Carmine (Completed)

Chapter 36

The many ways to kill were not something that would be considered when you were safe. It was only when you were on edge that you looked around and saw the many shadows.

"Is that it?" I asked.

"Yes, my lady. These were the earlier bodies they were made just before the war," Janilla answered.

Vapbon was quite plentiful in the soils of this world, but it was not something mined outside of Elam. Five found and bought raw iron as it usually had vapbon as an impurity.

He got it melted by a blacksmith and made thin strips that he used along the doors, windows, and walls. This should deter spatial effects, but not completely block them.

I could also use my knife to slice through the wall if it is thin enough.

Janilla got us musothin. Commonly used as a defense against witches. It is hard to get. Having it when you were not a priest or a member of a clergy was enough to get you hanged.

Janilla had to go to a dark part of the city to get it and hide it least the guards of the keep found it on her. I heard so many stories of how it was magical. In reality, Five instructed us, it just depowered the glyphs on a Elam's body.

Each Elamnite body was endowed with a tattoo made of olongoy. It was a living thing, a virus they called it. That was deadly when in a normal Shyia body.

Five showed me his.

On his right wrist, he could wake it from its slumber and make it raise, forming on his wrist. It went up halfway his arm and was intricate with swirls and lines, all culminating into a triangular base. Like a volatile flower, it gleamed.

Janilla said the beginnings of the body augmentation had those living tattoos present and in full display. So it was not a myth, we did use tattoos to show us who were the witches among us.

In time they adopted to hiding it in usually covered places such as between the legs and under the feet. Now they made a strain of the virus that could hide directly under the skin.

That was why they never found any on Valor. They hid it at will.

This virus fostered under the skin like a powerful living thing. It processed the complex coding etched inside to wield those abilities.

Janilla said it was a mutual exchange. A vicious virus that needed flesh to eat off on, essentially Five's body, and with that, it afforded Five the processing muscle to use those abilities.

As Janilla told me, Elam bodies had physical advantages over a normal Shyia body. Increased strength, speed, sense of hearing, smell, pain, magnetism, pressure, and so on, all could be altered beforehand.

Arcane were strictly the abilities that fell under the manipulation of arcane energy. It was the energy that surrounded us all the time.

The research behind it was young. All they knew was that it was an important energy force of the universe, like gravity, heat. It was related to time in many descriptions.

Through olongoys, it can be drawn upon to create effects unique to it. Warping, bounding, ward, spear, nucus, construct, among other abilities were possible through the olongoy etched tattoo.

All this power was in the hands of Elam. No wonder they thought themselves Gods. Yet, I knew better. They just had all the resources and knowledge for themselves.

If we had this knowledge, we would not be their pets or servants as they considered us.

I clutched my fist with fury. Everyone knew about this, protected them, turned their eyes from the truth.