IM2: Chapter #24 (Patreon)

It was impossible for Thorn to tell if Eve was rolling her eyes since her back was to him, but somehow, he could tell that she was from the way she flew on ahead.

“Thorn, we only need high power output for long range transmission. You can power the jump from this location to the surface. We just have to be really careful, since there is a strong chance Aciakko is still alive and furious. There is even a chance that she is still on this floor and will find you with that plate thing she was using. It looked like a divination plate to me.”

“You mean she can still track me?”

“Hopefully not. I’m hoping that the blast damaged the plate. Those sorts of devices are incredibly delicate. If it didn’t you’re going to be in a tremendous amount of trouble, but chances are good that it has been destroyed since she didn’t show up at the forge after you teleported there.”

“True, no one tried to get in, which tells me that she probably hasn’t figured out where I teleported,” Thorn said, stepping onto the teleportation spell circle.

Crouching, he adjusted the smaller ring to connect with the teleportation circle by the observation window and looked over at Eve.

“What next?”

“Next, gather your mental strength and connect with each of the mana entry points in the mana channels below you. You want to push mana through all of them at the same time.”

“Sounds easy enough,” Thorn said, nodding.

With a tap of his staff, he sent mana flooding into the ground but instead of triggering, the spell construct fizzled, failing to activate. Frowning, he tried it again, only to get the exact same result. Instead of pointing out what he was doing wrong, Eve leaned back to watch what he would do. Letting his mind sink into the spell construct, Thorn tried it a third time, this time watching to see where the problems were. Almost immediately, he realized that there were sections of the spell constructs that were not receiving mana quite fast enough.

In order for the teleportation circle to work, he needed to not only insert mana into it, but he had to do so in a controlled manner that would allow mana to reach every part of the symbol at the same time. Doing this not only required a more explosive burst of mana, but also required a different amount of mana to be injected into each opening. Grumbling, Thorn sent his mental sense sweeping through the soil above him but he couldn’t find anything but dirt. He could tell that he was about half a mile underground right now thanks to his supernatural connection with earth, which was much too far for him to use his Earth Step totem.

“Is there a way to use the principle that drives this teleportation network with Earth Step?” Thorn asked, scratching his head in annoyance. “Only being able to jump to a place my mental sense can reach is a drag.”

“Thorn, the fact that you can teleport any distance longer than three dozen feet without a pre-set spatial lock like the spell circle you are standing in is already mind-bending. So don’t look down on it. As your mental sense continues to grow, so will the range of Earth Step.”

Nodding, Thorn let out a small sigh and focused on cracking the mana injection code on the teleportation circle. After fifteen minutes of testing, he suddenly felt a flash and vanished, reappearing in the hallways above. Blinking, he smiled slightly and mana flickered around him, delivering him back to the command center hallway. Once he was sure that he could go back and forth without any issue, he warped up to the administrative building and climbed the stairs to the main hallway. Once he was there, he summoned his powers of darkness and earth to create an illusion of a wall that blocked off the stairs, making it look like there were no stairs down, only stairs leading up.

The blood stains and scorch marks were still present from the fierce fight Thorn had in the hallway, but most of the flying lightning jellyfish corpses had been removed by scavengers, at least, that is what Thorn assumed. Out of an abundance of caution, Thorn waited for the mana he had used to regenerate before casting a set of magical shields around himself and heading for the observation room. He had noticed that the large window overlooked a massive pit that led down to the strata below, and he was hoping that he would be able to traverse it.

Thorn’s mental sense appeared to be tied into his Intellect stat and every time it rose, he gained a corresponding expansion in the distance he could sense. Currently, he had a range of two hundred and fifty feet, which was enough to sense everything in the observation room even while standing at the door. He couldn’t sense any of the flying jellyfish hiding under the desks, but he could see that the entire room had been wrecked. Large cracks ran through the various levels of the room and the crumbled stone had devoured many of the desks. Even the thick glass window that made up the wall of the observation room had shattered, falling in great chunks to smash apart on the stone below.

So far, Thorn had not seen any major evidence of the destructive tremors that accompanied the power plant’s explosion, but it was clear from the sad state of the room that they had been terrible. There was next to nothing in the room that was still whole, and the lack of lights gave the whole scene an eerie feeling. Rousing his mana, Thorn stepped through the earthen doorway that appeared and emerged at the bottom of the observation room, next to the broken window. He could feel the wet, warm jungle air mixing with the cooler, drier air of the ruins and see the massive tree tops far below him.

“Is your plan to just jump?” Eve asked, flying out of the broken window and hovering in the air.

Nodding, Thorn snapped his fingers, casting Slow Fall, a spell that allowed him to resist the pull of gravity, and stepped out of the window. Drifting forward, he slowly began his descent into the massive hole, surrounded by the gloom of the jungle. It wasn’t long before he entered the leafy world of the treetops, causing the world around him to grow darker still. Like a feather meandering through the air, he slowly fell down deeper and deeper, passing by leaves a dozen times larger than he was.

Thick branches twisted this way and that, forming a winding maze that supported the heavy leaves, and as Thorn floated down, he could sense the small creatures that called the upper reaches home scampering into the gaps. Sensing his spell coming to an end, Thorn looked for a branch that would hold his weight.

[Blink]

One of the downsides of a spell like Slow Fall was that it was hard to change directions in mid-air, but Blink could solve that problem perfectly. Shifting a few dozen feet to the side, Thorn alighted on a thick branch like a drifting bubble coming to rest. Standing quietly on the branch, Thorn scanned everything around him with his mental sense, checking for danger, even as he got a better sense of the hole he was traveling through. The hole itself was approximately half a mile across, though from what Thorn could tell it was narrowing as he traveled down toward the fifth strata.

Twisting branches spread out from the thick tree trunks that rose up through the hole from the fifth strata to the fourth strata, creating a confusing maze of wood and leaves. There was nearly no way to tell what branch belonged to what tree, making it look like the different species of wood were all part of a giant mixed plant. The leaf cover was thick as well, causing visibility to be nearly zero. Thankfully, Thorn didn’t need to use his eyes to see what was around him and the information that his mental sense was feeding him was more than clear enough.

Lifting his hand, Thorn’s fingers wove a spell construct together, recasting Slow Fall as he stepped off the thick branch he was resting on and resumed his fall down the hole. His progress was slow, but if Thorn had learned anything since entering the jungle, it was that this world did not reward haste. The jungle was filled with dangers and the last thing he needed to do was stumble into a deadly situation because he was in a rush. He could feel a nagging need to put as much distance between himself and Aciakko as possible, but since he had no idea what had happened to her, he could only assume that he was going the right direction.

In the darkness time seemed immaterial as Thorn continued his controlled fall down the large hole that led between strata. He judged that he had covered at least four miles before he began to sense a substantial change in the air. At first it was just a slight sweetness in the air he was breathing, but soon, it became obvious that each breath he took drew in a considerable amount of mana. Taking a deep breath, Thorn could feel the weight of the air in his lungs as the mana filtered into his body, mixing with the earth and darkness attributed mana that his body already carried.

The mana he was breathing in carried a slightly wet feeling, like loamy earth right after a heavy rain. Because of his half-lich state, Thorn had no need to breathe, but out of habit he continued to exercise his lungs. He could feel the earth and darkness attributed mana that the air contained being absorbed by the Atlas Star while the other types of mana were sent back out with each of his exhales. The trapped mana was cycled through the device in his heart where it was broken down and purified before being mixed with the mana the Atlas Star naturally produced and sent back into Thorn’s body.

“Are we entering a rainforest?”

Speaking in his mind so as to avoid disturbing the stillness, Thorn peered down at the leafy world under his feet. He still wasn’t able to see much, but the force of habit was too strong. Eve, who had been flying alongside him as they descended, nodded.

[It appears so. The moisture content in the air is much higher on the fifth strata than it is on the fourth or the third. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found a fair amount of standing water, or even some sort of localized weather system.]

A moment later, as they drifted past a few leaves, Thorn sensed a thick cloud beneath them. Heavy with water, the cloud felt like a thick wet blanket as he fell into it. There was even a slight electrical charge in the air, but to Thorn’s relief, it wasn’t strong enough to produce lightning. Falling down through the rain cloud, it only took a minute for Thorn to come out the underside of it, allowing the wide world of the fifth strata to come into his view.

Stretching out in all directions, he saw a huge jungle full of twisting stone pillars that competed with the giant trees for dominance. Like towers thrusting into the sky, the stone pillars were nearly uniform in height, but wildly different in width. Some were thin, barely more than a few dozen feet across, while others were as thick as mountains. All of them, however, were made from the same reddish stone, causing them to stand out in the darkness.

Unlike the fourth strata, the fifth strata had clouds stretching across the ceiling, blocking much of the light from the glowing stones that covered it. Packed so tightly together that they were blinding to look at, Thorn found it impossible to even begin to estimate the number of sun stones embedded in the ceiling, and the result was that the jungle below was lit brightly compared to the dim fourth strata.

“This world never ceases to surprise me. Who would have thought that the fifth strata would have its own weather system?”

Locking onto one of the red stone towers, Thorn used Blink to shift himself toward it and slowly drifted down from the sky. He had rebuilt his store of nanites since they had been destroyed in the fight against Aciakko and while he was in the great forge, they had naturally reformed his robes, so he was once again wearing a fluttering black robe that covered the snake skin armor he had forged. Looking every inch an evil mage, he lightly touched down on the stone tower and scanned the jungle below him. The trees were thick and tangled, and he could both see and hear water pouring out of the stone under his feet. Curious, he walked to the edge of the tower and looked down, quickly catching sight of the waterfall that poured down the side of the tower.

[Fascinating. It appears that the tower you are standing on was created by a flow of water. It is carrying silt up into the air, and the deposits are what formed the tower over time.]

“The question is, is there an easy way to get down?”

[Says the mage who just floated down five miles,] Eve said, rolling her eyes.

With a chuckle, Thorn stepped off the edge of the tower and plunged toward the jungle floor below. While he could have cast Slow Fall again, there was little need now that he could see what was coming. At the last second he cast Blink and appeared on a large log that lay on the ground. Immediately scanning the area around him with his mental sense, Thorn was on guard against any potential threats. The third and fourth strata had been dangerous enough, but he knew that the average tier of the monsters he would face on the fifth strata was much higher. While he was confident in his ability to fight against anything under the eighth tier, Thorn knew it was better to be cautious.

Not sensing anything in his immediate surroundings, Thorn sent his attention into his mind, checking the connection he shared with Akira. Despite the distance, he could tell the rough direction that Akira was, and currently, she was somewhere deep under his feet, off to the west. Figuring that meant that she had not made it to the fifth strata yet, Thorn was about to begin moving when Eve spoke, causing him to freeze.

[Thorn, I just sensed a flicker of familiar energy. It looks like Velin has arrived on Lestra.]

“Can you establish a connection?” he asked, his tone intense.

[No, not until that firmware update. But it seems like Velin’s EVE has figured out how to release a pulse that I can pick up on. She is definitely heading in our direction.]