Chapter 22

Both Fusions activated simultaneously, but Larek could feel that it wasn’t because both of them heard his mental command. Instead, as the one nearest him activated, the other one was also activated, as they were – as the Fusion details described – entangled together; when something happened to one, so too did it happen to the other.

The Fusionist could visually see at least one of the auxiliary Effects enable, as he watched the steel plates sink further into the short grass, crushing it underneath its greater weight; as for the strength of the steel being increased, it wasn’t something that was physically visible, but he could see the actual Effect with his Magical Detection and saw that it was working.

Scattered around in different places were six separate areas of ambience, each of them absorbing a different type of energy. The absorption for all but the Mana Cost section powering the overall Fusion were even, if relatively slow, but already he could see the ring of Primal Essence forming that would define the “Traveling Gate”. At six inches in diameter, the perfect circle was suspended just above the Fusion, its lower portion approximately an inch away from the steel.

At first, the circle was a bit insubstantial in appearance as the energy necessary for its creation was gradually pulled in and combined together, but eventually it became more distinct. It wasn’t as fast as he was expecting, as it took nearly a minute before enough energy was gathered to fully materialize the ring, but by all accounts, it seemed to be working.

What he hadn’t necessarily expected was the fact that he could sense the coalescing Traveling Gate apart from the Fusion and areas of ambience. Closing his eyes as he turned away and concentrated on it, the feeling both Gates gave off was reminiscent of the Scissions that used to plague the Kingdom, though it was much, much weaker. In addition, whereas the Scissions used to give off an almost ominous and wild tinge to the power they exerted, this felt tame and sterile in comparison. It was almost like the Scissions had “bad intentions”, whereas the Gates he had constructed had no intentions whatsoever.

It took another minute for the slowly materializing curtain of Primal Essence to cover the internal portion of the rings, and when they were finally complete, there was a sharp spike in the feeling of power they gave off, before it settled back down. In fact, as he looked at the areas of ambience that were powering the Gate, the rate of absorption had been reduced dramatically, with their original areas of ambience being a little bit bigger than his fist, with the new areas being no bigger than his thumbnail.

Huh. I guess that is used to maintain the Gate’s existence? It was interesting to see that his focus during the creation of the Fusion had included that into the equalization and the steady rate of energy transfer, as he hadn’t necessarily planned for it to work like that.

Regardless of how all of those things came together, the fact of the matter was that it was working – at least he hoped so. He still had to test it, of course.

Taking a small stone from the dirt underneath his foot, he bent slightly to line up his aim, before tossing it perfectly into the Gate nearest him. There was a very slight resistance as the stone touched the multi-colored curtain of Primal Essence, which reminded him of the appearance of most Apertures, but it wasn’t slowed down much as it disappeared. Having been watching both Gates, he was easily able to see the stone emerge from the other one, its momentum slightly less than when he threw it, but there wasn’t too noticeable of a difference.

It works!

He grabbed another rock and did it all again, but this time he was looking at something else. As he had thought, the areas of ambience that powered the Gate slightly increased in size, and therefore their absorption rate, as the stone passed through it. It was barely noticeable and only lasted for a second before reducing to its previous flat rate, but it was enough to tell him that there was some sort of cost involved in transferring an object from one Gate to the other.

Next, he dug out a clump of dirt and grass from the field and tossed it through; it was slightly larger in size than the stones he’d tossed, and there was a little bit more absorption from the areas of ambience at that point, but it wasn’t too significant. The test wasn’t necessarily to see if the size of the areas of ambience would increase with larger objects, though that was good to know; rather, it was to see if living things – such as the grass – could survive the journey.

When he picked up the clump from near the other Gate, he was pleased to see that it seemed just fine. He was worried that it would show that all the life was sucked out of it or something, but it looked as normal as it had before he threw it. Of course, there was a difference between grass and an animal or a monster – let alone a person – so he still needed to test that. Thankfully, the field he was experimenting in wasn’t devoid of life, and it wasn’t long until he used his battle awareness to locate a field mouse cowering in the grass approximately 50 feet away from where was standing.

After a quick chase that the mouse had no chance of escaping from, he was leaning down toward the Gate with the mouse clutched firmly in his hand. With his eye on the other Fusion, which he had fortunately angled in such a way that he could see the exit, he pushed the head of the mouse through. He felt the slightest resistance, as if he was pushing the mouse through a spiderweb, but it didn’t seem to hurt the animal. As he watched the head emerge from the other Gate, he let the mouse go as it looked around and seemed to decide that it had “escaped” Larek and was trying to get away. It pushed off his fingers and shot through the rest of the way, emerging through the Gate without any noticeable negative effects. He watched it immediately disappear in the grass, getting as far away from the giant who had shoved it through a strange hoop.

With the successful test, it was, of course, time to try it himself. As he knelt down near the Gate, intending to push his hand through, he stopped when he sensed a Transport heading in his direction. Sitting back on his heels, he waited for it to land approximately 50 feet from his position, and he smiled when he felt who was inside. Or to be more accurate, he felt the many people who were inside.

Volunteers came bubbling out of the top of the Transport before they jumped down to surround the area, their staves thankfully not pointed at him, but at the two Gates. They were followed by not only Nedira, whom he first felt, but all of his other friends.

“Why does it not surprise me to find you at the center of this?” his betrothed asked with her hands on her hips and a smile threatening to break loose on her lips.

“He really hasn’t changed, has he?” Penelope asked, coming up beside her as they looked down on what Larek was doing. “Still doing the impossible and freaking everyone out as a matter of course.”

They were joined by not only Vivienne, Norde, Verne, Bartholomew, and Kimble, but Teena and Esmer, as well, two of the more recent additions to their group. The Aeromancer and the Illusionist seemed confused at what Penelope was hinting at, but they’d seen enough strange things that they caught on.

“You really scared us with… whatever this is, you know,” Kimble said, even as he and the others jumped down. Previously, they would’ve climbed down, but with unlocking their Martial potential, they had enough stats to jump off a greater height without hurting themselves. “We could feel it all the way at the Transport fields.”

Verne quickly sprinted over, squatting next to Larek as he looked at the floating ring next to him. The excitement was practically exuding from his old roommate as he bounced up and down slightly. “This looks amazing! Is this what I think it is?”

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“Uh… maybe?” The Fusionist wasn’t sure what he thought it was.

“Sounds like a yes to me! Have you tried it yet?”

He could only assume that he was asking whether Larek had experimented with some objects yet, so he nodded. “Yes, some—”

Before Larek could stop him, Verne shot his hand forward, slipping it through the Gate like he was trying to punch it, his hand and arm disappearing up to the elbow. There were gasps from everyone watching, as it appeared as though he’d just cut off his arm, but Larek was already looking at the other Gate, where Verne’s hand was spasmodically waving around in all directions. It was strange enough that he thought something might be wrong with Verne’s connection to his arm, but the smile and giggle on his old roommate’s face showed that he was just enjoying it as he tested out the gate.

“It won’t cut my arm off if I touch the edge, will it?” he asked, but again before Larek could react or respond, Verne was already banging his arm against the inner size of the ring. Fortunately, all that happened was that his arm was stopped by the edge as soon as he pressed up against it, as if the ring was simply a smooth piece of metal or something equally innocuous.

I guess that answers that question.

“W-What? How? What did you do?” Kimble asked, stepping up close to get a better look at the Transfer Gate as everyone seemed to finally see Verne’s arm at the other one. He couldn’t tell what most of the Volunteers were thinking, but their silence and blank looks seemed to indicate that he might have broken a few of them. His friends, on the other hand, took the development largely in stride, though they had the wide-eyed looks of those who couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

Larek stood up, gesturing toward the steel plate. “This is a Transfer Gate, at least according to the Fusion description,” he explained. “Obviously, this one is quite small, but I needed to test the theory out before I made one full-scale. They come in pairs, as you can see, and should be exactly what we need to occupy the Factions so that they can stop worrying about us and worry about the monsters we’ll send through here.”

Kimble was nodding, still staring at the multi-colored circle that Verne continued to play with. As he opened his mouth to speak, there was a cry from Larek’s old roommate as he touched the outer edge of the ring of Primal Essence with his hand, and two of his fingers were lopped off without any resistance at all.

“Verne! What happened?” Norde asked, as he ran up to his friend, but the still-excited young man calmly picked up his detached fingers from the ground, held them up to his bleeding stumps, and activated his Healing Surge Fusion. Within seconds, the fingers had reattached themselves; and besides the blood that covered his hand, there was no sign that anything had happened to it. He even flexed his fingers a few times with a satisfied smile on his face.

Larek wasn’t sure if he’d have been as calm if that had happened to him.

“Wow, that is impossibly sharp,” Verne noted, looking closer to the edge of the ring, but he was notably a bit more cautious about getting too close to it. “That’s even sharper than your axe. What is this made from?”

“Huh?” Larek asked, still a bit taken aback at the bloody scene. “Oh, it’s Primal Essence. It’s a combination of Mana, Stama, Pattern Cohesion, Pure Aetheric Force, and Corrupted Aetheric Force. Being able to create it is apparently the final Guardian Skill, as I now have Primal Essence Mastery,” he said matter-of-factly. “Ooh, did you know that this is what the Apertures—and likely the Scissions—are constructed from? It’s slightly different from this, however, as they are basically a conduit for Corrupted Aetheric Force that is sent here from the other world, and it converts that Force—along with some other energy—into monsters. Don’t ask me how exactly that works, because I don’t know for sure; I was interrupted by the arrival of those two Gergasi yesterday, so I didn’t complete my investigation.” He hadn’t been paying attention to everyone as he spoke to Verne, but he could sense that everyone had just gone really quiet.

“Is… that true? This is similar to an Aperture? And there aren’t monsters coming from the other world… just energy?” Kimble asked, with disbelief reverberating in his voice.

Larek nodded. “As far as I can tell, yes. I might be able to detect even more now that my Magical Detection Skill just hit Level 100, but I don’t think it will tell me anything differently.”

“You got a Skill up to Level 100?!” Nedira asked, her shock reflected on the faces of everyone else, even Verne.

“Uh… yes? Actually, I just hit Level 100 in seven different Skills when I finished this Fusion,” he added, again gesturing toward the steel plate.

Everyone had frozen where they were at this revelation, at least for a few seconds. That was when Penelope suddenly started chuckling, before turning into bent-over laughter that seemed to break the tension that infected everyone listening. “You… you… you just casually mentioned something that no one in the Kingdom has ever achieved,” the blue-haired Martial managed to squeeze out between laughs, “as if it was no big deal! That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard!”

Larek didn’t necessarily see the humor in it, but the others apparently did, as they joined in the laughter with her, along with a bunch of shaking of their heads. He just shrugged, a smile of his own tugging at his mouth at the sight of everyone apparently enjoying themselves. He even felt himself begin to relax a little bit, as a weight that had been weighing on him for days seemed to melt away. Until that moment, he hadn’t realized that he’d been operating in a hyper-focused state ever since he’d thought about investigating an Aperture, as almost every second he’d been wanting—no, needing—to express his findings in the form of the Fusion he’d just created. While there was still the process of scaling the Traveling Gate up so that it could fit at least average-sized monsters through its opening, he didn’t feel the same sort of pressure that had been unconsciously itching at him the closer he got to home.

“What are your plans now?” Kimble asked as the laughter died down. “Are you making these things bigger? What is their range? How many can you make? Are they only available in pairs, or can they link more than just two together? How long will they stay open?”

Larek held up his hand to stop the flow of questions as he began to answer them. “Well, I’m planning on making these bigger so we can test them for safety. As far as I can tell, the entanglement between them doesn’t have a maximum range, so they should theoretically work all the way across the world, as long as there is enough energy around to produce Primal Essence. I can only make these in pairs and only one pair at a time, as they need to be split using Focused Division in order to produce the entanglement.”

He had already thought about trying to create additional Gates instead of them just in pairs, but he instinctively knew it wouldn’t work; he might be able to entangle them so that they connected two places into one, but three or more would likely rip whatever crossed the threshold apart, if it didn’t catastrophically explode upon activation.

“As for how long they will stay open, they should stay open indefinitely, as long as enough Primal Essence can be produced. However, they can also be shut down if needed and moved somewhere else. Which, coincidentally, is something I still need to test.” Looking down at Verne, who was still staring at the Gate, he said, “Would you mind moving away for a moment? I need to shut it down, and I’m not exactly sure what it will do.”

His old roommate nodded and quickly moved away, and everyone else followed his lead and backed up at least 100 feet from the nearest Gates. Larek was a little closer, at about 15 feet, but he mentally gave the deactivation mental phrasing to shut the Fusions down.

Immediately, he saw the Fusion stop absorbing every type of energy and the formation on the steel plate shut down. The Gate, however, didn’t suddenly disappear; it continued to be suspended slightly above the surface of the Fusion, looking largely unchanged.

“Isn’t it supposed to close or something?” Nedira asked, still at a distance, looking at the Gate with worry written all over her face.

Larek thought about it for a moment before he shrugged. “I think so? Oh, yes, I see it now. It’s bleeding energy back out into the environment, but it looks like it will take a while. It might take longer for the Primal Essence to break down than it took to gather it,” he conjectured, before turning toward his friends. “Which is another slight limitation to the Gate I forgot to mention. For as relatively small as it was, this one took a little over two minutes to fully form, as it had to gradually pull energy from the environment at a constant and even rate. For one that is a lot larger, such as one that could fit people or one that would work for bigger monsters, the establishment of the Gate will likely take a lot longer. Hours? A day or longer? I’m not quite sure, which is something we’ll definitely have to test.”

“That’s… actually not so bad,” Kimble mused, his hand on his chin as he thought about it. “I can only imagine that if we felt this small Gate a little over a half-mile away, that a larger one will have a much more intense and stronger feeling to it. It would be more than enough to give warning to the Faction towns and cities we need to distract that they need to prepare, and it will give them that time so they aren’t suddenly caught out.”

Larek hadn’t really been thinking about that, but he supposed that it was probably for the best.

“Of course, there are other things to consider, such as how to get monsters to go through these Gates in the first place, but I’m sure we can figure it out,” Kimble continued, looking at the others, but Larek had already shifted his mind to some of the possible Fusions he’d thought about a few days before. While they hadn’t exactly been difficult ideas to execute before, now that he’d Leveled many of his Fusion-related Skills to 100, they seemed like they’d be almost easy to create.

And he couldn’t wait to get to it.