Arima Ayame hung, motionless, in space, watching the light steal across the surface of the planet below.
She found being out here immensely satisfying; it was always peaceful, always silent. She should have been strangling on vacuum, eyes and veins bulging from decompression, but she wasn't; she didn't know if it was because this universe followed different rules, or if it was a capability of her Windstalker Class that perhaps shrouded her in fresh air in such places. All she knew was that out here, among the stars, she was as comfortable as if she were lounging in bed.
She turned, slightly, to behold the thing that always captured her attention out here; the planet's moon. It was huge, gray, and uncomfortably close relative to Earth's, but it never seemed to move in any way; she had ventured there a time or two and found strange structures, like vast empty stone cathedrals, but never anything more. She longed to return and explore further, but Sora-kun had discouraged her; he was wary of unforeseen dangers there. "You're too important, Ayame-chan," he'd whispered to her once, and her heart had raced wildly in her chest; since then, she'd only beheld the moon from afar with longing.
She was feeling reckless today, though; maybe she wouldn't go to the moon, but she could go somewhere else.
She'd already explored the sun; it was tiny, and orbited both the planet and the moon in a wild, shifting spiral that seemed to accelerate and slow at different points in its orbit. Her Class's Intangibility Skill had protected her from the heat, although she couldn't maintain it for long and had had to explore in short bursts. But the sun had been boring; just a little sphere of white-hot flame about the size of the football stadium she'd seen on vacation to America. The Hoover Dam had been much more impressive.
With a thought, she accelerated herself west, streaking towards the nearest edge of the planet below; the dome of the sky rose up to meet her, but she became Intangible and plunged through the earth below until she emerged in the nether-world. Here, where the sun traveled the back half of its arc during the surface world's night, gravity was reversed; towering spires of stone reached nearly to the star-web and glowed red-hot from the nearness of the sun's passage during this place's daytime. She was careful not to phase through the sky-dome itself, however; she'd tried that once and hadn't enjoyed the experience.
Balls of lava occasionally arced through the air in this place; the reverse side of lava-falls in the deep underground, she supposed. She soared between them, engaging her Supreme Gravity Skill lightly to weave and bob through the sulfurous air as if making gentle tugs on a kite-string. Abruptly, a kimberlite spike of diamond shot out of the roiling molten stone below her; she engaged her Class's Windstep Skill and flickered in a short-range teleport to one side, then watched it soar past her impassively.
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With the gentlest motion, she shifted herself and danced across the under-sky until she had matched its velocity; touched a dainty toe on its jagged, sharp point and poised herself, still for a breath in a molten holocaust of black-heavened chaos. Her red scarf caught the hot wind and fluttered, and she took a selfie.
Then, with a sigh, she leapt free and soared back towards the point where she'd come. She longed to fly farther and higher, but Sora-kun was quite correct; ranging afield courted great risk for little reward, since Suzume-chan's little ghosts and gremlins had already painted a depressingly thorough picture of their strategic circumstances. If they were to have any hope of success, their efforts would have to cover all the aspects of the war's theater; she felt that they had logistics fairly well sewn up by this point, but research and scalability were still lacking, as were the personal development objectives they'd identified. She herself was still only Level 29, and that was the highest of the three S-Rankers so far; Sora-kun was still Level 26, and Suzume-chan a mere Level 19. All of them agreed that they would need to reach the maximum Level possible before engaging the Demon Lord's forces, as that was most likely the mistake which had brought down the previous S-Rank hero. Most of the A-Rank and B-Rank Heroes were already in the 20s as well (except Takano-kun, who was Level 35 somehow), and even the C- and D-Rank Heroes were mostly catching up. The hunts had been well-organized, educational for most participants, and had helped clean up some of the more dangerous fauna in the kingdom's wilder areas; with any luck, they'd soon be ready to tackle their next objective and begin organizing dungeon expeditions.
Sora-kun had calculated (and she had verified, with her own S-Rank Intelligence) that having each S-Ranker bring their party to a different dungeon would be the most efficient use of time and other resources; the plan was for them to clear dungeons located within Sheonn initially, to prevent exposure and attack from the enemy while building up their own Levels and Skills. And, of course, if they found any powerful magical artifacts in the process, so much the better.
Plunging through the solid rock of the earth once more, she emerged from a ring of mountains high in the west and swept majestically over the peaks into the onrushing dawn; she'd be back at the castle in time for breakfast. She hoped they'd be having pancakes.