before Renji cuts me off with a snort.

“While I may not know the exact definition I can piece it together using context clues. It’s something bad, on the level of Scion or worse?”

While that was a vast oversimplification I nodded my head. Yes, Lovecraftian entities were indeed ‘something bad’.

“Then it’s no issue.” Renji flippantly stated, before continuing. “You believe you were granted these powers by some higher entity, correct?”

I nodded once more. “Yeah, the inclusion of magic is a big indicator of that. While the entities are strong, I don’t think they possess something like this.”

The samurai grinned, and pointed his finger at me. “And that’s why I think it’ll be fine to test it.” Renji sauntered closer as he said this, a manic energy gripping him in it’s clutches.

“There are three possibilities. This higher being is either benevolent, uncaring or malicious.” Renji’s raised finger was joined by two others as he explained this, illustrating the three possibilities he saw.

The idea of mapping human logic to such entities seemed like folly to me, but human logic was all I had – so I simply grunted in affirmation.

“We can likely rule out this entity as uncaring, seeing as it actively interfered by placing you here, so that leaves us with two possibilities!”

Renji spun around and struck his gargantuan creation of snow and ice, the blow splitting the sphere in half with a might thunk.

“If it’s malicious, then we’ve already lost – just as you’ve said. All our strategies rely on your presence. The alternative would be attempting to use stolen fire, as Cauldron does. Given how that turned out, it’s not a great solution.”

“No kidding, I’d never follow a method those pieces of shit used” The grumble that left my lips was harsh, the reminder of Cauldron looming over my plan still wearing on my nerves. God, what were they going to do in response to my actions in Hyderabad?

No doubt it would be something stupid.

“Right. So then it only makes sense to assume good intentions from this entity, or at least not active malice. So what would such a being do when gifting immense power to a stranger?”

My eyes widened in realisation.

“They would add in safeguards,” I exclaim – my thoughts running at a million miles an hour.

On the one hand, the thought was nauseating. The idea of my abilities being shackled by a being I didn’t even know, one who had essentially kidnapped me, was not something that was easy to stomach.

On the other hand, I had already messed up with the power I currently had. So fair enough.

Plus, if Renji was right, it might be what allowed my insane plan to work. Plunging straight into the abyss with a safety rope was a far more appealing idea than going at it alone, like I had been planning.

Despite the slight disgust I felt a smile form upon my face.

“Ever the optimist, eh Renji?”

He only shrugged.

“It’s only logical to be an optimist, being a cynic certainly doesn’t help,” Renji quipped.

I sighed, my smile slipping off my face as I inspected the land before me once again. There were no edges here, only the smooth expanse of white extending to, what appeared to be, forever.

"I’m not quite sure I believe this god, or whatever, to be wholly benevolent. But you’re right that it doesn’t do much good to assume malice. So…”

I trail off, Renji’s encouraging expression being the last thing I required to reach deep within myself and touch upon the sparks of potential.

‘Please. Please don’t let me be wrong!’

I’m not sure who I was directing those thoughts to. Perhaps the being who had gotten me thrown into this mess to begin with? Perhaps the Judeo-Christian God, despite never being a believer. Maybe it wasn’t directed at anyone, just a simple hope released into a desolate ocean – longing for a prayer answered.

EldritchPunk.

The spark burned against the skin of mind, this was wrong! For a brief, horrifying, moment I thought this was it. I had just killed myself, and the world alongside me. The fire burned hotter, the pain more intense. More concerningly was the feeling of wrongness. Like I had attempted to fit a square into a circular hole, something fundamentally wasn’t working!

E#dr{t$+Punk

Then, there was a shift. There was no cool release of knowledge, not yet. But the spark shifted, writhing against my wishes. My grip only tightened, emboldened as hope once again surged through me.

£[&({!$Punk

The spark was still hot against my mind, and distantly I could hear screaming. Was it Renji’s, I couldn’t tell. Yet that brilliant potential was yielding, it’s form being hammered into place by sheer, unrelenting, bullheadedness as I used my power in a way it wasn’t supposed to be used.

S[ar{!Punk

The pain eased, the branding iron against my mind easing off slightly. I gasped, my body taking in cool gulps of oxygen. Blearily, I could see Renji – his form hovering over me.

Had I collapsed? When did that happen?

ShardPunk.

Finally, resistance fell away completely. The knowledge beginning to pour into my already beaten and battered mind – and, oh dear god that was a lot of it!

ShardPunk Level 1 – The barest essence of the Entities, the lowly god viruses that stalk creation. With this specialty you gain the most basic blueprints on the creation of Shards and Entities. Of course, with this speciality alone, you’ll never be a match for even a weak entity.

My mouth opened in a silent sob of pain, and in the ice pressing against my face I could see my features clearly reflecting my agony. My form arched and writhed in the snow, paroxysms caused my body to convulse upon the ground.

A single hand remained pressed against my head, offering comfort even as my arms cracked the air like a bullwhip – several striking the one standing over me.

‘Who is that?’ I feverishly thought, mind blurring as the information continued it’s assault upon my mind.

An alien planet filled my vision. Primordial life slumped onto dry land, a mirror to life on Earth. Barbaric evolution followed. Then, a change. Horrid energies wracked the world, life and locations bleeding into each other. Senses adapted to sense new directions their minds could not yet decipher.

Then, consumption. Endless, mindless consumption. Every resource was plundered. Every other lifeform taken and absorbed. Then they fell upon each other until a final signal called for a change. No, not a change, simply more of the same on a far larger scale.

The knowledge kept coming. The visions blinded me. I was only partially aware of my ever more violent spasming physical form.

Then, mercifully, darkness.

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“OOOOOWWWWWWW,” I groaned as I was dragged back to consciousness with little mercy. One of my hands reached up to cradle my forehead in a futile attempt to stave off the pain. It was awful, like someone had taken a pick to my frontal lobe and kept on hacking away.

I don’t even have a brain anymore, how the hell is my head hurting?!

“My liege?! My liege, are you okay?!” I felt movement at my side, the crunch of snow reverberating loudly in my ears – yet not nearly as loudly as his voice, fucking ow!

“Not so loud Renji,” I whimper into my hand. “Unless you can get me the Shard equivalent of Ibuprofen, please whisper instead.”

The shifting shadow at my side ceased it’s sudden movements, instead carefully shifting their weight to make as little noise as possible. Ah, Renji. Ever reliable.

“Also,” I said, “I thought you stopped calling me that?”

Renji coughed lightly, no doubt embarrassed.

“My apologies, for that and the noise.” I peeked through my fingers, the light earning a hiss of pain, and examine the samurai at my side. He was sitting completely still -fuck, I don’t think he was even breathing- eyes darting across my form as if it would reveal the cure to my pain.

“S’fine,” I slurred slightly. The worried look merely intensifying in response, and I groaned. My fingers slid back over my eyes, bringing blessed darkness.

We stayed like that for a while, basking in the silence with only the wind to offer any disturbance.

“So. Good news and bad news,” I say, drawing an exasperated huff from Renji.

“Oh, here we go.” I could hear the mutter, voice thick with weariness.

“Bad news, I still don’t know jack shit about what magic truly is or where it’s coming from.”

“Unfortunate.”

“But, good news, I’ve gotten something arguably better! The knowledge I’ve gained is about the Entities. How they work, how they’re structured, everything!”

Renji was silent for a moment, absorbing the immensity of my statement, even the hand that had idly been rubbing my shoulder stopped for a moment before continuing.

“That’s…that’s huge. That would mean we have actionable intelligence on how to hurt our enemy!”

I grimaced slightly. “The limitation of planetary levels of tech still applies, unfortunately, and I’ve still only explored the lowest level of this tech tree. But if I’m right it should give us a starting point.”

Renji hummed in agreement, mind no doubt categorising the new information.

“And?” How advanced is the tech you’re seeing?”

I was silent, because I truly didn’t know what to say.

The information I had gained likely wasn’t the peak of what the Entities could do, and yet the picture it painted was not a comforting one.

While I had been playing with nanomaterials and thinking myself oh so smart, The entities were casually utilising super materials far beyond even that. Picotechnology, the utilisation of black holes to create superimposed materials, banded formations of space-time to act as a physical material. It was all there.

I had shielded an entire city in a region of expanded space, and I had still had to resort to magic in order to do it. The entities utilised higher dimensions to shunt energy and matter across endless realities, creating virtual realities that were somehow simultaneously real and had dragged entire planets screaming into regions of unreality.

Every branch of technology you could name they possessed a horrifying understanding of it. Their knowledge of biology and engineering had no distinction in their archives because, to them, they were precisely the same. In the billions of years since they had evolved they had improved upon their forms. Upgrading, mutilating and mutating until they arguably couldn’t even be considered biological life at all.

And this was still only the ‘planetary level’ that I could see. There were entire sections of science that I knew were absent and missing. That’s not even mentioning the sheer requirements that these advanced manipulations of reality cost. Antimatter was the base starting level of what was required, and they viewed it in much the same way we viewed burning wood.

Properly utilising even a fraction of the knowledge in my head would take…years, maybe even decades. So much of this required precision far beyond atomic levels. Which meant, for the very first time, I was stuck in the same boat as every other Tinker, needing to build the tools to build the tools.

“Immensely,” I finally answered.

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“Our chances have shot up immensely but we’ll have to be selective in what we choose to pursue building.”

My hand finally raised away from my face, the light no longer as agonising as before. The pain was slowly, but surely, ebbing away into something manageable.

“I think I know what I want to build.”

Renji’s eyebrows rise in interest, and I continue.

“It comes from a book I read a long time ago. A group of researchers mount an expedition to Antarctica to explore some ancient ruins they had found. Much to their misfortune, however, they’re picked off one by one by an unknowable eldritch beasts and elder creatures of immense intellect.”

“Sounds dark.”

“I was going through an edgy phase at the time,” I say, pouting slightly. Sixteen year old me just wanted to look cool, okay?!

Renji simply nodded, surprisingly understandingly. I blink, surprised.

“It’s understandable for anyone to have such a phase, my friend. I’m also in an edgy phase, and will likely never leave it!”

I glanced at him in confusion. Renji wasn’t edgy, what on Earth was he-

Oh.

My confused expression melts into a blank stare as I observe Renji patting his sword like a beloved pet.

I didn’t mean that kind of edgy, Renji.

Well, whatever.

I cough to regain his attention and continue. “My memory of that book is quite lacking, but I enjoy the idea of such a place. Dark, foreboding and incomprehensible to the human mind. While I doubt I’ll be able to match up to the original this specialty will definitely help me get close,” I chuckle – already imagining immense black pillars dotted across the barren whiteness of this continent.

Underground tunnels would also have to be a must! My inner gremlin was cackling in delight at the thought of all the fake lore I could add to those catacombs.

It would all have to culminate in a massive underground centre, of course. One riddled with impossible geometries and higher dimensional art. Sure, augmented humans might bleed a little just from seeing them, but it’s not like I was planning on having any of them around.

My inner chuckles quietly escaped the confines of my mind as I instead began to vocalise them.

Ow!

Okay, maybe I’m still not over the headache just yet. I’ll start building it once that was gone.

AN: Okay, so this ballooned in size. I’ll be honest, this kind of just wrote itself. Alexander, now that he’s actually thinking, is examining everything critically right now. Including the circumstances of how he got here. This leads him to attempt to understand more about magic and potential ways of how he got here.

Which leads him into getting two of the most powerful specialties he could get, and an understanding that he isn’t just limited to ‘classic’ punk themes. As for why he got ShardPunk from attempting to obtain an eldritch theme, it’s because entities are the closest the Wormverse has.

Then, at the very end, we get a hint as to what the base will look like. Lots of you thought it would be the Fortress of Solitude or Santa’s Workshop, but may I instead introduce you to a Lovecraftian Fortress of Weirdness instead?

Thanks for reading, please leave a comment!