Above the Kingdom of Mitrikova
11:11 A.M.
Within a few minutes, we had flown over the coastline of eastern Rubigo. Dozens of small grey splotches below us told of countless small settlements, each holding thousands of Imperials. The fear of being shot down re-entered my mind, and I wondered if I would be able to escape the plane in the event of serious damage. Ferrum Online had a magic system, I thought, so it wouldn’t be too far out of the realm of possibility for some Imperial down there to cast some lightning bolt or fireball big enough to take down an airplane. Perhaps there was some Patrician down there who could do the job. Could I shatter a window and jump out if we started falling? Sure, it would be impossible for a normal human, but I could probably do it.
Melkior let out a low whistle. “That’s Rubigo, then? It’s pretty big for a video game.”
“How big is Rubigo, anyway?” I asked, trying to get my mind off of the thought of crashing.
Null answered my question. “Rubigo is a roughly circular continent with a diameter of fifteen hundred miles.”
“Fifteen hundred miles…” I said to myself. It was a number so large that it didn’t really mean anything to my primitive brain. Fifteen hundred miles was definitely a lot, but I couldn’t really comprehend it without some reference. “How big is that?”
Melkior closed his eyes as if thinking for a moment before saying, “That’s slightly longer than the length of Alaska north to south. It’s also slightly shorter than the distance from Ireland to Ukraine.”
“Wow,” I said. I was impressed that Melkior knew that off the top of his head.
“Oh, yeah, I remember that line,” Null said. “That was the line IGN used when describing the side of Rubigo.”
“Well, you didn’t have to tell him that,” Melkior sulked. He was clearly saddened that Null had taken away his chance to seem smart in front of the other Dark Apostles.
“Almost the size of Europe…” I said, lost in thought.
We flew for several more hours. Hundreds of miles flew beneath us, and no one tried to shoot us out of the sky. Null and Melkior talked about the magic system for much of the trip, but I wasn’t listening for most of the conversation. I wanted to really get a handle on the physicality of this new body before I started screwing around with any magic. Plus, I never really used casters when I played RPGs. I was more of a fighter class kind of guy, honestly.
Then, the pilot’s voice came on over the loudspeaker. “We are approaching the drop point thirty miles south of Osiris City. If you are dropping, please move to the launch area now.”
“Well, that’s my stop,” Melkior said casually as he unfastened the safety harness. He stood up just as Svenheim got to his feet. “Pilot!” Melkior turned to shout at the intercom system. “Make sure you drop with Null and Katya. I want to see you back at Castle Bosporus tomorrow, do you understand?”
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“Yes, my lord,” the pilot said without hesitation. Fervent loyalty dripped from his voice.
Svenheim stuck a tongue out at Melkior as he lightly placed a hand on the outermost crate. This crate held the supplies that Svenheim would use for the foreseeable future. At a volume such that I had to rely on my enhanced hearing to perceive, Svenheim said, “We’re supposed to be villains, remember?”
The boarding ramp started to open, and the sound of roaring wind filled the compartment. Our jumpsuits fluttered in the wind, and anything not fastened down jerked and slapped, yet the two Dark Apostles in the center of the compartment did not budge. They were stones in a typhoon.
“One man’s villain is another man’s hero, eh?” Melkior said with a devilish smile. Vague philosophical statements like that greatly annoyed Svenheim, and Melkior knew it. I could tell that Melkior was trying to take some minor revenge on Svenheim for preventing him from being the team leader.
“God,” Svenheim squeezed his eyes tight. “I hope we don’t have to spend too much time together.”
Just then, the boarding ramp finished opening, and the dull red lights on the walls of the compartment turned a bright green. The pilot’s voice came in through the intercom, “Jump! Go! Go! Go!”
Svenheim gripped the large metal crate and pushed it out the back of the plane. A moment after the crate exited the plane, a large cargo parachute unfurled above it, quickly slowing its downward momentum. As soon as the crate and its parachute cleared the exit ramp, Svenheim turned and pointed at the rest of us with two finger guns. He took a few steps backward and flung himself off of the exit ramp.
With a sigh, Melkior casually walked off the exit ramp as if he was stepping off a sidewalk into grass. He took three normal steps and, on the fourth step, disappeared downward.
With each departure, I felt the cargo plane raise up in the air as it lost a significant amount of its payload. Luckily, the pilot was able to get the plane back in control each time the plane shifted.
The exit ramp started slowly closing seconds after Melkior dropped out the back. It made me wonder if the pilot had a mirror or rear-view camera that he could use to make sure that the two Dark Apostles had dropped. Though, thinking about it, he probably knew based on the bouts of turbulence.
“Do you think swimming is possible?” Null asked a few seconds after the exit ramp closed.
“Huh?” I asked, confused.
“Sorry, I mean to ask, can we swim with our… denseness?” Null tried to formulate the question in a way that makes sense.
“Oh, yeah. The word is ‘density,’ by the way. Probably not. Humans are barely buoyant as it is. Some soldiers at D-day drowned because their helmets were too heavy. Considering that we have the density of metal, I’d say no. Why do you ask?”
“I was thinking about it as we flew over the water.” As Null spoke, I could see a distinct anxiety in her eyes. “If we had fallen into the water, we probably would have drowned.”
Great, a new thing to be worried about.
I looked out the window once more, and I saw the great crack in the ground that bisected the City of Osiris. Looking at it from the air, the Chasm dwarfed Osiris in size. I could easily trace that three-hundred-yard-wide crack in the ground from one side of the horizon to the other. Melkior and Crow had started referring to it as the Eastern Chasm to differentiate it from the three others.
After another hour of flying, something new came to dominate the view. It was the place where the four cracks in the ground met each other in the center of Rubigo. It was where GM had broken out of his prison deep beneath the planet’s surface. The people of Ferrum called it the Breach.