The Sorcerer’s Hand effectively played the role of a substitute in a “rehearsal” of the ritual proper. After imprinting her thauma upon it, she placed it where she would begin, and spurred it into motion by pouring thauma into it. The corpse hand twitched to life, barely managing to stand up on its fingers, and, with some struggle to control this quasi-graftbeast, Krahe went through the motions of the dive ritual using it as a substitute body, muttering the incantation under her breath. The angle-web came alive just as it would normally, albeit to a far lesser intensity, and when the hand reached the ultimate angle, there came a piercing screech and an abrupt outpouring of many-hued, hazy-distorted blackness. The hand was gone, but Krahe could still vaguely sense it; it was a drone with a very weak signal, but a signal nonetheless it had, and so she had to close her eyes and mentally shut herself off from her immediate surroundings to tune into the hand’s senses.

  It had no eyes, but she could faintly sense the surrounding astral gulf and “see” through her mind’s eye. Based on nothing more than gut instinct, she guessed the rite had cast the hand particularly deep into the gulf, which was good. Now she just had to reel the hand in to see if anything dangerous would bite. She expected nothing, and received exactly that; a few strange entities passed the hand by on its way to the surface, only whose silhouettes she could make out, but they didn’t approach.

  The Sorcerer’s Hand emerged with yet another miniature archon flash, alongside a small puddle of translucent slime. Krahe pulled the artifact from the angle-web using a tar tendril and set it aside. Another check of the angle-web showed no issues, so she moved on, taking the guidestone fragment out of storage as she went over her incantation and mentally prepared herself for the journey.

  “Barzai, return,” she thought. The raven picked an almost-burned piece of meat out of boiling oil with his bare claws, shut off the burner, and made his way to the basement. Meanwhile, Krahe went over the Wizard’s dossier twice more just to ensure she hadn’t missed anything, especially that which pertained to the actual structure of Zor’Aguhastra.

  While the structure, shape, and even apparent size of Zor’Aguhastra proper is highly dependent on the diver’s own perception, there are a handful of consistent traits. Firstly, the city is divided into two sections: Above, and below. Above, it consists of “Black Spires.” Below, all is shrouded in “Grey Fog”. In the middle, all is joined by a two-dimensional plane, with intermittent connections between individual spires.

  This fundamental structure directly reflects the two rulers, the King of Many Colours and the Shadeless Queen. The “Black” of the “Black Spires” is in truth a conglomerate of countless colours, most of which your mind will not be able to parse, and so they will appear as “iridescent-black.” In the same way, the “Grey” in “Grey Fog” refers to the total absence of any colour. Moreover, regardless of manifestation, the King possesses numerous shadows as if he were lit from many directions at once, while the Queen casts no shadow at all. In this way you can easily distinguish them from any other of the Chained Ones.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  It also spoke of an impenetrable defense that swirled about the city and was anchored by eight points, a barrier which had been put in place not by the Chained Ones, but by the hands of a young shrine maiden who had become stuck in the city for a time, and had thus decided to replicate her home, including a copy of her shrine and of the enormous barrier that the original shrine had supported.

  There are few protections in this world or any other that surpass the works of the Demon Shrine Maiden. I consider it fortunate that I have never met her and that her barrier reacts only to existential threats against Zor’Aguhastra, sealing them within its prison-moons to serve as its power sources forevermore.

  With Barzai returned to his Eidolon Vault, Krahe took one of the talismans she had prepared specially for this, a long strip that she used to bind the guidestone fragment to her hand, just in case. The idea was to seal the stone to her astral body such that even if she lost grip it wouldn’t have any chance of being lost, as it had to be used in the ritual and couldn’t just be kept in kenoma storage. As she had done in her first endeavor, Krahe raised her left arm and began chanting, stepping onto the angle-web from the Gate of the North. Once more she called upon key-holders and lock-openers, breakers-down of walls and locked gates — the pseudonyms of hackers and jailbreakers — yet she also interjected the names of guides, of those who had reverse-engineered labyrinthine systems and had written extensive guides on how to safely navigate the dataplane to reach its deepest depths. This was the first change in her effort to bend the ritual to better suit her goal of reaching Zor'Aguhastra. The guidestone fragment thrummed in her grasp, and the eldritch scrawl that had crawled upon its surface now crawled from it, spreading over her arm, halting only once it had passed her elbow.

  As she reached the South-most Pinnacle, she entered a partial dive. The Astral Gulf flooded in, the world of Man frayed out of awareness, and her angle-web twisted across inconceivable vastness of space, time, and vastest vastness whose ken can never be described by any mortal tongue. Even so, the direction in which it sprawled was unmistakable: “Down.” The guidestone-scrawl rushed out from her arm and spiraled ahead in that “downward” direction, laying out a path that felt at once like a current and a timeline, insofar as a line of text or the timeline of a video recording could be considered one; that was how Krahe parsed it in the moment. In effect, it was a diving shotline.

  She briefly shook her head, reminding herself that this was still the middle of the ritual and she was not in full dive yet.

  If you’d like to read ahead, consider heading on over to the ! You get up to 20 advance chapters for both Retribution Engine and Cherno Caster.

  I’d also greatly appreciate it if you could rate my story, maybe even leave a review or advanced review! Advanced reviews count for more in the eyes of the algorithm, so that pretty much means they determine the success of my work.

  For a link to the discord, check the synopsis.

  ? Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! ?

  by NekoSama#9999

  What To Expect:

  A protagonist who refuses to accept fate before he has tasted some beauties.

  > Good variety of side-characters with their own lives, motivations, and personalities.

  > Magic, stats, guns!