Truth was two hours north of Nailad when the blue sky turned pink. It was the pink of a boiled shrimp, Truth thought, though he admittedly felt a bit lightheaded. There was a sudden feeling, a sudden absence of pressure, leaving him lightheaded and almost dizzy.

The carriage stopped. The power had cut out. So had the brakes, but that wasn’t as much of a problem for Truth. The car wasn’t going so fast that he couldn’t just hop out. He just let it coast to the bottom of the slope. It had enough momentum to climb up the next slope part way, but lost speed. Truth stepped out and walked the car over to the side of the road. It took some careful work wedging in big rocks around the wheels, but he managed to pin the car in place.

He knew what was going on now. There weren’t enough cosmic rays here to keep everything moving. Not nothing, it didn’t feel like when he was raiding the anti-theist hideout. But not enough.

Wonder why the sky turned pink. Can’t think what that might have to do with magic.

<>

Truth didn’t waste time with questions. He was on the side of a mountain, rock on his left, an almost sheer drop on the right. The engineers had taken pains to remove any overhangs, and he didn’t think he was anywhere near a rest stop.

He called the Tongue to his hand. He had dug out rock with her before, and she didn’t mind it. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck starting to rise. Truth used the fangs from Incisive to slice apart the rock face. It took a hell of a lot more effort than it ever had before. Worse than when he first used it. Much worse. His own reserves took a nasty hit.

Deeper is more important than wider. Just needs to be big enough for me and my stuff.

Truth hacked away, furiously digging a coffin sized hole in the rock. He got it a little deeper than his body length, widened it a bit, so he had room for everything.

Incisive wasn’t just hinting now, it was flat out yelling. Truth slid into the hole feet first, then blocked the entrance with his bags. Shaking hands ripped the tarp out of the pack. One end tucked under the pack, then pulled over the top, covering the pack and Truth both, blocking up a little bit more of the entrance.

There was a crack of thunder, but no flash of light. Then another. Then a rumbling,drumming, organ shaking roll of noise. Truth could feel pressure grinding down on him, on his apertures, grinding down but not steadily. There were sudden spikes of pressure. Sudden pulls, then pushes of energy, ripping at him. Trying to tear apart his apertures. Trying to break him as a mage.

The smells- what were they? Chemical, or rotting meat, or the taste of artificial grapes and burning buildings. Seeming to drill into his nostrils and up into his pores. Or trying to, at any rate. The body cultivation wasn’t just for show. Truth pulled the backpack tight against his head and hung on tight.

Truth felt like he was covered in thousands of ants. Little tingles of crawling electricity over his whole body. With a barely repressed shriek of horror, an ant crawled over his eye. They were coming out of the stone. They were coming out of the solid stone walls! He didn’t have space to move. All he could do was thrash in place and try to kill as many as he could. They were biting at him. Ignoring his backpack and biting at him.

He spasmed, trying to crush the infinite crawling things against the rough stone walls. Smashing his arms and hands against the stone so hard, even that ancient granite cracked. There was a sudden stink of apples. As though he were buried in apples- ripe, almost rotting. Covered in the smell and the millions of ants trying to dig their way into him.

Stone flakes shattered and littered the little coffin. He could hear the little flakes sliding and bouncing around, and they sounded like the color green. Then it was electric purples trying to pull out his tendons and the very cosmic energy in his body. Trying to rip it right out, and fill his body with apple-stench and billions of stoneborn ants.

He could hear something sizzling, a rattling feeling as something sprayed against his tarp. Then stopped, then started again. The tempo of the unnatural whatever-it-was had no reason to it. It didn’t smell like rain, but over the apple stench, lost in the madness of the crawling ants, Truth hardly noticed it.

There was something outside. Even lost to the madness and overwhelming sensation, he could feel something moving outside. Something too great and terrible to be seen. Something that would shatter his mind and burn out his eyes if he dared peek. His body screamed at him at a level below or beyond words and mind, that he must hide. He must be buried in the earth. He must not be seen. But the ants were everywhere and the world pulled and pushed at the very magic in his soul!

There was a roaring now, a roaring of burning fires and screaming fans in the terraces. A roaring of waves crashing against cliffs, of a forest in a gale. It was everywhere, roaring without meaning. Roaring with a meaning too subtle and awful for Truth to know. The tugging and tearing at his apertures seemed to throb in time with the impossible vast noise. The ants vibrated with it. The noise was everywhere. The roaring cry, between a lion and a dragon, was everywhere. It was in everything. It always had been. He just hadn’t been listening.

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And then the madness was past. Truth thrashed for a few seconds longer, not realizing that the ants had vanished. The air was quiet and still. He lay on the ground, shuddering and trying to breathe. He was exhausted. His little hideaway had almost doubled in diameter as he thrashed around. His clothes were shredded. His entire body ached.

He worked a hand up in front of his face. Torn up knuckles. The pads of his fingertips were ripped open too, though he could see the bleeding stopping on its own. There must be enough ambient magic around for his body cultivation to get back into action. He would need to cast a healing spell to fix all the damage.

System. What the Hell was that?

<>

Truth stared blankly up at the roof of his one-man cave. He couldn’t think. Couldn’t even imagine what the System was talking about.

<>

Most of the cosmic energy suddenly vanished. Then the energy in the air around it rushed to fill the gap. Which resulted in all of whatever that was.

<>

Truth felt no particular urge to climb out of the hole. It wasn’t nice in there, but it was better than being caught in whatever happened outside.

It’s going to become a thing, isn’t it? This isn’t some one-off thing, it’s going to be the new normal, until the magic runs out. Sudden… I need a better description than “magic storms,” but that.

<>

Truth lay there a moment longer. He tried to get a candy bar out of his backpack, but it was awkward, fumbling around inside for the elusive snack. He gave up and crawled out, pushing his bag in front of him.

The world outside looked pretty much the same. Which didn’t seem fair, somehow. He sat on the road and ate his candy bar. Not very sweet, which was also a shame, but it had a load of nuts in it, which was good. He washed it down with a bottle of cold tea, and called it good enough.

The carriage was, in a word, trashed. In two words- completely trashed. Every talisman and fetish was utterly burnt out, broken or melted. The bound demon evaporated. Whether it was before the storm or during, Truth didn’t know. Either way, it was gone.

He looked up at the sneering blue sky. “Is it because I didn’t want to run across a mountain chain again? Is that it?”

The sky didn’t answer. Truth cinched on his pack, and set off at a jog. “Other international secret agents don’t have to do this kind of thing. I’m sure of it.”

____________________________________________________________________________

Truth didn’t have the right words to describe what he was feeling. This was not, for once, a gap in his education. He wasn’t sure if anyone had the words for it. How do you describe something you had always known but never noticed, suddenly misbehaving?

The cosmic rays filled the world. They didn’t ignore matter, as far as Truth knew, anyway, but for all practical purposes, they were omnipresent. It occurred to him that the planet itself must be generating cosmic rays, somehow. Presumably not too much, since they were living on the surface.

It would explain Conjin too. He wondered how a city under that much water could be hauling in enough cosmic energy. Easy-peasy. It was coming up from the bedrock. For now.

He ran up and down the mountains. Even after an apocalyptic event like the storm, it was still a boring highway. Although he was starting to see signs that it might not stay boring. The turbulence had caught up some of the trees next to the road. Some had merely exploded, caught fire, or turned to ash. Others now seemed to move on their own. The way their branches grasped at him spoke of their hunger.

Truth started noticing more houses popping up. More terraced farms. It must be a flatter bit of the mountains. No lights on, nor carriages on the road. A little further on, he ran into a village. People were… not calm. He didn’t understand the words, but he understood the emotions.

People were being hauled out of houses on stretchers and carried to the front of a young man’s house. He couldn’t have been over level one. Must be some kind of rural doctor or nurse- it seemed he had a specialized healing spell. He cast it over and over, trying to fix whatever was wrong. He was sweating hard. Truth didn’t blame him in the slightest. He kept on running. He had a feeling there would be plenty more villages just like this one.

An hour later, he found out he was only somewhat right about that. There were plenty more villages. Some didn’t have a doctor at all. No wagons, no carriages, no talisman that keeps Nan’s kidneys working, and all of a sudden, the alchemical medicine has gone worryingly off. Turning into poison, or clumps of dust.

Worst of all were the mutations. People sprouting extra eyes, or their skin melting, or thousands of parasitic beetles slowly making homes under their skins. Truth could only bless his constant commitment to body cultivation there. No wonder the Anak family was looking forward to the end of the world. They would be unrivaled, even if the surviving mages turned to sacrifice fueled magic.

He crossed a pretty ordinary looking ridge and suddenly, he could see it. On the horizon, across yet more mountains and a deep forest, was the caldera of the Great White Mountain. That ancient, active, volcano that gave birth to Jeon.

Truth took a quick snack break. The dark tower was in sight. Time to go rescue the princess.