It took an embarrassingly long moment for me to figure out why I wasn’t dead. I spent at least the first five seconds in a weird state between shock and wonder, my dark eyes greedily taking in the fatal beauty of the space around me. It was truly a scene unlike anything I’d ever witnessed before, and the grand scale of it dumbfounded me. To one side was sprawled out the expansive canvas of inky space, finely dusted with twinkling dots of white. And on the other side was a massive planet, covered in massive swathes of green and blue, with occasional patches of golden that I assumed were deserts. There was a sheen of whitish blue over the entire thing, more noticeable where the planet curved away from my sight, which I guessed to be the atmosphere of the planet.
This is probably what astronauts felt like, looking at Earth from so far up, I thought to myself. And then, with a jolt, I realized that I was thinking, when I should have been dead, not gazing in awe at the sights before me. My body should have been utterly destroyed within seconds of being exposed to space, killed in the million different ways that space could kill the human body.
And that was when I finally noticed the slight shimmer in the space just in front of me. Having been caught up in the beauty of my surroundings, I hadn’t noticed it before, but now that I did, it was easy to see. I did a twirl in space – only then realizing, to my great embarrassment, that I had been weightless since I left the ship – and saw that the strange shimmer was all around me, like a bubble I was inside.
Stretching a tentative hand outward, I brushed my fingers softly against the strange substance. It was hard, extremely so, and incredibly smooth. It didn’t budge in the least, no matter how much force I put on it. Turning my body in a full, vertical circle, I traced the bubble the entire way around. As I did, I spotted Ren, who floated only a few meters away from me, doing exactly the same thing as me.
He quickly noticed me watching and cast over an amused, half-questioning smile. I had no answer for him, so all I could respond with was a laugh. And once the laugh started, it just didn’t stop. The laughter poured out of me like water out of a broken dam, filling my little bubble with the happy – bordering on insane – sound.
Ren soon followed suit, and the both of us were left in fits of laughter for the next few minutes. I couldn’t hear Ren, and I was sure he couldn’t hear me, but it only served to make the strange circumstance even funnier. I couldn’t help but think again of how quickly life had gotten so weird. Only a few months ago, life was entirely normal. I was getting ready to make my first step into the real world. I was nervous, excited, and, most of all, just happy. And now, here I lay, floating in a strange bubble in the middle of space.
Then, suddenly, before the laughter had even subsided, I felt a strong pull tug at me from the side, slamming me into the side of the bubble. Ren felt the same thing, and very quickly, I felt our bubbles begin to pick up speed.
Fighting against the force that held me to the bottom of the bubble, I picked my head up and looked downward, trying to see where we were headed.
The last vestiges of the laughter still curved the corners of my lips upward as I stared at the planet, Argonis, getting larger and larger in my vision.
My mind quickly connected that we had been caught in the gravitational force of the planet, which meant that we were about to crash land on the planet, with only the safety of a strange bubble protecting our lives.
Still, the grin on my face was unfazed, and as I looked over to Ren, I saw that his wasn’t either. He was right, I thought to myself. Life is just funner this way.
But the grin on my face did not mean that I had given up, however. I wouldn’t disgrace myself by accepting death so easily. Crash landing onto a planet was one hell of a way to go out, so I didn’t have any problem with dying, but there was no way I was just going to sit by and accept it.
The bubble around me was made of Flux, I could tell, and I quickly decided on my plan. With a set face, I placed both my palms on the surface of the bubble and channelled my Flux through my body. Focusing it in my hands, I pushed the stream of power out and into the barrier.
My plan worked, and the bubble greedily drank up all the Flux I fed it. By now, the bubbles – both Ren's and mine – were racing downward at incredible speeds, and sparks had already begun forming at their edges.
Setting my mind to full throttle, I forced my focus to split into two parts. One kept the steady flow of Flux from my body into the bubble, and the other began to circulate whatever power could be spared throughout the rest of my body, actively strengthening my bones and muscles. No matter how hard the bubble was, the landing was not going to be a soft one, and I needed my body to be in its strongest state if I wanted a chance at surviving it.
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Then, with a violent tremble, the front of the bubble suddenly burst into flames as the friction with the atmosphere heated its surface.
An idea suddenly sparked in my mind as I watched the flames flare up. The flames had to be fueled by Flux – there was nothing else for them to use aside from the bubble, and it was made of Flux. And if it was fueled by Flux, then I would be able to use it for myself, if I could get enough of my own Flux into it.
Furrowing my brow in concentration, I pressed my palms harder against the bubble, trying to force my Flux out with more pressure to get it past the barrier and into the fire. I could sense the barrier getting thinner as the fire ate away at it, but that only served to make it easier for me to get my Flux into the fire.
I could feel the reserves of the power in my Flux Core depleting as I forced more and more of the Flux through the barrier and into the fire. I was straining my body, I knew, but it was necessary. Trying to make the bubble strong enough to survive the landing while the fire was constantly eating away at it would be impossible. More so than what I was trying to do, anyway.
It took an excruciatingly long minute, but eventually, I began to sense the fire in a very similar way that I could sense my own fire. With my reserves running out fast, I immediately began the next, and more improbable, phase of my plan.
The entire principle was based on one haphazard theory I’d only come up with seconds ago. My reasoning was simple: if, according to Leonard, my body was able to convert Flux into fire automatically, then it wouldn’t be impossible to do the reverse. Which meant that I could potentially convert the fire that was eating away at my bubble into my own Flux, and then feed it back into the bubble.
It was a foolproof, absolutely ingenious plan; I was sure of it.
With a nervous breath, I suddenly reversed the flow of the Flux from my palms, pulling it in instead of pushing out. And, unbelievably, the Flux obeyed. The warm power flooded my arms, and I could feel it travelling through my body, spreading its warmth. It was a feeling akin to drinking warm tea, but starting at my palms instead of my throat. With a wild grin, I continued to greedily suck up the Flux from the fire, through the bubble.
As I did, the bubble finally exited on the other side of the atmosphere with another violent shake. Below me spread out a vast ground of rolling clouds, white as paper. Like a meadow in the sky, the undulating hills of the clouds stretched out in every direction I could see, making for an awe-inspiring sight.
The ride suddenly became much smoother as the turbulent friction ceased, but the fire continued to rage on the surface of my bubble, eating away at it.
With a newfound urgency, I started pulling the Flux harder as I tried to put the fire out. Wispy white clouds zipped past me as I struggled, the misty water helping with my efforts. The fire had already lost its vibrancy and its ferocity, but it burned on with a stubbornness that only a fire could embody.
The thick layer of clouds eventually pulled away to reveal the actual ground far, far below. For the first time, I got a proper sense of how high I was. I’d never in my life seen a planet from this angle, and the sight was as terrifying as it was exhilarating.
To one side stretched a lush green landscape, with tall emerald trees growing like grass as far as the eye could see. The ground wasn’t flat, but it wasn’t mountainous either; falling somewhere directly in the middle. It rose and fell drastically, but never climbed high enough to break out of the clutch of vegetation.
To the other side stretched out a massive ocean, spreading out far into the horizon. The colour faded to a dark blue the further out I looked, but closer to the place directly under me, it became a much more pleasant, lighter shade.
And directly under me was a thin slice of dusty yellow, drawing a long divide between the forest and the ocean.
And as far as I could tell, that was exactly where I was headed.
As much as I wanted to prove to myself that death didn’t scare me, and that I was at peace with the prospect of dying by crashing onto a planet, I would be lying if I said that my breath didn’t quicken as I neared the ground. My chest tightened as true fear tightened its fingers around my heart.
Still, I didn’t let the fear make me helpless, despite the ten-ton weight that now seemed to rest on my body. With one more grunt, I sucked in the last of the Flux from the flames, leaving the wind to put out the dying remnants.
Power brimmed within my body, ready to be unleashed, to feed the bubble. But I didn’t. Instead, I kept pulling, bringing the Flux of the barrier into my body.
Potent Flux poured into my body, filling my Flux veins up until they threatened to burst. It was painful, in a soulful way words couldn’t describe, but I kept going, greedily taking more and more in.
The bubble closed in on the beach at breakneck speed. I watched with determined, almost wet eyes as the beach expanded in my vision, getting closer and closer.
Then, just at the last second before the bubble made impact, I pushed myself upward. With a herculean effort, I lifted my body off of the bottom of the bubble, throwing myself to the top just as the bottom exploded under the force of the impact. The sound of glass shattering was loud, jarring, and everything happened so quickly that I barely had a moment to process anything.
The last thought I had was the fleeting image of Ocean’s face, her kind eyes watching me with glowing pride.
And then everything went black.