Chapter 73: Drifting (Patreon)

“The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

-Albert Einstein

Tom’s skin seared on one side and froze on the other, his body flooding with a toxic mixture of endorphins and adrenaline as the merciless vacuum tugged the air out of his lungs with a winch and yanked on his eyeballs.

Orsoth was a huge sphere in the distance, and while it looked big, it was still thousands of miles away.

The potent cocktail juiced Tom’s brain up until it felt like time itself had screeched to a halt, leaving him floating there wrapped in darkness and pain indefinitely while his mind desperately searched for a solution.

Too far away from the planet. Ghostwalk isn’t gonna help, healing crypt isn’t gonna fix my location problem. I’m gonna die in space.

Can I pull some help out of my dream? The problem was there was no way he had enough soul pulses on hand to bring anything that might help, Space suits probably weighed thirty pounds or so…Unless there was a tiny ring powered by soul pulses that allowed survival in space and orbital re-entry?

Maybe?

God, it’s worth a shot.

Tom’s eyes flickered back, and he fell asleep.

***DREAM***

“Outta the way, sorry!” Tom shoved Nema out of bed and sprinted naked through the encampment to Luz’s summoning circle.

Tom did a power slide through the gravel in front of the summoning circle, ignoring his shredded knees. He tapped the circle and juiced it up.

“Greetings, mr. Gra-“

“Is there jewelry that can allow someone to survive in space!?” Tom demanded.

“Yessir, The more technologically advanced planes sometimes sell them –“

“Give me the best one I can afford that weighs no more than two .44 caliber bullets!” Tom shouted.

“Right awa-“

Tom spat up blood in his dream.

***AWAKE***

Tom’s eyes fluttered open as a chunk of boiling lung-flesh spewed from his mouth.

NO!

Tom closed his eyes again, his eyelids barely closing around his bulging eyes.

***DREAM***

Tom’s eyes fluttered open as a chunk of boiling lung-flesh spewed from his mouth.

NO!

Tom closed his eyes again, his eyelids barely closing around his bulging eyes.

***DREAM2***

Tom’s eyes fluttered open as a chunk of boiling lung-flesh spewed from his mouth.

A rough thumb grabbed his eyelid and peeled it open, shining a brilliant light right into his pupil, searing his retina.

It was a middle-aged man, with a strong jaw hidden by a beard, gnarled and thin hands covered in the callus of hard labor. He had salt and pepper hair and wore a long robe with covered with intricate, familiar golden embroidery over purple and blue and many pockets.

“Wha-What’s happening?” Tom muttered as the blood left his mouth. He tried to turn his head, only to realize that his head was strapped in place. Same story with his arms and legs, and there was a massive golden band around his waist.

Directly behind him, he could hear a loud hum of something powerful, threatening to rattle his teeth out of his body.

“You’re drifting. I’ll have to make adjustments to the temporal field so as to preserve your continuity of consciousness. My mistake. Hopefully this fixes the issue.” He said, stepping off to the side and typing some code into a faintly keyboard covered in spell script.

“Wai-“

The man pressed a button and a searing flood of white power cut off Tom’s words and all rational thought.

***AWAKE***

WHAT THE FUCK!?

Tom’s entire body got a jolt as something passed through him, seemingly charged with the power of a thousand suns, threatening to burn him from the inside.

It faded quickly, and the reality of boiling alive in space reasserted itself.

Tom’s vision was already starting to turn colors as his oxygen fled his body in a faint pink steam.

Fuckin’ traitors.

There was nothing Tom’s fancy time-duping powers could do now, he’d lost contact with Luz, so there was no way he was calling for help now.

Or…Is there?

Tom stumbled across a faint memory, brought to the surface by pure desperation, and all his brain cells firing at once as they gave a last gasp.

I wonder if Orsothians ever bothered to measure the speed of communication between these undead. Because my modern sensibilities are telling me that communication over large distances is the key to winning a war.

Could that work!?

It’s either that or die…so…

Tom focused on the bond between himself and his undead minions, the remaining steelworkers.

**** Kar’el, the butcher of the Dinamore Stretch***

“Welp, he’s dead.” Carol said with a shrug before dusting off her hands.

Good riddance to constraining oversight.

“Alright, back to work everyone. No time to mourn over the sperm donor. There’s a war to win, and we didn’t really like him anyway.”

“Wait!” Carol rolled her eyes as the Waste of Space’s cock-socket came running up, her face twisted with desperation.

“Whaddya want, cock-socket?” Carol asked.

“You have to save him! You did once before, right? You can find out where he is?” Nema asked, her eyes moist with concern.

Carol glanced up at the sky, where she could feel her control ring some ten thousand miles distant, give or take.

“Yeah…I don’t think that’s going to be an option this time,” she said. “The Kinzena took the kid’s gloves off. Best we can do is honor the breeding stud’s memory with a slaughter. Genocide: It’s what he would’ve wanted.”

There was a flicker of motion in the corner of her eye that resolved into one of Tom’s undead charging towards them at a dead sprint.

“Tenacious bastard…” Carol muttered, arms crossed.

The rotting corpse gave Carol the bird on the way by and slid to a halt in front of Suzie, writing furiously in the dirt.

SPACE RESCUE

CALL LUZ

The undead then pointed into the sky.

“I can’t read English without a translation spell.” Suzie whispered, wincing.

“Hah, choked at the goalpost!” Carol gloated. She knew English, having been trapped on that boring, nonviolent planet for a good five years.

The undead’s head swiveled one hundred and eighty degrees, its milky white eyes locked on her.

“Ah, crap.”

Carol’s control over her body abandoned her as the control ring flared to life like a star in the sky.

“Juice up Luz’s summoning circle. We need to buy a rescue portal for Tom. He’s approximately ten thousand miles above us, and has maybe thirty seconds to live.” The words rolled off her tongue unbidden.

Suzie’s eyes widened, and she hopped to it.

***Tom***

Come on, Come on, Come on…

Tom’s vision darkened, the pain fading as his brain lost the ability to process it. He couldn’t feel anything, like a formless spirit, left alone with his thoughts, and even those were fading.

Was it ten seconds, or five minutes? Tom had no idea, time seemed to stretch out as the last of his brain cells went into hibernation, his vision darkening to black.

Then the white light.

Then nothing.

***Raze Kinzena***

Raze stood on nothing, swaddling himself with pressure and fresh air from the world below as he watched his target die.

The boy flailed in the vacuum for a moment, then stilled as he tried to use his powers to save himself. There was a hint of something powerful, like a leviathan causing ripples on the surface, but it quickly faded to nothing.

There was a last gasp, a desperate tap of the boy’s Well channeled through one of his rings, but there was no tangible outcome.

His struggled faded, then the last of his target’s breath left his body, and he died.

Raze felt the compulsion of the order leave him as his task was completed. Replacing the compulsion was an emptiness deeper than anything he’d experienced before. The only thing remaining was that tiny spark of unquenchable rage burning deep down at the bottom of the pit. That never left him.

Raze was about to leave when he spotted a shimmering portal opening beside the boy, and long, insectoid limbs reaching through to grab him.

Resourceful. Clever.

Raze felt himself smile as he turned away. He couldn’t testify to things he hadn’t seen.

What was he feeling?

…pride?

***Later***

“So your target is dead?”

“When I left, the boy’s heart had stopped and he was drifting in space. Half his body was frozen and the other half was burnt.” Raze said, arms clasped behind his back. “I’d say that counts. I don’t know how much clearer I can be.”

“You can bring his head to me!” Vendrith shouted.

“Is that an order?” Raze asked.

“Yes! Go back out there, find his corpse, and bring me his head! That is an order!” Vendrith bellowed, brandishing the cursemark at him, unaware of the discoloration and fraying creeping into the fabric from the edges. “You’ve bent the rules fartoo often for me to trust anything less than my own eyes!”

“As you wish,” Raze said, bowing deeply as the compulsion took hold.

A moment later, Raze flickered into the vacuum of space, his ear popping for a as he coated himself in atmosphere.

Oh no, the boy’s corpse seems to have drifted away from where I left it. Better keep looking for ‘his’ corpse, for as long as I have to.

The faint smile resurfaced.

***Tom Graves***

Tom heaved in a huge breath as his eyes flickered open. His entire body ached, and the world seemed muted and slow around him, like he and everything else had been dunked into syrup.

“Tom, you’re okay!” A gigantic insect said, leaning over him. It’s massive, clawed limbs and mandibles quivered hungrily.

“AAAGH!” Tom yelped, scrambling backwards, clawing his way through the viscous substance he’d found himself surrounded by and propelling himself away from the creature.

“Whoah!” the insect said flinching away from Tom as the gravel surrounding them flung itself up into the air. “Oh, wait, duh!”

The insect’s torso unhinged, opening to reveal Suzie, covered in slime. The former frog Outsider climbed out of the twitching insect and knocked on the side.

“Outsider Space suit.” She said with a smile. “We’re currently renting it from Luz. Which reminds me, we should get it back soon, because the late fees are astron –”

“You’re alive!” Nema’s voice came from where he’d been lying, and the little Vith woman tackled him back to the ground, flying through the murky substance they were suspended in. Her fist was clenched around the healing Crypt that had been stored in his pocket until a moment ago.

“Where are we?” Tom asked, glancing around.

“What do you mean?” Nema asked, pushing herself up and frowning. “You’re back on Orsoth. The camp? Where you were before the Kinzena ported you away?”

Tom blinked and scanned the surroundings, noting the Vith, the camp, the archers, the fifty-foot summoning circle busily converting fallen enemies into reinforcements, seemingly heedless of the thick substance they were embedded in.

“I suppose I am.” Tom murmured, waving his hand through the viscous substance. Strangely it semed to go through his hand rather than around it, and it seemed to go as far as the eye could see. “What’s all this, then?”

“What’s all what?” Nema asked.

Tom opened his mouth to respond and thought better of it. It didn’t seem to be bothering anyone else, and if they didn’t know what it was, then they probably couldn’t help. There was no reason to concern them. “Nothing. Just some near-death induced vertigo.”

Tom noticed that he could perceive the syrupy substance in every direction, even when he wasn’t using his eyes.

He didn’t know what it was he was experiencing until he felt the stuff fold on itself, creating what appeared to be a spinning disk, like a giant coin that hung in space, creating ripples in the air that Tom could feel impacting against his entire body.

The spinning coin faded into the masked giant, standing high above them on a field of the substance compressed into a platform.

The giant raised a finger to where his lips would be, and one of the mask’s sockets darkened as he winked.