“We will keep watch outside,” Nathariel said to Glade.
“Outside? You are…not coming with me?” Glade asked, looking hesitantly at the rift. When he stepped inside, time inside would start moving faster. Or…it’d start moving slower outside, there was a difference.
“The more people who go in, the less stable it becomes. You’ll have less time inside the rift.” Nathariel tapped Glade’s chest with his finger. “You know everything about the Master stages. I will tap the roots for a base spiritual elixir, but it will be up to you to cycle it and push yourself to the peak of Master.”
“How long will I have?”
“Inside, I estimate that it’ll feel like four weeks before the pocket realm collapses. Outside, only a few days will pass.”
“What happens if I am inside when it collapses?”
“If you know what’s good for you,” Nathariel said, “you won’t be.”
That was enough of an answer. Glade stepped along the surface of the conk, then reached out and stuck his hand through the rift. Aside from a few faint shivers running down his skin, it didn’t feel any different.
He patted himself down, making sure he had everything. He didn’t have a haversack of his own, but they had taken two empty kegs from the maintenance platform. He had filled one with food and freshwater flasks from Nathariel’s voidhorn, then they filled the other with elixir from the root. They had drilled a small hole into the root and tapped it like syrup from a tree. It wasn’t as perfect or refined as the well water, but it would be enough to keep Glade going.
“Stay close to the entrance,” Nathariel instructed. “Place the barrels down, set up a camp, and work hard.”
Glade nodded. He pushed the first two kegs through the rift and set them down on the ground, then accepted a third cask from Nathariel—a barrel of concentration-aiding elixir. He offered a short bow to Nathariel, then another to Pels, who stood on the distant maintenance platform. Then he stepped through the rift.
The air around him warped. It was like trying to enter a lens, but just slightly too curvy, and scratched all over. He turned his shoulder and pushed harder.
After a few seconds, he tumbled through the rift with a pop. He landed on the barren sand inside on his stomach, then rolled over onto his back. The ground was plain white sand. It was almost perfectly flat, save for a few ripples here and there. The sky was black, and there were no stars or moons to cast any light around. Somehow, when he looked down at his arms, a dim glow lit them, like he was standing next to a guttering lantern.
He spun around to face the rift. It looked the exact same from the inside, except it hovered in the middle of the empty plane. Nathariel still stood on the other side, but the man moved comically slowly—it almost hurt to watch.
So Glade didn’t watch. He turned away and got to work.
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Glade had no way of telling the time inside the pocket realm, and he tried to avoid looking out the rift as much as he could—it just made his head swim and his stomach sink.
Whenever he felt tired, he used the concentration-aiding mind elixir. He kept a constant flow of elixir in his system, and he never let a cycle go to waste; he was always purifying something. Nathariel and Pels seemed to be working as fast as they could to refill his base elixirs.
As he cycled, he practiced conjuring a seer-core. He would need one eventually—he didn’t have a Goddess in his head to tell him how much mana he had left.
Over the past few weeks, he had been gathering metal filings and sharp shavings into a pouch. It hung from his hip just beside his sword. Inside the pocket realm, whenever he took a break from cycling to let himself rest and catch his breath, he sharpened and polished his sword. When sparks or debris or shavings fell off, he dropped into the little leather pouch.
By now, he hoped he had enough sword-like objects to form a seer-core with.
He had studied for this. It was a Reach technique, technically, which required him to reach out with tendrils of Arcara, forming an aura around his body, and look for objects within his realm of influence.
His sword was the most obvious. He threw it a few feet away from him so it wouldn’t interfere.
He focussed on the metal filings. They rose out of his pouch in a thin line, then swirled into a cyclone above his hand. The sword-Arcara manifested along each of their tiny edges, letting off a soft shhhing. He tried to compress it into a ball with his mind, but instead, it flashed out in front of him like a whip of tiny swords. It struck the sand, kicking up a wave of debris and shredding the grains into dust.
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He pulled the filings back, but he pulled too hard. It tore his sleeve and slashed up the skin of his arm, leaving thousands of tiny cuts. He clenched his jaw. The sting made everything clearer.
Arcara was about intent. He didn’t intend to attack; he intended to make a seer-core appear. Imagining his own core and his basic Arcara system, he concentrated on the ways it had developed under Nathariel.
He took a calm breath, and when he looked down at his bloodied hand, the filings had swirled up into a faint sphere above his fingers.
He picked out the storms of slightly darker shavings—his Arcara and mana supplies. The Arcara covered about a third of the orb’s southern hemisphere, and the mana was a stable, coin-sized cyclone.
He was on his way to Master.
He guided the filings gently into his pouch again, then sealed it up. They weren’t exactly easy to come by, and he couldn’t go losing them.
Then, he reached out towards his sword. It was about ten feet away, but it had a blade. Maybe he could control it a little, the same way he had with the shavings: with a Reach technique. He sent tendrils of invisible Arcara out towards it, trying to grasp onto it and draw it closer.
The sword vibrated, then shifted a half-inch through the sand. Glade fell to his knees, panting. A little too much, a little too fast. The sword was too large.
He walked over and picked it up. As he stood back up, his gaze shifted along the empty sandy plane. In the distance, on the perfectly flat horizon and silhouetted against the gray haze, a speck trundled across the waste. A plume of dust rose behind it.
He scrunched his eyebrows and blinked. There was something else out here?
With a flick, he tucked his sword back into its sheath, but his hand hovered over the hilt.
The thing approached. The closer it got, the more of it Glade could make out. It was about the size of a horse, and it had four legs. It used them all to run, but it didn’t gallop—more like a gorilla hauling itself along really quickly.
As soon as Glade registered it wasn’t human, he drew his sword again. Its sinewy skin was a dark shade of red, and it bulged like it had ropes beneath it. If it had fur, Glade didn’t see any, but a mane of horns ran along the back of its elongated head. A steel collar clung to its neck.
Somebody lost a pet.
It prowled towards him, snarling. Tar dripped out of its mouth like saliva, and its eyes shone with yellow light.
Before he could try to scan its spirit, it pounced, doubling its speed. With a single swipe, it swatted him away from the rift. Short claws clung to its feet, and they ripped the lapels of his coat off entirely. He tumbled back along the sand. It took all his concentration just to keep holding onto his sword.
Jumping to his feet, he flourished his blade. The beast stood between him and the rift, snarling and gnashing its jaw. Its breath reeked of rotting meat.
At first, Glade had hoped it would be more interested in the elixirs and supplies than him, but it was probably just hungry, and elixirs wouldn’t fix that.
The beast charged before Glade could come up with an attack plan. He sidestepped, his instincts reacting for him. The beast’s claws raked past inches from his face, swooping through the empty air. As soon as the claws passed, he slashed down at the creature’s flank.
His bare sword glanced off the flesh like he had just tried to cut a rock.
Again, he tried to concentrate long enough to scan the creature’s spirit, to see if he could determine how strong it was. The beast whirled around and lunged at him before he could even reach out with his spiritual sight. Its jaws raced towards his neck, and its teeth snapped together with such force that it sounded like someone had fired a musket.
He fell back into the sand and rolled away. He leapt to his feet and swiped at it. Thrice more, his blade glanced off its skin harmlessly. He couldn’t find the usual weak points of a beast—its shoulders, its stomach, its mouth.
He was about to try scanning its spirit again, but he stopped. It was just a waste of time, and though his clinical mind demanded it of him, he didn’t need to know how strong the beast was. He just needed to kill it.
He ran his hand along the flat of his sword, strengthening the tip of the blade with a knife-thin strand of Arcara. The intent was to cut, and sword-Arcara wanted to slice anything.
Vayra’s scythe used heat to burn through what it tried to cut. That was brute force. He was more elegant than that. His techniques split matter in two.
He ducked under a claw slash, and as he stepped to the side, he dragged his sword across the beast’s chest. It bit into the flesh and cut through, leaving a shallow wound. Black tar sprayed out.
He whirled his sword behind him as he spun away, leaving another few cuts along the beast’s arms before falling to a crouch. His line of Arcara started to slip off the blade, but he raised a thumb up and pressed it against the exposed crossguard of his sword. His Dawnsteel body went to work, connecting him with the blade and refilling his intent to cut.
He sprinted forwards, finally on the offensive, and drove the sword straight into the beast’s chest. It snapped at him with its jaw, but he called his metal filings out of his pouch and struck the beast under the chin with an uppercut of tiny razors.
Howling, the beast stumbled backwards, but Glace chased it to the ground. He kept his blade in place and twisted until the beast stopped howling.
Panting, he stumbled back. Black tar coated him. He flicked his sword off and sheathed it, then called his metal filings back to the pouch.
As fast as he could, he sprinted back to the rift and pushed through. “Nathariel! Did you see that?” He staggered out onto the conk, relishing in the fresh, warm air.
“It passed in a flash,” Nathariel said. “What happened?”
“There was a monster. A beast of some kind…” He described it to Nathariel as best he could. “Why was that in a pocket realm?”
Nathariel sighed. “This place has massive spiritual power. The pocket realm that these unnatural forces have created will only fade as the facility itself fades. Openings will only appear in certain places. It is the consequence of Gods operating in a realm they shouldn’t be in. That beast was probably once a nymph, sucked in at some other location and twisted by apparent centuries in the void. Her mind decayed, if she ever had one to begin with.”
He leaned to the side, peering around the corner of the rift just a touch to glimpse the body of the beast. “There is a spot of good news. That…flesh has experienced rift-centuries worth of use and refinement, and its spiritual weight is immense. It will help tune your new body to its purpose.”
Glade gulped. “The things I do for advancement…” He shuddered at the thought of eating any of the beast’s corpse, but if it would help him at all, then he had to try. “Yes, sir.”
“Now, go back in there, and get yourself to Master. Before any more of those things find you.”