Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!

With all the damage to the maglev's system, steering it or raising the speed was no longer as easy of a task as it was before. From a course that could ride the winds, the hovercraft turned into a heavy, metal ball that somehow continued to defy the simplest laws of gravity and abuse them to move.

"Shit, they are getting closer!"

With the view of the rear displayed on one of the maglev's secondary displays, I didn't even need to look back to confirm it. Looking back, in the first place, made absolutely no sense given how the long, wide window that stretched throughout the hovercraft's circumference didn't reach as far as the entry ramp.

In short words, the rearview displayed on the maglev's windows was the only way for us to check just how much leeway we had left.

And to put it blankly, we had none.

'If they get any closer, we will get in range of their attacks,' I thought, basing this decision on the attacks our vehicle endured thus far.

"It's stalling," Fay noted in a dull voice.

"What?" I turned my head back to the girl, baffled beyond any sense.

The ship didn't have an engine that could stall, to begin with, so how could it…

'The weight? Are we bleeding power? Is something blocking the hypermagnets?' In an instant, an array of possible reasons for the ship to stall flashed through my mind… But not a single one fit.

The only change to the weight that we introduced was the girl that we took onboard, a measly fifty or sixty kilos worth of flesh. Or, in other words, a single box of ammunition for the maglev's main guns worth.

'We had several tons of free cargo lift, so that's not it,' I reasoned while taking into account the fact that the maximum weight the maglev could lift… was given in relation to its max safe power, not the maximum possible power it could induce.

When it came to bleeding power… it was simply unrealistic for it to be the issue.

As a certain actor in a certain movie about the Apollo moon mission mentioned - power was everything. Without the power, there would be no lifting force of the hypermagnets, the displays wouldn't work, and… the onboard AI would cease to function.

In other words, losing power was the greatest problem this vehicle could encounter, thus making it also part of the ship's systems that were guarded with extreme redundancy of secondary systems and failsafes.

In other words, if there was even the slightest problem with power or the fuel cells leaking, the alerts about the problem would flash on every display possible.

Lastly, there was a chance that something was blocking hypermagnets. In other words, there was a surface of the ground much closer than the ground itself. A possibility that only existed in a world where aura abilities could take all kinds of shapes and forms and introduce elements that even the most vigilant designers and engineers from back on earth could never fathom.

'That's not it either, otherwise, we would have long fallen down or lost propulsion,' I thought… Only to raise my eyes and check the data displayed on the screens.

As little of a sense as it made, as few of reasons I could find for it happening… The hovercraft was clearly slowing down.

"If it's nothing physical…"

I took a deep breath, right as it dawned upon me.

'Is it some sort of spell cast by those guys that are chasing us?' I thought, only for the ship to suddenly swerve heavily to the left, avoiding a tiny yet extremely fast ray of starlight that passed by. 'Or is it the…'

Raising my eyes to look beyond what the onboard AI displayed on the windows of the ship and towards the real world on their other side, I realized one thing.

When the ship swerved to the side… It actually gained distance in relation to the barrier!

'If that's the case…' I thought, giving Fay just the minimal and extremely restrained heads-up, even going as far as to restrain our bond for a moment, all for the sake of preventing her from realizing the same thing that I just did.

'But if this hunch is correct,' I thought, gulping my saliva down right as I grasped harder at the control stick… and pushed it all the way to the left, as far as the design of the device allowed.

"Woah!" From the back, Claudy uttered a short scream, his face already showcasing just how much he abhorred the idea of staying on this ship any longer.

Still, as the ship dove to its left, I turned my eyes right, watching with glee how the barrier grew more and more distant… All the way to the point it no longer did.

"Now, let's floor it!" Shouting, as in the heat of the moment I failed to realize I only needed to relax the hold over my bond with Fay, I killed the side-momentum and turned all the power of the hypermagnets to push us forward.

This time, whatever held our acceleration before, was no longer present to obstruct our moves.

"What the hell is going on…" Fay muttered, following whatever I was doing without any question thus far.

In fact, I could tell that her question wasn't an inquiry but a mere expression of her feelings.

But now, after all, I've seen, checked, and tested, I finally felt confident enough to reveal the things I was paying extreme yet also minimal attention to.

"Do you remember when we jumped off the mountain for the very first time?" I asked, instantly switching the maglev from rushing ahead to swerving left, away from the barrier, when I sensed that our acceleration started to slow down at a rate that couldn't be explained by the resistance of the wind.

"It's hard to forget something like that," Fay countered without a second of thought, already balancing the angle of the hypermagnets to make them do their job in the most possibly efficient manner. "What about it, though?"

"I take it you didn't notice how we landed much further away from the barrier than we should?"

The hovercraft didn't cease to move. The supremes never stopped trying to chase after us, irregardless of how many of them fell prey to the chaotically moving zones of direct starlight.

And the restraining nature of this damned barrier never ceased in its attempts to… well, restrain us, only ever taking a fewteen seconds each time it switched from trying to stop us from distancing ourselves from the barrier or limiting our acceleration.

Everything continued to move at the exact same pace as before… but the insides of the maglev were all frozen in time when I revealed the one, tiny thing that I'd noticed while we were still back on the other side of the barrier.

"Did we?" Claudy, shocked by the revelation to the point he momentarily forgot his fear of flying, asked.

"Yeah, we did. And by quite a considerable margin too. I bet if we lingered for long enough or tried to move along the barrier again, we would be steered back to the distance we should be away from it… But we didn't."
Explore stories at empire

I allowed a small smile to appear on my lips as I started to unveil all the secrets that I held regarding this place out of worry that ever voicing them out - or even thinking about them for that matter - would alert this damn place of my plans.

"That's where I got the first hint. And ever since then, all I did was all for one, singular purpose."

This time, I decided not to go any further, curious to see whether Fay or Claudy could figure out my reasoning.

"You were testing the limits?" Claudy muttered a few moments and three alternations of our course later.

"No, you were trying to stress-test it!" Fay corrected Claudy's suggestion.

Through our bond, I could tell that something clicked in her mind, allowing her to look at all my actions from the recent past through a new, correct point of view.

Still, for the sake of Claudy, I decided it was only right for me to explain myself.

"The reason why we managed to land much further than we should, is likely because we moved at a speed much greater than what the barrier was ever used to countering. By moving faster than we should, we tested the limits of the barrier as you guessed.

And when we continued to move at high speeds while climbing up the mountain," I stopped my voice for just a moment when switching the directions of our propulsion again.

Now that we managed to accelerate much more, pushing us to the side as opposed to pushing us simply ahead came with quite the g-force. And with only one charge of the kinetic foam left, I dared not to deploy it just for comfort's sake.

"When we maintained a high speed while climbing, speed up even further when moving across that massive gap or launched ourselves high up in the air when we jumped down the mountain again…" I took a moment to wash my throat with a gulp of my saliva, "we were at speeds that were simply too great for the mechanism of this barrier to counter!"

At this point, there was no need for me to explain anything any further.

The reason why we continued to switch directions of our propulsion was pretty much obvious. Even though it could no longer stop us, the mechanism of the barrier continued to attempt to do so. And wiser by all the faults of the recent days, it was pretty desperate to stop us from achieving speeds at which it could no longer control us!

Yet, to use a greater force at stopping us, meant it had to give up on other restrictions that would normally be imposed upon all of those who fell into this trap.

If it wanted to slow us down, it could no longer restrain our movement away from the barrier. Taking our speed into consideration, it also could no longer affect our acceleration whenever we tried to gain more distance from the barrier.

And so, it continued to switch to where the majority of its power would go, lagging behind only a second or two behind the alternations to the course that we've made.

One or two seconds that we kept exploiting to gain more speed and distance and thus make the barrier's job even harder than before!

"But how did you know?" Claudy asked, clearly stuck on some part of my explanation.

"Know what?" I asked while struggling to remain in my seat now that along our speed, the forces pushing us within the maglev also grew to the point they were turning hard to ignore.

"How did you ever know you should check the distance?" Claudy clarified his question. "As far as I understand how this barrier works, even if we gained distance from it, it should obstruct our ability to perceive it, don't you think?"

Hearing this question, I couldn't help but smile.

It was a detail even Fay didn't seem to notice.

"It's fairly easy. It's because back then, I already knew we could stress the mechanism of this barrier beyond the point it was capable of contending with," I revealed. "And it was Fay who brought it up to my attention."