The Games We Play

DISCLAIMER: This story is NOT MINE IN ANY WAY. That honor has gone to the beautiful bastard Ryuugi. This has been pulled from his Spacebattle publishment. Anyway on with the show...errr read.

Puzzles

I stepped out of the portal onto wild grass. Naraka's tinted sun was hidden by the branches of scarred and ancient trees, letting only small streams of light slip through the canopy. Almost the moment we touched down, I could hear the distant shifting of the Grimm, Beowolves spawning in the darkness of the forest in response to the change in my location.

But I didn't care about that. Generally, I kept the Grimm Naraka spawned deliberately weak, simply to avoid the bother, but they weren't very threatening one way or another. I'd tested it a fair bit as it leveled up at a glacial pace, summoning things like Nevermore instead of Beowolves—but while they weren't actually dangerous, their ability to fly made killing them en masse more trouble than their piddling experience rewards were worth. After enough time, a Giant Nevermore would appear and I could kill that instead, but the spawn rate was pretty abysmal for the level I was at now and killing something that many levels below me every few hours was more tedious than anything else. As such, I usually stuck to the Beowolves who, if tremendously unrewarding, at least were not annoying and didn't require any actual attention on my part that would disrupt my efforts to train. They also appeared in greater numbers than Ursa, so they…well, they didn't really make up for anything, but they won the quantity vs. quality argument in a technical sense. In terms of pure numbers, it was the better options between the two, even if it didn't amount to anything of much value.

Holding back a sigh, I turned my attention to the ruins before me—which were really ruins of ruins, at this point. Though I could see where there had once been buildings, now there were mainly just fields of shattered stone, the vague skeleton of a foundation, and some structural support that had managed to survive. Plants had grown around or upon the rubble, the wind and rain had worn away at them, and much of the metal appeared to have rusted. I couldn't tell without having seen how it had looked before, but it seemed likely that the local wildlife had probably claimed various bits and pieces of the wreckage for their own purposes as well, to say nothing of what any Grimm that came passing through might have done.

All told, it looked exactly what it was—the broken remnants of something that had already been a broken remnant, left to rot for about a decade. It was a dim shadow of whatever it had once been and after this much time…well, picking through it for clues would be a pain in the ass for just about anyone.

Thank God I was me.

As I pondered the best way to go about this, Raven stepped through the portal to join me in front of the ruin, eyes focused on the back of my head as she came to a stop just behind and to the side of me.

"Find anything yet?" She asked.

"Patience," I murmured. "I've been on the case for less than ten seconds."

"And you haven't found anything yet?" She clicked her tongue chidingly, making me smile slightly even as I continued to slowly look around. After a moment, I nodded to myself and made a decision.

"I've been busy despairing over the general ambiance," I told her. "Which is why I'm about to close Naraka. You may wish to prepare yourself for whatever might be waiting on the other side."

Her hand dropped to her sword in a way that seemed bizarrely casual, as if the weapon had just happened to be there. As she did that, I closed my eyes for a minute, mustered my will, and shattered the barrier, returning us to normal reality with a feeling like static inside my body. At once, I let my senses flood out in every direction, training over rock, tree, animal, and Grimm nearby. The latter I singled out to examine more closely—and, when I didn't find anything deserving of concern in our immediate vicinity, sent Ereb and Levant out to handle the matter.

Those close enough that they might notice our presence found themselves abrupt sinking into the ground, their howls and screams muffled almost before they left their throats. They fell in quick succession, as if the dirt had turned to water beneath their feet, and then the earth tore them limb from limb beneath the surface. One by one, they died, taking no more time to fall then a stone would take to fall into a pond, and not even one of them got off an audible sound.

From her slow exhale, I figured Raven had probably scoped out the area, too, and had likely seen at least some of what I was currently doing—but she didn't comment upon it and neither did I. Instead, I remained focused on the task at hand and the sight before my eyes, contemplating the ruins one last time, seeing what differences there were in the real world.

"I can never be certain of what carries over to Naraka," I said, because a part of her was wondering why we'd left the barrier. "It's based on the real world, but there are minor differences. You've seen how the sun's dimmer there, but there are other differences too, in ways people wouldn't usually notice. Some bacteria remain or exist there naturally, while others fade, and the air molecules are in slightly different locations then they were before the barrier opened; that type of thing. Then there's the odd emptiness you can see sometimes, where things that should be there are simply absent."

I nodded towards the ruins.

"Biological evidence doesn't tend to appear in Naraka," I told her. "If I used it at the scene of a crime, things like broken glass and such will remain, but bloodstains and corpses won't, unless I specifically brought them along, and graves tend to be empty. If I don't limit the barrier to prevent it, more obvious changes can occur as well."

"What do you mean?" She asked, a finger tapping the hilt of her sword as I finished drawing the last of the nearby Grimm beneath the ground. She seemed to realize this was my attempt to make conversation as I cleaned up and prepared.

"Though I've yet to find a way to make a place completely inaccessible to the Grimm, I can force it to only allow, say, Beowolves to form," I explained as I checked our surroundings again, as well as the spaces above and below ground. "This tends to result in worlds very similar to our own. But if I don't restrict it in such away, or if I allow the 'cracks' within the barrier to widen as they're inclined to do, then things change more obviously. Though the trees and plants within Naraka aren't alive, they seem to be at first glance, but the leaves could fall out as the world darkens. Running water might turn stagnant as well, among other ominous things. Personally, I think it's a bit much; if you're going to attack someone, it may as well be on a nice day. There's no need to darken the sky or make a city look more rundown."

Raven hummed, a sound that was, again, in acknowledgement rather than agreement. Beneath the ground, the last of the Grimm ceased twitching and I called Ereb and Levant back to my side.

"Though it usually doesn't make much difference, the things left behind by Naraka might disrupt an investigation like this one, hiding things we might otherwise find," I continued. "On the other hand, it means things that otherwise wouldn't might find us, so be on your guard. I've cleared the area, but more Grimm may come—and though it's rather unlikely, whatever did this might still be around, waiting for my intruders. Just in case, I'd rather it not find us."

Raven tilted her head and calmly swept her eyes over the field of rubble laid out before us.

"Noted," She said dryly. "Though I'm more concerned with how we're going to find anything."

"Simple," I looked over my shoulder and smiled at her. "Think of it as a giant puzzle—all we need to do is put the pieces back together in the proper order."

"The hundreds of thousands of pieces," She noted.

"I count one hundred thirty-three thousand five hundred and eighty-six pieces of meaningful size, myself," I pondered the mess for another moment. "Though that's for a rather broad definition of meaningful, granted."

"I've never liked jigsaw puzzles," Raven continued. "Putting a broken building back together seems like it would be significantly more miserable."

"It's too early in the morning for such a negative outlook on life, Raven," I shook my head at her.

"It's too early for any of this, too," She replied, gesturing vaguely at the mess. "But here we are. I assume you have a way to expedite things?"

"Expedite?" I repeated, smile widening. I considered commenting on her word choice, but simply shook my head in the end. "As a matter of fact, yes."

"Go do it, then," She ordered. "I'll supervise from here."

"How kind of you," I chuckled, slipping to one knee and placing a hand on the ground. With a silent command, I let Ereb slip into the earth again and sent him reaching out towards the mass of stone. Crocea Mors followed a moment later, sliding into the surprising amount of steel that had apparently be a part of the building, and then I drew upon Levant and sent the air gliding over the debris. I felt the objects clearly in my mind, but though the sheer amount of them should have reduced it to a singular blob of sensation, I had no trouble discerning between the many, individual pieces. I checked my math again quickly and felt gratified—as I'd thought, there were one hundred thirty-three thousand five hundred and eighty-six pieces of this puzzle.

Now all I had to do was put them all back together in the right order, to compose an image I'd never seen, from over a hundred thousand massive pieces.

Like I said. Simple.

It's a good thing I like games, I told myself as I held back another sigh.

Shutting my eyes—not that it made much difference anymore—I finished up my preparations, summoning a Temple and Sanctum Sanctorum around myself to boost my MP regen. With that raised, I let my Elementals spread through and into the stone and steel that remained, making the valley of rubble shift and shudder in place. Even those small motions required moving a tremendous weight and I felt it as a drain on my MP, but that didn't matter now. In real combat, how I used my MP could make a world of difference and be the decisive factor between victory and defeat, but in a situation like this, when I had time to spare…

Well, spending a few thousand MP was nothing. Not to me—especially when I wanted to push my MP low to take advantage of my skills.

To that end, I took the chance to Accelerate, increasing the rate I moved through time several times over. Even without opening my eyes, I could fell—and thus, see, hear, taste, and smell—the difference in the world around me. Though the effects of Acceleration were, in many ways, identical to super speed, they reached those ends through different methods and it was those differences that mattered with powers. If speed was distance over time, then superspeed increased the former while Acceleration decreased the latter, and that changed the way I perceived everything. Even things that should have been mathematical constants shifted, because the speed that light could travel in a second became a nebulous thing when the length of a second became variable.

So light shifted oddly, in ways that were hard to describe or define. At the same time, the air near my skin seemed to heat, an illusion caused by the heat that was trapped between two different 'time zones.' The world quieted as sound lagged further and further behind me, the faint breeze softened—so many things changed as the world slowed around me.

And then my eyes blinked open again and I got to work. It was just another puzzle, I reminded myself, comparing edges and the remains of markings as I tried to get a feel for the pattern. With each glance, I felt as if I were brushing my fingers carefully over every stone, tracing every edge as I carved them into my memory. I separated them by the information I gathered from each—by markings, materials, and so on—and then began to extrapolate.

It wasn't as simple as merely glancing at the broken edges of the stone, not even when I could see things on a molecular level, because the same thing that aided me now had worn away at these ruins. In the decade since this place fell, the wind, rain, and nature as a whole had gone to work, dulling edges and washing away signs. Traces still remained, of course, but I knew better than anyone how quickly things could change, to say nothing of the fact that I may well be missing pieces of this puzzle, with vital bits having been stolen away while this place was left to rot.

But I made do. Based on their position in the rubble, I could take a fairly good guess as to which pieces had hit the ground first. Starting with the largest piece, I reached into the material and glanced it over, getting a feel for the patterns within it—not merely of those craved on its surface, but of those within the stone itself. From there, I drew upon my analysis of the other pieces nearby, singling out those that seemed most similar in my thoughts, and then set them to shaking in a slightly different fashion from the other pieces.

Moving on, I expanded the process to the surrounding stone, touching upon the bits and pieces in the next layer of debris to repeat the process. Where I found bits of stone that seemed to fit with the first batch, I set them to shaking in the same fashion; others got their own different tunes. And there were others—hundreds of them, with large chunks of stone that could be as big as a wall surrounded by hundreds or even thousands of tiny stones.

I didn't move anything from their original positions, however—or, at least, I didn't move them more than the teams that had been here before us already had. Simply by making them shake slightly, I was able to divide them into groups and move on, working my way from the bottom up, 'oldest' to 'newest.' When I was done and the entire field was trembling with perhaps a hundred different tunes, I focused on the pieces I'd left by the wayside in the initial run through, where they hadn't seemed to be an obvious fit anywhere, looking at them again with most of the pieces divided. Most of the pieces that didn't seem to fit with the lower levels matched with higher ones, so I adjusted a song here or there and drew back for a moment to observe my work.

All told, I spent about twenty minutes merely sorting through the rubble—which was perhaps five, outside of my Accelerated time. Simply moving all the pieces in so many different ways while so Accelerated was a massive strain, despite the boosts from both my barriers and Mana Reactor, but after looking over my math again, I thought I had the right of it.

At last, I rose—and layers upon layers of steel and stone rose with me. Where I'd sorted the pieces from the bottom up, I now worked in reverse to rebuild the ruins, lifting those on the upper most layers into the air. Lifting a hand, I curled my fingers as if squeezing something and dozens upon dozens of pieces changed position in midair, smaller parts connecting with larger ones or else gathering into larger ones. I watched carefully as the pieces came together, shifting positions slightly here and there as I saw new patterns emerge. Then, with the flick of a wrist, I set the giant stone block down.

Lifting my other hand, I drew a hundred more pieces into the air and started to arrange them as I saw fit, fingers curling again as I did so—but this time I didn't even wait until it was finished to raise my right hand again. Another tune, if one only I could hear, rose to a crescendo as the pieces fell into place again and again and again, and I set down block after block, arranging them in rows I could all but see from the wreckage. Within mere seconds, as broken carvings gave way to complete or near complete images, I was certain and that surety made me move even faster.

In perhaps two minutes, the majority of the massive structure had been assembled from the wreckage, rebuilt in the opposite order in which it had been destroyed, as if I'd pressed rewind on an extremely convincing hologram. It was an enormous step pyramid—almost a ziggurat, really—or so it seemed on the surface. But…

Behind me, Raven exhaled slowly again, eyes focused on me. She wanted to ask, but didn't want to give the question voice, so instead she chose to say nothing for several long moments. For my part, I stood like a statue, arms falling back to my sides, and simply allowed myself several seconds to regain my strength.

"It's odd," I said at last. "I'd noticed how there seemed to be a surprising amount of metal in the rubble, but now I'm sure—it's not solid. There are hidden chambers within the pyramid and an entrance beneath the altar at the top."

"An altar?" Raven asked, tone considering as she elected to focus on the task at hand. Glancing over my shoulder, I nodded at her. "A normal altar or…?"

"It's what you think," I told her. "The type they used for sacrifices. Probably human sacrifices, in fact."

"How can you tell?" She murmured, taking a step to stand side by side with me as we both looked back up at the pyramid. "Do you see something?"

I nodded.

"Blood stains in the Ultraviolet," I said. "Enough that I can still see some of it after who knows how long, all the way down the stairs."

She considered the pyramid silently for a long moment.

"Those stairs must be a hundred meters long," She said.

"A little more than that," I replied. "But yeah."

"It would take a lot of blood to leave stains down a stairway that long," She continued. "A lot of people."

I nodded as she looked around again.

"Any moral abhorrence aside, it seems like a rather odd place for it," She mused. "I did not see any other signs of civilization nearby. Could this place be so old that it's the only things that remains?"

"I doubt it," I answered, following her gaze. "Not so completely that nothing remained, at least. I doubt this place is more than a few thousand years old; if there was a city here, I'd think there'd still be something to show for it."

"The Grimm can be quite thorough when they wish to be," Raven noted. "Such as with Babel."

"True," I nodded. "But I think the Grimm are why this was built out here, far away from anything else. That many people waiting in line to be sacrificed on an altar would draw them in like moths to a flame."

"But then why do it?" She wondered. "Why sacrifice that many people, knowing the Grimm would come by the thousands?"

"Perhaps to make them come," I murmured before shaking my head. "But I honestly don't know. But if we want to find out, I can think of a few ways to do it."

And with that said, I started walking up the once-bloodstained steps.

Raven followed with another quiet sigh.