The Sixth School Book II Ch. 026

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All Characters in the story are 18 years of age and above...

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Chapter Twenty Six: Exposed...

"Are they going to be okay?" He asked as the healer stepped out of Lothar's room, her fourth and final visit.

Greg was pleasantly surprised when he walked out of the meditation room he'd been in for the past year to find that his family and those close to him were there to greet him. When Greg had let Olivia know through their bond that he was about to come out, it had been more out of politeness than any expectations of such a welcome. None of this is to say that he didn't appreciate the gesture. If anything, after a whole year of isolation, Greg had been over the moon to see the people he cared about all present. Howbeit, the reunion quickly went sideways.

Just as he'd been about to greet his mother, Greg had noticed a figure moving toward him. Greg turned to her thinking that Calyn had something to say to him that she found urgent, hence her approach. As a second-tier body-enhancing mage, Calyn was rather strong. Still, Greg was stronger than her by a good margin and could have subdued her if it came to that. Greg, however, was stunned into inaction when Calyn wrapped her arms around him and pulled him into a kiss filled with need and desire. And that was only the start.

Greg felt someone grab onto his arm even as a teary face was pressed into it. "I'm sorry, Roka, I'll be a better sister, just don't leave us anymore. Don't leave us like Dad left us," she cried, desperately clinging to his arm. Greg finally pulled away from Calyn's lips to find Tayani crying desperately, genuine fear in her voice.

"I... I want to have your baby!"

Even before Greg could respond to his sister, a declaration that made his brain short-circuit left Calyn's lips. Greg turned back to her to find her looking at him with eyes full of desire.

"W... what? What are you...?

"I'm going to die alone," A despondent voice that Greg recognized as belonging to his mother reached his ears. Greg turned in her direction instinctively wishing to deny her claim and assuage her fears. She was standing in the middle of the hallway, an empty look in her eyes almost as if she could directly see the future in which everyone she loved left her and no one was by her side in her final moments.

Greg was about to move when he caught sight of Lothar who had his back against the wall, slowly sliding down to the floor even as twin streams of tears flowed down his face. "Who am I fooling? I'm a cripple. That's all I'll ever be!" He stated.

Greg stood stunned not sure what the hell was going on. He was about to reach out for his mother when the healer spoke. "Grab hold of them," she said in a somewhat strained voice, her hands moving in intricate patterns as she weaved together a quick spell. With a final wave of her hand, a light shimmer covered his mother, sister, Calyn, and Lothar. Greg wrapped a hand around Calyn and his sister as they sagged in his hands. Olivia turned into a blur and appeared behind his mother and caught her before she fell to the floor. Lothar was already seated on the floor, so all that happened with him was his head sagged, his forehead coming to rest on his knees.

"What is going on?" Greg questioned his gaze moving between his teacher and familiar.

The healer didn't answer him directly. Being the only one who was unencumbered, she moved past Greg, reached for the door to his meditation room, and pulled it closed. The difference was immediate. Greg had spent most of the past year in direct contact with and fighting the law of desire. He'd become so used to its presence that it had faded from notice. That only changed when the door was closed and Greg felt the aura of the law of desire that had been filling up the hallway start to ebb. While he was inside the meditation room with the door closed and the formation active, it had been like a sealed chamber. All the spillover effects from constant contact with the law of desire were kept inside the room. When he opened the door, however, it had been like opening the door to a room full of smoke. Only, the remnant aura didn't cling to the roof like smoke would. It slowly started to spill out of the room affecting the ones exposed to it.

It was at this point, as understanding was dawning on him that Greg heard Morpheus cackling away like some naughty kid who had managed to pull a prank on an adult and gotten away with it. Greg was once again reminded of what Olivia once said about deities. People project onto them what they think such beings should be, stoic, wise, measured, and so on. The things they considered noble they projected onto the gods they liked, and the things they considered ignoble, they ascribed to the gods they didn't like. The truth of the situation though, was very different. Gods didn't have to be anything. They could be mature, wise, honorable, and all the good traits one could think of just as easily as they could be childish, malicious, dishonorable, and so on. Powerful as they were, who but another God could take them to task for it?

When Greg finally managed to get the fiend to stop cackling like a maniac, he demanded an explanation from him. "As you've just worked out, they were exposed to some of the aura of the law of desire. This must have turned everything they were feeling up to eleven. As for why they responded the way they did, it's simple. The law of desire makes no distinction between conscious or unconscious feelings. If you are unused to dealing with something, you will more than likely succumb to it when it is empowered. The things people suppress because they fear or are unwilling to deal with them, are also the ones that are most likely to overwhelm them when amplified," Morpheus laid out with clear amusement in his voice.

Greg could feel his jaws clench tightly, anger flaring within him at the deity. There was no doubt in him that Morpheus had known that this would happen. He had chosen to keep silent simply for the fun of seeing the chaos that would follow exposure. "I've died thousands of times from exposure to the law of desire, why the hell would you not warn me not to expose my family to it?" The only reason Greg could get the words out without his voice trembling from rage was because this was mental communication.

There was a while of silence before Morpheus replied with the tone of someone who was trying to get a mentally challenged person to understand a simple concept. "Do you think that the law of desire, or any other law for that matter, popped into existence the moment you sensed it? Or perhaps you think that it's only confined to your meditation room?" The deity questioned, clear derision in his voice. Greg's anger was immediately doused as he understood what Morpheus was trying to convey. "The laws are present everywhere and at all times and yet people aren't dropping dead left, right, and center. Why do you think that is?" Greg didn't bother answering the rhetorical question, knowing that Morpheus was just mocking him. He had jumped the shark in insinuating that the deity had been willing to let his family die from exposure to the law of desire. "It's your strongest affinity and yet, not even you can connect to it without the life order promotion elixir acting as a bridge, what makes you think that your mundane mother and sister can connect to it?" Morpheus spat acidly.

"I'm sorry Morpheus. I should have been more measured in my words. They are my family, so I got a bit worked up, but that's no excuse. I'm wrong and I'm sorry for that," Greg backed down. It was a dick move on Morpheus' part to not let him know what the aura of the law of desire would do to those exposed to it. Still, to accuse him of wishing to kill his family was a step too far and Greg acknowledged as much. As Morpheus had pointed out, without the elixir aiding him, not even Greg could connect to that deeper layer of reality that he'd become so familiar with over the past year. His past year of connecting to the law had left the room with a potent aura but not the law itself. Besides, as the deity had indirectly said, just because he'd been inside his meditation room when connecting to the law didn't mean that the law itself was in any way confined to the room. Greg didn't know if the deity was mollified or not, but he didn't speak after that.

"They are okay," his teacher, who took a second to compose herself, answered him. Of all that had been present, his teacher and familiar were the only ones who managed to maintain their composure. Olivia seemed completely unaffected by the aura, a fact that didn't surprise Greg in the least. She was, after all, the avatar of a being at the peak of the ascendant tier. The final rank of the demi tier before one stepped into the ascendant tier was severance. A step in which, according to Morpheus, one severed the hold that other laws had on them. Greg didn't know if this freedom from other laws had been passed down to the avatar she left with him. Her indifference to the aura of a different law seemed to suggest as much.

But while Olivia was completely unaffected by the aura left behind by the law of desire, the same was not true of his teacher. Even now, Greg could see a storm of emotions in her eyes that threatened to overwhelm her. She was maintaining a tight hold on her emotions through sheer force of will. While he admired her tenacity, Greg couldn't help but also worry for his family's sake. Her loss of power clearly hadn't affected her willpower or mental discipline, if she was struggling this much, just how badly had the others, especially his family who weren't mages, been affected?

"I've put them to sleep," the healer continued with her report. "I can keep them under for a few days, let whatever it is that's affecting us pass before I bring them back. If you can get a memory-fogging potion, I can help them forget what just happened," she offered.

Greg turned in Olivia's direction, but before he could even speak, a prompt appeared before him asking if he wished to buy a tier-one mind-fogging potion, the cost of which was thirteen thousand magic points. Greg immediately clicked on the 'Yes' option. "Will Lothar and Calyn require something stronger than tier one?" He asked out loud. Given the fact that they were still mundane humans, Greg knew that tier one was plenty strong for his mother and sister. Calyn and Lothar, however, were both in the second tier.

The healer shook her head. "No need, I can make it work for all of them," she said as Greg took the vial of clear liquid from his personal pocket space and handed it to her.

"How about you, are you okay?" Greg questioned the healer who was about to turn around.

A weak smile crossed the healer's lips. "A mental attack is not the first thing I expected when you came back out, but I'll be fine," she said. They both knew that it was an unintended side effect of his yearlong meditation session, so she wasn't really accusing him of anything. Still, Greg couldn't help but feel a bit guilty for being even tangentially responsible for what happened. The healer must have noticed as she lightly pushed at his shoulder. "I jest Roka. I know you didn't mean to have any of this happen. Tell you what, How about you go up to the deck and I join you after I'm done? We both need to decompress," she offered with a smile.

Seeing no reason to decline, Greg offered a nod in the affirmative.

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A sigh left Greg, enraptured by the almost picturesque beauty of the view before him. The white sands of the beach stretched on for miles making it easy to see from the airship. Even from here, he could see rice-grain-sized figures moving about on the beach, probably enjoying a relaxing day at the beach. Contrasted to the beach that looked like it had popped out of a photo, was the vast blue ocean. Greg caught sight of a few figures moving slowly in the water. He couldn't help but the awe and a bit of dread looking at the behemoths. While the humans looked like little more than ants from this distance, the creatures in the water, were about the size of a housecat. Greg dreaded to imagine what their size would be from up close.

Greg's gaze turned in the direction of the beach once more and he couldn't help but smile at the fact that they were moving toward it and not away. Apparently, they had been sailing above the waters for the past three months as they crossed from the continent of Farendel to the much smaller continent of Vandor, if what Greg remembered of their time charting their path to the Arcana Islands was accurate. They'd even be stopping at a port city, much like the one before them. A part of him regretted the fact that they didn't just stop at this one, but when they'd been plotting their path, his only interest had been getting to their destination as quickly as possible. That meant that every trip was stretched as far as it could go, the port city they'd be landing at was still a week or two or away.

Greg was seated at a table close to the railing with Olivia, taking in the view, when his teacher finally joined them. With a few quick motions of her hands, a bubble of privacy was cast over them. Not only would it prevent any sound from going past their table, but it'd make anyone looking in their direction see them just quietly admiring the view from the deck. Greg spent the first part of their discussion asking after his family and how the past year had been for those in his group. There wasn't much of note to report. His teacher had been working with Olivia to help push her mana core and pathways as far as they couldn't go. With Olivia at the peak of the second tier, that was as far as she could push the healer. Greg would have to take over from her. Given that he now had the mana capacity and density of a third-tier mage, Greg would help push her over into this new tier. The only other thing that set Greg's heart racing when he learned of it was the fact that they'd been attacked by pirates!

Despite the fact that these were events in the past, Greg couldn't help the tension he felt as he listened to the two before him retell the attack. A feeling of vindication filled him when he learned that one of the strategies he'd come up with for dealing with Fate's pursuit had proven useful in the fight against the pirates. His eyes went wide when Olivia told him of the attack by a fifth-tier fire mage and the fact that most of the deck had been left as blackened wood. Greg had studied the deck around him, only now noticing that the wood that made it up was different from what it had been a year back. They'd been forced to incur a hefty cost of repair at their next stop. No passenger was going to entrust their lives to a half-burnt airship. The price was only made steeper by the fact that they strived to maintain their travel schedule. Having the repairs expedited made it cost almost twice what it otherwise would have, still, they managed it.

Greg couldn't help but quietly ask Morpheus. "How did I not feel anything?"

Greg had worked it out in his head and this attack had happened a month after he had stopped leaving the airship with Morpheus. His connection to the law of desire had stabilized and there was no need for him to be exposed to someone experiencing strong emotions for him to sense it. His teacher and familiar had no reason to lie or exaggerate the attack, meaning that a fifth-tier fire mage had attacked the Airship with him inside and he hadn't felt a thing. Part of Greg hadn't been certain that he'd get an answer from Morpheus owing to their disagreement earlier.

His fears proved unfounded when Morpheus replied. "Here's a rule to always abide by, Greg. Just because someone tells you that a formation does something, doesn't mean that that's all it does," he stated with a measure of amusement. "The stasis formation wasn't just protecting you from the threat that the laws posed. It turned the room you were in into the magic equivalent of a nuclear bunker. The whole airship could have been blown to smithereens and you wouldn't have felt a thing, let alone be harmed by it," he reported.

Greg had to grit his teeth to keep the reflexive anger he suddenly felt at being kept in the dark while his family was in danger. Greg, however, had already had one outburst today, making the same mistake twice wouldn't endear him to the deity. "Did you protect my family?" He chose to ask instead of leveling an accusation against the deity.

"You found them safe, did you not?" Came Morpheus' calm reply.

There was a while of silence after the answer, Greg taking in the deity's words. "So what else does the formation do?" He finally asked.

An amused laugh resounded in Greg's mind. "You are learning," Came the deity's reply. Despite the approval in Morpheus' tone of voice, he didn't actually answer the question. Greg's lips formed into a thin straight line, he suspected that there was more to the formation than he'd been told. Still, there was no way of forcing the answer out of Morpheus if he wasn't willing to tell, so Greg turned his attention back to the healer.

"... We went below deck to prepare for their attack, but it never came. The attack by the pirate captain had destroyed the arrays on deck that would have allowed us to monitor them, so all we could do was wait. But an attack never came. At first, we thought they were waiting for more of their compatriots to join them on deck before they made their assault. An hour turned to two and eventually, we had to come up and check. Strangely enough, when one of Olivia's clones came up to check, there was no one on deck. Even the pirate airships themselves had withdrawn!"

A brow arched on Greg's face. "Why would they fight so hard to get on the deck just so they can withdraw without getting anything?" He questioned. Morpheus had already explained to him that he'd intervened and saved the day. This bit of information, however, wasn't known to the two before him. The expected reaction from him would thus be the confusion he now displayed.

"Perhaps they realized that even if they won in the end, they'd lose too many people to sail all eight ships and thus chose to cut their losses and make a run for it. Your guess is just as good as mine," the healer replied with a shrug. "Other than that one incident, we've had a relatively uneventful journey since. Now, I'm curious, Why can't I sense the aura of any aspect on you?"

"Well, that's a long story..." Greg said with a sigh before launching into an explanation of everything that had taken place over the past year. Greg went into great detail on every part of his experience with particular emphasis on the times Morpheus had imparted him with key information. Even if she hadn't asked, Greg had already been planning to reveal everything to his teacher. She was after all on the same track as most other mages in this realm. Rather than looking for a new domain for the laws they pursued, they simply mimicked it. And while this path would make them powerful, it led to a dead end at the third rank of the demi tier. Should they try to push into the substitution rank, they'd be subsumed by the already existing law. And without a god-tier formation to restore them, it would be curtains for them.

His teacher had pursued the law of vitality and that of decay. If she stayed the course she was on, she still had a substantial amount of room to grow in power. But that growth had a hard limit past which she wouldn't be able to safely go. That said, there was no guarantee that she'd be able to find a new domain for the laws that she pursued. Perhaps she'd be better off sticking to the path she was already on. Nevertheless, Greg knew that his teacher would want to know and have the choice rather than be left to grope in the dark, which was why he was detailing everything that he had gone through.

"Do you have any idea how valuable the information you've just given me is?" The silence that had engulfed the table for the past ten minutes was broken as the healer finally found her voice once more.

A warm smile crossed Greg's lips. "Valuable enough that I had to share it with you," he replied. The smile straightened a bit as Greg remembered something else. "It's also very dangerous," he warned, unable to help the weight in his tone of voice. "According to Morpheus, the vast majority of beings, human or otherwise, live and die in the life order tier they were born in. Rising to the demi tier the correct way is infinitely harder than doing it the way all other mages have been doing it. It might even be arrogant of either one of us to believe ourselves capable of it," he voiced the warning Morpheus had given him about how hard the path ahead would be.

An amused smile crossed his teacher's face as she replied. "If humility were the price for power, then no mage would ever be able to achieve it. Even without this bit of information you've shared with me, one needs to have an arrogant belief in oneself that one can rise to the very pinnacle of power to keep on going as a mage." Much like Greg though, the smile slowly faded from his teacher's lips, and in its place emerged a look of guilt as she turned away from him.

"Is something wrong?" Greg couldn't help but ask, clear concern in his voice.

Her eyes were still on the beach they were fast sailing past. "It was real. The aura from the law of desire might have exacerbated and pushed it to the extreme, but whatever they said came from a real feeling inside the ones that voiced it," she stated quietly

A brow arched on Greg's face. "Are you telling me that Calyn actually wants to have my child?" He questioned in a jesting tone.

"Not right now probably, but yes, she wants to have your child," his familiar chimed in, the look in her eyes relaying that she was being completely serious.

"She was enslaved by a deity connected to me, why the hell would she want to bear my children?" Greg found himself muttering even as he brought his hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. His relationship with the girl had been cordial thus far. Not being completely clueless, Greg had also picked up on the subtle sexual tension between them. Greg would be lying if he said that he didn't find her to be attractive. He also wasn't unaware of his own appeal, especially with Roka's handsome face and how toned his body was. But finding someone attractive and wanting them to father your child, were worlds apart.

"Because she was enslaved by a deity connected to you," Came the blunt answer from Olivia, who was looking at him like he'd asked what was the answer to one plus one. "Having your child is the closest that the Sydrak clan will ever come to having a deity they can call on to protect the family," his familiar gave a simple explanation.

The brows on Greg's face rose, never having looked at it from this angle. With the personality she'd already demonstrated, it immediately struck him as being the most plausible explanation. Calyn had after all confessed to said deity her perceived transgression just to protect her clan. She was loyal enough to her clan that she'd probably be willing to try and have his child just so she could tie him to the Sydrak clan. Had this been in his previous life, Greg would have been bothered by the fact that Calyn wanted to use him for his connection to Morpheus. After years in this new world, however, Greg wasn't surprised in the least by the girl's thinking. This was a world where everyone was chasing power, and if you couldn't get it yourself, then you attached yourself to someone powerful. It's just a shame that she thought having his kid would in any way endear her or her clan to the deity. "She clearly wasn't listening when I told her that I have no control over Morpheus," Greg muttered to himself.

Greg had been trying to delay it by first thinking about the most amusing admission first. His thoughts, however, inevitably turned to the reactions of his family. A gnawing guilt ate at him as he remembered the pain that had been in his sister's voice when she pleaded with him not to abandon them. Greg hadn't noticed just how much his younger sister had come to rely on him to fill the role left by their father. The aura of the law of desire may have pushed that feeling to the extreme causing her to cry and beg for him not to leave, but something had to be there to begin with for it to be amplified. Everything Greg was doing was so he could keep them safe, but without telling them that, it must have seemed to them like he was handing them off to Olivia so he could do the things he actually wanted to.

It burned Greg to remember the look on his mother's face. He had gotten so caught up in trying to become more powerful that the woman felt abandoned. She smiled and put on a brave face for her children, but inside she had been dreading the day that her children left home and made their own way in the world, leaving her to be on her own. It went without saying that Greg had every intention of looking out for his family till either he or they drew their final breath, whichever came first. But perhaps that was the problem, the fact that it went without being said. It was a balancing act that Greg would have to do a better job at. He wasn't naïve enough to believe that he could spend the rest of their lives being by their side. In this world, being powerful wasn't optional. To protect those close to him, he needed to be powerful and that pursuit of power would probably take him away from his family from time to time. Nevertheless, today was a reminder that he couldn't let his pursuit of power blind him to the fact that he had people close to him who needed him. Not just him the powerful mage but him, the brother and son.

"Don't be too hard on yourself, Master. What you saw in there was an exaggerated form of their sentiment. When they are more sober, they'll likely understand that you are doing all this for them," Olivia tried to soothe Greg's guilt.

A sigh left Greg. "Doing things for them doesn't absolve me of the responsibility of doing things with them," he voiced the conclusion that he'd come to. "Me being powerful enough to protect them is good and all, but what good is it if I still lose them in pursuit of that power," he added.

Lothar's issue was the one that bothered Greg the least out of all of them. Not because he was in any way apathetic to the fire mage's plight. Greg could understand why he was distressed over having his future as a mage compromised. Worse still, it was his very own family that was behind the deed. Not to mention, it was now just a little under two years since they met and not much had changed about his situation. That he feared he was a cripple that would never truly advance to the higher tiers as a mage didn't really come as a surprise to Greg. The reason he wasn't bothered by it was because he knew for a fact that they had the solution for him. Greg had almost damaged his own mana pathways trying to dissolve his teacher's mana pathways, but that's only because he was the equivalent of a second-tier mage trying to dissolve a seventh-tier mage's mana pathways. Worse yet, he wasn't even a healer whereas she was. Her mana pathways were more than used to the life mana that Greg was using to dissolve them. With Lothar, the same wouldn't be true. When his time to have his mana pathways dissolved came, he'd have a healer working on him. Even better, while he was in the second tier, his teacher would be in the third tier. And if that wasn't enough, His teacher was actually a seventh-tier mage with all the experience that came with that tier. Save for some freak event happening out of the blue, Greg fully expected the dissolution of the fire mage's mana pathways to go off without a hitch.

"What about you?" Greg questioned, turning to his teacher. Greg had noted the look of guilt that had crossed her face when she told him that the amplified feelings had come from a real place. She may not have acted on it, but clearly, she'd felt something that bothered her. Greg didn't wish to pounce on her vulnerability to get her to tell him. Instead, he gave her time to compose herself. Time to decide if she wanted to tell him or not.

The healer let her gaze drop to the table between them, unable to meet his gaze for some reason. "I... I wanted... want to kill you," she admitted, her voice barely above a whisper...

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