NOVEL NEXT Chapter 427: Surreal
"Oh right…"
Claudy suddenly calmed down.
The realization struck him so hard, that it broke past all the mental defenses he built in the moment of absolute terror from before.
"We are down indeed…"
I turned my eyes back towards the vehicle's displays.
'We did it without that much of a damage, but…'
As insignificant in the long run as those were, we didn't lose any of the crucial subsystems of the ship.
After I pushed Maglev to its limits, the dampeners of inertia on the hypermagnets went offline from all the stress they had to endure. In other words, we could no longer rapidly change the flow of power to cushion rapid falls.
The next mountain or creek we would encounter, we would have no realistic way of passing.
But with the exception of a few systems the lack of which could prove, at most, annoying, the ship was still in a pretty good state.
I raised my eyes and looked beyond the numbers and data on the main screen, at the vast plain stretching north from where we stood.
And scattered all across the plain, the spots of direct starlight were currently going crazy.
'What the…'
Stunned by the unexpected situation on the other side, I rushed closer to the window, as if to take a better look at the situation.
'Wait, what if…'
Casting my eyes to the side, I jerked my body the moment I realized one zone of direct light of the stars was currently rushing at some insane speed towards us!
'Shit!'
It was too fast.
No normal supreme could react fast enough to escape it.
But I was no normal supreme nor did I have to escape with just my legs.
"Ding!"
A high-pitched sound filled the insides of the ship.
A step behind me, Fay desperately jerked the stick to the side, her restraints cut off all for the sake of her reaching my stick.
'Stop.'
By now, I didn't even need to call out the name of my spell.
Sure, the aura weaves that made all of those skills and spells of mine up were way beyond my current ability to understand.
But I didn't really have to understand it, as long as I could replicate the structure with the weave of my aura. A process that grew increasingly easy ever since my cores coalesced and since I developed a better understanding of the nature of aura.
The incoming charge of the deadly light of the stairs slowed down to a crawl.
Most of my abilities had something to do with time.
Aura tribute slowed down the lenses through which the time flew, sacrificing whatever I offered for the tribute to affect this particular quality of the world around me.
The eye of time raised my perception by seemingly only three points…
But by doing so, in my current state…
It brought me beyond the level of an inexperienced supreme.
My stats didn't change when I evolved to the higher rank, nor did I feel the constraint that held them back from release.
And most of all, my system couldn't be bothered to announce anything, as if on a mission to remove itself as much from my consciousness as possible…
'Wait, what?' Enjoy new stories from empire
Comfortably taking my time thinking within the influence of my skill, I casually took the step towards my seat, making sure not to go anywhere Fay's hand, just in case.
Yet, right as I was leisurely sitting down and reaching for my stick, ready to unlock my bond to its limits to somehow pass the intention through the barrier of the slow-down of my skill…
Something happened.
And at the speed of a slow personal computer booting up, a set of messages suddenly appeared on the maglev's display.
[Detecting high-powered radiation]
[Registering the danger]
[Detecting a threat]
[Evasive manouvers in effect]
[.]
[..]
[…]
[.]
[..]
[…]
Watching how line after line appeared felt surreal.
Somehow, I sensed the slight vibration of the maglev's floor as power surged into the Hypermagnets.
Following nothing but my instincts, I threw all the aura I needed at the altar of my skill while reaching out with my hand to my left.
Thankfully, the move that would make me spit blood just two ranks below or waste half of my aura a single rank before now felt like lifting a medium weight at most.
The effects on my aura were also pretty negligible.
But most importantly, I managed to move fast enough to press down on Fay's chest and keep her locked in her chair.
'Shi…'
The world went dark in a single instant, the moment the Maglev's insides exploded in white bubbles.
[Kinetic Foam Engaged]
The hovercraft surged to the side, moving as fast as a biker would through my slowed-down perception of time.
[Evading the threat]
'Oh god…'
The lapse in my focus tore through the weave of my spell. And just the very instant in which my perception of time returned to normal, Maglev jumped by several times the distance that separated my seat from its inner wall.
Normally, this kind of disposition would turn my insides into a paste.
But with the kinetic foam deployed, its rapidly increasing bubbles would slow down the shift of my own mass to the absolute limits of the human body endurance before breaking… And the process repeating with the next layer of self-replicating emergency foam.
What should be a lethal dose of inertia, hardly caused my supreme body to ache a bit.
And for this relatively small price, the onboard AI managed to save all three of us from the path of the crazed starlight.
But that didn't mean we were out of the danger.
"Keep the foam!" I screamed out to the AI, quickly restarting my aura tribute to match the speed I needed to avoid the danger in this crazed place.
'How could the North be so damn different from the South?!' I screamed out in my mind.
Things were going great for just long enough for me to forget about just how damn dangerous this world could be!
'Yeah, fuck it, not gonna risk our lives for this,' I thought, waving my hand and summoning my portal, ready to grab Fay and call Claudy for us to retreat.
"We can do it!"
Somehow, Fay's words reached my mind.
'I'm still within the tribute, so how…'
It felt like something sprouting in my soul. The endpoint of our bond blossoming into a beautiful flower… Only to turn into deep cracks in the barrier of my skill that separated Fay from my perception.
Cracks quickly developed sideways, quickly causing the barrier to collapse, unleashing all of Fay's agitated soul upon the realm of the slowed-down time.
"We got taken by surprise," Fay somehow reached out and grabbed my cheeks, despite neither of us moving an inch. "But we can do it. And if it really gets dangerous, we will escape then."
There was no fear or panic in Fay's thoughts, just boundless confidence and assurance.
"Actually, Maglev can escape all on its own," I thought? Or did I say it?
In my current state, I couldn't really tell.
"Then it's all the better, isn't it?" Fay's soul warmed up in what felt like a smile of the very core of her being. "We just need to grab that person from before and we are out of here, right?"