Chapter 382: Intertwined Darkness
[Merge with Darkness]
When Darkness is activated through the Malachor-Weave Basilisk Coat, the wearer and armor partially transition into an incorporeal shadow state.
While active:
Physical matter may be passed through.
Movement through darkness is significantly concealed.
Energy consumption increases according to the density, thickness, and magical resistance of material traversed.
Living beings and magically reinforced structures significantly increase consumption.
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Kael read the description twice. By the time he looked up, Andre had already recognized the expression on his face.
"What does it do?" the dwarf asked. "And try to explain before testing it on something supporting my roof."
"Something ridiculous," Kael said, his smile widening. "The coat can partially turn me incorporeal."
Andre glanced toward the wooden posts surrounding them. "I know that look. Pick something that won’t bury us if yer wrong."
Kael approached one of the heavy supports anyway and placed his palm against the wood. It felt completely solid beneath his hand.
He activated Darkness through the coat.
His fingers became indistinct as shadow spread from the coat. When Kael pushed forward, his hand passed through the timber without resistance.
He stopped with half his forearm inside the post, then slowly pulled it free. No cracks had formed in the wood, and nothing within it appeared to have been displaced.
Kael flexed his fingers. "There’s no damage. The gauntlet application imposed Darkness upon whatever I struck, but this works in the opposite direction."
Andre nodded as he inspected the untouched support. "Yer not changing the material. The coat is changing you."
"Which makes this far more useful."
"And dangerous...."
The gauntlet could temporarily remove cohesion from whatever Kael touched. The coat allowed Kael himself to ignore the cohesion of something else, creating possibilities that had nothing to do with directly damaging an opponent.
Kael’s attention moved toward the workshop wall.
Andre followed his gaze and immediately understood. "Before ya walk through solid stone, perhaps test something thinner than a wall."
"The post worked."
"A hand is not yer entire body. If the effect fails halfway through, I have no intention of chiseling ya out."
Kael considered the warning for approximately a second before activating Darkness across the entire coat and walking forward.
His shoulder entered the stone, followed by his torso. The workshop disappeared around him as the wall enclosed his head and reduced everything to darkness.
There was no crushing pressure or pain. Instead, Kael felt resistance throughout his body, as though the stone demanded a constant payment of energy for every moment he remained inside it.
His internal reserves dipped noticeably while he continued forward. The resistance disappeared the instant he emerged on the other side.
Kael turned and looked through the nearby doorway. Andre remained inside the workshop, staring at him with an expression balanced between fascination and exhaustion.
Kael crossed back through the wall, paying closer attention to the drain this time. He deactivated Darkness as soon as he returned to the workshop.
"That’s expensive," he said. "The cost increased the longer I remained inside the stone."
"How expensive are we talking?"
"This wall wasn’t terrible, but thickness clearly matters. A fortress wall would be much worse, and anything magically reinforced would probably drain enough energy to make the attempt dangerous."
Andre nodded toward the wall Kael had just crossed. "Then remember that before getting stuck halfway through something."
Kael imagined the effect failing while part of his body remained inside solid stone. The thought stripped some of the excitement from his expression.
"That is an extremely unpleasant possibility."
"Aye. Perhaps unpleasant enough to make ya test the limits properly before walking through a mountain."
Kael intended to do exactly that, although he had no plans to begin with a mountain. For now, the defensive applications interested him more than passing through barriers.
If he timed the effect correctly, a sword could pass through his body. The same should apply to an arrow, spear or many physical attacks used by monsters.
The protection would not be absolute. Magic could interact differently with Darkness. Not to mention the absurd energy cost which also prevented Kael from remaining intangible indefinitely.
For brief moments during a fight, however, the ability bordered upon unfair.
Kael liked unfair.
Another possibility occurred to him as he watched the shadow settle across his sleeve. He turned toward Andre, who responded to his expression before Kael could speak.
"Whatever yer planning now, leave me out of it."
"You keep saying that before I do anything."
"I’ve survived enough of yer ideas to recognize when another one arrives."
Kael activated Darkness. The coat dissolved into shadow around him, blurring his outline beneath the shifting forge light. Once the transformation stabilized, he activated Presence.
Andre blinked, and Kael disappeared from his awareness.
He had not become visually invisible. A dark figure still occupied the space in front of the dwarf, but Andre’s mind stopped treating it as something worth noticing. It was the same thing you do with your nose, your eyes can always see it, but your brain choses to ignore it.1
The dwarf frowned and searched the workshop. His gaze moved from the forge to the table, passed directly over Kael and settled upon the doorway.
"Kael? If ya walked off while I was speaking, I’m keeping every Rune ya left on the table."
Kael gave no answer. He moved around Andre, paying attention to the energy consumed by Presence.
Usually, the effect became weaker and more expensive when someone actively searched for him. Presence did not make Kael invisible; it suppressed recognition. A determined observer could eventually force their perception through the effect by studying the space he occupied.
Darkness changed that relationship. Kael barely presented anything for Andre to recognize.
His footsteps had become almost nonexistent. The coat no longer scraped against itself, and its shadowed outline blended naturally into every dark edge inside the workshop. Presence did not need to conceal the small signs that normally betrayed him because Darkness had already removed most of them.
Kael circled behind Andre. The dwarf turned but looked directly past him.
Kael placed one hand upon his shoulder.
Andre nearly jumped out of his skin. "By the nine forges of hell!"
Kael released Presence and deactivated Darkness. His solid form returned behind Andre, accompanied by a grin he made no attempt to hide.
"That worked even better than I expected."
Andre spun around. "Don’t ever do that again. I thought ya had left, then the bloody shadows put a hand on me."
"You could still see me, though?"
"I could see something," Andre admitted. His anger gave way to a frown as he searched for the correct explanation. "Every time I tried looking directly at it, my attention slipped somewhere else. It was like my eyes knew ya were there, but the rest of my head couldn’t be bothered to care."
"That’s Presence. It normally consumes more energy once someone begins actively searching for me, but Darkness removes most of the obvious signs before Presence has to hide them."
Understanding gradually crossed Andre’s face. "The ability doesn’t have to suppress as much because yer already little more than a moving shadow."
"Exactly. Presence only needs to convince the observer that the shadow isn’t important."
Andre stared at the place where Kael had been standing. "That sounds incredibly unpleasant to fight."
"Good. That’s usually what I’m aiming for."
"It also sounds dishonorable."
"Even better."
"Aye, honor fills graves."
Andre snorted and returned to his workbench while Kael deactivated the last traces of the Rune.
Darkness belonged on the coat.
It did not provide a simple resistance bonus or make the armor harder. It changed the nature of the equipment and, while active, changed what Kael could become inside it.
For the first time, Kael truly understood why Andre’s ancestral book placed so much importance upon synergy. The correct Rune did not merely add another effect to an item. A sufficiently compatible combination could create something neither component possessed alone.
Kael inspected the coat’s status again. It remained Epic, and the irritating [Incomplete] classification still floated beside its rarity.
That bothered him far less than before. If an unfinished recreation could produce Merge with Darkness, he wanted to discover what the coat might become once he learned to reproduce the original mesh properly.
Andre looked at his face and immediately recognized where his thoughts had gone. "Don’t start planning another coat when ya haven’t finished this one."
"I’m not making another one," Kael assured him. "I’m thinking about how to finish this one."
The dwarf groaned, although Kael suspected that answer pleased him more than he wanted to admit.
Kael returned Darkness to the socket and spent the next several days testing the combination. He measured how long he could maintain the shadow state, how rapidly the energy cost increased while passing through thicker objects and whether he could limit the transformation to individual parts of his body.
Partial activation worked, but it required considerably more control. Transforming a hand was easy, and an entire arm became manageable after several attempts. Turning only his torso intangible for the exact duration of an incoming attack proved far more difficult.
Kael practiced anyway.
By the end of the second day, Andre could swing a wooden rod toward his shoulder while Kael activated Darkness at the final instant. The weapon passed harmlessly through the shadowed portion of his body, after which Kael immediately returned to solidity.
Andre stopped volunteering after the third attempt, claiming that helping Kael learn how to ignore blunt weapons went against every healthy instinct he possessed. Kael continued practicing alone after that.
Presence and Darkness proved even more promising when used together. The combination did not make Kael truly invisible. Instead, his body became so indistinct that Presence required substantially less energy to suppress recognition.
Kael could move, change direction and circle someone who was actively trying to find him. Presence still weakened eventually, but the effect endured far longer than it ever had during direct combat.
He found himself thinking about the Lesser Death Knight. During their previous fight, its shield had been a constant obstacle, forcing Kael to strike around it or overwhelm the defense through brute force.
With the coat, he could approach beneath Presence, enter the shadow state and pass directly through the shield. Once he returned to solidity inside the Death Knight’s guard, only a short distance would remain between his gauntlet and its core.
A smile spread across Kael’s face while he imagined the sequence.
Andre looked up from the forge and immediately pointed a hammer at him. "Whatever violent nonsense produced that expression, keep it away from my workshop."
"It’s already too late," Kael said. "I know exactly how I want to test this when I return to the climb."
By the time he felt satisfied with the equipment, nearly his entire visit to Floor Two had transformed into another training period.
Kael had come to Andre intending to repair his equipment. Instead, he had built new gauntlets, studied an ancestral smithing manual, learned the foundations of proper metalworking, created an unfinished Epic coat, discovered an entirely new interaction with Darkness and frightened a dwarf badly enough that Andre threatened to install bells throughout the workshop.
It had been a productive vacation, by Kael’s standards.
He sat near the forge and turned one gauntleted hand beneath the light, watching the dark Malachor plates shift over his knuckles. Before he could decide what else required testing, a notification appeared at the edge of his vision.
It was not an achievement or an equipment update. Someone had sent him a message.
[Yenna **** has sent you a message.]
Kael raised his eyebrows when he saw the sender. "Speaking of trouble."
Andre glanced over from the forge. "What happened now?"
"Nothing yet, but someone sent me a message."
"You actually have friends?"
"What is that supposed to mean?"
Andre grunted, shrugging.
Kael opened the system messaging window.
[How’s the climb going?]
For Yenna to have contacted him first, she may have finally gotten time away from whoever was pursuing her.