The strange invisible magical storm surrounding the oil rig barely nudges our helicopter as we begin our descent. The equipment, though, is a completely different story. Lights go off like fireworks as alarms blare repeatedly for every single problem that’s possible to happen to a helicopter. Ursula calmly sets them off one by one, ignoring the onslaught of sensations that have me more than a little on edge.
I tap my headset and pull my seatbelt even tighter. “Why can’t I make out the platform? We’re less than a mile away.”
“Censorship. Not as bad as on the other world, but it can spread here when the apocalypse does its thing.” Ursula explains as she fights with the helicopter’s systems. “Once the krarig fully forms it’ll go away, but we obviously don’t have the pleasure of waiting for that to happen.”
“So what? We make a blind landing on it?” I glance down at the massive mass of blurry metal that is apparently an abandoned oil rig. “Do you even know where the helipad is?”
“Who do you think I am? Of course I do.” Ursula scoffs and angles the helicopter into a descent. “We’re coming in from the southeast, so the helipad will be around the blur and on the other side. As long as the apocalypse hasn’t twisted it too far yet.”
I stare incredulously at her and grip my seatbelt even harder. “Yeah, because the system racing through worlds to censor this shit is definitely not a bad sign. Do you have a plan B?”
“Nope!”
Shit.
The magical disruption washes over the helicopter like a sheet of thundering rain, crashing all at once against everything around us. I instinctively ready a few shields to protect us if the metal fails, but the constant crash of something against the helicopter doesn’t seem to be getting any worse. Or any better. Though I doubt it’d get better while we’re flying directly into the eye of the magic.
Ursula reaches up and flips a switch on the ceiling. The helicopter whirrs and groans under some newfound stress, but the assault of magic dulls to a low ringing impact. Like pleasant rain on a tin roof. I raise an eyebrow at Ursula in question, but her gaze doesn't stray from the front window. Whatever she’s seeing right now is taking all her concentration. And I’m not going to be the one to break it.
Mechanical shrieking courses through my bones as something happens. The helicopter slams to a stop, rotors chopping through still air as a thick coating of magic blurs the window to a dull white. Ursula breathes a sigh of relief and relaxes into her seat, then turns to offer me a smile.
“We’re here.”
“I couldn’t tell.” I say with a mixture of sarcasm and seriousness. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but this magical storm isn’t just going to disappear when we leave the helicopter, right?”
She nods in confirmation.
“Well, then what the hell are we supposed to do? I’m not running out there blind as a bat when there could be apocalypse-touched heavy machinery waiting with rusted teeth and shattered claws.”
“You don’t have to.” She grins and summons her briefcase while popping the latches. It clicks open to reveal two sets of… something. They look like clear oxygen masks you’d find on a plane, but much sturdier-looking and rimmed with gooey golden material. “Here. Put this over your mouth and nose and press until it sticks.”
The mask calls tantalizingly to me from the briefcase. A little more than just something that’ll help me live, but I can’t really tell why. I reach down and grab it as Ursula takes her own, then she snaps the briefcase shut as she presses hers to her face with one hand. It conforms over her nose and mouth just like a normal oxygen mask, but once the golden stuff sticks in place, it shrinks down to a small clear film.
“Why’d it do that?” I ask as I press mine to my face. The gold is cool to the touch, and I can feel it sticking to my skin like cement. Moments later it vacuum seals over my face, leaving me more than enough wiggle room to move everything normally.
Ursula shrugs. “Hell if I know. Maybe it’s supposed to go inside of a helmet and this is how they get it to fit. Breathe normally for a few minutes and it’ll get you used to the magic in the air around here. Then we’ll set out to find those notes the client alluded to.”
“Alright. But… man. This is way worse than I imagined.” I say with a gesture at the whited out window. “And we’ve got a magically armored helicopter to make our way in. How would anyone else ever get through the storm?”
“They won’t. Not unless they’ve got a huge private backing, or they’re powerful enough to get through on their own. That rules out most people who’ve got a class, and leaves only the preservation or a few powerful individuals.” She pauses, then shakes her head with a sigh. “Don’t think too hard about it. Earth’s pretty damn safe all things considered; it’s the non-starter places on the other world you have to worry about.”
Non-starter? Does that mean places far away from Palastia, or just places that are harder to get to? The system gives out clearance levels, so we have to use that clearance for something. Why not the places we’re allowed to go?
I blink a few times. The white shivers, but doesn’t look like it’s disappearing just yet. “So how does clearance work? Does the system just lock us out of going places it deems too dangerous, or is it more complicated than that?”
“Nah, it’s pretty close to what you said. If you don’t have the clearance for something, you can’t use your system while you’re in that place. And the system won’t recognize your ownership of anything you get in that place, so you effectively get nothing out of going out of your clearance. ‘Course sometimes you have to make a quick detour through dangerous lands, but it won’t give you anything for your troubles.”
“Huh. Good to know.” I cross my arms and glance up at the ceiling. “Is there anywhere I can see what clearance places are?”
Ursula pulls out her Class Card and holds it between two fingers. “System upgrade. Normally it’d just be a map upgrade, but we need both the map upgrade and the map upgrade upgrade due to our unique properties.”
“You mean the system’s hate-on.”
“Yeah. That.” She confirms with a little laugh. “Alright, take one more deep breath. Your body should be accustomed enough for us to start moving.”
The patchy white coating the windows says otherwise. I stand up with a shrug and pull out a coin, then split it into two ghost quarters. Relocation goes into both of them, and I mark myself as the target for the first while holding out the other to Ursula. She stares at it for a few seconds, but takes it without hesitation and mirrors my palming the coin.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“What’s this supposed to do?” She asks, then twitches as I target her with relocation. “A spell? What’d it do to me?”
“Nothing yet.” I say as I motion for her to hand back the coin. “These are our lifelines, so hopefully we won’t ever need to use them.”
Ursula nods in understanding as I set a coin down on my chair, then turn and set the other down on hers when she stands up. I close my eyes and focus on the connection my awareness has to these two coins, cementing the particular threads as panic buttons. Once I get them solidified in my subconscious, which is confirmed with a nod and a thumbs-up from Pearl, I stretch my back with a groan and join Ursula right next to the back hatch.
She smacks the butt of her fist against the wall and the hatch hisses open. “Can you say what spell’s going to save our lives? Or is that some system secret that’ll give me a censorship headache?”
“I… don’t think it is. It’s just not all that impressive.” I say with a shrug. “It’s called ‘relocation’. Coinbound relocation if I’m being more accurate. It lets me swap the places of a coin and anything I designate as that coin’s target.”
“Huh. That’s pretty damn useful.”
“Very.” I chuckle in agreement. “If I get your permission for it I barely have to use any Worth, too. Contact me through the messenger if you’re in enough danger that I have to bring you back here.”
“You’ll hear my screaming from the other side of the world if I’m in that kind of danger.” Ursula laughs as the hatch slams onto a metal platform. For about three inches. After that, it’s one long drop down to the choppy waters below. “Wow. Talk about cutting it close. Watch your step; it’s definitely going to be slippery with all this unnatural mist.”
I roll my eyes and follow Ursula around the helicopter. Still can’t make out much of anything through the magic mist, but now that I’ve got feet on solid-ish ground, I can feel so much more. Almost like my awareness is seeping into the metal and spreading for a good chunk of distance. Except… it doesn’t feel right. Not that I’ve been on many oil rigs to know what’s actually right.
Ursula reaches out a hand and spreads her fingers wide. Somehow, I can see her perfectly fine through the mist, but even the helicopter’s shrouded in white. She hums in thought for a second, then looks over her shoulder and nods when she sees me.
“Looks like the platform doesn’t see us as a part of it. But the helicopter isn’t so immune. If this thing fully becomes a krarig while we’re on it–even if it’s just on the surface like this–it’ll take the helicopter with it.”
I raise an eyebrow and step up next to Ursula. “I thought you said it was magically protected against this kind of stuff.”
“Well, yeah, but not this level of this kind of stuff.” Ursula chuckles and taps the nose of the helicopter with her fingertips. “So long as we’re out of the mist before the krarig gets taken we’ll be fine. Anything else and we’re going to have way bigger problems than a missing helicopter.”
My throat tightens as I swallow hard. She makes a damn good point–being this close to a krarig is certain death. Nevermind at the moment of its birth. I walk towards where my awareness tells me there’s something small-ish while ignoring the yawning void that’s off in the other direction. That feels like what I’d imagine a portal to another world would feel like, which means that’s probably where the coins are going to be.
“You know where to go?”
I look to my right as Ursula hurries to match my pace. “Somehow, yeah.”
Without saying anything more, I beeline for whatever my awareness has latched onto. Ursula shrugs and follows without asking anything else, looking down at her briefcase every now and again as if waiting for something to pop out of it. I reach up to adjust my oxygen mask with two fingers as even more of the cloaking mist dissolves like holes in a raggedy sheet, revealing more and more of the rig that I kind of wish had stayed disguised.
Twisting spires of rusted and salt-coated metal reach for the sky. Huge chunks of the rig jut out in the completely wrong direction, making everything around it a minefield of holes and jagged edges. I look back at the helipad, which has mostly eluded destruction, but even that’s starting to bulge upwards like something’s trying to burst through from underneath it. And that’s just what I can make out with what little I can see–the whole picture must be so much worse.
Awareness crawls up a spire a few steps away. Jagged thorns jut out like some massive plant, but they wriggle like parasites when I get too close. I reach out and pull Ursula out of the way of a hole, sidle just barely out of the range of the wriggling worms of sharp metal, and gesture at an incline off to the side.
“Stairs.” I say with a frown as my awareness scans the ‘stairs’. “Ah, shit.”
Ursula stops on a dime and stares straight ahead into the white. “More holes?”
I sigh and shake my head. “That would’ve been way easier. No, the apocalypse decided to give us every northern country’s nightmare; a slippery, untextured metal slope.”
“The apocalypse turned stairs… into a slope.” Ursula states in disbelief. “It punched massive holes in the floor, made freakish tentacle-spires with parasitic thorns, and turned stairs into a slope.”
“Yup.” I confirm and lean down to test the metal. Slick as ice. “Well, let’s get climbing.”
Ursula taps her briefcase on the ground, then reaches into it and pulls out a simple retractable ladder. She motions for me to get out of the way, pulls all the rungs free with one flick, and sets it against the slope. While holding the very bottom she nods up towards the building.
“Get up there, then take hold of the top so I can get up too.”
Alright, that makes things a whole lot easier. I step onto the first rung and bend down so my hands touch one further up, then cautiously take a single step up the ladder. It doesn’t budge one single inch–like it’d been set in concrete, not held by one woman’s hands. She grins at the look of disbelief I give her, as if that was the highest compliment she could get. I roll my eyes and go right back to climbing.
----------------------------------------
Big surprise–I’m not as strong as Ursula. A climb that took me five minutes takes her a hellish thirty-two through no fault of her own, but out of a simple requirement for her not to fall and die. My arms scream at me for rest after minute three, and by the time she scrambles onto the raised platform, my muscles feel like dying worms. I’m pretty sure Pearl and Illumisia’s improvements to my body are the only reason I didn’t drop the ladder at any point.
“Sorry.” I manage to say between deep gasps that feel like razors in my throat. “I didn’t think it would be this far.”
She offers me an unflinching smile and dusts off her pants. “Not your fault the apocalypse is a dick. Good thing the ladder decided to grow a few dozen more rungs when we needed them. But hey, all that delay gave the masks time to actually work.”
I follow her with my eyes as she lets the ladder fall and spins around to sit on the edge of the platform. She gazes out over the rig, and after wondering how her ladder grew larger, I fold my screaming hands in my lap and join her in a moment of rest. Ninety-nine percent of the mist has dissipated, revealing a horrendous amalgam of metal and magic that looks like it could get up and start walking any time now.
Well, not walking. More like swimming. Unless it manages to get to land like the last one did.
“Look at all that magic.” Ursula sighs longingly. “More than anything any human can do so far, and it’s utterly wasted on trying to kill us. On another completely different note; does your instinct that found this slope tell us what’s going on in the belly of this beast?”
“Not… quite.” I say slowly. “It feels like it’s way bigger than it should be, but beyond that, I’ve got nothing. For all I know it could be run through with more of these tentacle things, or it could even be a portal back to the other world.”
Ursula shakes her head. “I can guarantee you that it isn’t a portal. There’s exactly one way back, and it happens exactly when the system tells you it’s time. Bigger on the inside, though… that’s almost a guarantee. We’ll have to play it extremely safe when we start venturing in.”
She grunts her last word as she gets to her feet and motions at the series of shipping crates welded together to form… something. Maybe an office? Or an overseer’s point? Whatever it is, it definitely looks like an aftermarket addition to the rig. The windows are all salted up, the door is barricaded from the outside, and there are more than a few humongous dents in the metal walls.
“Blasting our way in?” I ask as Ursula reaches into her briefcase once more.
“Not this time.” She says with a smile as she pulls out something that looks like a combination flamethrower and acetylene torch. “Can’t risk damaging the goods.”