Edge Cases

There was a certain satisfaction that came with being proven right, sometimes. Derivan found that this was not one of those times. Animated potions attacking them were one thing; they'd chosen not to deal with them because the effects were chaotic and unpredictable, and that made them more dangerous fighting animated swords and slightly malformed boots.

Animated potion golems were... a little bit more of a threat. The upside of it was that all the salves Sev had made with his 'priestly knowledge' were all relatively harmless. The downside was that all the potions Derivan had mixed were unknown quantities, and he had no idea what any of them did.

And then there was the more pressing problem of Irvis.

"Any ideas?" Misa asked. She was panting slightly, her eyes focused just ahead at the almost ordinary-looking man standing at the other end of the circular room. His name was, apparently, Irvis. "I can scratch him, but it takes some fuckin' work to do. Also I don't want to lose my sword and he's probably going to try to grab it. You got magic, right, Deri? I could block that."

"That could work," Derivan agreed. Misa had explained what she'd determined about Irvis' strengths and weaknesses mid-battle — no mean feat, considering Irvis never quite stopped harassing them — and even with the relay charms they still wore, Irvis seemed to be able to tell they were talking. He didn't seem to be able to hear what they were saying, but he was certainly aware something was happening.

It seemed to piss him off.

"You lot are really stubborn about just dying, aren't you?" Irvis said, his voice cold. He'd stopped at his end of the room, silently observing them while the potion-golems stalked towards them. "Even that little friend of yours."

"What did you do to Vex." It wasn't even a question — the words emerged from Derivan before he'd even processed saying them, and he was distantly aware that his grip on his sword had tightened.

"Oh, nothing much," Irvis said with a laugh. His eyes darkened. "I wouldn't worry about it."

"He's baiting you," Misa said quietly. Sev nodded beside him.

Derivan had Physical Empathy. He knew Irvis was baiting him; the man was pretty good at controlling his emotional cues, but the stat was high enough now that it was feeding him information without him even trying. There was almost nothing physical left about that stat. He could see the anger and hatred in Irvis' eyes, a hint of what almost seemed like anxiety in the way he carried himself. He saw the way Irvis' gaze flickered upwards every so often, like he was trying to check in on something.

It didn't stop his eyes from narrowing. It didn't stop him from launching himself forward, a small cloud of [Barrier]s forming around him like shards of glass.

He wasn't angry, exactly. At least, he didn't think he was. He'd never really known anger. There was a part of him that knew that rising to Irvis' bait was exactly what he wanted, but at the same time—

One of the potion-golems lunged for him, as Irvis no doubt knew it would. Derivan had been anticipating it, too, but the golem moved faster than he expected. Liquid snapped out at him from the center of its chest, avoiding every single one of his [Barrier]s, and Derivan reacted more out of instinct than intent.

From within his armor, slime surged.

Derivan hadn't had a lot of time to try to learn more about his Slime stat. He had some understanding of slime-theory from discussions with Vex, in particular its relation to mana. He understood, in the abstract, that this was a new part of himself that he would have to learn to control.

Lesson one about his Slime aspect — it seemed to have a bit of a mind of its own.

It was strange, feeling a part of himself stretching out and then flattening into a shield. For as long as he could remember, his body was characterized by rigidity and inflexibility, save for the limited movement provided to him by the joints in his armor. Now there was a part of him that could move and shape itself almost freely, and would do so with barely a thought.

The golem tried to whip its potion-lash around his makeshift shield, to no avail; it struck the surface of his slime, and he understood.

The golem was a slime, too.

Sort of. An advanced one, with a shape impressed upon it like a shell around its form — not unlike his own body. It was imbued with the properties of one of the potions he had created, and he almost laughed when he realized what it did.

He didn't, of course. All that had happened in less than a fraction of a second, and while his mind was processing what had happened, his legs had already carried him past the golems and to Irvis. Irvis' face sat somewhere frozen between surprised and mocking, but he caught himself before Derivan actually reached him.

"Worried about your friend?" he asked, his tone still mocking.

Derivan responded by flaring mana into the glyph that he'd etched into the back of a [Barrier]. It was a simple glyph — the glyph for fire — but Irvis still hadn't been expecting it; he was prepared to respond to a spell, but his expression changed into one of puzzlement when the mana moved past him and infused itself into a [Barrier] that hovered just over his shoulder.

Fire flared out. There was a moment of smug satisfaction from Irvis, no doubt because magic didn't do much to him.

Then Misa appeared, her mace sucking all the fire into it in an instant. She smashed that mace directly into Irvis' face while it was still in the process of blocking that attack, and Irvis yowled in pain as he stumbled backwards.

"Surprise, fucker," Misa said calmly, and then turned to Derivan. "You should warn me when you have a plan, next time."

"I did not want him to think I had a plan," Derivan admitted. "He is astute. And he was expecting me to be angry."

Really, he was mostly just worried about Vex. But they had to deal with the threat here and now before he could help their wizard — and that was if Vex actually needed help at all.

"You're lucky I know you," Misa said, smiling slightly. Derivan simply nodded in response.

"I am."

"You..." Irvis interrupted both of them — one hand was clutched against his face, and the rest of his expression was twisted in a frighteningly hostile grimace. "You have access to signs."

Irvis knew about that form of magic, then. There was something personal about it, too — he wasn't just surprised, he was... there was a complex set of emotions there; far more than he'd felt from the man in the entire time he'd known him, though that admittedly hadn't been for very long.

Anger, still. There was always anger and hatred there, persistent in him like it was a part of his very self. A touch of nostalgia, strangely enough. A small spark of something that seemed almost like hope, but ruthlessly squashed. Grief, strangely enough.

Followed by a second wave of anger, more intense than the first.

"Alright, then," Irvis said. "You're more dangerous than I thought. Means I can't play with you as much. A pity."

He genuinely thought it was a pity, too.

Irvis took a step forward, and then began to melt.

Put more accurately, Irvis pulled his hand away from his face, where Misa had struck him — and long strings of flesh followed his hand, sticking to it like tar. In the gaps between those strings of flesh where there should have been blood and bone, there was instead a strange, pulsing gray matter. Irvis brought his other hand up to his face, and began pulling away more clumps, letting his more of his skin melt into a disgusting slurry—

"Hey, guys?" Sev said. "This is really gross and all, but we're not really going to just... stand here while he does whatever that is, right?"

"Oh, fuck no," Misa said. "Derivan?"

"Yes," Derivan said, and brought forward another two of his shards.

Fire and light. An easy enough glyph combination to make on the fly; Derivan imagined a burning ray of light, and the pseudo-glass of his [Barrier] was the perfect medium for it. Misa bounced off that ray of light again, her mace this time flickering into what seemed like a claw that she slashed through Irvis' still-melting body; he didn't even try to dodge.

He didn't seem hurt by the attack, either.

Instead, Misa hissed in a mixture of bewilderment and pain as the Irvis-residue on her claw-weapon began to crawl up the weapon and towards her. Derivan hastily canceled his spell, and the claw flickered out of existence just before that residue reached her — she took several steps back, and her face went slightly pale.

"That version of me is gone," she said. It wasn't clear if she meant dead, or if it was just that she could no longer access that version of herself.

"I sense it too," Derivan said, his tone grim. Shift had rippled strangely for a moment — was still rippling strangely. A lot of those ripples were coming from the half-melted blob that was Irvis, and the three of them took cautious steps back, because maybe this was a process that would be dangerous to interrupt.

This was, of course, the moment the potion-golems decided that this was their time to shine, and began to attack in earnest.

"Shit," Misa muttered — she blocked an attack almost reflexively, her mace turning briefly into a transparent shield that absorbed a potion-golem's whip into a flicker of color. "Any idea what these do if they hit us?"

"The red one will cause you to sparkle," Derivan said, pointing at the golem he'd blocked on his way to Irvis; even now, the potion was swimming within his system, though it didn't seem to affect him as long as it was contained in the 'slime' portion of him. "It is largely harmless."

"How do you know that?" Sev gave him a strange look, and Derivan shrugged helplessly.

"It is an interaction with the Slime stat, I believe," he said. "The golems operate in a similar manner—"

The now-formless blob that had previously been Irvis lurched, and with it, the entire floor of the room they were on did too. Unprompted, the floor began to rise, lifting them up towards the fog above them.

And before they could respond to that, spikes lanced out of Irvis' body, piercing into every potion-golem in the room. Three of them came for Derivan, Sev, and Misa as well, but a well-timed block shattered each spike, and this time there was no residual matter that took out yet another timeline — the sword Misa had conjured seemed resistant to that.

"Good to know my skill's still working, at least," she muttered to herself. The potion-golems each sagged suddenly, like something vital had been drained from them. Then all at once, almost too fast to see, each of them were sucked up into Irvis, his spikes acting like straws through which he drained everything else from them.

And the Irvis-blob was suddenly much, much larger. Even as Derivan watched, it split into two, and then slowly resolved into something that was very much man-shaped once again; Irvis' face peered out at them, though this time with no real attempt at looking human.

Almost perfectly on time, the floor of the platform flashed beneath them, flickering into a series of perfectly square tiles. They seemed to form a pattern on the floor that Derivan didn't quite recognize, though he understood it to be important.

And then, echoing from the fog above them, came the sound of music.

"Thank you for waiting," Irvis said, in a way that didn't sound thankful at all. If he was surprised by the change in the dungeon, he didn't show it. "Let's begin, shall we?"