CHAPTER 163: Frozen

  Adam shivered.

  He knew he was still not in his body but in his soul. There was no physical sensation, but he also knew that his soul was frozen. The image of cold seeped into his mind, affecting his image form, so he shivered.

  Imaginary arms wrapped his chest as he huddled in a fetal position. There was no light, no sense of direction or gravity. He was buried in snow, packing so deeply that he couldn’t move from the spot. The frost held him through pressure and weight rather than directly restricting his movements.

  The first thing Adam thought of was relief. He wasn’t on an alien planet, as far as he was aware. His sister hadn’t been captured, again only as far as he knew. But now there was hope. He could get out of this, find a way to fight back, and then return to Jackson.

  There was no telling how long he had been here or even what they were doing to him. However, he had a few new things from his time in the memories. Those memories had allowed him to learn more about classes and skills, their paths and shapes. He had gained knowledge, understanding, and had learned some more of the abilities that his status sheet predecessors had, gaining pseudo-skills that he would be happy to test out on some invaders. Preferably that mind witch who captured him.

  Of course, he also had one older thing that had been with him since the [System] arrived. His fury!

  Even without the berserker powers inherited from the older Gregor Munstean, or the corruption, he was as angry as he had ever been. Someone was going to pay for this.

  Adam stopped shivering. He imagined heat inside his image body. No actual heat started, nor did the berserker skills start up. The snow didn’t move from around him.

  Slowly, having difficulty moving due to how tightly packed the snow was, and unsure what it was besides the form he imagined from the sensations, Adam turned his hands. They had been pressed against his arms as the imaginary cold seeped into his body. He forced them to turn outward, to get his fingers so they could push into the snow.

  He started by wiggling the fingers. They were able to loosen up and displace the snow. When enough pressure had been taken off his hands he began moving them as well, creating space around them.

  Methodically he continued. His hands moving resulted in his arms pressing out. He wriggled his body and kicked with his drawn in legs. Anything to create more space.

  A feeling of rotating hit him. Vertigo struck his mind as the space didn’t result in him falling or moving upwards. He stayed where he was while shifting the freezing snow into more manageable density.

  It felt like slow progress to Adam, but there was no sense of time here. There was no fatigue, breathing, or muscles to tire. Just like so many times when fighting hordes of invaders, he kept moving, pushing forward to get him to a better place.

  Eventually Adam was able to reach out a single arm, pushing it into the less packed snow that surrounded him. He tried moving his arm around his body hoping to free himself further when his arm struck something hard. This object was more solid than the snow, and much colder too, metaphysically speaking.

  Touching the outside of this colder object, tracing it with his freed hand, Adam felt along it. It was cylindrical and long. Longer than his arm could reach, like a tube. While it was radiating more cold than the snow, this cold felt familiar. It pulsed with a power that Adam recognized. The snow felt foreign and had him trapped, but the tube of ice was welcoming to him, even if it trapped him as much as the snow.

  Carefully he continued to dig around, finding more of the tubes. He knew them as conduits now. They led somewhere that he wanted to get to. Too much snow was packing him in so he couldn’t free this image body to explore or follow the ice conduits.

  After more time spent wiggling and struggling, he found that even if he was able to move, the ice tubes were all around him. They trapped him, twisting and turning to form a cage while also reaching into the distance. The cage held him inside, even as it kept more of the snow outside from pressing on him tighter.

  He probably wouldn’t be able to get out by moving. Yet the power contained in those conduits drew his attention. He touched them, feeling the cold and strength. So familiar. They reminded him of the time when he was fighting the goblins where he almost attacked his own friends.

  “That’s it!” Adam exclaimed as he realized. “The ice tubes are the coolness in my head. They aren’t trapping me, they are trying to keep the snow out. Whatever the mind witch did to lock up my heat, the [Unquenchable Rage] pseudo-skill, must be represented by the snow.”

  With the mystery solved, Adam knew what to do. He touched one of the ice conduits and sent his awareness down it. He was still trapped by the snow, but his senses became aware of the state of his soul.

  The conduits ran in one direction, to the area of his brain where the coolness usually stayed. The other direction looked through the rest of his soul and connected to where the heat resided in his heart. The heat was encased in the snow, just like his mind was, but the ice conduits had pierced through the snow and connected to his restrained berserker power. The cold of the conduit was freezing his heat as much as the snow was.

  “Better pull it back,” he thought. Then he took control of the ice, and it slid backwards, pulling from his heart all along its path until all the ice was now amorphous and in his head area. Unlike real snow, the soul snow hadn’t changed position at all, staying where it had been. That also meant the tunnels that the ice conduits had occupied were still there, and they had reached all the way to his heart.

  Adam thought about the memories he had seen from Cruxannith and the way it had ended with Emily captured. There couldn’t be a more infuriating experience than his family members captured by invaders. The whole reason he fought was to prevent that. Anger rose in him.

  Then he remembered being blindsided by that Scyrric berserker. The mind witch and Scyrric had defeated him so easily. Embarrassingly easily, with a cheap shot and unknown abilities. Steam came out of his heart, moving down the empty tunnels in the snow while heating up.

  The damn [System] and all the problems it had brought couldn’t be ignored. It had intentionally ruined humanity, ruined his world. There was no fairness. Even the warning message at the very beginning had been a setup to give natives false hope and confidence.

  A cracking sound would have happened if this was a physical place as the memories riled Adam up. Anger and hate filled his heart. Heat pulsed out from it, cracking the frozen shell around his heart and rushing through the snow dug tunnels. Steam reached Adam’s image body first. It broke through the disturbed snow and surrounded him, warming him.

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  Adam reached out and touched the snow. It fizzled and dissolved, not just a single snowflake at a time, but in large chunks. Standing up, not caring that there was not up or down, left or right, Adam opened his palm. He pointed it in front of him. In this place any direction was as good as another. Then with violent strength, he slapped his hand closed, into a fist.

  Fire raged out from his hand. It surged through his soul, burning away the snow, clearing and cleansing him from the invader’s influence. He could feel the heat reaching his physical body, gaining strength from it, but it wasn’t time to go back to it just yet.

  If he had been watching Cruxannith’s memories, that meant they had a connection, and he wouldn’t stand for that. His connections were here to empower his friends, not to give his enemies a backdoor into his soul.

  He flew around his soul, checking all the tendrils that reached out from it. The ones for the girls were in the same place as always, still open. He could feel fear and uncertainty coming from them. That would have to wait until Adam was truly free, though feeling them increased his urgency and further stoked his heat.

  When Adam found the connection to the Red Clan speaker, he was shocked. His image body stood there looking at it. The connections he had with the girls were like a small pipe running from one apartment into another. Each was its own location, with just a small opening to pass emotions through.

  The connection with Cruxannith was like a wall knocked out between apartments, where either person could just walk right through, large enough to even take a metaphorical elephant.

  He didn’t know how to fix this, or even what caused it. Instead of having to reach a tendril to access someone’s soul, he was able to send his whole being through.

  He felt his own energy mixing with hers where they connected, and his own energy followed with him as he moved around her soul. This was very different than the tendrils he used for his connections, where they couldn't truly interact since one soul would avoid another.

  Since he had enough experience, he was able to visit the regions of her soul easily. He traveled through them, guessing what they were based on what he had learned in the tower, in her memories. The area where her class and skills were formed made more sense to him now, having learned the basics of what the Red Clan knew of it. The class shaped the region like a shell and various skills fit inside like a game of Tetris, though he didn’t know enough to identify specific skills.

  Next, his trip took him to where XP was stored, the energy to enrich the soul was waiting until there was enough for the [System] to shape it into skills or class evolutions.

  Finally, he reached the memories. It was a large area with a hazy membrane that indicated the border. Inside, the memories were shaped like black orbs of fluid, oozing and flowing around the space. A few of them looked like they had yellow crystals encrusting them. That crystal was what his own memories looked like, showing that the gaping connection between him and the Red Clan speaker was more than a token. His mind and memories were encroaching on her, and he knew that those corrupted memories were the ones he had lived through her, over laying himself onto them.

  The encroachment showed that the connection between them was a bigger deal than he had realized. He wasn’t sure what the connection was or how it had happened, or even if it was fixable. There was one possible solution that he was enthusiastic about trying. How could her death not be the answer?

  With his exploration complete, Adam was ready to return to his body. Turning to leave, Adam noticed a line reaching outside of her memory region, to an unseeable point. He frowned.

  Adan had seen the lines inside himself connecting his memories to the other Gregor’s memories, and there had been the line on the memory from Detective Baker that led to all the other people affected by the mind witch’s [Charm]. It was odd there would be a memory linked within her area.

  Without giving it much concern, Adam reached out and touched the memory, finding it even easier to enter than on other people. Probably another side effect of that huge connection.

  “Then you’ll detail a path for me so that I can get a more powerful class and survive?” asked a husky male voice with skepticism.

  “That is what I’m offering,” said Cruxannith, holding up a crystal like the one Tom had used to learn the [System Common] skill. “Also, once your race has fallen, I will send you to a world where you can get stronger and survive. You can even conquer it to live in comfort, if that is what you prefer. There will be little there to threaten you should you earn the class listed on this crystal.”

  “That sounds like a suspiciously sweet deal. How do I know it’s legit?”

  “To work together we will need a bit of trust.”

  “I’m not buying that. Aren’t you a mind controller?”

  “Of a sort, I am,” answered Cruxannith.

  “Then why not just mind control me or someone else?”

  “Someone near him has a way to sense and break my control. For this I need someone to act willingly, without evidence of my powers on them.”

  The man nodded and reached for the crystal. The mind witch let him take it.

  “How do I know I’ll be strong enough once I get to Jackson?”

  “The dimensional convergence rifts are placed in cities and populated areas. Travel to the less populated places and gather an army. I will send defeatable enemies to you to empower you and your army. It will be difficult at the beginning, but that crystal should give you the knowledge you need to make use of it. By the time you reach his city, your army will be stronger than any natives have achieved in the recorded history of world claiming.”

  The man held up the crystal, looking at it through the light. Then he placed it on his palm and bounced it up and down.

  “And all you need from me is to stir up trouble? Keep the boy looking the other way?”

  “Yes. After I take him, I don’t care what you do. Claim his Rift, fight more of other races, it is up to you. Though I recommend staying away from the Scyrric, since they paid to own this world. They won’t let you be should you get in their way.”

  “Right. Gotcha. A new challenge and some fun. I can’t wait.”

  “Take this crystal with you as well,” she said as she handed him a yellow soul crystal. “Just having it on you will let me know if you are succeeding or need help.”

  “This isn’t going to betray me or be used against me, will it?” he asked, looking at the new crystal like it was a venomous snake.

  “You sound as if you matter enough for me to bother. No, I will provide all I promised and even give aid if you need it. It will cost me little yet will be worth any price to capture him. All that matters is my lovely Adam.”

  The man scowled, clearly unhappy at being thought of as insignificant compared to an inexperienced kid. With the conversation finished, the man turned and left.

  Adam watched the memory from Cruxannith’s eyes. He looked into the face of the man she was bargaining with and seethed. Hate and fury filled him.

  The last time he had been this angry without the corruption’s influence was when that clinic had been found. Now the genuine emotion was back, and he knew the face of the man that had betrayed him…betrayed humanity. The face of the man he would make sure to kill.

  Adam would not let this stand.

  ***

  Abbey looked into the distance, towards the edges of their territory in the direction of Memphis. She wished she knew for certain that Adam was still there. All she had felt from his connection was happiness and excitement, only slightly tinged with concern.

  While she wanted Adam to be happy, that constant state of euphoria that he was experiencing didn’t blend with who she had known. More than anyone else in the [System], he had been choosing what to do and who to be, and she loved him for that. The freedom he had, even with the soul corruption and anger, was unique to him amid this war.

  She had stopped listening to Lucas negotiating. If this agreement prevented them from gaining the strength to find and save Adam, then heaven help those who got in her way. Otherwise, she didn’t really care. The people would be protected even if they didn’t like the change in leadership. Her group still had plenty of bases they could conquer to use. They could start over if they needed.

  A quiet sigh escaped her as she looked in the direction the sun was moving, destined to set where she hoped Adam would be held.

  Then, something changed. She was startled as she felt it. The anger. It began small but quickly grew into a raging hatred. It was so strong she knew it couldn’t be manipulated, and it was coming from Adam's connection with her.

  Without saying anything she looked around. No one else had reacted except for Brittney, who was now looking at her in surprise. Abbey gave her a tiny nod and then put a finger to her lips to quiet her.

  It was difficult to stifle the smile that wanted to appear on her lips. Something had changed and she had faith that the war would change with it. She looked to where Gregor was getting smacked around by that Scyrric. Then she looked at Commander Rexus as his group jumped from the wall. Finally, she spared a glance for General Carmichael, huddling with his officers in an excited discussion.

  Change was coming, and heaven and hell had no chance of helping anyone who got in Adam’s way.