It had been days, and Mikayla was only marginally closer to unlocking the secrets of the Engraving Array. There had been no sign of the Giant Roc since that first encounter with it, and as nice as it was to have a warm bed, the air inside Astralia’s Spear was growing stale, so she was perusing the notes - attached to clipboards to protect them from the wind - while enjoying the fresh air and thanking whatever godds patronised this new world for her coat.
“I don’t understand why you’re struggling so much with this,” Nocturnus had muttered at one point. “You said you were a scholar,”
“I am a history student. I was barely into my first year, too,” Mikayla didn’t even bother freaking out about how everyone was probably going to think that she had dropped out of university. Being freed from the looming dread of exams was perhaps the best part of being lost in this new world. “And even if I was a science major, this is some kind of advanced magic science that I have barely any idea how to parse. So either explain to me what a thaumic projection cascade is or keep quiet so I can figure it out myself!”
Nocturnus had piped down, inarticulately grumbling to himself.
As torturous as trying to decipher the notes was, she didn’t have any choice, because she needed to find a way to make the Engraver work. So she toiled onwards.
Her tranquil study session, however, was disturbed by a faint noise on the wind.
Mikayla’s eyebrow quirked up, her nerves still raw from her miserable first day in the Kaiju Coast. “Mana Assistance, armour on,”
“You used Mana Assistance again. You need to learn to do it properly, or -“ Nocturnus started, but Mikayla waved him off.
“Not now. I heard something,”
Ready this time, she heard it more clearly. An animalistic howl. “I heard it too. It's coming from around the corner,” Nocturnus confirmed.
Mikayla stashed her notes inside the door to keep them safe from the wind, then ran along the balcony. One of the tips Nocturnus had idly imparted on her was the importance of knowing your foe. It was rare for a Kaiju to be anything resembling subtle - he’d been quite surprised to hear about the gecko - and usually they were obvious enough that there was little risk and lots to gain by getting close enough to investigate.
She gasped as the source of the distant sounds came into view.
There was another Goliath visible on the horizon.
It was neon green all over with slight streaks of orange, and seemed sleeker and more angular than her Black Knight. Its legs had a second set of knees, like those of a grasshopper, and its arms had wickedly sharp blades protruding from its wrists. Its helmet bore a triangular crest, with two large horns extending behind it, and a single baleful orange eye glinted from within its visor. It was so far away that it looked like she could squeeze it into dust between her fingers, but the tiny trees around it exposed that trick of distance for the lie it was.
Mikayla’s awe at the distant titan was shattered when a massive wolf with matted black fur leapt out of the treeline and tackled it to the ground, both vanishing into the canopy.
She checked her Mana. Fortunately, she’d done her very best to keep it as close to maximum as possible, and only the past moment of consulting Nocturnus had taken a bite out of it. Two of the six points she’d earned from the Bear had gone to improving her Intelligence cap. [MANA: 1387/1400] “How quickly can we get over there?”
“Hiking that far? It’d take all day, and that’s assuming we don’t get attacked on the way,” Nocturnus denied. “We should make contact, agreed, but we cannot get there in time to rescue that poor soul. They’ll have to rely on their own skills to survive,”
“Who said anything about walking at normal size? With the Black Knight at size ten and sprinting, will I make it before my mana runs out?”
“How should I know? Maybe?”
Mikayla looked down at the drop. They were seventy-one floors up. “If I jump off the balcony and summon your armour while I’m falling, will I survive the fall?”
“You plan to do what? That’s insane! I love it!”
“Will it work?” Mikayla urged him.
“Not if you stick to size ten. So don’t! Tell it to go to size two hundred!”
“It can go that big? Really?!”
“It’s incredibly impractical. Everything will look like insects and be just as hard to hit, and you’ll be as clumsy as a giant baby. Worse, at your current level you’ll burn through your entire mana pool in fourteen seconds at that size. As soon as your feet touch the ground, drop back to something reasonable, like size ten, and drink one of those mana potions to keep yourself going,”
Mikayla looked at the ground below. A long, long way below. She checked her belt, the sealed mana and health potions were still there. “. . Alright. Mana Assistance, Black Knight to size two hundred,”
She had immediate regrets.
The thought of hurling herself over the balcony and growing to that impossible size in mid-air had crossed her mind, but she hadn’t been able to overcome that instinctive fear of heights yet. But any sort of plan was immediately driven from her mind. The vertigo of shifting around sizes five and ten had been bad? This was abominable. The way the mana was sucked from her body made her feel like her very cells were being ripped apart. She couldn’t even bring herself to step forwards, for fear that the sky would club her over the head.
Which turned out to be unnecessary, because her feet rapidly grew too large for the balcony. She vaguely felt something crunch, and then there was a dim, disorienting sensation of falling while also rising as the growing armour carried her aloft faster than her engorged feet fell. The only thing she could think to compare it to was walking down the aisle of a moving train in the opposite direction that it was travelling, but this was so much worse.
And then she felt her feet hit the ground. That had been a signal. What was she supposed to do when that happened? It was so hard to think with her vitality being shorn away like this.
“Size ten!” someone distantly shouted.
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Right, that was it. “Size ten,” she murmured, screwing her eyes shut and bracing for the fresh bout of vertigo.
Shrinking back down to a reasonable size wasn’t quite as nauseating as growing while falling had been, but out of instinct she braced her hand against the side of Astralia’s Spear for fear that she would topple over.
A crunch of stone turning to dust under her fingers told her that had been a mistake. She spread her legs, letting the shrinking drag them apart to widen her stance and change her centre of gravity instead.
The process felt like it took hours, even if it was only a few seconds, and left Mikayla feeling as though she’d just attached a garden hose to her own veins and started spraying.
“How do you feel?” Nocturnus urgently asked.
Mikayla forced herself to open her eyes. It had worked. They were on the ground outside the tower. She could see several trees nearby that had been crushed into kindling by her own feet, and, looking back at Astralia’s Spear, a massive gash had been carved into the side of the tower. “Let’s never do that again,” she moaned. “System, how’s my Mana?”
[MANA: 326/1400]
“Alright, that sounds like potion time,” The massive gauntlet of the Black Knight clawed at its own waist, trying to mimic the motions of Mikayla’s actual body as she uncorked one of the mana potions and brought it to her lips.
Idly, it occurred to her that this would be a really bad time to find out that the mana potions she was trusting had expired.
But, thankfully, that wasn’t the case. A rush of energy flowed into her body, an influx of vitality so great that she couldn’t capture all of it, and she heaved out a sigh of relief as her Mana shot back up to full.
[MANA: 1400/1400]
“Was that potion made for someone higher level than me? That felt kinda wasteful,”
“It worked, did it not? Do not mind it. You are still on the clock, start running,” Nocturnus commanded.
“Right!” Mikayla couldn’t help but cast one more glance at the damage she’d done to the Spear as she began jogging towards the distant site of the fight, but something strange was happening. Yellow and purple sparks were fizzling around the crater. “Say, Nocty? Did I piss off the Spear?”
“What? Oh. Oh no. You triggered its defence systems by damaging it! Run faster!” Nocturnus hollered.
“Why, what’ll it -“ A massive image of an eye appeared over the crater and launched a solid line of purple energy that only narrowly missed Mikayla. “The hell?!”
“Get out of range! Now!”
“Why couldn’t it have done that to the goddamn Roc?!” Mikayla shrieked, redoubling her pace and juking out of the way of another laser that reduced a chunk of the forest to ash.
“Beats me. Doesn’t matter!”
Miraculously, the blasts stopped after she’d avoided a third strike, and Mikayla heaved a sigh of relief. Now she just had to close the distance to the other Armour Core and, finally - hopefully - properly make contact with the locals of this world.
Hopefully they weren’t all like Nocturnus. As weirdly fond as she was becoming of the bloodthirsty ghost, she didn’t think she could endure two of him.
Minutes ticked by as she pelted across the countryside, smashing a trench through the canopy of the birch forest on her wake.
Her veins felt leaden, and she checked her mana. [MANA: 230/1400] That wasn’t enough to keep going. But she couldn’t stop, couldn’t miss this chance. “Nocty. Any ramifications for drinking multiple potions in a row?”
“You might suffer some flatulence, but that’s all,” he dismissed her concerns.
“I can live with that,” Mikayla decided, watching her Mana bar. Once it had dropped below 50, she reached for her belt mid-stride, grabbing the second mana potion and tipping it down her throat. Again, an influx of vitality filled her body, rejuvenating her dry-feeling veins. The second time around was even more potent and somehow more ephemeral than the first. It was like someone had replaced all of her blood with soft drink, like little bubbles of carbonation were filling her body. [MANA: 1200/1200]
Fortunately, it was only half a minute later that she arrived at the scene of the battle. Unfortunately, she saw the wolf first. The treeline exploded, and a monstrous dog appeared, floods of drool spewing from its gums as its teeth came towards her.
Mikayla swatted it instinctually, which was much more effective than she’d really expected. The wolf went flying, bashed away by the colossal arm of the Black Knight. “Mana Assistance, Sword!” The silver-red blade appeared in her other hand, and she pivoted on her heel to strike. The wolf, however, saw the blade coming and scampered out of the way.
She kept turning to face it, but then something hit her in the back.
Spinning back around, there was another wolf there, snarling and slavering as it tried to gnaw through her engorged armour plates. She smashed it into the ground with her free hand, then - drawing on months of community service collecting garbage - skewered the beast like a discarded can of beer.
She didn’t have time to confirm the kill, as there was a blur of green and suddenly the grasshopper-like, one-eyed Goliath was flanking her. “Who’re you?” an unfamiliar male voice was broadcast into her ears.
Knowing she only had one chance to make a good first impression, she put on her best Batman voice and declared, “I’m the Black Knight,”
The monocular gaze of the grasshopper didn’t have enough of a face for her to read its expression. But based on the way it paused and stared at her, that hadn’t quite been the superhero introduction she’d been going for.
Her good first impression had totally failed. She had immediate regrets.
“Keldryn. But you can call me ‘Skyward Grasscutter’ if you want,” the other armour managed to respond, but then another wolf lunged at him and he was distracted by catching it on his blades.
“To your right!” Nocturnus howled, and Mikayla had to once again intercept the first wolf that had attacked her.
“Skyward Grasscutter. That name is so much cooler than Black Knight,” she murmured in mild frustration.
“No, it’s just pretentious. Too many syllables,” Nocturnus disagreed.
Mikayla smashed the wolf into the ground with her free hand, stunning it, and barked; “Right! Mana Assistance, size thirty!” Her Black Knight swelled as she lifted its leg. The vertigo, which she was growing more and more accustomed to, made her head spin, but she!d already lined up the strike and all she had to do was put her foot down.
There was a howl of pain, followed by a sort of disgusting wet crunch.
[YOU HAVE EARNED XP POINTS FOR KILLING A WOLF!]
[LEVEL UP! CONGRATULATIONS, YOU ARE NOW LEVEL 10!]
“Size ten,” she absently declared, hunkering down in a defensive stance with her arms tucked in until she could regain her bearings.
“Whoa. What’s that Armour Core’s size limit?!” she heard the unknown Goliath call out to her.
“Size limit? What size limit?” Mikayla frowned.
The unknown combatant didn't respond, instead focusing on fending off two more wolves with the blades on his forearms.
“No, really, why would -“ Mikayla trailed off, remembering the trees she’d casually crushed and the massive hole she’d so casually put in Astralia’s Spear only minutes ago at size two hundred. “That must be something they started doing after your time, Nocty,” she realised.
Scanning their surroundings, she confirmed that there was only one wolf left, squaring off against Skyward Grasscutter. She circled, flanking it in with her sword raised.
For a second, she wondered if this would be the first time she’d see a Kaiju run away. The wolves had clearly been pack hunters, a lone wolf who’d just watched his fellows be slaughtered had to know he didn’t stand a chance.
Instead, it snarled and lunged at Skyward Grasscutter again. He took its jaws on the blade attached to his left arm, then did a strange motion with his right fist - and it caught fire. Mikayla boggled at the sourceless flames that rapidly spread down the blade on the Goliath’s right arm. She almost missed it when, in a smooth strike, he impaled the wolf on the flaming blade. Its fatal would was instantly cauterised. A clean kill. There wasn’t even any blood.
Mikayla winced as the burned corpse collapsed. Why hadn’t it run away?
The green Goliath shrunk down, and she saw it fizzle out, leaving behind a humanoid figure that was already waving at her. “Mana Assistance. Size one, then armour and sword off,” As much as she wanted Nocturnus in her ear, keeping her equipment out might seem too threatening. The last thing she needed was to ruin this meeting over a misunderstanding.
After all, this was her first time meeting a native of this world face to face. This conversation had to go perfectly.