NOVEL NEXT Chapter 425: Cresting the mountain
"I BEG YOU!"
Claudy's shriek filled the insides of the maglev, ringing unpleasantly in my ears.
"FOR THE LOVE OF HEAVENS, SLOW DOWN YOU TWO!"
Up until this moment, I still harbored this kind of perverse idea of Claudy being a calm, composed, most elegant kind of person.
He never spoke much, all the more if he didn't have anything of value to add to the conversation.
'He was a perfect example of a man of a few words… And here he is now…'
My rate of synchronization with Fay was through the roof.
Whatever we were both lacking in practical experience and theoretical knowledge, we compensated for with just how well we could attune ourselves to the other.
Just as a single thought appeared in my head in response to my spotting a large pitfall hidden within the gray of the mountainside, Fay would already take the hypermagnets for a spit, smoothly turning them to get the best out of the maneuver flashing in my head in response.
In a sense, she could tell what I was going to do before I learned that myself, while I kept perfect confidence in her ability to make even the most ridiculous maneuvers possible.
It was for this reason that our trusty vehicle could now scale stone walls much stepper than before or fly over massive chasms and voids, ignoring those natural traps as if they weren't even there in the first place.
But…
If there was one point that I could boil down all that change in regard to our climb of the mountain, it would be the momentum.
The fact that we could glide over most of the natural traps allowed us to not only keep up a constant momentum at first, but as we got used to the new sensation and started to get deeper and deeper into each other's instincts, our speed started to grow.
Soon, we crossed the threshold that we agreed not to approach while hovering over near perfectly flat plain.
The speed limit that we self-imposed on ourselves now was of no significance, as we were no longer trying to approach the barrier. Right now, as we skirted on its outside as if there was a tether that disallowed us from increasing the distance while our vigilance stopped us from getting closer…
We could travel at speeds many times greater than what we allowed ourselves before!
And that led us to our current dilemma, where Claudy's desperate pleas for mercy only served to annoy and distract Fay and me.
"We are almost there, so just grit your teeth and whoops!"
I heavily pulled the stick to the side, right in time for the ship's vector of movement to push off to the left.
If not for Fay's timely reaction, we would have fallen into the abyss, sending the hovercraft down the massive hole and stumbling as we could only try to desperately bounce off the nearly vertical walls of the fall to prevent crashing the maglev.
Yet, with her quick thinking and the rapid changes she implemented through her stick, the whole vehicle leaned heavily on its right, making it feel as if we were already falling into the abyss below.
But no.
Now that the hypermagnets on the right side of the vehicle turned nearly ninety degrees off the abyss, the rate at which we fell towards the hole matched the speed at which we flew away from its edge.
Our speed only increased even further as we skirted over the edge of the chasm, locked in the delicate balance of the gravity pulling us down, hypermagnets pushing us up and Fay balancing the entire ship to keep those two forces balancing each other out.
"We will pull up in three," I called out, reinforcing this crucial message with my voice, worried it would get lost in the rapid streams of the thoughts that were rushing through our heads.
"Two!"
The Maglev sped up even further, adding up the force of the air resistance trying to slow us down and the sheer forward momentum of our circular spin across the diameter of the abyss to the equation.
"One…"
I clenched my hand over the control stick and even reached out for the power lever.
"GO!"
With all the speed we've gained, I raised the lever right as Fay centered the hypermagnets back on their default axis, spring-boarding us off the chasm's edge and several tens of meters into the air in a gentle arc.
"Just a little bit longer!" I screamed out while Claudy grew simply too terrified to scream anymore.
Pushing the power lever further and further up, I kept up all the way to when we peaked on our trajectory and the front of the vehicle angled down, allowing me to catch a glimpse of our surroundings from this elevated perspective.
We still had quite some distance and height to cover… but from so far up, I could already see the edge of that massive hole in the middle of the mountain that stopped our advance during the last attempt.
"It's now or never guys!" I screamed out, keeping the hypermagnets output at its maximum for long enough that the ship started to stall in the air.
We've used up all of our momentum to climb as far into the skies as we did. The additional distance we gained with this slingshot only served to bring us higher and higher up the mountain, thus decreasing the distance between the hypermagnets and the ground they needed to work.
And so, at the peak of our air-climb, Maglev started to twist down further and further away. In the end, though, the very moment it would reach the terminal angle, the hypermagnets at its front would get just a tiny bit nearer the ground to compensate and thus stop the tilt.
Or so they would do if I didn't pull the power level all the way down the moment I sensed the hovercraft reached this equilibrium.
"Wha…?"
Fay produced a small moan of surprise, not prepared for the sudden plunge that followed.
"Get ready!"
Not saving my throat for later, I screamed from the bottom of my lungs, fully focused on the imaginary trajectory I'd projected for our ship.
It was the crux of the two realizations I had recently yet decided to keep silent about.
And if I was right, not only would it allow us to cross the abyss of that ungodly hole in the mountain, it could even free us from the hold of this barrier completely!
"Just a little bit more!" I screamed out when the rising momentum of our ship brought us closer and closer to the ground.
Hovercraft wasn't a plane or even a helicopter. And despite flight being its mode of operation, it could never reach the same altitudes as those two of its predecessors. Enjoy new adventures from empire
That, in turn, meant we didn't really have that much height to work with, giving us no more than just a few seconds of a freefall at best.
'Now.'
It wasn't a calculated moment. I simply followed my guts when I suddenly pushed the power lever halfway up, introducing a new powerful force and turning our freefall into a swing now that there was something pushing our vehicle ahead.
The further down we went, the more of our momentum turned towards the vertical plane as opposed to the horizontal one, turning our slide through the air into a glide. And as we reached the peak speed of this maneuver, we pretty much reached the peak of the mountain preceding the massive hole.
It would be a sensible thing to do to slow down and come to a complete stop, giving ourselves time to rest and prepare before challenging the hole.
But that would be a sensible thing to do if I wanted to maintain the status quo, not shatter it and move on.
"Here we go!" with one last shout, I jacked the control stick all the way forth while releasing the safety on the lever and pulling the power to the factory-allowed limit.
Already at the peak speed of our arched glide back to the mountain's side, we reached the usual, cruising attitude mere meters before the local crest of the mountain…
Only for the fresh supply of power to hit the hypermagnets and springboard us up again, now that we've multiplied the reverse magnetic pull between the hypermagnets and the ground.
I couldn't even pinpoint the moment when we lost track of the last of the ground below the ship. We were simply moving too fast to do so.
And for a moment, we found ourselves in a state of suspension as the ship once again crested the peak of its trajectory and started to rapidly fall down…
But fall down safely, on the other side of this seemingly impassable hole.