Azura sat in a meditative position as magic seeped out from him and into the world around him, and natural mana flowed into him at an even rate. It was difficult for him to relax and focus given how dire their situation, but if he wasn’t able to grasp as much as possible about this space, they may end up forever lost in it, so relax and focus he did. He didn’t know what the others were doing, and that was a blessing they were going out of their way not to bother him, and that peace and quiet was helping immensely.
That being said, even with them behaving themselves he still wasn’t having much luck. The time stream was the only point of contact he could easily access from inside the subspace, and with that one floating in the wind there wasn’t a lot for him to find. Unless he could reach outside the… Wow that was an unbelievably bad idea. Perhaps the worst idea he’s ever had, and yet he was just desperate enough to try it. He abruptly stood up. Elismera and Auros quickly turned to him with hopeful expressions. He barely withheld a grimace. “So I’ve got some bad news, and some good news.”
They looked at him with apprehension. “Start with the bad news.” Elismera was clearly agitated. Not that he could blame her, this was an awful situation. To the point he definitely thought it would have been better if they had just lost to the shadows. That would have just been embarrassing, this was quite literally life or death. All because he had gotten a little overzealous with his magic.
“Well I can’t manage the subspace from within it. There is nothing that connects to the regular world from the inside of the subspace.” Although if he managed to get them out of this, a subspace that could have a different flow of time than the real world opened up all kinds of possibilities.
“Ok that’s pretty bad, please tell me the good news is you still have a way out.” Auros was easily the most panicked out of the 3 of them, but he didn’t really blame the older student. Despite Auros having a year on him, he had definitely dealt with way more crazy stuff. Though admittedly nothing quite this life threatening.
“I’m not not saying I have a way out.” It was just insanely risky, and the odds of success weren’t that much higher than just waiting for outside rescuers. In life or death though even a .01% increase in your chance for success was worth investing in. Auros’ confused look and Elismera’s impatient one prompted him to continue. “Well to be blunt, like I said I can’t really do anything from inside the space, but there just so happens to be a way I could make it outside the space. Even if it is on the wrong side.” His teammates paled as they realized what his plan was.
Elismera recovered fairly quickly though. “Why did you make that sound so ominous? Just send your copies out and we’ll see what happens from there.” He winced, unfortunately that wouldn’t be an option. He was going to have to connect to the spirit world from outside of known spacetime, that was not something his copies would be able to do, honestly it was a gamble on whether he would be able to do it, with his increased connection to Alaya, and his fae blood.
“That won’t work. I mean I’ll send a copy through to make sure they don’t instantly get erased, but they won’t be able to actually do what needs to be done to repair the space enough to open a portal or to correct the timeflow.” thankfully he no longer required air, so as long as he wasn’t instantly erased he should be able to survive in the void.
“So you’re going to get lost in the void on the off chance that you might be able to increase our odds of escape.” huh, he was not expecting either of them to catch that, but that actually made this next bit easier, he wasn’t the self sacrificing type after all.
“Actually I have something for that. It is, however, a secret, so I’ll need each of you to sign a geas that makes sure you don’t tell anyone.” He met Elismera’s eyes and subtly moved his eyes to Auros briefly. He knew Elismera wouldn’t talk, mutually assured destruction and all that, but he had nothing on Auros so geas, but her not having to sign one would make the other student suspicious.
***
It had actually been surprisingly easy to get them to agree to the terms of the geas, and not more than 5 minutes later they had signed the magical contract. He took a deep breath. Now came the rough part. He placed his hand on his chest, and then pushed it further. His hand sunk into his chest emitting a golden light. Aurso and Elismera both gasped in surprise. He ignored it as his hand found what he was looking for. He gripped it and pulled out. He had to hold in a laugh at the horrified looks on their faces as he pulled out a small blue orb, with white armor around most of it. Golden accents marking the armor pieces. “I’ll need you guys to hold on to this.” Normally a monster wouldn’t be able to function without their core, but he was a unique existence, in that he had lived a long time with his core sealed away, and in that he actually had 2 cores. His other core existed in the spirit realm, and he was still connected to that one.
“What… What the hell is this Azura?” He couldn’t blame them for the wary gazes. He had just pulled a monster core out of his chest after all. The geas they signed probably didn’t help them feel anymore comfortable with it. Ideally he would have wanted to keep this cat in the bag, but there were a multitude of reasons for his decision to leave his real world core with his current team.
“Exactly what it looks like. My ability to generate magic is greatly reduced without it, but not so much that I can’t finish the task. As for why I’m handing it to you, is that I am almost certainly going to ‘die’ out there,” He pointed into the void. “but that core is more my body than this is, so as long as that’s intact I should be able to reform around it. Meaning so long as you guys keep that safe there is no real risk to any of our safety.” Or at least he hoped so. He couldn’t claim to know anything about the void, and if his soul was trapped out there then that was that. Then again if that was the case they were all most likely dead anyway.
“Let me rephrase Auros’ question, why do you have a monster core inside you, normal people don’t have monster cores.” Despite her obvious apprehension Elismera did take the core from him, surprisingly gently. This was a lot of trust for him to show. They could do some real damage with his core, and all the geas did was prevent them from telling anyone else about it.
“Well I never claimed I was normal. I’ll tell you what though if we make it out of here safe and sound I’ll tell you all about it, but you’re probably better off not knowing. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Without giving them a chance to respond he jumped into the void. There was a split second of panic right before he reached the void, he really hoped this wouldn’t end horribly.
***
Azura had been through a lot of painful things in his life, this was nothing like those. Somehow it was worse. He hadn’t really realized what nothing meant. Like actual nothing. There was no sound, no color, nothing to touch, nothing to smell, true emptiness. It was awful. All he could see was himself, but he couldn’t make a sound. There was no air for most of his senses to receive information from. He’d expected it to be cold, with no heat in the void, but with nowhere for his body heat to go the temperature was whatever his body regulated it to.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
He wanted to say he floated along, but he wasn’t sure that was an apt description. Was he even moving? He honestly couldn’t tell. He had thought the hole would be open from both sides, but it would appear not, or at the very least it didn’t exist in a way he could perceive. He supposed given the context that it made some sense there wouldn’t be a hole in the void itself. Well at least he wasn’t immediately erased from existence, and in equally good news his connection to the spirit world was perhaps actually stronger here. This wasn’t the world between though, or at least he didn’t think it was.
Then again he supposed it wouldn’t really count as a world at all. It was beyond words, beyond comprehension, and wonderfully exciting for his curiosity. Unfortunately he had far more important things to focus on, like trying to fix his mistake. Unfortunately he was a bit stumped in that regard. There was nothing for his symbols to rest on, as such he found himself vastly less able to function than he had expected.
Then again, if he was able to exist here without issue there was no reason to suspect that anything he made wouldn’t. With that thought in mind his gauntlets glowed with icy blue light as he made a sheet of ice roughly the size of writing paper. Sure enough it stuck around without issue. That at least gave him a place to start. Hopefully this wouldn’t be too difficult.
***
Elismera sat in silence. After Azura had disappeared she had created a chair out of vines. She had felt the need to sit down after being handed the slightly glowing blue crystal by Azura. It was surprisingly warm to the touch, even the armored part was pleasantly warm. On top of that it was radiating Azura’s mana. She was extremely uncomfortable holding it but the horrified glances Auros kept sending it convinced her she was the right one to be holding it. She wasn’t willing to risk the fate of her people on the 2nd year not doing something they’d all regret.
Funny enough as mysterious as this whole thing was, it answered almost as many questions as it brought up. She had wondered how Azura has what seemed like nearly limitless mana, and this would definitely do it. It also explained how he was able to rid himself of the curse taint, or at least part of it. Purifying monster cores was after all a fairly standard procedure, and much easier than purifying natural circuits. Still it did raise a lot of questions. Just what was Azura? As much as she thought she should be glad to have some leverage against a man who had previously held all the cards, part of her couldn’t help but wish she never had to see this thing.
She almost wished the core wasn’t so beautiful. That would make it easier for her to put it away, and pretend this never happened, but she could barely bring herself to look away. It flashed brightly every now and then, and she assumed that meant Azura was doing something in the void. She sighed. The worst part, was she doubted he’d tell her much about this later. He trusted her by virtue of keeping her secret too, but she didn’t exactly count among his friends. Not like there was any point in asking them either, not one of them would sell him out.
It was funny, usually being such a long lived species meant your curiosity died rather quickly, you kind of start to assume that you’ll see everything the world has to offer eventually, and new things become less special, and thus less interesting. So to pique the interest of an elf like her was no small feat, yet she couldn’t say she was curious. More curious than she had ever been before. She didn’t know how, but she was going to get some answers somehow.
***
Azura still floated in the emptiness of the void, but thousands of sheets of ice floated where he had discarded them. At least he knew he wasn’t moving now. Which he didn’t understand there was nothing here surely without gravity or friction or wind resistance everything would just move forever in random directions? Then again nothingness meant there wasn’t actually space or time either, so there may just be nowhere for it to move?
He shook his head. He could worry about his curiosity later, he had more important things to worry about right now. He had been worried he wouldn’t be able to find the info he needed when he entered the void, but he now knew that not to be an issue, instead the issue was knowing what information was correct. The void existed between all dimensions, and all subspaces, so he was finding information by the boatload. Hundreds of thousands of dimensional anchors, and that was just what he had found so far! He needed to find a way to narrow his search results. Each dimension he tapped into had a unique feel to it, but he had never really thought about it until he had something to compare to, so he wasn’t actually confident he could correctly select his own universe by feel, but he didn’t exactly have any other way of latching to it.
It would be one thing if his core was there, but… A smirk came onto his face. Perhaps he was going about this wrong. He couldn’t narrow it down to the regular world, but he bet he could feel out the spirit world, and that was just as good. He quickly manifested a new sheet of ice, and furiously began filling it with enchantments. His connection to the spirit world was as strong as ever, and his other core resting there made things even easier. It didn’t take him long to find it, unfortunately the hard part came after that. He had to link the spirit world to the subspace his teammates were in. His cores being on both sides would make the task doable, but not easy by any means.
Still he relished the challenge, and excitement bubbled in his chest destroying the panic that he had forcibly been suppressing. He could do this, he was really going to make it out of this mess. All he had to do was get enough mana together, to open a portal, and he’d need to make sure the portal existed in the void too, if only so his soul could get out and return to one of his cores. This would take some time, but then again it didn’t seem time existed here, he could connect to the subspace or the spirit world at any point in time he wanted. From his point of view it had been almost 6 hours, but he could open the portal at any time for the subspace. Still best not to cause any paradoxes, so an hour after he left would probably be best. In the meantime he best get to work.
***
It had been half an hour since Azura had gone off into the void, and Auros still hadn’t been able to wrap his head around the fact the first year had handed them a monster core, one that Azura had pulled out of his own chest nonetheless. Even weirder was the fact Elismera was holding it so reverently, it was a monster core!! That meant Azura was a monster… Right? What other explanation was there? Then again he didn’t know of any monster that could disguise itself as a mage, and make a body with the prerequisite circuits. Then again if the disguise was that perfect how would anyone know?
All that didn’t even begin to cover all the chaos going on in his head. Did Azura being a monster change anything? The younger.. Was Azura actually younger than him? He didn’t actually know that. He sent another wary glance at the core Elismera held gently above her lap. He shook his head, he needed to try and stay on track. Azura hadn’t actually done anything to warrant mistrust, aside from keeping the fact he had a monster core a secret, but anyone would have done that. Still he couldn’t get past something so ludicrous so easily.
The boy was monstrously strong for his age, but not so much so that he felt like there weren’t other people just as strong. Honestly the most terrifying thing about Azura wasn’t his strength, but his absurd versatility. Azura had after all just torn a hole in the subspace, and was now out in the void trying to fix it. He wouldn’t be surprised if the kid was the only one in the world capable of doing both things. Even though there were probably several that could do either individually.
So what should he do? Well there wasn’t much he could do until they made it out of here, if they made it out of here anyway. Honestly even if they made it out he doubted there was much he could do. He couldn’t tell anyone else about the core, and he doubted he’d be able to deal with Azura 1 on 1. If Elismera was as disturbed by this as he was then they could probably take their other teammate, but that didn’t seem likely. Although the girl was clearly surprised she seemed more curious than upset.
In the end it seemed his only option would be to watch and see. He just hoped that if worst came to worst, he’d be able to stop anyone else from getting hurt. He took one last glance over at the orb The elf princess was holding. Even from all the way on the opposite side of the platform he could feel the magic it emitted. He didn’t like his odds.