Mercy assumed he would use his pure madra to active the technique, since his hunger arm was broken, but she sensed no madra from him at all. She supposed he was using his authority as a Sage, and she felt as uncomfortable as she always did.
Sages were always old, even when they didn’t look like it.
Yerin noticed her discomfort and asked about it, but it was hard to explain.
“It’s not…it’s nothing big, but Sages are always old, at least on the inside. A Sage my age is just wrong. It’s like he’s a young man with an old head, you know?”
Mercy had tried to control the air with her soulfire to stop Lindon from hearing their conversation, but the aura was so thin that she was afraid he’d overheard. Especially when he looked depressed out of nowhere.
She desperately wanted to apologize, but what if he hadn’t heard her? Then she’d have to explain…
Yerin was giving her an odd look. “Huh. Used to say the same thing.”
“What?”
“Well, a baby’s head on a man’s body,” she said, making no effort to keep her voice down. “So not the same; the complete mirror opposite. Been a long time.”
She was speaking fondly, but Lindon was slumped against the panel, and he looked like he was about to collapse in shame and depression.
“I’m so sorry!” Mercy called.
Lindon waved it away.
Yerin winced. “Oops. Should pay off that debt later.”
Finally, Lindon caught the unfamiliar technique, and Mercy saw the disgusting white hunger aura begin to swirl. It took on a shape in the center, made all of shades of white and gray, until it looked like a person leeched of color.
A familiar person. A very familiar person.
Mercy’s breath stopped as she saw the hair, pulled back into a ponytail with strands of sticky shadow madra. The familiar build, the stance, the expression. The bow, made all of liquid black threads woven together, with a dragon’s head that hissed. She was sure the woman’s bright eyes were actually purple.
As the image had started to form, Mercy had at first wondered if this was herself, but every detail that settled proved that wrong. This was her mother, centuries ago. She looked to be Mercy’s age.
[We scoured the memory of this place, and we found that it had fed upon your mother,] Dross said triumphantly. [This is a triumph of great effort and skill.]
“The labyrinth?” Mercy asked.
“What you feed on becomes a part of you,” Lindon said. “The energy your mother gave the labyrinth is gone—it was consumed long ago—but the memory of her remains. It’s powerless, but we should be able to learn from it.”
“I…I never knew she came here.”
This was a startling revelation. Mercy knew, of course, that she didn’t know everything about her mother. It would take her a hundred years to read all the stories of Akura Malice, and it wasn’t as though Malice was very forthcoming about her past.
But she knew Mercy had been here, around Sacred Valley, and she had never said anything. She had even warned Mercy away.
Why?
Lindon pulled open a nearby box, which he must have removed from a void key earlier, and aura gushed out. Instantly, hunger aura swarmed over the natural treasures, and Mercy could sense some of the ghoulish spirits coming nearer. They would be crawling through the floor now.
He began spreading natural treasures around the room, quickly increasing the power of the ambient aura.
Mercy realized what they were trying to do, and she braced herself on Suu. “Do you really think we have time for this?”
“Doesn’t take more than a breath,” Yerin said. She patted Mercy on the shoulder. “Might sting, though.”
Eithan had taken his own handful of natural treasures, and he called out from the other end of the room. “You have four people here who have all successfully completed their Overlord revelation, and you have your own mother to learn from. How could you have a better environment?”
Mercy had grown up with near-constant access to people who had advanced past Overlord, and in one of the richest inhabitable aura locations in the world. If it was that easy, everyone would have done it.
But she still found herself somehow believing it was possible here, now. Why not? She was a peak Underlady, and she was even acclimated to Overlord-level madra and soulfire thanks to her Book. Now that they’d prepared the environment, the only thing missing was her own revelation.
With a deep breath, Mercy slid down the slope and into the trench.
Facing the black-and-white image of her mother.
Malice spotted Mercy, and Mercy’s heart caught. Malice pulled her own bow—identical to Mercy’s—back, and Forged an arrow on it. Mercy did the same.
As they faced one another, dream aura drifted over from one of the natural treasures. It twisted and reacted to the hunger madra, guided by this place.
And Mercy felt something. A taste of her mother’s memories.
Malice was down here, in the labyrinth, because no one had fully explored it before. This was going to be fuel for her rise to Monarch.
And she would not allow anyone to get in her way.
Both Malice and Mercy released their arrows. Mercy’s passed through Malice as though the woman was made of mist, then embedded itself in the wall at the end of the trench. Malice’s struck Mercy and dissipated.
Even that image called up another instinctive half-memory. Malice was more of an archer than Mercy was. Not just a better archer. More of one.
Another memory surfaced, still not Mercy’s, but one she’d seen before in a dream tablet she’d won from the Uncrowned King tournament.
Larian, the famous archer of the Eight-Man Empire, demonstrated her form as she drew back her bow. Her voice had explained what she was doing.
“A launcher construct is by far more efficient than a stick with an elastic string. So why do sacred artists use bows?”
She released an arrow, and it streaked through the air, detonating a mountain-sized tree in the distance. The explosion from the arrow filled the sky with dust and debris.
“A woman with a bow taps into the power of all who have used bows, of what it means to wield a bow,” she continued. “You are not just an archer. You are a fragment of The Archer, the single template of all archery. The bow is one of the deepest symbols of all.”
There was a trace of that concept in her mother’s archery. The Bow Icon, The Archer, whatever you wanted to call it.
Mercy had meditated on this concept before. She had even asked her mother to demonstrate, and viewed the dream tablets that she could handle. But somehow, watching it here and now—a version of her mother who hadn’t perfected her connection to an Icon yet—caused realization to slide into place.
And slowly, subconsciously, Mercy began to adjust her stance in ways she couldn’t even name.
Ziel looked down on the trench. “We don’t have time for this.”
“In fact, we do,” Eithan said casually. “Subject One has closed the way forward for the moment, but he has to fight the nature of the labyrinth to hold it. We must wait for his grip to relax, so we might as well put the time to good use.”
“You don’t seem worried about the lost time.”
“Do you think worrying would help?” Eithan nodded to Mercy. “Besides, if we walk out of here with another young Overlady, I will consider that a substantial gain.”