Chapter 101: The Second Most Important Boundary
Two days has passed since Nara’s and Aliyah’s abduction by an interdimensional peace coalition with the singular goal of incorporating every civilization into its protective but non optional fold. They spent their days the same as usual: perusing the library, attending the screenings in the auditorium, discussing the situation, and even sparring in the outside field.
Some of the captured iron and normal rank researchers found an outlet for their frustrations in sparring, and Nara, Aliyah, and the other adventurer, Amas, were happy to oblige.
Most had never sparred before in their life. They were bookworms, through and through. Ironically, the normal rankers may have exercised more than the iron rankers, since essence users couldn’t get fat. Iron rankers didn’t have a strength advantage over a normal ranker who worked out. Strength increased with small ranks, with Iron 9 reaching Olympian levels. A normal rank body builder would easily surpass what Nara or Aliyah could output. At bronze rank, the scales tipped from human to superhuman.
As usual, Ceram leaned against a wall watching Nara, but had mostly left her alone these past few days. He occasionally approached and flirted, and Nara made basic polite conversation from him, pulling whatever information form him she could. He didn’t touch her inappropriately again, nor threaten injury to Aliyah. That would be good enough for now. There wasn’t much Nara could do about it anyway. If Lina’s complaint to Hellis had worked, she was grateful for it.
Ceram occasionally hopped into spar, facing off against the bronze rank adventurer in their midst. She was relieved to see that the bronze ranker on their side was the superior fighter. Not that it mattered much; abilities made all the difference.
Aram claimed victory, but the sparring field was tense. Ceram got up, casually brushing away the dirt on his pants after he had been knocked to the ground.
“Good match, good match,” He genially said, “You lot are good fighters. As expected of savages.”
Aram’s brows knit together, but he didn’t say anything.
“You’ve built your society on ‘might makes right’. The stronger lording over the weaker. It’d be insulting if I won. What would that say?”
He pat Aram cooly on his shoulder, and stalked away from the field back inside the facility.
“…He’s pissed,” Nara said.
“Yeah, he’s pissed,” Aliyah agreed.
“He wanted to show off to the girl he’s crushing on and has his ass handed back to him on a shiny, shit-stained silver platter,” Jiro said, “Of course he’s pissed.”
“So?” Nara asked, changing the subject, “Do you know if any location in the facility is closest to being outside?”
Jiro specialized in magic and research for construction and architecture, especially relating to the strength and stability of large structures. Since Erras’ science lagged, they made up for it with reinforcement magic, or as the elves did with their cities, building their structures in a combination of living wood, stone, and metal.
Jiro unrolled a layout of the building he had hand drawn.
“By my estimations, the greatest chance of any place adjacent to the outside is here—” he gestured to two locations without verbalizing it, “—and here.”
“Just those two?”
He nodded, and quickly rolled up his map.
Erras didn’t have a sign language since everyone who was deaf had their deafness fixed. If there were a few people born entirely deaf with no cognitive function able to process sound, there wasn’t enough people around to develop a language for it, and there were other magical methods for them to communicate.
Nara swore to learn sign language when she returned to Earth, then make everyone in the party learn it too. Sen wouldn’t be able to refuse; she knew what to say.
The captives could only assume every word was being listened to. That make communicating a plan incredibly difficult. Some attempted to construct a non-verbal plan and used their bodies to shield what they worked on from any observation; they could only hope that was enough. Nara developed her own internal plan that she told no one.
Nara had always felt the suppressive force of a suppression collar was semi-physical, like air pressure. It was a weight she could feel, and if she could feel it, it was malleable. While sparring back at the academy, she had felt that the suppression collar wasn’t absolute, but she didn’t have much reason to push that instinct when she had a plethora of other more important skills to develop. Here, she had the time and the motivation.
Nara suspected her increased aura strength from both the gods and her astral torture had boosted her aura to a strength the typical iron rank suppression collar could no longer indefinitely suppress. She was still angry at the gods, but their ‘gift’ would prove useful now.
There were almost no advantages to having her aura and abilities suppressed, but that didn’t mean there were none. Aura retraction was a lesser and self-imposed version of aura suppression, useful for stealth. As it was, all of the captives were as stealthy as they could be. Their auras were undetectable as they were completely suppressed. Their captors had to rely on physical senses and the capabilities of their facility to track them.
With suppressed auras, their emotions and auras themselves were unreadable. Nara had discovered this early on when she sparred with others. She couldn’t read what she couldn’t see, like a book once open slammed shut.
While the captives had no physical privacy, their emotions were their own.
*****
Nara had to be very careful about practicing to lift the suppression of the collar. She never had a normal aura, so she hadn’t realized there was a difference between herself and other people for a long time. She had been underutilizing it’s capabilities, which was true of a lot of Nara’s racial abilities too. She just hadn’t had the time to experiment while playing catch up. It had been better to focus on combat capabilities anyways. In 9 out of 10 situations, being the better fighter would keep her alive.
This was that outlier, 1 out of 10.
Torture to her soul had refined her ability to manipulate and shape it, along with whatever she had done to her soul itself to escape. She could direct its spiritual power more than other people could. This was the sort of quality aberrant researchers sought with soul experimentation, and outlawed for good reason. On top of that, the gods had reforged her soul for her. She was annoyed that her initial vehemence with the gods was slowly fading with circumstance.
She was careful—she needed to practice lifting the suppression without actually accomplishing it. The moment she did, her aura would be detected, and it would be clear she had slipped it. Moreover, no matter how powerful she was, she wasn’t likely to hold the suppression off for long. To assume that pushing it off once was enough to destroy it completely was folly. She wouldn’t act as Icarus in this play. Her plan was one built on moments.
She had two plans—one for if Phase Shift could shrug off the collar entirely, and one if it could not. She hoped for the former, but bet on the latter. If suppression collars could be shaken with an errant teleportation or dimension effect, they wouldn’t be nearly so effective. Most likely, it’d teleport with her, or phase shift with her. She didn’t know if Erras’ and The Advent’s collars functioned differently, but if she had to bet with Encio, she’d bet that The Advent had superior suppression collars. The collars at the Academy had been a solid ring of metal. The ones The Advent used on them were skin-tight flexible material.
If The Advent had enacted their takeover plan on many other worlds, then she wouldn’t be the first to shake off suppression to escape either. A strong aura was rare, but not singular, even at iron rank.
People go through tough shit at any rank.
Nara’s immunity to tracking effects had proven more detrimental than beneficial to life in normal society on Erras so far. It prevented the aura tracking the Adventure Society used to track their members. But, if it wasn’t working for Aliyah and Amas, that had was already a lost cause.
Nara’s tracking prevented anything from tracking her or her aura through magic. It did not prevent anyone from manually tracking her with their senses, and she didn’t know how it’d interact with technology. It prevented anything in her inventory with a tracking effect from working. However, if she could bring something inside her inventory outside of it, the tracking magic on it would work.
Nara had two objects that potentially had tracking magic on it: her society membership badge, and the bracelet Amara had given her for communication on the complex (which became a neglected piece of equipment when Nara just started teleporting around the retreat instead. She wasn’t a very good product tester). The detection and tracking array of Innovation’s retreat had failed on her, but the tracking magic in the bracelet did not.
The plan was simple…because Nara wasn’t capable of complex plans. She couldn’t act as a leader to rally the troops or sabotage the facility with magical know-how. Suppression collars stopped essence abilities and most racial abilities, but it didn’t stop external magic. Aliyah was independently working on her own plan and didn’t communicate what it was, which is what they had agreed to do.
*****
She sat as far forward in the theater as she could. According to Jiro, the theater was built off the mountain top, hanging off of it like an oversized balcony. It was even further south than the training field, so Nara could only hope that Jiro’s assertions were accurate. If she failed, she’d phase herself into solid rock and die.
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Sen would not approve of this plan, she blithely thought. Turns out, she was the gambler, and she gambled with the ultimate chip—her life.
She sat in the theater next to Aliyah. Lina sat a few chairs back—it didn’t matter, and she didn’t care. She wouldn’t be able to escape for long. She just wanted to send a message or a signal.
She focused as she had practiced before. She felt the suppressive force of the collar, both as a physical object on her skin and a weight upon her aura. Her torture in the astral and the aura forging process of the gods had awakened and refined her ability to manipulate and shape her aura. She solidified and focused her aura sealed within her body and slowly began pushing outward, like a slowly expanding balloon. It was a strain, but she persisted.
Finally, the suppressive force snapped, just briefly, ringing out like a crisp clap in an empty auditorium in her mind. She ignored the Guide notifications that flickered in her vision, and immediately activated phase shift, grasping the brief moment of freedom with action. She slipped through the seat, the ground, and plummeted out of the building towards the ground.
*****
Luckily, she didn’t phase into solid rock and die.
Unluckily, it turned out that The Advent facility was built upon a large stone spire like the ones commonly found around Sanshi and was a tad higher up than Nara thought she’d be. The familiar sight grew a sapling of hope within Nara that she struggled to ignore. She slipped out of the building, plummeting down towards the ground from a massive height. Around her, a forest circled the stone spire, then faded as it transitioned to rolling hills of grassland, like a three dimensional natural bullseye.
She had gotten lucky (again)—the stone spire was steep enough that she would avoid impaling herself on the sharp stone of the spire. Instead, if she fell long enough, she’d splat like an egg dropped from a skyscraper onto concrete if she didn’t save herself.
She focused once again, successfully pushing away the suppression a second time. She retrieved three items from her inventory—a blinding handheld flare, which she immediately activated with magic and threw into the air. If all other methods failed, perhaps one of the locals would spot the flare and report the strange activity to the Adventure Society. It’s second purpose was to mask the two other items she threw—her Adventure Society badge and the communication bracelet from Amara. The communication function didn’t work off of the compound, but she hoped the tracking function did. The bracelet landed in a scraggly bush on the stone spire, concealing it.
Nara fell past her Adventure Society badge.
Well shit, it had more air resistance than she did. She should’ve thrown it out later.
The next order of business if Nara hoped to survive this ordeal was to stop her impending doom in the form of pancaking against the earth.
She had two options—the slow-fall effect of Cosmic Path or a well-time Node Jump to reverse her velocity. She couldn’t maintain Cosmic Path long enough for to be effective, so she only had one viable option.
Thankfully, she’s had quite a lot of practice flinging herself in odd directions and high speeds during the Celestial Book trials to increase and decrease her velocity. She once again pushed against the suppression collar, but she was reaching the limits of her ability to do so. Each time it was a great exertion, and it exhausted her. It was like she had just achieved three consecutive weightlifting records with her aura, and now she was a gold medalist pushing past spent energy and snapping muscle ligaments. Still, she managed it once more, the suppression pushed away long enough for her to do a snap-quick node conjuration plus node jump, a technique she was thankful Amara had forced her to develop.
She shot upwards and spread out her body so that air resistance ate as much velocity as possible. As she fell back down towards earth, she tried to push off the suppression once more. She failed. She had to accept her velocity, whatever it was, and prepare for it. She had node jumped herself above a lake in the forest, which wasn’t so densely grown that she couldn’t see it. She smacked into the lake in a cannonball, hoping that it was deep enough to kill more of her velocity.
It was, praise water. Water was life, and today, it was in another way than the typical.
Her back stung all over, water sharp as if it had turned to sand, and her breath would have been punched out of her body if she had any lungs to hold it. Nara hauled herself onto the muddy bank of the lake, laying on the mud for a moment to catch her bearings. The spire loomed behind her in the sky, so all she had to do was run in a different direction. She didn’t she any villages or towns on the way down, unfortunately, and she didn’t recognize this forest or spire. They didn’t have any particularly distinguishing features except for the evil abduction camp at the top, which looked like a too small hat on a tall stone golem.
Peering upwards she reasoned, “I guess it is hard to notice.”
But, a silver ranker should be able to see it from a distance. Gold and diamond rankers without question. Erras had telescopes and binoculars—that should’ve been enough for almost anyone to spot it too. It most definitely had concealment magic. Maybe that magic didn’t work if you knew it was there?
These were pointless questions to Nara, who needed to escape. Dripping wet, she ran through the forest as best she could. Dodging past trees, bushes, and boulders placed intentionally in her path just to trip her. She was barefoot, but iron rank damage resistance and the soft forest floor protected her feet somewhat.
The cheap bastards didn’t provide any shoes.
She was surprised she hadn’t been recaptured already. The gold ranker must have sensed her escape. She gently squashed her growing hope, crushing the bud with her own foot. But plants were tenacious; she couldn’t help herself. Maybe, the suppression collars were too good. They suppressed her aura so well that the gold ranker couldn’t detect her.
She exited the forest, afternoon sun bright on her face, causing her to shield her eyes with her hand as her vision adjusted. She scanned the grasslands, but every direction looked just the same as any other direction to her.
She picked a direction at random and ran.
A few normal rank monsters attacked her, but she could handle those with her bare hands. It was a strange feeling, punching a hamster that leapt in her face, but as far as hamster deaths, that wasn’t the weirdest way to go.
She saw something shimmering in the distance that would have made her heart drop if she had one. The bud of hope that had unwillingly grown was abruptly ripped from its roots, then blowtorched.
“No…” Nara said as her pace slowed.
She recognized that shimmering boundary.
“No…” She tried to deny it.
There it was, the dimensional boundary of an astral space, shimmering like a heat mirage. It was the illusion of an oasis, her hope thoroughly crushed like a parched wanderer in the Sahara Desert. The flickering was not the effect of her rolling tears, but the unstable boundary of physical reality and astral.
She slumped in the grass.
Tracking magic did not work across dimensional boundaries. Many things did not work across dimensional boundaries. Nara knew a few rules, by virtue of her astral magic studies.
Of all the boundaries in the world, other than the boundary of life and death, it was the most important boundary that separated reality and unreality. Tracking magic, portal magic, and communications magic all failed past dimensional boundaries, with very select and intentionally crafted exceptions. The Adventure Society could track inside an astral space, if they brought their tracker into the same astral space.
This all meant Nara couldn’t escape. With her racial abilities sealed, she needed to enter and exit an astral space like everyone else through the astral space aperture. She didn’t know where it was. Aliyah knew a ritual that could probably locate the exit, but their inability to work together without having their plans discovered cut that possibility off. Even if she knew where it was, the astral space aperture could be sealed by The Advent. They could seal it with their own magic with a lock only they knew to open, locking the door to the astral space from the inside. A skilled astral magic specialist would be able to crack it, but that took time on top of how long it’d take to find this astral space in the first time.
If they were looking.
They were, Nara told herself. They were looking.
Encio had probably messaged his grandfather and they were making a big fuss in Sanshi. She had recognized the names of some of the researchers here. Over the past few days, Nara realized they had been on Aliyah’s list. John would realize this too. They’d go shake down Erin Nisei as well as Oswald Willard. They could be traitors, or just being spied on. Sezan would use his super cool ultra-awesome deus ex machina diamond rank senses to pick out The Advent spies in the city and get the information about the location for the astral space from them. Then, they’d be rescued.
Nara was aware that somebody was standing beside her when they made themselves known.
“Which one are you?” Nara dimly asked, “The gold ranker or the silver ranker?”
“Raina Bow.”
“Ah, the gold ranker. It must’ve been fun, watching me run around like a headless chicken. All to let me realize it was all pointless. Why do you guys bother? Bother these worlds that don’t want you,” she asked bitterly, not really expecting any answer.
“Can you sit by, and watch children hurt themselves? These people fight themselves constantly, waste resources, and throw aside their lesser. The evil gods foment destruction and propagate their being while the ‘good’ gods do the same. They maintain this absurd, destructive balance. It is not harmony for those caught in their destructive wake.”
“And here I thought you were some divine cult.”
“No,” Raina assured her, “We are like you. We should not be at the mercy of the whims of the transcendent beings and their nonsensical rules. They may impose their restrictions upon each other, but we have shaken off their one-sided shackles.”
Nara looked up at Raina. She had the unreal perfection of an essence user at gold rank. She looked human—The Advent chose adherents that matched the races of the world they were suborning so that they could blend in with the local population. She had very dark brown hair, almost black, like charcoal infused dark chocolate. Her eyebrows were bold and well-defined. Combined with her high cheekbones and sharp jawline, she beheld the intensity of a jaguar hidden in jungle shadows.
“And yet,” Nara scoffed, “We are at your mercy. You deny the gods yet take their place. Why not just pack it up? You did your best; you fulfilled your ethical obligations. Give the world the goods, help them, and if they reject you, leave it to them. You don’t want the gods so don’t be the gods.”
Nara angrily gestured to the empty grasslands around here.
“These people aren’t children. We aren’t children. We can decide, even if the decision we make is wrong.”
“The decision of those with power,” Raina said.
“There will always be those in power making the decisions, just as you are now. At least it’s the power structure of this world, and not of another world making their decisions for them. You’re saying you’d let them represent themselves in your authority structure? The country I’m from fought a war over that.”
Raina smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. Nara had no idea if her rebuttals had affected her.
“Do the people of this world now have any ability to represent themselves?”
Nara groaned frustratedly. She wasn’t good at political ideology nor debate.
“Your world cannot trust other worlds to make their own decision. Just like how I can’t trust you guys and what’s beyond the portal. We’re not so different after all, are we?” Nara said, her tone dripping with dispirited sarcasm. “For all your ‘harmony’, you can’t really trust anybody. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re doing some sort of weird brainwashing or conditioning magic to match people into this ‘harmony’ you keep talking about.”
Raina’s expression imperceptivity changed. Nara usually wouldn’t have noticed, but she had been honing her ability to read expressions with her aura sense cut off from her. Her desperate situation made her more perceptive than she had ever been.
“I’m right? I’m actually, right?” Nara realized with a growing sense of dread. “What’s on the other side of that portal?” she said in a raspy, horrified whisper.
“Harmonization is willing,” Raina hissed.
“You shouldn’t be surprised when I say I don’t believe you.”
“There is no other way,” Raina said, indignancy creeping in. “We must all act for the sake of harmony. Corruption is insidious, spreading like mold through authority. Vile and hard to kill, digging it roots down like weeds in well nurtured soil. We’ve seen it repeatedly in other worlds. One traitor, a greedy few who put themselves in the right place, the selfish, the short-sighted. They choose to serve themselves; they select short term benefits over the final goal. They are parasites, bleeding dry the hard work for their own pathetic interests!”
“After all that,” Nara drawled, “and you still have dipshits like Ceram.”
“He thinks what he does is for the sake of harmony. Even if his actions are reprehensible, his intent is true.”
“If you permit corruption on the low levels, then corruption must exist on the highest levels. Your ideology is tainted as long as people like him exist in any position of power. If you’re going to act like you’re better than everyone else, it should at least be fucking true.”
A slap rung Nara’s head, causing her to slump onto the grass. Evidently, Raina was not above physical violence.
She was still conscious. A real slap from Raina would have splattered her head across the ground in ground meat and bone chunks. She laid there, reeling from the pain and despair, curled in the grass with her head on her knees and her arms blocking the sun.
Raina let her sit there for some time, before she walked over and lifted the despondent iron ranker by the arm, and slung her over her shoulder, carrying her like a sack of potatoes. She lifted off into the sky, flying at a speed slow for a gold ranker towards the stone spire base.
Nara stared blankly at the ground as her shot at freedom and help to save everyone in the base drifted further and further away.
She had failed, but she never had any chance of success in the first place.