Chapter 555 - Moonfall I (Patreon)

21 years after the events at the Phoenix Peaks.

I didn’t feel almost 60. Age and White Dove had their talons in some of my friends, those who’d deferred Immortality for now, and they looked a little older. Iona’s insane vitality meant she aged at an eighth of the speed a Systemless person would, and her changes were subtle. A few hairs had gone grey here and there from stress, but that was it. 

For me? I’d stayed at the peak of youth and vitality the entire time, continuously rejuvenating myself to a biological age of approximately 25, keeping my organs from prematurely failing. It kept me fresh and energetic, and I had to wonder what it was doing to my thinking and thought processes. 

I was still… vaguely human though.

I woke up a little groggy to a cold bed, mentally berating myself again for leaving ‘switch my sleep cycle’ to the last minute. All sorts of delicious smells filled the air, and a thousand and one sounds reached my ears and woke me up before I could check the time and see if I needed to be up now, or if I should be sleeping more.

With a sigh I [Teleported] out of bed, and a series of rapid [Teleports] later I was splashing face-first into our warm bath.

I blew bubbles into the water while I adjusted, then flipped over and floated on my back for a bit, letting the warm embrace slowly wake me up.

Tonight’s the night.

The thought, the reminder, jolted me to full awareness faster than getting hit by one of Artemis’s [Lightning Bolts]. 

Tonight was the night!

I had to look my best. I pushed my speed and dexterity to the maximum as I scrubbed and washed myself at absurd speeds, not really caring about all the water being flung everywhere. I was a bird in a birdbath, losing half the water in the gargantuan pool was to be expected. After, I zipped out, using a clever [Teleportation] trick to instantly dry myself, then hit my vanity a moment later, three rooms over.

My hand paused in the middle of applying foundation.

Hang on. Every single pound, every single gram was accounted for, with only the smallest of tolerances. Did I really, absolutely, need to be looking my absolute best in front of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people?

My hand trembled as a vicious war erupted inside of me, the practical side at war with my vanity.

Forget White Dove’s curse on apples. The vanity I got from my companion bond with Auri was the true curse.

The vanity part of me won out when it pointed out that I could literally dip my face into [Event Horizon] to wash off and delete the makeup, and the survival part pointed out that pixie cuts were adorable and I’d look amazing with one. 

The last second stuff was weird. We’d done our best to plan everything out, but we clearly hadn’t planned out every single last detail.

My outfit for the next three months was next, and it could only be put on with [Teleportation]. I’d been right back in the School. It took years of experience and leveling to get the skill high enough to be easily useful, but once I was there and critically, in the habit of using it, it was good. Spatial for the win! Shame it was so expensive, but the quality of life improvement couldn’t be beaten.

The outfit was one-of-a-kind, unique for my build, biology, and situation. It had a dozen different layers, each doing something unique. The ones I really cared about were a number near me designed to be luxuriously comfortable, and to feel like it practically didn’t exist at all. Like being wrapped in a warm, weighted blanket at all times, but designed by [Tailor] Classers so that I wouldn’t start to feel like it was ‘too much’, in the same way a shirt worn for days on end started to feel icky.

A layer of personal enchantments deeper in would be keeping everything clean, and where we were going… yeah. The less said about how my natural functions were handled, the better, and it was both terrifying and a little humiliating when I had to test it all out on the ground. All aspects of it.

Honestly, sunk-cost fallacy and how much this all meant to Iona had been the only thing keeping me going at that stage.

The last layer was made out of shimmering overlapping teal scales, and I had my suspicion what they were made out of. Harper refused to say what they were, ‘for my own protection’, and the final cost on the outfits was staggering. Each individual layer had been treated with a different set of alchemical solutions to improve them in one way, shape, or form - except the scale layer - and the technical specifications were thicker than some dictionaries. The only thing stopping it from being a marvelous suit of armor afterwards was how bulky it was - I wasn’t going to be doing any sprinting in this - and the utter lack of gloves. My bare hands were exposed, a sealant around them stopping anything from getting in, and the helmet looked like a fishbowl.

Harper had laughed her ass off when I asked, and Iona and I kept making fish-faces when we tested them out. Glub-glub, I’ma fish. Speaking of her…

I closed my eyes, letting my ears locate my beloved wife. A quick [Teleport] through a wall and a dash along the walls, running literally over the heads of bustling staff members, Valkyries, and only-Skye-knew-who running around, and I joined Iona in our great planning room. She looked frazzled.

“Hey!” I gave her cheek a quick peck, looking all over the room. 

Twenty one years of project planning had done a number on the place. I’d thought the thousands of sheets of paper I’d started the project with had been overkill - they hadn’t been nearly enough. Papers were pinned to every wall, and several more standup cardboard walls had been installed to pin more papers to. Those were just the reference diagrams - tens of thousands of calculations littered the stacks of papers on the desk, and there was an entire corner, floor to ceiling, of ‘discarded’ calculations that we weren’t willing to truly torch or discard.

We’d learned of our mistake in our fourth year of planning, when we’d needed to revert back to an old plan, but all of the old plan’s math had been discarded already. Ever since then we kept all papers, no matter how bad, and stuck it in the corner. Even when we brought on teams of [Mathematicians], [Engineers], and [Computers], we’d kept the room as a central repository, a backup, and a private place for us to review.  

Ink had stained the desks to the point where it’d be easier to finish the job and paint them black than to try and clean them up, and honestly, if we succeeded, a [Curator] would probably level like heck taking this room and preserving it in a museum. My nose wrinkled at all the empty glass vials around, and I smelled the faint scent of the pick-me-up potions, obviating the need for a night of sleep.

Iona held up a single finger, her reddish eyes burning a hole through yet another trajectory. She’d done alright at math at the School, earning a degree in it, but the math we’d needed for this project had been beyond both of our abilities. Iona had eventually relented somewhat, electing instead to memorize and understand all the outcomes herself - nevermind that we were bringing all of this with us. Knowing which chart to pull out at any given time was part of Iona’s job, as well as reading and interpreting them.

I could do it as well, but I’d be backup on it. 

Weight was the name of the game, and storage skills were the ultimate cheat. The math made that explicitly clear.

Iona tore her eyes away from the paper and just lit up at the sight of me.

Almost thirty years of marriage, and that look she gave me still had butterflies fluttering in my stomach. Gods I loved that woman.

“Hey love! You all ready?” She asked me.

“Yeah - you didn’t sleep?” I asked, fully knowing the answer, but knowing it was the best way to prod the real question with her. Iona picked it up, and shook her head.

“No, sorry. I decided that this was the last chance to properly get a look at everything, and I wasn’t quite sure about this chart. No matter how I look at the landing velocities, they’re not making sense to me. I’ll be able to sleep once we’re in the Argo II.”

She had a point, and I wasn’t going to argue it. I pulled out the big weight sheet again, half-expecting [Repository of the Magus] to ding! On me.

The numbers were practically endless, and trying to figure out the correct material for this adventure had taken literal years of effort. There was a complex interplay between the various types of strengths different materials had and their weight. If that was all there was to it, the equations and calculations would’ve been simple.

It had exploded in complexity once alchemy had come into play. Thousands of different processes and treatments could be applied to change the properties, but they all came with their own set of twists. It wasn’t like the [Artisans] could pour endless potions on a piece of metal and call it a day, there was an entire field and discipline around what could be treated when, orders, principles, laws - both natural, System, and legal - available materials, and the one that had driven me insane - some [Alchemists] refusing to work with others. Plus, the potions and treatments did ‘wear off’, and the project was planned to go for so long that it was a serious consideration. Between testing and the length of the journey, we were on a tight deadline. Weather was less of a challenge - rain or moonshine, we were going to launch.

Availability of materials also came into play. There literally wasn’t enough Skyte - the magic metal - for sale in the entire world to make what we needed, and that was if we could even afford it, before the ‘we’re cornering the market and buying it all’ caused the price to skyrocket. Some Classers might’ve been able to make a sheer layer of the stuff all around us, but then we’d literally sneeze and break it.

To make literal years of discussion short - Harper was a genius, and her original instinct of ‘clear steel’ had been close to the winner. A few more clever potions had been applied, and we had the Argo II. A five-meter sphere of .5 cm thick see-through steel, ‘only’ 12,000 kg. By regenerating approximately 19,000 mana per second, I could just about lift the entire spaceship with a little bit of room to spare - enough room to accelerate us to a modest top speed of ‘only’ 400 meters/second. Why I topped out there and not somewhere faster I could only attribute to ‘magic said so.’ Similarly, I felt like I should be able to continuously accelerate us - after all, only gravity was slowing us down, and I’d already demonstrated I could beat it - but no. My flight skill had a top speed, and no amount of ‘but I’m pushing harder against what?’ changed that.

I didn’t dare voice my complaints outloud. The System and magic in general was making this entire trip possible in the first place, and just because it had some random limits didn’t mean I was going to complain too hard. I didn’t think the System would hear me and fuck me over… but occasionally I felt like the entire operation was held together with spit and literal prayers.

Iona was a powerful Gravity Classer by all accounts - but at ‘only’ a million mana regeneration, her contributions were only about 2% of what I could manage myself. 

[Luminary Mind] let me split my attention, and keep chatting with Iona while I checked over the well-worn numbers again.

“Anything particularly devastating?” I asked her. “And shouldn’t you start getting ready for the ceremony?”

Iona frowned, then nodded.

“Yeah, good call. Time to store it all?” She asked. 

I looked around the room, taking it all in. Over twenty years of work, sometimes serious, sometimes paused, was here. The efforts of what must’ve been over a thousand people in the end crammed high, pins holding papers up on every wall.

[Astral Archives] gave me perfect memory, but I extra-committed the scene to memory before I acted.

“Time to store it all.” I confirmed, swiping my hand over the wall and storing it all in [Repository of the Magus]. 

Wall after wall, pile after pile, I dumped all the papers in, mentally able to ‘see’ the tags and labels we put on each one. SPEC-11-v0.2.1843 was an early iteration of the space suits we were wearing, TRAJ-17-v6.44.204 was one of the plotted intercept courses. [Repository] let me ‘sort’ the files, and the TRAJ “finalized” sets - truly, only the latest iteration, we had learned wisdom about calling ANYTHING ‘final’ a long time ago - were near the ‘top’, metaphorically speaking. The SPELL set was a detailed list of everything we thought we needed, with endless tallymarks next to them as I wrote each one out in duplicates - along with a few blotches when I’d cast one of the spells. Iona’s eyes glimmered with unshed tears as the last of the paperwork vanished, and I found myself blinking rapidly as the unexpected emotions hit.

[*ding!* [Repository of the Magus] leveled up! 650 -> 651]

[*ding!* [Luminary Mind] leveled up! 791 -> 792]

I suppose decades of work for a project of this size did have some significant weight to it. Only one level was a bit of a disappointment, but I suppose with how high of a level it was, it made sense. Would’ve been dozens upon dozens of levels at sub-100, but over 600? I had to work for every level.

Just like that, it was all gone. Stored away. It was far better to bring the extra papers and not need them, than to realize we needed an old trajectory, calculation, or thought, and not have it. [Astral Archives] had a copy, but Iona didn’t have a perfect memory for this.

I hugged her. She needed it. I needed it.

The Valkyrie sighed, and brightened up.

“Alright! Let’s do the ceremony!”

I poked her ribs.

“Eat first.” I scolded her. “We’re going to be burning calories on this, you’ve been burning the entire candle, and we need to be at peak performance. Eat. Or else.” I threatened, not having any ideas what I’d actually do.

Iona nodded.

“Alright, I’ll eat something. Think Auri left us a pie?”

I snorted.

“Unless she’s changed her recipes recently, I think she’s left us 41 pies.”

“Such overkill.” Iona hurried over to our private kitchen, one of the few places in our villa that was just for us. “I think I can eat three now, and maybe stuff one more in during the parade.” 

I found my appetite was being held hostage by the steadily increasing knot of tension in my stomach.

Holy Ciriel. We were actually doing this. Speaking of ceremonies and Ciriel, I should say hi to my friend. It was kinda weird that anytime, anywhere, I could say hello. Made me a little self-conscious at times and drained my introvert batteries whenever I was aware, and I was so thankful that Ciriel let me talk first before responding.

Hey! It’s the big day! We’re going soon! You going to watch the launch? I asked her.

Yes! It’s going to be super exciting! I don’t want to rain on your parade, I really don’t - also, Selene bribed Elarin, the Rain God NOT to mess with the parade, he was totally going to - but back in my day, I got the chance to heal some people who’d gone part of the way to the moon, and got quite a few nice levels out of it! Hopefully you’ll see some of them yourself! I’ll be watching most of it - unless you clearly don’t want me to! Just pop over and say hi if you ever need to chat and are bored. The goddess said.

Okay! I will!

I kept up two different conversations, one with Ciriel, one with Iona, as I forced myself to eat. The suit was big, bulky, and hard to move around in, but every bit of practice was good.

[*ding!* [Etheric Aegis] leveled up! 450 -> 451]

Then it was time for the ceremony, and the start of the end.