Daniel

They opened a nodal portal and paused, watching Cassie as her radar ears took twice her average scanning time.

“We’re at the edge,” she said.

“Bubbles, Cass?” Kenta asked with repressed impatience. The bat girl nodded.

The seven of them crossed a quiet world of shady forests and still grottos as if trespassing. Paul led them to its Terminal, where they took extra care with now-routine measures. They checked with Signpost for recent traffic and Listened at the open World Gate until they’d exhausted all excuses.

All their progress until today had been crossing a peaceful meadow before stepping into the dark woods.

Now, they entered the Wilderness.

Gravel covered this world interspersed with tufts of grass and stunted bushes. Three World Gates surrounded them. Though his eyes saw nothing above, Daniel’s Second Sight detected the blue aura of an invisible dome in the sky. The barrier’s edge separated the gate they’d come through from the other two, dividing the Terminal.

“The nodes are silent,” Cassie confirmed.

“And one path in,” Paul added, pointing down an old, ragged trail bordered by more invisible barriers with blue auras. This tunnel even extended dozens of meters below ground.

As he looked around, Daniel had a strange feeling, “Does this seem familiar to anyone else?”

Lea answered, “It’s the way we came three years ago.” The group took a somber moment and eyed the road ahead with trepidation.

“Guys, I know we’re psyched to find the T.O. and everything,” Cassie tried to keep her voice steady through a slight quavering, “But we don’t have to do this. We can wait outside for them to come out. They’ll have to… eventually. With Paul, skirting around the edges will be a piece of cake.”

Kenta didn’t get angry; he just said, “Done talking,” and departed in a whirl of black hair.

The bat girl flapped ahead of him as the others hurried to keep pace, “At least let me go first. I’ll Listen for trouble.”

Over the past month and a half, Daniel learned as much as he could about this strange universe. He knew these barriers interrupted nodal connections between worlds because Portal Rings couldn’t connect nodes divided by magic.

What bothered him was, “Why limit nodal traffic?” he’d asked Rana last week.

“Well, ignoring a lot of ancient history,” Rana had told him, “The Second Great War rolled around with everybody fighting. They knew how to make Cintamani project a barrier, red to keep things out and blue to keep things in.

“They erected massive barriers to protect whole planets like a castle. This stopped invaders coming through, except at the Terminals. That’s your castle gate, where you focus your defenses.

“Then some genius figured out the key—when two barriers overlap, instead of repelling each other, they merge.”

He’d intuited the outcome. “Like bubbles.”

“Exactly. They had Taotie Scribes making small barriers to stop travel by node in a zone, connected zones to make tunnels, then connected tunnels to create mazes. So, when an army comes through, you stall them with dead ends and hold them at choke points while you send for reinforcements. It made interplanetary territories defensible, but everyone was doing it.

“Ninety-nine mazes expanded into each other, engulfing the galaxy… except a few boring pockets—like Eastwood’s neighborhood—and rare, isolated worlds. City road designers tried to make sense of it, but a full map is impossible. Only the Terminal knows how Taotie Scribes with contradictory blueprints overwrite each other moment to moment. Crossing the Wilderness, you can expect your path to double back, corkscrew, bottleneck, zigzag, and tie itself in a knot before circling in.”

Daniel had begun to fathom the situation, “So it’s the lack of maneuverability within the roads that makes the Wilderness so dangerous?”

“No. That would be the demons, monsters, beasts, revenants, rōnin Taotie, Wildlings, City mages, and racial factions. Lack of an easy-out just makes things worse.”

“Okay, but what’s a Wildling?”

“Daniel, we’re Wildlings.”

“Oh.”

They made steady progress. Ahead, at the center of the blue dome, hovered a collection of basketball-sized glassy globes. Each contained a complex mosaic of Letters visible at their core. One glowed blue, akin to the dome above. Its siblings thrummed a soft red matching the translucent barrier encasing them.

He’d heard these magical shields were force walls, like one-way glass. The incredible power it radiated reminded Daniel of UE 000, seeming invincible, though different in nature. Apart from their size, the orbs were indistinguishable from the heart of a Taotie guardian. Wendi brought him within reach of the spherical red shield at his request.

“Tell me he’s not,” Kenta said.

“It should be fine…” Cassie reassured. “Probably.”

The bat girl’s words must have been enough for Lea and Rana because no one stopped him. Daniel brushed the barrier with his fingers.

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A dozen red orbs hummed and glowed in unison.

His magic taxed the barrier, but the globes fueled and repaired it with their combined power. Daniel might overcome such opposition; however, his heart wasn’t in the task. He couldn’t tap into whatever lurked beyond the depth of his well without a purpose. The Ruin magic sapped his energy, and he withdrew before getting lethargic. Also, he didn’t want to activate any secondary defenses.

The others, besides Wendi, heaved sighs of relief. Then they held their breaths again as Daniel directed Wendi to the blue barrier.

He touched the membrane enclosing the tunnel, and his consciousness expanded. As the red spheres shared defenses, the single blue orb wasn’t alone either. This dome merged with its neighbor at the edge, that barrier with the next, and so on. He’d be fighting all the blue orbs in the chain simultaneously to breach this wall.

Daniel removed his hand and rendered a verdict, “I might be able to break through in an emergency. That said, I’m worried the red orbs will become Taotie Guardians and attack if I make an attempt. Even if I succeed, I’d be totally exhausted.”

Or he might get so much power from destroying the structure he couldn’t control it and explode. Hard to say.

Their path continued.

As the dome slanted down, the barrier stopped twelve feet above the road in an arch leading into another chamber. Daniel saw firsthand how the overlap between the spheres determined the height of the bottleneck.

What impressed him, though, were the numbers. The sheer industry. Taotie Scribes in the Terminals manufactured these orbs as they did Taotie guardians, stringing hundreds of bubbles together. Trails might connect opposite corners of the planet, leaving a single node open at the end of the path. Multiply this across the stars for an astronomical enterprise.

The children walked through the grand bubble hallways for hours. The barrier orbs themselves varied in size from four inches tall to dozens of meters, set close or spaced wide throughout the path. Their trail forked twice before landing them in a massive, multifaceted chamber.

Here gravel had melted into liquid sheets that ran downhill and solidified. Daniel recalled that battle with the demon three years ago. He knew the aftermath of Fire magic.

As they traversed lumpy solid waves, Daniel noticed unnatural rock formations. Pillars of stone, their sharp edges untouched by erosion, littered the arena. There were pools of water, pockmarks of explosions, and the skeletal remains of creatures larger than elephants.

Daniel’s eye caught on the ice. A dead mist coiled lazily around jagged crystalline teeth. An explosion of icicles, their expansion frozen in time, dominated a corner. The translucent daggers’ cold aura bled energy from the air.

The scene imparted a visceral feeling of violence.

“Mage battle,” Lea said, then turned to Rana. “Who were they fighting?”

The frog girl ran a finger along a scratch mark in the rock. “Not sure. The beast could’ve been their pet. But, whatever they fought, the mages won.”

“Should we be concerned?” Lea asked.

Rana shook her head. “It’s weeks old.”

The ice hasn’t melted, Daniel thought. Instead, the magical ice had grown a prickly layer of natural rime from super-cooled humidity.

Wendi wandered over to the ice with Daniel in tow and touched it with her free hand. She shivered but didn’t jerk back, continuing to feel its surface with intense curiosity. Likewise, Daniel wanted to try his destructive intuition. The cold shocked him as he placed a hand near hers. He’d plunged his hand into the void, where heat went to die.

This was the sixth Element, Ice.

Not frozen water; this would never melt. It had no internal structure. No molecules. Weight without mass. Solidified absence. It felt anathema to him. His magic destroyed things.

This was nothing.

Over time, energy absorbed from the sun above and the ground below gradually filled this emptiness. It visibly shrank as it drank power through contact while Daniel’s defensive ability protected his skin from frostbite.

He dug in his fingers, and the Ice crumbled like dry clay. Daniel could blast the Ice apart with a fist of Ruin if needed. Still, if Daniel fought an opponent wielding this Element, he felt it’d be an uphill battle of attrition.

With nothing else to gain, they moved on. A strange animal grazed further along the road.

“A riding beast,” Rana said. The creature resembled a cross between an ostrich and a duck, but sturdier. “Sometimes, when mages fight, their Glyph beasts escape during battle. Some survive off the land for years.”

No one considered the creature a threat as it nibbled on a tuft of grass not three feet away. Daniel noticed something odd; it stood on the wrong side of the glass. The barrier allowed them to watch it like a zoo animal.

“Aww, cute,” Wendi cooed.

It did look sort of stupidly adorable, if ugly—in the way of cows.

“How’d the bird get out?” he mused.

“It’ll be ahead,” Rana predicted.

Sure enough, half an hour later, Daniel saw a purple pimple on the face of a bubble. A small red orb the size of a fist hovered in line with the larger blue dome’s wall. While blue bubbles merged with blue and red with red, they overlapped in purple like a logic diagram when red and blue touched.

This fusion created a barrier that repelled inside and out but merely with the strength of the weaker bubble. Thus, the fragile result of the tiny red orb’s intrusion served as a four-foot radius artificial weak point.

A whistle sounded behind them. The group turned to see an eight-legged, anteater-faced lizard with a glowing orb embedded in its back. The creature shrilled as it walked, ignoring them as it waddled along.

“What is it?” Daniel wondered.

“A barrier runner,” Rana said. “A beast-servant created by the barrier orb for transport to its programmed destination.”

“Can we follow it?” Wendi asked, fascinated.

“And should we stop it?” Lea stated the problem.

Without magical guidance, they couldn’t know if the barrier runner would open a path or turn their road into a dead-end. They could either proceed the way they’d been going and follow the barrier runner or be side-tracked with the purple door bubble.

“Which way, Paul?” Kenta asked.

The candle boy concentrated, then pointed at the purple gate, “More dangerous, and slower,” then at the way they had been going, “Safer and faster.”

That put the others at ease, barring one.

“Let me stick my head through to Hear what’s outside,” Cassie said and flew over.

The red orb didn’t attempt to stop her as she approached. Then she folded her wings and dove through the purple film. The soap bubble surface burst at her touch. Though fragile, the tear mended itself with a ripple like water. Her time in the purple airlock lasted an instant.

Cassie burst into the foreign world, unfurled her wings, made a short loop in the sky, and ducked back inside with the purple screen tearing and mending behind her.

“Nothing headed our way… at least, nothing that could fit inside the bubble hall. I Hear a working node in case of retreat, and there’s a rock to hide behind. Let’s stay out there a few minutes.”

He found the effect of Cassie’s suggestion on the others remarkable. Calm, without objection, everyone followed instructions.

Then, after an idle second in the lee of the stone, Daniel asked, “Were we actually in danger? Didn’t we say the other way was safer?”

Paul bowed his head. “I didn’t check behind us.”

The prescient bat girl reassured them both, tranquil, “No, we’re fine here. Just… be quiet, and it won’t notice us.” Then, as promised, she soon said, “Okay, we’re good to go.”

Leaving cover, they found no tracks or evidence of passage. “Let me double-check, really quick,” the bat girl said and stuck her head through the airlock, “Yep, it’s gone.”

Cassie didn’t say what they’d avoided or how long she’d known about it. Not far away, they found the eight-legged barrier runner squished to a pulp.

No one commented.

The holes in Paul’s ability fascinated Daniel, not to mention how easily Cassie covered the flaw. Thankfully, the seven of them compensated for each other’s weaknesses. With this in mind, Daniel grew hopeful of their chances despite Rana’s warning. What could possibly catch them?