Reborn as Sabretooth: Seeking Zen in the Marvel Universe Chapter 60 60

***

If I could have killed Issei a second ti, I would have. Magic and an infinitely long day. Infinitely long for Suo and . An infinite torture for — though it didn't begin that way.

At first, everything was almost pleasant: a room in Kamar-Taj, a soft warm floor, Suo in her sorcerer's robes sitting cross-legged on that floor, and sitting across from her in my tracksuit. A small table with two mugs of tea. An unhurried lecture on the fundantals of magic and the structure of the magical community.

Suo had wanted, at first, for to dress in their novice's training robes — it would have felt more natural to her. But a single eloquent look from was enough for her to stop insisting. So yes. The tracksuit. The sa one I wore at the Moscow sports complex when moving between training sessions.

The lecture was interesting to listen to — after all, you have to know your enemy. And who knows sorcerers better than the Sorcerer Supre?

The tea was good. Though not quite the blend she usually brewed for . The aroma was slightly different. I didn't hesitate to ask about it.

"Yes, darling, it's a different blend," she said. "It's ant to help loosen and expand your consciousness."

"Psychotropics?" I raised an eyebrow. "Those don't work on ."

"They almost don't work on you," she corrected with that serpentine smile of hers. "I spent a long ti calibrating the dosages. So don't worry, darling — the effect will co." The little sparks of amusent in her eyes when she said that made involuntarily shift and look at the mug in my hands with an entirely different kind of attention.

The conversation continued its unhurried course. In principle, nothing I heard was particularly new: the basics had been studied by long ago, back when I'd only just begun hunting sorcerers. Without understanding them, the first half-trained apprentice I ran across would have had flat on the ground. So there were no revelations for yet: sorcerers use borrowed energy from other dinsions, creating "punctures" and, accordingly, a mutual flow of those energies. From our world into that dinsion, from that dinsion into ours. The Law of Equilibrium in its purest form — nothing cos from nothing. This convection of energies is precisely what generates the "driving" force that makes a sorcerer's constructs function, the sa way water flowing in a river turns a mill wheel, or the directed movent of electrons drives electric motors or supercomputers. Sa principle. The entire challenge reduces to creating the "puncture" and initiating the "convective" movent of energies along a defined circuit — composed of specific magical figures — which then exert influence upon the material world. Simple enough, on the surface.

But that's only the foundation. The complexity begins beyond it. It's like programming: writing a "Hello World" application takes five lines of code, but anything even remotely functional ans pages of code and importing a dozen libraries. Magic works the sa way. The complexity of the figures scales directly with the complexity of the task. And the power and scope of the effect scales directly with the "width" of the puncture — though the coefficient there is so extre it borders on the incomprehensible.

Accordingly, it is vastly easier for a sorcerer to produce crude, powerful effects than fine, precise ones.

Collapsing a mountain, for instance, is vastly easier — and faster — than accelerating the growth of a single rice sprout.

I had already known this: sorcerers' powerful area attacks are extrely fast, and even the weakest half-trained apprentices can manage them. Precise, targeted strikes, on the other hand, are the exclusive domain of genuinely skilled and experienced sorcerers. This is exactly why sorcerers are most dangerous at range, less so at mid-distance, and at close quarters barely more formidable than an ordinarily trained fighter. At close range, an AoE attack is more likely to bury yourself than a nimble, fast-moving opponent. And anything precise or complex demands concentration, skill, and ti.

Sorcerers aren't fools, of course. They want to live, sa as anyone. So they compensate for their natural weakness at close range with enchanted weapons, amulets, artifacts, chard clothing, prepared battlefields, traps, and the like. Just getting near a fully combat-ready sorcerer without the elent of surprise is its own challenge. And if the bastard manages to jump into the Mirror Dinsion, you might as well start picking out your burial clothes. He can see you; you can't see him. He has ti to collect himself, prepare sothing nasty — or several sothings. To use it, he'll have to erge from the Dinsion, yes. But where will he co out? And when?

So, if you want to live: dive in after him, don't give him a mont to recover. Just make sure you get back out before the breach closes.

But all of that was practical knowledge from the outside — the applied basics of hunting sorcerers. Suo was revealing the sa material from a different angle: from the inside. How a puncture is created, how to control its "width," how the simplest circuit is ford, what circuits make up the "alphabet" of the "language of magical programming," how these elents combine and interact with one another, how to link two elents, three, and so on. Which dinsional energies are most convenient and effective for which purposes.

Listening to it was interesting. Watching her illustrate the lecture by sketching figures with a pencil on paper — also interesting. Even trying to put together the figures myself, assembling the most rudintary working "spells" — interesting as well. And not particularly difficult, as it turned out, since I'd had technical drawing in several forms across different institutes, and I'm a decent artist to begin with — spatial imagination well developed.

But beyond that point… Theory without practice is dead. And practice, for , was torture. From start to finish.

And the first, most foundational step: leaving the body and entering the astral plane, in order to "see" all those Dinsions whose punctures would later be used for casting spells.

Suo rose and stepped around behind , laid her hands gently on my shoulders, and began to work them — massaging, kneading.

"Relax, darling," she said softly. "It doesn't hurt. You've done this before. You know how to co back."

"I know," I growled, my voice flat. "Just do it. Stop dragging it out."

And she did. This ti, though, it wasn't a blow. I could feel her drawing out of… myself, carefully, delicately, like coaxing sothing loose. The effort of will it cost not to resist, to let myself go and follow the directing pressure she applied, was considerable.

This… I would never get used to this. The discomfort was extre. Sensory shock. A feeling of helplessness. The absence of the body's sensations, replaced by the presence of sensations belonging to… sothing standing in for it. A ringing emptiness where the head had been, and a space that was utterly unlike anything experienced in bodily existence and perception. A feeling of defenselessness, of vulnerability.

And that was only the beginning. What ca after was worse: moving the "body" from the Astral Plane to the Etheric, and the journey through the Dinsions — when you yourself do not move, but the worlds around you shift, bleeding into one another, interpenetrating, rushing past at trendous speed and then freezing, thick as molasses, and you are a fly caught in it. Insane images. Impossible sounds. Things for which no words exist.

Endless torture. Dreadful torture. Sanity-unraveling torture. Mind-splitting torture.

I endured it. I endured it honestly for as long as I could. And then I "locked," the way I had in En Sabah Nur's car. The beam from above again, the beam from below, and at the place where they t and rged — . And it was good. So extraordinarily good after all the madness that had co before. The "equilibrium point." An anchor, solid and unshakeable, nothing could tear loose from it, nothing could send plumting and losing myself in the multitude of worlds, dinsions, planes. The "equilibrium point," where it was good.

A slight effort, and I opened my eyes already back in my body.

"You are so difficult to work with, Vic," Suo sighed from behind . "You're a natural-born sorcerer. You have incredible aptitude for astral and etheric magic. Not to ntion your ntal abilities. Why do you resist so desperately?"

"Sorcerers," I growled. "I hate sorcerers."

"But you are one!"

"No. I'm not," the growl grew more irritated. "I only want to stop a war. Keep going."

"I can't," Suo sighed. "Your resistance has drained to the bottom. I'm more tired than I've ever been from my most grueling battles. You are impossibly stubborn and heavy!" She walked around to her place and dropped onto it with the exhaustion of soone who had truly earned it.

"I wasn't resisting," I half-growled, half-admitted.

"Oh! And he says he wasn't resisting!" Suo threw up her hands. "How I understand now the sorcerers who flinch at the re sound of your na. To fight sothing like you — I can't even find the words. It must be absolutely terrible." She said this and lay down flat on the floor.

"Are we continuing?" I asked, dissatisfied.

"We are," she answered from the floor. "Take us to the desert. I know you can. I'm not in any state to work the ring right now."

Without a word, I got up and walked over to her, lowered myself to one knee, touched her and the tatami beneath her, and jumped us both to the familiar place — near the ruins of Apocalypse's fortress.

***

It's a very strange sensation, looking and seeing your own arm lying beside your leg. And your other arm ten ters to the left. Your second leg you can't see at all, because the head lying on the sand has no neck to turn on — the blast tore it clean off.

Even stranger: realizing you aren't dead. And that you have no intention of dying. Even while torn into pieces scattered not in "one pile" but spread across roughly fifty ters in every direction.

And I was still alive. I could even blink.

Terrified past all human function — if there had been anything left to function with, it would have. I wanted to scream, but my mouth only opened and closed without sound.

And there was no one to help: Suo was lying on the sand so thirty ters away. On the sand — at least she hadn't been torn apart. I was completely certain she was alive. I felt it sohow. Or saw it. I didn't understand how, but it did nothing to diminish the certainty.

A gust of wind threw sand into my face. My nose started itching unbearably. That need turned out to be so intolerable that it actually pushed aside the all-consuming horror that had possessed a mont before.

And then — my right hand moved. I saw it clearly from where my head was lying, face turned in that direction.

My hand moved. It stunned so completely that both the horror and even the urge to scratch my nose stepped back. I made another effort to move the fingers. Consciously, this ti. And I… did it.

The fingers moved. Exactly as I had intended.

After that — it took roughly twenty minutes for the right hand to crawl its way back to the torso. More precisely, to the largest intact piece of the torso, with the remnant of the shoulder it was supposed to attach to. Another twenty minutes to maneuver into position beside it. A couple of seconds for the arm to "bond" back on.

Then things moved faster: five minutes to reach the second torso piece, five minutes for the second arm. Ten minutes for the head. One minute for the legs.

When I finally "assembled" myself, I was overtaken by hysterical, unstoppable laughter. I rolled around on the sand — torn, bloodied, wearing the scorched rags of what had once been my tracksuit — and howled with laughter. Wildly, wiping the tears streaming from my eyes, slapping my palm against the ground.

I don't know if it was from the multiple enhancents done to my body over the years, or whether I'd always had this in , but this was absolutely unhinged. The kind of thing nightmares were made of — or zombie films. Not that it mattered.

Pulling myself together sohow, tamping down the hysteria, I got up and ran to Suo.

Thank God — and I hope Buddha won't take offense — she was alive. And not too badly hurt. A few pats on the cheek, and she groaned and opened her eyes. The phrase that tumbled from her lips after that, despite all my knowledge of languages, I could not have translated no matter how hard I tried. I will say with certainty, however, that it was elaborate and entirely unprintable.

"Let's go ho, Vic," she said, having finished swearing, and getting to her feet with my help. I nodded silently and jumped us both back to Kamar-Taj.

There, Suo went off sowhere to heal, and I dragged myself to the kitchen and set about satisfying the hunger that had woken up inside .

What had happened in the desert? Nothing strange, really: my first spell. The simplest possible figure with a puncture from the fire plane, designed to light the wick of a candle — except the puncture, instead of being the size of a pinhead, ca out the size of a finger. The flash that resulted was probably visible from orbit. Pressure differential, expansion, shock wave.

Suo had been lying on her tatami thirty ters away, watching from there. I had been standing one step from the candle, with my hands stretched toward it.

"You know what," I said darkly when my wife returned. "Take your furniture. To hell with the war. I am never getting involved with your magic again."

***

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