Edge Cases

If nothing else, Derivan reflected, the tides of the battle had definitely turned. That was... about all he could say for the situation they were in.

Unlike their own weapons, magic — 'proper' magic, as it were — was apparently able to punch through the bodies of the Patchers with little to no trouble. The problem was that the Patchers simply didn't die. Whatever allowed them to kill one of the Patchers wasn't something they could replicate, for all that Derivan tried to strike at the same point on the other Patchers; any damage they dealt simply healed over slowly.

Not quite like health, where the damage was reversed after it was done, and became nothing but a number on a sheet. Not quite like they didn't have health, either, or Derivan would have been able to deal with them himself; his sword still did damage, even if it did so slower than the magic did. It simply didn't kill the Patchers.

Even when he struck at what seemed like their weak spot.

"It's like they patched it out," Sev said, irritation lacing his tone. Derivan glanced at him just in time to catch the way he narrowed his eyes, then let out an exasperated sigh. "...That's exactly what they fucking did, isn't it."

"I am unsure what you mean," Derivan offered.

"They fixed it," Sev said. "That's what they do, right? They're Patchers. They fix things. I don't know exactly what they're here to fix, but obviously they can fix things about themselves, too, or they wouldn't be healing back like this."

"Whatever it is they do," one of the mages said — he was a large, chitinous fellow, with a slightly rounded shape that reminded Derivan of the little beetles that would sometimes land near or on him, thinking he was another part of the scenery — "You need to find a way to stop them. We cannot keep this up for that much longer."

He was telling the truth, too. Each of the mages fought by tossing out little emblems with glyphs pre-painted onto them, firing a variety of spells through — lances of light, bolts of fire, and twisting, shifting shadow, among other effects — and yet none of them permanently disabled the Patchers. Even the more esoteric spells didn't seem to do much. The equivalent of Sleep had simply whiffed against them, and they'd broken out of any of the cages that the mages created in short order; in that sense, it was a miracle that Derivan's barrier had lasted as long as it did.

Although he supposed that this was an opportunity to draw up his barrier again.

The mages fought in a way that was quite unlike any other adventurer they'd encountered, though. Derivan wondered if they would be nearly as effective without the massive stream of mana flowing above them. As far as he could tell, there was no form of [Mana Manipulation] happening here; if there was a variant of that at play, then he couldn't sense it.

Instead, small streams of visible mana fell from above, connecting to the mages like they were puppets on a string, though the imagery was far more striking. That mana flowed through them and into the glyph-painted emblems, and the emblems would flare with the color of the spell.

It was a mesmerizing sight, and a display of skill, too. Derivan saw the way they moved, the way they breathed. There was a gracefulness to it — almost like the dance they were performing was another way of calling the mana. He remembered what shopkeeper version of Anyati had said about the personalization of mana, and how it could be a little different in expression for everyone...

He wondered.

But now wasn't the time.

It was an opportunity for him to draw up his barrier again, but a barrier wasn't what would save them here. He could wait to recover, and try to Shift the Patchers back through all the layers he'd pulled them through; whatever muscle he used for Shifting seemed almost recovered. That was an option.

Until that was an option, though...

Sev had said that they were Patchers, and that they were fixing themselves; patching their own problems, as it were. They had a weakness, and they had removed it — but now he had access to what was presumably the same mechanism they used. If he could just reach out with Patch —

It was a new stat. He didn't understand all that it could do, yet; could barely find the new muscle it had no doubt given him that he could flex. If he focused, he could sense an oddity in the air in front of him, right where the Patchers were. If he focused even more, he could sense strange complexities from the Patchers, like interlocking gears he couldn't quite make head or tails of.

It was a lot easier to break something than to fix it, though. If it was a complex mechanism...

He reached out without quite understanding what he was doing just yet, using the same sense he'd used to notice this phenomenon at all. The delicate touch of his stat might as well have been a hammer, or a waraxe — he had not nearly the stat he needed to make a gentle change.

So those metaphorical gears, ticking away invisibly, following some invisible script — they were smashed to pieces.

The Patcher shuddered, slowing down; the next barrage of spells from the mages, another set of luminous beams, tore through those insectoid arms and left gaping holes and bleeding chitin, except this time those holes did not heal.

Derivan, though, simply stared. He wasn't sure exactly what he'd done there — but he had the feeling that the Patcher had been dead before those spells had hit it. He'd torn apart something vital in a creature that fundamentally relied on the system to exist, and the stat — or the part of him that was that stat — didn't like that. It was supposed to Patch. To fix —

He suppressed that spiral before it could begin, but Derivan felt uncomfortable. That stat was strange. He'd have to learn to work with its compulsions. This was the first time he felt like he'd lost points in a stat, though it wasn't visible in the system interface.

He hadn't even known it was possible to lose points in a stat.

The new sense, though, hadn't diminished with the slight reduction in Patch — and now that Derivan was paying attention, he could feel how every one of the Patchers showed up on it, complicated pieces of machinery that seemed entirely driven by the System. His friends showed up on it, too, though their machinery was more opaque to him — the intricacies of how the system tied in to them and their skills were obfuscated, somehow, or shifted many layers away.

The mages were blank — they had never been tied in to the system. And Derivan himself...

His system was in shambles.

It reminded him of the way the mages were tied to the great mana flow above, streams of mana trickling down to them to feed their spells. Long strings of system-stuff trailed out of that obfuscated box that he saw over each of his friends, like a dozen strings tied to him had been cut, and those strings vanished into the distance, fading entirely out of the new sense.

Derivan wasn't sure how to feel about any of that. But he did know now that Patch could kill the Patchers, even if it came at a consequence.

"I will send them back," he said. There were three Patchers left — no doubt he cold use Patch to take out at least one more, but he wasn't sure where that would leave his stat, and the feeling of forcing it troubled him. He wanted to understand a bit more about the nature of the stat, and the consequences for pushing against it.

"Did you summon them here?" one of the mages asked incredulously, staring at him. She was a thin, wasplike figure, though most of her figures were shrouded in her cloak; he wouldn't have even known she was staring at him if she hadn't rather pointedly made sure he could see her eyes. "Summonings are not legal without the approval of—"

"Oh, come off it, Helg," her companion rolled her eyes; this one had the pattern of a ladybug. Humanoid insects in general seemed to be common to Teque. "I'm sure they're not hurtin' no one."

"Except themselves," the first mage that had spoken said shortly. The next emblem he drew sprayed cloudy, sticky-looking spots of light into the air; they hung there for a moment, ethereal and impossible, and then promptly dove towards one of the three remaining Patchers.

And then they began to spin, tearing off the limbs of the Patcher one by one.

...Some of this magic was brutal.

"I did not summon them," Derivan answered, trying to focus on the question at hand, though Patch proved to be a distracting itch. "They were already here; I simply... pulled them closer, so we can interact with them. They are likely what has been stealing your mana slivers."

"And you want to send them back so they can continue?" the beetle-mage frowned.

"I want to send them back because we cannot fight them as we are now," Derivan said, and then he made the decision for them, before they could convince themselves they could fight anyway. "We will find another way. We now know the cause, and that is progress. Please stand back."

He didn't wait for a response from the mages. Instead, he pushed forward with Shift, feeling now more than ever the way the layers of reality pulled back from him, even when he wasn't actively using the Skill. He felt it brush against each of the three remaining Patchers, forcing them forward —

— felt the Patchers slide through several layers of reality, tumbling from the raw force of the Shift —

— and sent them back. The Patchers vanished, fading from sight.

For a while, there was a short silence.

"...How the hell did you do that?" Helg asked after a moment. She narrowed her eyes at him. "I didn't sense you using any mana."

"It is a long story," Derivan sighed.