I send some mana into the defenses to maintain the field, and climb through the hallway on the crashed Deathtrap up to the deck of the tilted ship.
(Stay inside,) I tell everyone through the link with the rest of Group 4.
Eventually, I reach them, still inside the ship, though they’ve positioned themselves further back, watching the others stare into the darkness.
Someone uses an item, and it flies through the door and lights up the area, throwing moving shadows on what appears to be a rocky wall. A cave leading down, into a vast, deep tunnel. A few more skills or items follow, illuminating the place further and further with powerful lights in all shades, from yellow, to white, blue, and red.
The old and rusty ship has crashed against the rocky surface of the cave, and its stalled engines leave the place eerily quiet with the sound of the storm totally blocked off by the walls around us. I want to examine the entrance we must have passed through to get here, but I can't see it from where I am.
Dravos also watches the other passengers, and I notice the broad smile that takes over his expression when some of them start exiting the ship.
There doesn't seem to be any white sand, and some probably don’t even know the truth of its nature. I can understand their sense of security and curiosity, but there is a reason I’ve kept the defenses running.
As somewhere around two dozen people exit, reaching the rocky ground below they die.
The small amount of white sand that landed on Deathtrap, that we’ve managed to bring with us reacts to their mana. The tiny white grains move and swirl as they step on them. Just the smallest hint of white dust on the wind. Something you could even miss in the low light.
As the screams fill the pitch-black darkness of this place, Dravos smiles even wider and turns to me, “Isn't it amusing to watch, crazy human? These people who’ve been hiding and cowering inside of the SDAT until now, crawling out in a spurt of bravery and curiosity. Feeling safe, newly confident with the change in the environment and the quiet of this place.”
His brother is the same, and both of them, I’m sure, they’ve reached the 2nd stage of their subclass: Adept of Pride, much like me. It’s something I can feel, the same way they can feel my Pride. The second stage allows us to recognize our fellows.
I've already met a few people like that, having spoken to them in passing or walking among people I’ve seen back in Last Rest. Yet, this duo in front of me seem to stand above the rest. They have the same confidence in their abilities that I often find in myself.
The next person to reach our group is the last surviving guide called Kallus, the one who took care of navigation. He seems tired, dead on his feet, and whereas before, when his eyes kept flitting all over the place, anticipating danger, now it seems like he’s given up.
There is someone else we need to worry about too, the one who killed the second guide, forcing us to seek help from the Champion. Knowing that we’d need three guides to properly control the Deathtrap and that we would have to wait for the storm to disappear before attempting to leave without making contact.
The mystery continues. Do Dravos and Drekar know who it is? Is the person responsible for cooperating with them even though they tried to run away before and leave them behind? Or maybe they just don’t know, and they have their reasons. It’d have to be someone who can avoid my detection and Sophie’s web. Someone with the capacity to kill the people we had protecting the guide with little to no effort.
I already have my suspicions about who may be behind it all, but for now, I’ve decided to let it be. To see where this takes us.
“How did the other guide die?” I ask Kallus.
Sitting on the ground, his back resting on what used to be the floor, he looks at me, “Different from before. They probably used a blunt weapon or unarmed strikes, every person was killed with one strike.”
“Stay near me,” I tell him, and he just nods.
Even though it's probably not needed, I share the information through the link and head towards the hatch that once led to the deck. Now that Deathtrap lies on its side, it is almost like a normal door. The field still stretches a bit further, and we have plenty of space to maneuver before we find ourselves in danger.
Down below, I can see the bodies of the poor naive fools who decided to leave. I then take another step and make myself float, pushing myself through the air on waves of kinetic energy, proceeding in short, tightly controlled, bursts to make the experience as smooth as possible.
Scanning the area for white sand, I pass through the field and look around, sending my senses outward like a wave crashing against the walls.
A massively long tunnel winds its way deeper into the ground, leading ever downwards. And I can't sense its end even with the extended reach of my enhanced senses.
The people of the system really seem to like building massive structures, isn’t there supposed to be a phobia for that? Megalophobia I think it was?
Creating a few thermal orbs and making them as bright as possible, I place them around the ship and the tunnel, the resulting light’s golden hue doing its part to illuminate the place. As expected, I find walls, roughly hewn from the stone around us. There are no smooth edges, no inscriptions, no sign that any part could have been the work of a skill. And then there’s the fact that there’s no white sand, other than what we managed to bring with us, in small piles sliding from the deck to land on the rocky surface below.
It isn't even touching the ship, nor is it anywhere close especially with the angle. It really only accounts for a few small grains. It seems like it should be fairly easy to avoid if we use a different place to exit and check for more sand first. The hole left by the main core’s explosion immediately comes to mind. It’s patched up, but it should be possible to open it back up.
With that checked, I turn off the backup core from my current location, and the mana being supplied to the field dries up, leaving the field to flicker and dissipate, to the sound of a few screams from within the ship.
I share my thoughts with Tess through the link, and she likely passes it along. To Dravos, Drekar, to the black chainmail Dawnslayer guy Famir, and to the remaining guide Kallus. I then spend a bit longer flying around the ship, watching carefully for more of the white sand, and when I'm done, I return.
Just in time to see the tired guide in the same spot, face buried in his hands.
Next to him stands Biscuit, repeatedly shouting at him, (Food! Food!)
Landing, I reach down and gently smack Biscuit on his back, “I told you already, that’s not it.”
Biscuit looks at me and then at the guide before gracefully wobbling away, probably on a quest to bully someone else for snacks.
I rejoin the others in one of the bigger rooms, where most of the people have holed up, we still have almost two hundred passengers waiting for a solution. Seeing that many of them, most of them rush to talk over each other, I decide to leave, only to be caught short by Min-Jae. I slow down matching my pace to his until we’re walking side by side.
“Everyone has their food, most people have enough to last a week or two. Water is the bigger problem, most only have enough for a week and they’re already starting to fight over the reserves in the Deathtrap,” he starts explaining.
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
I gesture to him, and we take a seat with an open view of the giant tunnel lit by the many orbs I’ve created, though they look so tiny in comparison despite releasing so much light.
“Most people are fairly subdued, and everyone’s fairly reluctant to use their mana, so even if they fight, it’ll probably be hand to hand. I think part of it’s that they’re scared of you,” Min-Jae says, smiling, the statement seems to make him happy, “No one knows how much mana you have stored away, and someone’s been spreading a rumor that you’ve been storing it for months before heading here.”
“Months…” I repeat. Just how much mana would I be able to store in that much time?
With it comes an intriguing thought. What if I stored away my mana for years? Maybe even decades? Even as I am now, I should be able to live over 100 years easily with a body and capabilities fairly similar to what I have now. So would my crown be able to store years' worth of mana? I’m inclined to say yes.
“Show me your eye,” I ask, interrupting his train of thought when he continues to talk about what happened and the plans.
Somewhat awkwardly, he moves a bit closer and turns his head to the side so I can see his newly yellow eye.
I think it’s Gravity Wavelength Iris or something like that. Seeing it now from up close reminds me how disappointed I was when we opened that damned black chest after weeks of trying, and the eye only reacted to him.
Carefully, I reach out and touch the skin just under the corner of that eye and send my senses towards it, which he allows to happen. It’s something I have done a few times already. As much out of a fear that the eye would reject him as my curiosity.
There are some things I learned from the mana stone Savant gave Lily, things about body modification, transplants, and the like. It represents a wealth of information that Lily and I are still working to understand, and even Sophie’s begun to show a degree of interest as of late. All three of us have a skillset that would benefit from the information.
“Is the eye going to start bleeding and pop up out of my head?” Min-Jae asks with a bright smile, “Maybe it’s going to activate and siphon away my mana until I die.”
“The twins?”
“The twins,” he confirms. “We joke like that from time to time, but sometimes I really find myself thinking about it, you know? It’s a powerful eye, and I’m still getting used to it though I feel myself growing into it.”
“You should be thankful, it’s like a free half trait.”
“I am,” he nods seriously. “But I don’t want to rely on it too much. I need to work on my basics before relying on easy power.”
At that, I take a moment to study him.
Yeah, Min-Jae might actually be smarter than me sometimes. The amount of restraint it had to take for him to avoid using that power and take the boring route... I needed Lissandra to beat that into me, and he grasped it so effortlessly.
For some reason, I find myself wanting to tease him a little, but then I remember that there are places he’s lacking as well. His envious nature, constantly putting himself down, and his occasional fits of over dependency.
I point down at the ground, “Try grabbing a few grains of sand and lift them, use your eye.”
“Sure,” he agrees and moves to comply, and I watch him move his mana to activate the skill and the eye.
I move one of the orbs a bit closer so he has more light.
The moment his skill touches the grains of sand, they start moving erratically, as they do any time mana touches them. They become charged and deadly.
I gesture for him to stop, and he does so. In my mind, I count down the time until the sand becomes inert and stops looking for mana while also trying to estimate the amount of mana Min-Jae used. With a bit more testing, I should be able to estimate it much better.
“Still no primordial gravitational energy?” I ask as I watch the sand.
He shakes his head, “Still nothing.”
I nod in acknowledgment, and when the grains of sand stop moving, I lift into the air and lower myself closer. Then I blast a bigger pile of sand with kinetic energy, which makes it fly into the air before returning to the ground.
And once again we confirm that the sand doesn’t react to primordial energies.
I find a few tiny, separated pieces and send a whiff of my mana towards them, causing them to immediately charge and fly towards me. I send a blast of kinetic energy at them, but this time they ignore it and pass through as if I hadn’t done much of anything.
Three small grains circle around me a few times, piercing my leg, and belly, burrowing tiny tunnels clean through my flesh and bone no matter how I try to defend against them.
Body strengthening using mana? Nope. Kinetic strengthening? Nope. Disrupting mana? Nope. Resonating mana? Nope.
Having had enough of tiny grains burrowing through me, I fly away from them much faster than they can follow, nearly a few lengths of Deathtrap before they start swirling in a confused fashion. It takes them longer to lose their charge and land this time. It would seem that they can charge themselves with mana from my body when they pierce the skin.
I activate my passive to heal myself as I fly back only to meet the others where I left Min-Jae.
Some of the passengers are milling around, ready to leave Deathtrap. Far away from the white sand, and I see some of the larger groups, already heading deeper into the tunnel.
Group 4 is there with the remaining guide, two thylarin, a few of the other groups we’ve teamed up with, and Heryd, the vyssari who “guarded” me with his group while I was working in the room with the backup core.
“Tess is dealing with some last-minute stuff, but she’ll be back soon. We’ve decided to join up with some of the smaller groups. That way there’s no need to take care of a bunch of assholes who just want to hide behind us,” Sophie informs me, while I nod and pull my manabloc chair over to have a seat.
It’s the same one I created a few days ago, still holding strong, with a few more snake-mouth-sized bite marks on the legs.
----------------------------------------
POV Famir
“Do you want me to kill the other guide as well?” I ask the woman standing in front of me.
“There is no need,” she shakes her head.
Even though [Suppression] blocks my emotions, I feel a hint of curiosity, so I decide to ask, “Why did you want the guide dead?”
She doesn’t even seem to mind, “For my group.”
That’s confusing, “Doesn’t doing this put them in more danger?”
She nods. “Yes, it will. But it will also allow them to shine more brilliantly.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s fine, you don’t have to. Just follow my orders, and we can continue our little alliance when we reach the central region.”
“Understood. I have another question, won’t he get angry when he finds out?”
“Nat? I’m sure he already knows.”
At this point, my level of confusion grows even bigger. This woman, that man, their group, these two animals. I fail to grasp them at all.
She seems to notice it even through my lack of expression, “Aren’t you happy you didn’t decide to help the thylarin twins? If you had or decided to attack us before, he would have killed you by now.”
There’s that small smile on her face, making me question if I made the right choice in following her. From the moment I first saw her, I’ve felt this unshakable pull to stay close, and I’m not even sure why.
It’s not romantic interest or sexual attraction, I’m not capable of those anymore. It's sheer admiration for her decisiveness and strength. I didn’t know I could still feel that way, but I have decided to place my bets on her to get me off this moon.
Before leaving, she turns to me, glancing over her shoulder. “I don’t want to simply stay here just to find a way to leave. Adventure is what I want. A desperate, life-threatening adventure where everyone struggles to do their best and overcome their limits. Where my group has to rely on each other, strengthening our bonds through the dangers we face together. So that once it’s over we can sit side by side, talking to each other around Nat’s thermal orbs. We might be hurt and scarred from the dangers we’ve overcome, but we’ll be happy, knowing we went through it together and survived. Maya will make her lame jokes to lift our spirits. Sophie will pat Izzy’s head. The twins will sit quietly together, sharing their feelings. Nat will pet Biscuit on his lap and will train with his orbs while Kim and Lily try to show off in front of him. Meanwhile, Noodle will keep nibbling on Nat’s chairs in secret. And I will watch it all, happy to know I’m part of it. That's what I want.”
And with that, she turns and leaves with a mysterious smile on her face, the lightning of her crown lighting the way.