Chapter 49: Stairway to Heaven
I’d spent a perhaps unhealthy amount of time thinking about Lena’s wings. Can you blame me? Consider all the Third Eye phenomena I’d encountered. What was more visually spectacular than a twelve foot wingspan where each feather was a lick of flame?
And yeah, the fact they emerged directly from her back, rather than being part of her avatar’s costume, didn’t hurt. The first night where I’d gotten the chance to confirm as much was not going to leave my memory anytime soon.
I had not, however, ever thought of them as functional wings.
They beat in irritation, stretched languidly when Lena did, shuddered when I tickled her, folded in to enclose her and those lucky enough to be welcomed under their canopy.
Actually flying, though? That had seemed absurd before we realized Third Eye had real-world effects, and had never come up since.
Yet there Lena hovered, not atop the Rueter-Hess Incline but in the sky above it, her wings beating, her flames twisting as the stiff wind curled around her. Her hand was raised in front of her face and I knew it was to hold her phone up, but in that moment it almost looked like she was giving a blessing.
It struck me as strange that I’d never thought of her as looking like an angel. A winged humanoid figure, that was the pop-culture version, right? With her curly hair and round cheeks, backed by a pair of wings, she might’ve seemed cherubic. Even the flames sort of fit, more on the biblically accurate side. And angel was a term of endearment people used sometimes, wasn’t it? “She’s my angel?”
I just couldn’t get it to fit in my head. Maybe because her outfit split the difference between pillars of flame and wheels of eyes on the one hand, and cupids and St. Michaels on the other. Maybe because her expression usually trended toward the impish rather than the angelic.
Either way, in that moment, she descended from the heavens.
Her eyes widened, her wings beat, and she stepped down toward the level I’d stopped at.
Stepped down.
Not flew down.
I wrenched my gaze away from her to my own feet. Which were also suspended above the ground. Also, clad in sturdy, fur-lined leather boots, into which were tucked loose blue trousers. The cloak whipping around them in the wind was a paler blue, streaked with wisps of white cloud that almost seemed to move across it as it billowed in the shifting air currents. Above them hung my amulet, silver and set with an aqua-colored gemstone.
My eyes adjusted and I saw we weren’t standing on thin air, but on steps that carried on from the ones below. How many were there supposed to have been? A hundred? Hundred and twenty? We’d simply ascended a few more tiers of the Incline than actually existed.
The wind grew so strong I thought it might legit lift me off even these new steps.
I looked up at Lena and saw she really was rising from the ground. Her wings battered the air, not so much to carry her aloft as to try to force her down, and the flames of her dress flickered so much I thought they might go out.
Then I blinked, and her dress was gone and so were her wings, replaced by striped stockings and a denim skirt and a familiar pink jacket.
The wind was gone, too.
So were the steps we’d been ascending.
I tumbled onto my ass and Lena landed in front of me on her hands and knees.
“Ow, fuck,” she cried.
I dragged myself to her side.
“I’m fine.” She held up her hands. Bits of gravel and loose dirt fell from her palms, but I didn’t see that they’d left any bruises or scratches. Of course not. How high had she been? Eight feet off the ground? Maybe ten? Third Eye would protect her from far worse, as it had me.
She picked up her phone. She sucked air through her teeth.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “How much did you lose?”
“HP?” She shook her head. “Just twenty, that’s no big deal. Look at my phone, though.”
She turned it so I could see. It must’ve hit a rock when she landed, because a spiderweb of cracks spread from one corner. Third Eye’s interface, ill-suited to a phone screen at the best of times, looked borderline unreadable.
“That sucks,” I said. “It still works okay, right?”
“Not for scouting. I can hardly see the screen.” She ran her thumb over it. She hissed, which Bernie echoed a second later. “The crack feels pretty sharp, too. I think I’m gonna lose HP just trying to use this thing.”
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I patted her shoulder. “We better get enough subscribers for you to replace it.”
She nodded.
Abruptly, she sat up straight on the dirt. “Oh shit! What happened back there, It must’ve been...”
My eyes widened. “Can you check your Reactants?”
“It’d take more than a busted screen to stop me.” She jabbed at the cracked phone, then pumped her fist. “Hell yes.”
I hauled myself to my feet and scurried around to peek over her shoulder. When I saw her screen, or, more accurately, when I squinted to make out what was beneath the cracks, I clapped my hand on said shoulder.
Alongside her familiar three Fire, Lena had acquired two units of Air.
We bumped fists, then we hugged, then we kissed.
Lena couldn’t stop squirming. “Back up. I’ve gotta try it out!”
“Of course!” I stepped away, arms outstretched. “If you need any tips –”
“Nah.” She stuck her tongue out. “I watched this great tutorial video.”
Once we separated and I got the chance to pay attention to our surroundings, I realized we’d overshot the high point of the Incline. Technically, we were in the brush where people weren’t supposed to be, and snakes were.
How many more steps had we taken than actually existed? I supposed it didn’t matter anymore, but I did wonder why Lena had only acquired Air, not some Earth to account for the extra tiers we’d climbed. I supposed those were wrapped up in the special effects of the Reactant, rather than being objects we could acquire in their own right.
I pushed speculation aside to watch Lena try out her Air.
She made a half turn, tapped carefully on her cracked phone screen, and conjured a slab of Stone. Courtesy of the mounds we’d been collecting all morning, that had shot past Wood to become our most common Material.
She swept the Stone back and forth. Nothing fancy or particularly fast, certainly nothing on the level I’d learned to operate at, much less what Albie could do.
Still, it brought a huge smile to Lena’s face. “I don’t know how you stop yourself from doing this all the time. Having such precise control is super fun.”
“It’s the best,” I said. “I just don’t want to waste my MP when I don’t have a practice plan in place.”
She tried pushing the Stone further away, then yanked it back to herself so fast it actually ended up smacking into her outstretched arm. She laughed. “Oops.”
“Is that one Air or two?” I asked.
“Just one for now,” she said. “I want to get a feel for it before I double up.”
I flashed a thumbs up.
“Actually,” she said, “c’mere. Could you show me the gesture you use to get rotation?”
“Sure.” I stepped around her, balancing on the slope. One of my arms encircled her waist. She settled back against me as best Bernie’s sling allowed. He made a happy meep and, judging from the feel of wetness against my face, licked me.
All in all, a very nice way to practice. Easy to get distracted, though. I forced myself to concentrate.
My other arm extended around Lena’s shoulder. She stretched her hand out, mimicking the motion. My fingers curled and twisted; I didn’t normally pay conscious attention to my Third Eye gestures, at least when I wasn’t filming them, but this time, I curved my hand precisely and deliberately.
Lena mimicked that, too, and though I couldn’t see the results directly with the hand holding my phone down around her waist, happy squeaks from her and Bernie alike told me I’d shown her exactly the move she wanted to learn.
We tried a couple of my other favorite one-handed moves. I walked her through a wide corkscrew loop I’d tried when I was playing catch with Albie, through the sudden, curling fastball motion I’d actually won the occasional point with in that game, and finally, something more practical: the tight, chopping motions I used to deflect attacks.
“Oh,” Lena said. “It’s more of a parry than a block, huh?”
We repeated the motion in unison and I paid extra attention to the speed of it. “I guess so. I’ve never thought of it that way.”
“The Earth users go for more of a shield,” Lena said, “and that’s what I’ve tried to approximate. This is way more my style, though.”
I frowned. “As long as we don’t mess up the parry timing.”
“You hardly ever have,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to get nervous about it just because I pointed out what it is?”
“I can parry just fine,” I lied.
She knew it, because she knew my track record in games where it was the most effective defense. I usually stopped trying and spammed dodge roll instead.
“You can,” she said. “More than fine. You’ve been owning at it this whole time.”
“If I was really owning at it, neither Mask nor the creature would’ve hit us.”
Her body tensed. “If you weren’t, they would’ve kept hitting us until we dropped.”
“Thankfully, that won’t be the case anymore,” I said. Not gonna lie, as much as I preferred intellectually if Lena could protect herself, and even me, I felt a pang of regret. We’d started to develop beautiful synergy with me tanking and her providing the DPS.
“Are you kidding?” She wriggled around to face me. “Get real, Cam. You can’t actually think that I got access to an amazing, flexible, high-speed power, and I’m going to practice using it for something as boring as tanking?”
I laughed. “I hope you practice at least a little defense, because unless there’s a doubles format at the tournament, and also you find somebody with more than 10 Max HP to double with, you’re going to be fighting solo.”
She turned her nose up. “The best defense is a good offense.”
“The second best defense,” I said, “is an actual defense.”
“Sounds like defeatist talk to me.” She gave me a quick kiss on the chest, but danced backwards before I could press my lips to the top of her head.
I think my attempt to do so must’ve left me in a pretty funny-looking position, because instead of engaging in any non-defeatist talk, she tried and failed to stifle a laugh.
We stood there grinning at each other for a moment.
Before we could get back to work, I noticed a shadow.
My eyes shot to the top of the Incline. With the sun almost directly overhead, that put it right in my eyes, just slightly behind the tall figure silhouetted above us.