Chapter 14: The City of Union
In the afternoon, Nara began her combat training. The first thing Nara had to master was the basics.
“You have a skill book for technique,” Amara said, her voice adopting the stern tone she used for instruction and training. “But it important to build your base. Your parkour training is part of this foundational training.”
The skill book showed Nara how she should stand and swing, and Amara had her repeat the techniques until they were ingrained into her. Her body knew the techniques that the skill book provided, but she needed to add mortar to her wall of bricks. She had Nara complete basic reaction exercises, such as slashing at a moving target thrown before her eyes, jumping onto small targets thrown onto the ground, and dodging rocks.
“…Does it have to be a rock?” Nara said. “Don’t you have like, rubber balls or something?”
“You’ll heal,” Amara said. “That’ll train your new abilities as well.”
“Amara you didn’t answer my question. Do you have rubber balls?? Can we use those instead?”
Nara had her first taste of the harshness of Erras’ culture. Just from Amara and Redell’s attitudes, she could tell they had no compunctions of using violence as a form of training. For now, it was just pebbles. Enough to hurt but not to break bone.
Nara wasn’t fast or skillful yet. She was pelted with her fair share to small stones, bruising her or breaking skin. Redell was on standby in case anything too damaging occurred, but nothing did. Amara had perfect control of her strength, throwing just fast enough to be a challenge, but not hard enough to be a serious injury.
Nara had been overjoyed that her rank up fixed her near-sightedness, but now missed the incidental eye protection. She was never hit in the eye, since she did her darndest to avoid a projectile to the eye. Even if she had magic that could fix herself up, she couldn’t quite wipe away the terror of being permanently maimed and losing her eye, and human evolution helped her right along. With eyes as such a crucial part of their senses, human reactions to projectiles aimed at the head were better than anywhere else.
“That’s good,” Amara said. “The eye is one of your few early rank vulnerabilities, until you can sense without them.”
“You can sense without them!?”
She should really stop being surprised what magic can compensate for.
*****
As the sun spilled glowing gold across the jungle, the group gathered near the arrival pavilion.
A portal had far less fanfare than Nara expected. Chelsea waved her hand, and a portal arch woven from wooden vines grew from the ground. Flowers like jewels sprouted from the arch: ocean sapphires, crimson rubies, refracting diamonds, and delicate citrines. The center of the arch was a shaded forest path, penetrating into deep quiet woods. It was large enough to allow two people in side by side, and tall enough for Laius who, despite his reserved personality and presence, was actually the tallest of the group, almost 7 ft tall (210 cm).
“I just step through?”
“That’s all there is to it,” Redell confirmed. “Easy as that.”
She shrugged and stepped through the arch, following Chelsea that had already entered.
She stepped out at the top of a hill, overlooking a city sprawled between tall spires of stone that resembled the stone spires of China’s Guanyin stone forest. The city was predominantly made of grey stone, likely the same as the stone spires. It feature prominently three colors—a rich, dark blue, a vibrant fire red, and a silver white. Among those colors were ones used in lesser quantities: yellow golds, leafy greens, and a royal purple. Arches and paths of crystal bridged gaps between buildings of five to seven stories tall, with the height of the buildings decreasing relative to their proximity to the city center.
The closest stone spire had a structure built on a ledge on its near vertical face. It resembled one of those stone monasteries, except boardwalks of crystal extended outwards like the spokes of a wheel. It looked nothing like an airport but served as one. Flying ships anchored in air lots up and down the mountain, and arriving and disembarking to locations unknown.
Nara didn’t have a fear of heights, but even she’d feel challenged standing upon a transparent crystalline platform at the plunging depths below her.
“This is Sanshi of the Shian Union,” Amara said grandiosely like a narrator of an opening cutscene. “The city of union.”
“Now.” Amara said, clasping her hands onto Nara’s shoulders with near-painful enthusiasm and interrupting her silent appreciation of her first fantasy city. “There’s something I want you to try.”
Chelsea crinkled her brow in disapproval, “Amara…”
“Relax, Chelsea. If she can do this, it’s a good thing.”
“…What do you want me to try?” Nara said slowly.
“Your ability mentioned you can go to your Astral Domain, even without a portal.”
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“Yeah.”
“Your Astral Domain is a part of the astral, and not physical reality.”
“That’s right.”
“Then, can you leave your Astral Domain in a different location in physical reality than the one you entered from?”
Could she? She hadn’t tried, yet.
Even without an explanation from Amara, she knew what a great convenience that ability would be. She could teleport without a care for distance. Perhaps, it was even a hint back to her own reality. Did the great beings not give her a return path because she already had one, she just had to figure out how to make it work? It may not take as long as she feared it would. Even better, she’d be able to take trips back and forth between worlds, like an interdimensional vacationer.
She instinctually knew how to return to her Astral Domain, her home in unreality. She focused, forming a shell of the astral so thin that it was like a second skin.
With her new Gaze of the Boundary, she could see it and sense the dimensional membrane separated reality from the astral. Physical reality could not exist in the astral, it was annihilated on contact, like anti-matter and matter. She could see how filtered magic trickled through the membrane, seeping into reality in a cosmic scale version of magical osmosis. The membrane wasn’t so much a two dimensional membrane as a three dimensional weave of reality. It’s strength determined how much magic could seep through without flooding and destroying the world. A stronger local membrane equated with more local magic.
Her own personal membrane created, she took a symbolic step forward, slipping past the membrane and entering her Astral Domain.
She hadn’t needed to move to enter her Astral Domain at all. She could have slipped into it where she stood, disappearing like fog in morning sunshine. The movement was purely demonstrative, but action solidified thought and focused her mind. As Redell had said, physical actions, even when not technically needed, had mental benefits.
She didn’t linger. She stepped forward again, back in front of the arrival pagoda, where Redell and Laius still waited, their expressions of mild surprise.
Once she had created her membrane, it was easy enough for her to slip back and forth past the dimensional membrane consecutively. She felt as if she was a living montage, slipping from scene to scene in rapid succession.
She stepped forwards once again, her shoes touching the grassy hill overlooking the city where Amara and Chelsea waited.
“That was wild,” Nara said, not quite believing what she had just done. She let the membrane fall, dispersing into magic. She looked out at the glittering crystalline and stone city in wonder.
“How far is the compound from this location?” She asked.
“It’s far,” Amara said, her expression contemplative. “You’ve crossed an ocean.”
“Oh,” She responded, at a loss for words. “Wow.”
Sanshi, the city of union, was built at the waterfront, a port city. If there was anything history told Nara, ‘location, location, location’ was the single most important aspect of the success of a civilization, and a ocean bay was civilization’s fertilizer, magic world or otherwise.
She looked across at the ocean. It was the same sort of ocean as Nara’s world, vast, glittering, and blue, curving over the horizon in the far distance. She was relieved that many physical aspects of this world resembled hers—a sky of blue and an ocean of deeper blue.
The laws of physics still held some sway even in a world that regularly ignored it.
“Since the experiment is a success,” Amara said. “We’ll move forwards with our plan of action.”
Chelsea tossed a wood orb to the ground, which unfolded itself into a vehicle of polished wood that hovered over the ground. White horizontal rings of magic floated at the undercarriage and at the back of the vehicle, glowing with particles of magic. It was some sort of ground skimmer, like those of science fiction stories like Star Wars, except made entirely of smooth polished surfboard wood. The body resembled a jeep with a pointed and rounded hood, to split the air. Nara hopped in one of the cushioned back seats, with Chelsea taking the wheel and Amara sitting beside her. There wasn’t a physical wheel, but rather a crystalline orb that coursed with magic. Nara had no idea how one was supposed to pilot with it.
They sped off towards the city, the skimmer easily flying over rough, rocky terrain, thin streams, and even boulders as they descended the grassy hill. The advantages of hover-transportation were obvious. The ride was impossibly smooth, with neither turbulence nor engine hum to shake her.
The city had no walls nor gates. As they passed into the city, Chelsea slowed the vehicle and lifted it higher off of the ground, passing over the city as other vehicles did. There was ground traffic—some in the form of ground hugging skimmers, compartments and carriages drawn by strange magic beasts, and those that rode atop beasts as mounts. Lifting into the air avoided the majority of the traffic. She pulled her vehicle into a lot at a tall pagoda, with wooden spokes instead of the crystalline spokes of the distant mountain sky port. It was an arrival area where others unconjured or parked their vehicles. Once they stepped off, the sleek floating wood vehicle crumpled on itself, re-forming into a wooden ball in an impossible display of size and material manipulation. With a gesture, the ball floated back towards Chelsea’s hand, and it was stowed away. She followed the group into the center of the pagoda, and they rode a crystalline floating platform that functioned as elevator down to the ground level of the city.
She was within the thronging, lively, city. The people were primarily human, but Nara spotted other folks with fantastical features and impossible colorings. People with glowing eyes like living embers, their hair of hot fire-like energy. Lion-people like Laius in an array of builds and ethnicities. Some were panther like, and others had large, majestic manes. She even saw a pink-furred lion man, and tracked him with wide-eyed wonder as he weaved through the crowd to set about his own business.
The people of Sanshi wore long Asian-inspired robes that flowed down to their ankles. The colors of silver, blue, and red were once again prominent, though like all fashion, all colors were expressed. Embroideries of landscape, flowers, weapons, and famed scriptures were popular embroidered designs. Some robes were formal and fancy, made of long, gleaming silk, and more elaborate collars and sleeves. Others were simpler, and more martial in style, and made with less resplendent material, like basic linens and cottons. Simple cross collars and a simple sash at the waist were paired with loose pants was the usual style for these basic fits. The clothing in general was modest, with almost no skin exposed beyond the occasional sleeveless top, a shirtless leonid (who as a whole preferred to wear very little clothing), or robes with slits that exposed the leg.
The three descended into an underground entrance, where Nara was surprised to find a subway system. It operated differently; the subway hovered over the ground instead of riding atop tracks, like many other vehicles Nara had already seen. It resembled the hover-magic of Chelsea’s skimmer, except the large rings of magic encircled the subway compartments, and a final one laid at the back to propel the compartments. The subway had a similar tube structure. There was no place to buy tickets nor pay money, and they simply stepped onto a compartment of the subway when one arrived.
The subway was made of a combination of materials, most she didn’t recognize. The primary material was some kind of metal. The other, a crystalline glass. The windows on the compartments were far larger than of a normal subway, and she could easily gaze outside as the plain tunnel walls passed with no advertisements to occupy her eyesight.
The clear view was needed—there was no announcement nor electronic sign to indicate their stop. She turned her head to look outside of the compartment, and read a large display that let people know of their location.
“Sanshi Adventure Academy.”